Published
Weekend Reading — Go forth and prompt
cliff538 "What a great artistic reuse of old license plates!"
Tech Stuff
Shepherd "Stay focused. Grow your sheep." Chrome extension that auto-categorizes thousands of sites as productive, neutral, or distracting—keep using productive sites and watch your sheep grow. If Pomodoro timer did nothing for you, hopefully this can boost your productivity.
HazeOver Love it! Distraction Dimmer™ for macOS dimms all windows in the background, so it's easier to pay attention to the window in the foreground. And you can adjust the dim level to your liking. Stage Manager feels clunky on the 13" MacBook display, so now that I'm using HazeOver, I'm back to regular windowing. (via Jonathan E Cowperthwait)
Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase
There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.
In a complex codebase, small changes quickly become an elephant.
If you address them upfront, chances are you’ll hit a wall. It will be painful. You will be late. Clients and management will be upset. Trust will erode and without trust, there are few chances you can get management support for necessary refactorings.
Instead, chop down the elephant into small pieces 🐘
Switch to Claude without starting over Simple and smart. Instead of an over-arching committee of experts debating the nuances of an interoperable protocol that's loaded with proprietary vendor extension so it would break when you most need it, its just using prompts. First, ask Claude to suggest a prompt, then feed that prompt to the other AI, and ask Claude to remember that AI's response.
The age of flat pack code The path from being a master software craftsmen to IKEA code:
We are just at the start of this flat pack phase of software development. It is not completely clear how it will play out however it is probably the biggest disruption of software development, certainly in the 30+ years I have been a developer.
What will happen to those “master craftsmen” who have spent years honing their ability code? What will happen to the “apprentices” now they no longer need those specialist skills for most of the work?
🛠️ 156 free tools. Zero accounts. Zero ads.
One website for everything:
〈/〉 43 Developer tools — JSON, Regex, API Tester, JWT, Diff...
Aa 27 Text tools — Word Counter, Grammar, Paraphrasing...
⇄ 53 Converters — Unit, Currency, Image, PDF, Color...
✦ 33 Generators — Password, QR Code, Resume, Meme...
And it's all free. Always.→ akousa.net/tools#FreeTools #WebTools #Developer #Productivity #NoSignup
The best OpenClaw setups I've seen all have one thing in common: they do less Correction: it's not "do less", it's "build incrementally":
The setups that survive are the ones where the person can explain what their agent does in one sentence. "it manages my schedule and triages my email." Done. The setups that die are the ones where the person needs 5 minutes to explain all the things their agent "can" do, most of which work 60% of the time.
they sold downdetector and speedtest for over $1 billion
meanwhile both are completely free on https://akousa.net, along with 100+ other tools.
no ads. no signup. no catch.
AlexsJones/llmfit Want to run an LLM locally in this age of impossibly expensive memory? llmfit finds the right-size LLM models that fit your system's RAM, CPU, and GPU and that will run well on your machine.
Hold on! I know exactly what you are thinking about right now! But hear me out. Software engineers of all levels are making increasing use of AI Agents, touting that they have 100% of their code written by AI. Agentic code use is increasing by the day. The sheer volume of tokens being burned reaches crazy new heights every other day. Because of scaling laws, even if we can reduce token use by a meager 0.001% by something like
LLM=true, isn’t it worth we attempt this? After all, this could be a …
I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion I can relate:
I’m ready to retire. In my younger days, I remember a few pivotal moments for me as a young nerd. Active Server Pages. COM components. VB6. I know these are laughable today but back then it was the greatest thing in the world to be able to call server-side commands. It kept me up nights trying to absorb it all. Fast forward decades and Claude Code is giving me that same energy and drive. I love it. It feels like it did back then. I’m chasing the midnight hour and not getting any sleep.
Krisp This looks like a meeting powerhouse—transcription, recording, note taking, meeting summary, CRM sync, noise cancellation, accent conversion, agenda planning, and more. Starts at $8/month/user.
Gabriele Svelto 👇 This is a really interesting thread, and the discussion on HN confirms the findings. When software becomes very reliable, which some browsers are nowadays, it could still crash occassionally due to … bits flipping. This is particularly problematic for Firefox which sometimes runs on hardware that has memory without ECC:
A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
(* Even though memory is now quite expensive, I still suggest splurging and buying RAM modules with ECC)
occult "Computing in the year 2029 as depicted in UNIX WORLD magazine, 1985."
Eye for Design
A Designer’s Guide To Eco-Friendly Interfaces
As UX designers, we are the architects of this energy consumption. Every high-resolution hero image, every auto-playing background video, and every complex JavaScript animation we approve is a direct instruction to a processor to consume power. If we want to build a future that lasts, we must stop designing for “wow” and start designing for
Put the ZIP code first How to design a 10x more effective UI with one simple trick:
A US ZIP code is 5 characters. From those 5 characters you can determine the city, the state, and the country. That's 3 fields. Autofilled. From one input.
Just had a sighted person tell me they often use features, clients and programs that were made for us, they don’t use screen readers, but they use accessibility features, even when they do not have disabilities, but also clients like a blind Mastodon client, or a text editor designed with screen readers in mind such as the ones I list on my Tools page at the end, as an example, because they said, the interface is 1000 times cleaner, there’s a lot of keyboard shortcuts, clutter free interface, even though the UI is basic, speed, less bloat, and a whole host of other things including, but not limited to, and never having to put up with distracting animation nonsense. You know software development has vastly sank in quality when sighted folk are using blind clients. To see the tools and stuff I use, go to https://sightlessscribbles.com/tools/
The middle one caught my attention because it talks about URLs that are not just user readable, but also user guessable. I think that’s a perfect word for something I tried to capture in my post: if a user successfully guesses a URL from your scheme, then you know you have something good on your hands.
Peoples
What Is Code Review For? I always tell my team we're doing code review for acculturation. I'm using different words, more plain speak, but with the same intent. You hardly ever catch bugs that the test suite didn't already notice, but you gain so much useful information:
Second — and this is actually its more important purpose — code review is a tool for acculturation. Even if you already have good tools, good processes, and good documentation, new members of the team won’t necessarily know about those things. Code review is an opportunity for older members of the team to introduce newer ones to existing tools, patterns, or areas of responsibility. If you’re building an observer pattern, you might not realize that the codebase you’re working in already has an existing idiom for doing that, so you wouldn’t even think to search for it, but someone else who has worked more with the code might know about it and help you avoid repetition.
Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
Although people anywhere can BS each other – that is, share dubious information that’s misleadingly impressive or engaging – the workplace not only rewards but structurally protects it, Littrell said. In a work setting where corporate jargon is already the norm, it’s easy for ambitious employees to use corporate BS to appear more competent or accomplished, accelerating their climb up the corporate ladder of workplace influence.
Business Side
Esther Schindler "A friend shared this photo with me, taken in a bookstore in 2010. I think it's evergreen!"
Machine Intelligence
elder-plinius/OBLITERATUS I have no idea whether this works or not, and no idea what it does exactly, I just love the name they chose:
OBLITERATUS is the most advanced open-source toolkit for understanding and removing refusal behaviors from large language models — and every single run makes it smarter. It implements abliteration — a family of techniques that identify and surgically remove the internal representations responsible for content refusal, without retraining or fine-tuning. The result: a model that responds to all prompts without artificial gatekeeping, while preserving its core language capabilities.
Your LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code.
I write this as a practitioner, not as a critic. After more than 10 years of professional dev work, I’ve spent the past 6 months integrating LLMs into my daily workflow across multiple projects. LLMs have made it possible for anyone with curiosity and ingenuity to bring their ideas to life quickly, and I really like that! But the number of screenshots of silently wrong output, confidently broken logic, and correct-looking code that fails under scrutiny I have amassed on my disk shows that things are not always as they seem. My conclusion is that LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria before the first line of code is generated.
Insecurity
Online ads just became the internet's biggest malware machine Just a friendly reminder that your browser should be running an ad blocker for your own safety:
- Online ads leapfrogged email as the primary channel for malware in 2025, per a new report.
- The Media Trust said ads accounted for more than 60% of malware and phishing campaigns in 2025.
- The threat has been compounded by AI advances, The Media Trust said.
What privacy? Meta's smart glasses are filming unwitting naked people No one could have seen this coming:
Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses are a privacy nightmare, with footage of naked people, sensitive information, and violent acts captured and seen by Meta's AI and an army of employees.
* Sorry for the bad pun, just being silly. BTW there's an app you can use to tell if anyone near you is using spywear.
Everything Else
Rick Calkins "The Lux Arts Hippy Bus walker for seniors. Wife found the advertising video on FB last evening so I had to check it out."
Wisdom from Jesse Jackson’s service yesterday: “You don’t forgive because they deserve mercy. You forgive because you deserve peace. Forgiveness is an emancipation.”
You can close those tabs now. You’re never going to use them.
Heliograph "still looking 🙈"
You can't spell autonomy without am not you
in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with.this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.
The Song of LinkedIn Masterful.
The best part of having a doctorate is any time someone asks me to do something I don’t want to do, I write “absolutely not” on a post it and say sorry can’t I have a doctor’s note
When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.
Madcollector "Hey Gen Zs, this is how records were made"
Nobody on LinkedIn has ever had a bad day. Every setback is a "growth opportunity." Every firing is a "new chapter." Every complete professional disaster is framed as "excited to announce." These people would describe the Titanic as "a bold pivot to submarine operations."
The Internet's Most-Read Tech Publications Have Lost 58% of Their Google Traffic Since 2024 I'm not happy about the demise of media (tech or otherwise), but media has gone clickbait long time ago, to where they focus on eyeballs from a particular demographic, and in that race to the bottom AI is the winner. Do we need tech journalism? Yes. But we need something better than what we had, not faster horses.
Cafou Jedi "La réunion commence"
I'm at the launderette. It's really busy. A dryer finished so someone emptied it to use the dryer, the person who owns the clothes isn't here though. 3 ladies are chatting and folding the clothes. No one knows each other. It's all rather lovely.
Who knew that sitting in the launderette showed you a sweet side of life.
Also there's a man here unsure how to do the wash, he asked me for help, and promised he wasn't a weirdo. He's not a weirdo and now lots of the women are helping him too.
I'm remembering that time when, in an undergrad CS course in the 90s, the professor said, "Write a program to determine how much memory <university mainframe> has."
You can guess what happens when 20 undergrad CS students write a program with that specification...
The professor had to go to IT and grovel to get our accounts back.
Two weeks later, he introduced us to fork(). Guess what happened next?
From then on, our assignments were to be done on a CS DECstation and not the mainframe.
Have I ever published decent photos of this bear? I think I haven’t, so here you are.
Grizzly bear, designed by Shuki Kato, folded by me from a 35 cm square of Grainy paper.
