Published
Weekend Reading — I am so far behind on my procrastination
Cat "Jeez, would you look at the time?"
Tech Stuff
InkLeaf Foldable screen, but not a phone — an e-Ink tablet on which you can read and write. Stylus included.
In defense of not understanding your codebase
That’s why many engineers take up open-source projects in their spare time in order to work on small codebases by themselves: in order to do engineering work where they can maintain an accurate Naur theory of the codebase. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
"You write all of your code still by hand?"
"No, I prefer a keyboard."
🤡
dom-docx Convert semantic HTML fragments to native, editable Word documents (OOXML): paragraphs, runs, lists, tables, images. Renders HTML in Chromium, converts to docx, rasterizes via LibreOffice, scores layout + structural fidelity against a human-validated metric, iterate.
My vim
~/.vimrcconfig file is like my life. full of settings I copied from a stranger on the internet, don’t understand and now am too afraid to delete 😭
The Great Divergence in Software Engineering
Most engineering organizations were built for a certain throughput. The review processes, the deployment pipelines, the team structures, the way knowledge gets shared. All of it assumes a rate of change that was reasonable two years ago. AI changed the order of magnitude.
Steganographr Hide text in plain sight using invisible zero-width characters. It’s digital steganography made simple. It works in a surprising number of places.
There is a profound freedom in this approach. When you build for an audience of one, the software does exactly what you want and nothing more. There is no feature bloat, no upsell, no UI clutter. You are the product manager, the engineer, and the customer. If your workflow changes next week, you don’t have to file a feature request and hope it gets upvoted; you just change the code. You don’t have to convince anyone else that your problem is worth solving.
Know what your USB-C cable can really do. WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and connected devices in plain English. Name a cable, and it tracks how the cable actually performs over time, so you can spot the one that has started misbehaving. (via cliff538)
Eye for Design
OpenAI Starts Cleaning Up the Utter Mess It Made of ChatGPT
This whole thing makes the “New Coke”/”Coke Classic” fiasco from the 1980s look like a well-thought-out change.
Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source The chat client that brought Comic Sans to the world is now on GitHub.
Business Side
I think I can see where this goes. The government will try to regulate AI and open source in particular, and it will run the playbook it ran for the auto industry. Decades of subsidies, bailouts, and protective tariffs produced American carmakers that sell trucks at home and barely register anywhere else in the world
We could be forgiven for thinking we live in a Silicon Valley soap opera. It's so outrageous, so unbelievable, so perfected for the outrage algorithms that at this point I'd be willing to bet the plot is just being written by a writer's room of AI's. A whole boatload of digital monkeys whose output hardly meets the Shakespearian bar.
LARP Revenue infrastructure for serious founders:
Revenue is just an agreement between friends.
LARP pairs you with another founder. You send them $10,000. They send you $10,000 right back. You've both now booked $10,000 in revenue. The books balance. Cash never moves. Everybody's a rocketship.
Machine Intelligence
Nokia 210 4G Nokie is bringing back the dumbphone … with a dedicated AI button! 🤦
I’ve spent the past few weeks battling the fact that AI agents are unreliable because the underlying LLM technology is.
My main conclusion is that the most useful tools you have are assuming everything an LLM says is wrong until verified and automating some verification with adversarial LLM reviews
Slopfix New profession just dropped: slopfixing
Slopfix is a team of three senior engineers who refactor vibecoded codebases back to maintainability.
Everything Else
heyheymomo "Rise and grind"
"i have so many hidden talents"
"like what?"
"i don't know, they're all hidden"
My autocorrect thinks you're full of shirt
LittleAlex "I have to admit this is a spendit idea."
You can just pretend to have your shit together. They don’t really check
In my head: Are you all out of your fucking minds?
In the email I send: I would caution against proceeding with this plan, due to the following concerns: …
BasicAppleGuy "Lil Finder Guy passes the sniff test"
Oh my god, I am so far behind on my procrastination.
Turns out if you want your clothes to dry you need to actually turn on the dryer follow me for more trad wife living tips
When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss looks away nervously, muttering "Oh, cool, another weirdo”
after how many dates is it ok to take a relationship to the next level and let your partner join your tailscale network?
Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions How simple tweaks to map apps can reduce traffic congestion:
By rerouting a small share of Google Maps trips from targeted congested highway and arterial segments to less congested alternatives of equivalent road-classes with comparable travel times, we observe a city-average 2% increase in vehicle speeds on the intervened segments, along with improved travel times 0.7% and potential annual reductions exceeding 1,000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions per city in the majority of studied locations.
/etc/stands for “et cetera” because the original Unix devs genuinely couldn’t be bothered to name it anything better
Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes
Yet for months, the em dash has been the victim of a relentless campaign of online persecution the likes of which no punctuation mark, not even the semicolon, has ever seen. Any chucklehead who disagrees with an online post can, if that post happens to include an em dash, dismiss it with the claim that it was written by a chatbot.
Today is National Library Workers Day. The library where I work has a knitters group that meets on Monday. I've never been interested in learning to knit, until now.
I just saw a video of an AI executive saying that people will connect their brains to the cloud so they can have 1,000 times more thoughts.
Neurotypical people. Please listen to me. I promise you, with all the ADHD in my body-
You really do not want 1,000 more thoughts.
You may think you do, but you extremely do not.
No, sorry—when you told me about your cyclospora outbreak, I didn't say "let us pray."
I said "lettuce prey."
Looks like the cyclospora outbreak was caused by Taylor Farms, a company that sells more than $7 billion in produce annually and makes more than 40% of salad kits available in the US.
‘The pigeon came to them seeking help’: California firefighters give oxygen to suffering bird And now for your moment of zen.
