Published
Weekend Reading — How to lose 2 hours
Tech Stuff
Zed I really like using Cursor but it's a huge IDE (basically VS Code) which takes forever to load and eats up too much memory and sometimes I have to restart it just to fix a broken extension. I started using Zed for the occasional quick file edit (tweak .gitconfig, edit .claude.json, etc.) Overall I find Zed nicer than Vim and just as quick to launch. I still prefer Cursor for most tasks — code autocomplete, PNG diffs, etc are just better — but overall Zed wins on being snappy and so I switched to Zed as my daily driver.
pi.dev Claude Code feels vibe coded, every day a new release that breaks up something. Not to mention Claude is terribly expsensive, I run through $10 tokens a day. OpenCode is simpler and as such more stable, also supports affordable LLMs like Deepseek, GLM, et al. Though OpenCode is glitchy under Ghostty. Now I'm on PI, which does the least and that's its super power. It offers a huge selection of plugins you can install for different duties, and also supports the affordable LLMs. I would say almost perfect, because good luck searching the web for anything related to pie 🫤
Too many people still confuse Software Engineering with writing code. Code is the artifact. Software Engineering is understanding the problem, making tradeoffs, designing the system, reducing complexity, and deciding what shouldn't be built. No amount of 'vibe coding' can help you with this.
I Read the Claude Code Source Code. Here's Everything You Can Configure That the Docs Don't Tell You. Getting hooks to talk back, running hooks that don't block, the skill frontmatter, mastery of agents, magic docs, and more.
replacements.fyi A tool that helps you find better performing and safer replacements for outdated or unnecessary npm packages. Type a package name like is-number, left-pad, or is-odd, and get drop-in alternatives or short code snippets you can paste instead.
Package managers that package package managers Did you know you can brew install pip install poetry add pdm add uv tool install conda?
Factually A cool idea for "nuance instead of outrage." I tried Factually by asking it about alternatives to Google Search since people seem upset about Google right now, and Factually provided detailed answers about DDG, Kagi and Brave, all of which are problematic in their own way. No mention of the second biggest search engine, Bing, no mention of lesser known search engines like Qwant, Ecosia, Mojeek (most are in the EU). So not super smart but I like how it frames the answers to be the opposite of ragebait.
(* I used to recommend Kagi because their search is really good and $10/month is a better business model than skipping over ads. Turns out Kagi's business model funnels some of that $10 to Yandex, Brave, and xAI. So I'm off Kagi and looking for a new search engine to call home. When I find one, I'll let you know.)
Quakpit Little animals flying planes across your screen to remind you of upcoming meeting.
Le Baguette Index Two bothers used an AI to call 5,173 bakeries all over France and find out the price, which their site lays on a map, along with the bakery's Google rating, emojis, and other helpful info.
The Front Page Hacker News like it's 1926.
Eye for Design
I don't love or indeed understand the more recent pattern of having a bunch of actions in an immediately recognizable menu presentation, but putting the most important action in a button at top which looks like a header (and which I thus frequently overlook, as it doesn't register as a clickable control). Just put it with the other menu items, please.
What Is a Dickover? “You can hardly go anywhere on the web without getting dicked over by a dickover.”
dickover — a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.
The form asked my permission to share my health data. Then it wouldn’t let me say no. How are these dark patterns even legal?
But when I got to the end of the privacy notice, I wasn’t allowed to say no. I had only one choice: “I accept.” After that, there’s a spot to type my name “to accept the policy,” check a box that I understand that I’m electronically signing, and a big button to “Continue.”
Peoples
Two survival systems, two empathy modes What if autistic and neurotypical empathies were two different systems, driven by two different survival instincts? (via Raphaël Pinson)
rcanzlovar.com ADHD task management:
- Don’t sit down for “just a second.” That’s how you lose 2 hours.
- If it takes less than 2 minutes, do it before your brain schedules it for next year.
- Never trust “I’ll remember.” You won’t. Write it down immediately.
- Put important things where they physically block your path.
- Motivation is fake. Momentum is real. Start badly if you have to.
- Timers are emotional support devices. Use them constantly. Background noise helps. Total silence feels illegal.
- If you suddenly have energy, don’t question it. Ride the wave.
- “Out of sight, out of mind” is not a metaphor. It’s a diagnosis.
- Don’t organize the task instead of doing the task.
Business Side
Appearing Productive in The Workplace — No One's Happy
The cost of producing a document has fallen to nearly zero; the cost of reading one has not, and is in fact rising, because the reader must now sift the synthetic context for whatever the document was originally about.
I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
As further evidence that enterprise agents represent product-market fit for these companies, consider their open job listings.
OpenAI have 703 open jobs right now, of which I’d categorize 229 (32.6%) as relating to enterprise sales and support—account executives, “Go To Market”, “Forward Deployed Engineers” and the like.
Anthropic have 390 open jobs, 105 (26.9%) of which look enterprisey to me.
It’s pleasingly ironic that these AI labs have picked a business model with such a heavy demand on human labor—enterprise sales contracts don’t close themselves without a whole lot of humans in the mix!
The Million-Line MVP TL;DR Reminder, the M in MVP stands for minimal:
It’s the founder version of Wilson the volleyball. In your unwashed isolation, you’ve made a friend, you’ve named the friend, and the friend agrees with everything you say. The problem is that the friend is also the boat, the island, and the ocean, and you haven’t actually left the house yet.
Machine Intelligence
America Has a Pangram Problem AI-detection tools are getting better. But they still aren’t good enough.
LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help. It doesn’t know when it’s making stuff up, and it couldn’t change that even if you told it to. (In fact it’s always just making stuff up, and is only ever true by chance.)
Part of why I’m so negative about them is that their advocates simply do not understand how they work and do not seem to want to.
Jonathan Wight (via Rob Fahrni)
Pssst I'll let you into a secret.
Most software was terrible before LLMs too.
You're welcome.
Continue? Y/N How carefully do you really read AI commands? Try this 60-second game about LLM permission fatigue.
Everything Else
The French looked at a wheel of cheese and said "yes, but what if our village made it slightly differently?"
STRESS TEST your email server by ordering a single item from AliExpress.
does anyone actually know how long an olympic sized swimming pool is?
The “Undo” icon on Apple Newton MessagePad contains more whimsy than the entire current macOS.
For they were, all of them, deceived.
For the Dark Lord Sauron had embedded deep within his EULA the right to change the terms and conditions without notice
And once the users had become dependent on the service
He started increasing the cost of his tokens
The Perfect Cripple: A User Guide to Being Palatable (via Violet Blue)
Michel Foucault, a French historian and philosopher, writes about how power doesn’t just repress; it produces norms, behaviors, and self-regulation. You don’t need to be told explicitly how to act—you learn by being corrected, dismissed, or quietly disbelieved. Over time, you internalise the standard. You begin to monitor yourself. Is this too much? Is this not enough? Am I believable right now?
Disability, then, is not just something you experience. It’s something you are expected to perform correctly. To present in a way that is legible, coherent, and above all, non-disruptive.
The Whore of Blahbylon "Your periodic reminder that we are not the apex species."
A corollary.
Once, long ago, I was hired at a new job. They gave me a big wedge of new-employee paperwork to fill out on the first day. One of the documents was a form assigning ownership of any intellectual property I came up with on my own time to the company.
I didn't want to do that, but I also didn't want to have a big fight over it. So I just tossed that form in the trash. If they really cared about it, I figured, someone would come bug me about it later. No one ever did.
People can ask you to do anything they want. But don't assume they care enough to fight over it just because they asked
The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients The trouble with Big Wellness:
Nutrition science will always lose the attention war to something that offers community and tells you who to blame.
Josh Sternberg "The Onion print ads are true genius. There should be a coffee table book of these."
I, Sisyphus, Am Ninety-Five Percent of the Way There
After several thousand years of constructive engagement with the boulder and every muscle in my posterior chain, I am pleased to report we are 95 percent of the way up the tenacious little hill here in Tartarus. Honestly, folks, we are so, so close. The summit is largely visible. It is nearly visible. There is a concept of visibility at play here that is impossible to ignore.
The Filipino virtual assistants behind LinkedIn’s “thought leadership” content mill On the list of things every YC CEO would know: you can get click-magnet thought-leadership content posted to LinkedIn for the price of a cup of coffee:
Listings on job boards like Jobstreet and Indeed typically advertise $4 to $7 an hour to do tasks like bookkeeping, managing appointments, and social media marketing.
Meet Burrito, a crucial employee at a big solar farm in Tennessee. The 9.5 megawatt facility owned by Volkswagen brought in sheep to keep the vegetation trimmed between the panels, and they were doing a good job. Then they became the object of carnivorous affection for local coyotes. Enter Burrito, who when he came on board quickly began to patrol the perimeter of the site (which powers the production of VW’s EVs).
If unfamiliar animals approach, Burrito reacts immediately. Donkeys naturally protect herd animals from threats. It’s in their nature, despite their “dozy” reputation. Burrito acts as a scout, clearing “paddocks” for safety before the sheep enter to feed. Workers said the donkey even inspected areas before the sheep moved through them.
Once a stray without a home, he is now the most essential “worker” on the property.
