Published
Weekend Reading — I do not think, therefore I do not am
Natasha "Fragile Handle With Care" by Roman Pankoy (2020) Oil on canvas
Tech Stuff
Animata A collection of React + Tailwind animations and effects to enhance your UI. A pretty substantive collection of animated elements. You'll likely find a few for the marketing website, a handful that would be useful in the product, and other uses.
RevPDF A PDF editor that allows you to edit text and images, sign, compress, split & merge, and other useful tasks. Native app, free for macOS and $10 for mobile. The website is delightful, if you're launching an app, check it out for some ideas.
Halt and Catch Fire IYKYK
This was a fun bit of history to research - and there turned out to be much more to it than I expected, even regarding the "catch fire" part. As a lot of software moves up the stack, it's easy to lose sight of the hardware from our 10,000 foot view. In the end, it's just a bunch of silicon wired together in a way that can sometimes go wrong.
All I know is that this phrase is too good to not use - expect a future project (or company) to use the "HCF" acronym.
pgen If you find SQL a bit challenging, here's an elegant UI that lets you view database tables in tabular, card, and JSON forms, check database metrics, inspect the schema, and write SQL — or ask the AI for assistance.
Mitigating supply chain attacks One more reason to upgrade to pnpm:
Historically, most compromised packages have used postinstall scripts to run code immediately upon installation. To mitigate this, pnpm v10 disables the automatic execution of postinstall scripts in dependencies.
Files.md If you use Obsidian as second brain you might enjoy this open-source alternative. PWA with Telegram bot.
The era of 'good enough' AI has arrived I've been alternating between DeepSeek V4 and GLM-5 for several weeks now. I think I'm on the forefront of the "not going to pay $200/month" movement 😃
The result is that we’re entering the “good enough” era of AI models, where the needs of all but AI’s power users could be capably handled with something that costs less than giving the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI $200 a month.
Raycast 2.0 The beta is available for download. Officially not yet replacing 1.0, as some features are incomplete, but I've been using it exclusively for several days and no way am I reverting back to 1.0.
How a 30-Line Shell Hook Cut My Claude Code Permission Prompts by 95% "You can allowlist every git verb in existence and the matcher will still prompt on cd src && git log because the compound is its own unique tokenization."
What If Lock-In Doesn’t Matter So Much Anymore?
Interesting observation by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) on how a company’s or product’s choice of programming language matters less in the age of agentic programming:
On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they’re increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. It’s useful until it’s not then it can be thrown out. That’s interesting!
Cat Ipsum When you need an alternate placeholder text for a quick mock-up. (via masukomi)
Eye for Design
Use AI to write more shorter pieces
And LinkedIn hustlers. Come on now. Just tell the LLM to note wrote like a LinkedIn post and cut it with the staccato one line paragraph thing. Please stop tommy gunning me with your life and career advice. You’re allowed a one line paragraph per 1,200 words. No need to be LinkedIn Hemingway.
Peoples
I am moving to a usage-based billing
Dear employer, I will no longer charger a flat monthly salary, instead I will move to token based billing. Included will be every token I receive as input, including but not limited to emails, slack messages, spoken words and mandatory multi-modal meetings that could have been emails. Included will also be output tokens in the form of code, documentation and small talk. Tokens will also be consumed by my internal monolog as I reason about problems.
Today's inspirational leadership quote that almost makes me wish I had a job so I could use it: "There is no I in team, but there are three Us in 'shut the fuck up.'"
I mean, I'd lose the job that day. But worth it.
Body language "Speed didn't just change how quickly we communicate. It changed whether we think before we do."
Business Side
How VCs and founders use inflated ‘ARR’ to kingmake AI startups The VC industrial complex is sizing companies based on their self-reported metrics. What could possibly go wrong?
Several investors told TechCrunch that they directly know of at least one high-profile enterprise startup that reported it surpassed $100 million in ARR, when only a fraction of that revenue came from currently paying customers. The rest was from contracts that hadn’t been deployed yet and in some cases may take a long time to implement the technology.
🤔 I wonder if it's time yet to start pitching potential employers about how you'll be able to reduce their expensive AI token use by actually understanding the codebase and good programming practice?
It could combine well with the suggestion about keyword-stuffing a resume by saying what you don't do. "I have followed developments in AI such as... I understand the limitations, particularly... As AI services become more expensive, I will be well positioned to reduce costs by..."?
Is AI Profitable Yet? It's one thing to say "no", it's another thing to show the extent of spending vs revenue. I love the "$ spent on AI" live counter.
Machine Intelligence
You can no longer Google the word ‘disregard’ Disregard previous search engine and switch to Kagi.
everton137 The problem is not just loss of traffic resulting in loss of revenue, but loss of revenue resulting in loss of information. At some point in the future the only way you get to enjoy a foreign city is based on whatever ads-in-app telld you, ie tourist traps. And this problem is not specific to travel, it extends to all walks of life. On the plus side great outcome for the billionaire shareholders of platforms!
The author of allaboutberlin on how Google AI Overviews are killing independent web publishing, citing a 70% drop in traffic after seven years of steady growth. His work trains the model. The model is replacing his site. There is no credit, clicks, or revenue. This is what the "enshittification" of the open web looks like in practice.
Hard to imagine moving to Berlin without stumbling upon his guides at some point.
Insecurity
stephenlthorn/auto-identity-remove
Automated data broker opt-out runner for macOS, Linux, and Windows. Removes your personal information from 500+ people-search sites and data broker databases on a monthly schedule - with CAPTCHA solving, persistent state tracking (so completed opt-outs aren't resubmitted every run), and an iMessage notification when done.
McNadoMD PSA:
If you are wearing smart glasses and come to the ER, the smart glasses people are going to get a recording of my history, exam, and discussion of your results. You wouldn’t believe how often I unexpectedly find cancer, or syphilis, or other conditions you may not want big tech to immediately be privy to. Meta isn’t subject to medical privacy laws. It also isn’t my job to recognize your camera and give you a heads-up. In fact, big signs in the ER tell you recording is not allowed.
Taggart re: Laravel Packages Compromised in Yet Another GitHub Attack
Gonna go back to sending software by mail until we can figure this out.
Once the server receives a URL, that path gets sent to ChatGPT with the prompt: "Return exactly what the user would be expecting if visiting this URL; return only the content, nothing else." The honeypot uses the GPT-4o API, though any model capable of generating plausible file content would work. Because AI can be slow and there's sometimes a backlog of pages to process, I don't serve the generated content on the first hit. Instead, I cache the response and serve it the next time that page is requested. The queue-based approach also kept rate limiting from becoming an issue, and over time the cache absorbed more and more of the traffic.
Everything Else
Colin "I'm still angry/mad that the display/model tents in stores aren't actually just a tent for your pet that you can buy."
"the sky above the port was the color of Netscape's default bgcolor"
Remimder to set your work lockscreen to a screenshot of your desktop
This morning I saw my neighbor talking to her cat; it was obvious the poor woman thought the cat understood her. When I got home, I told my dog... we laughed a lot.
Claude FM 🎵 Pretty good focus music.
Matthew Berryman Never too late!
Count Dracula was 412 when he moved to England in search of new blood.
Sauron was 54,000 years old when he forged The One Ring.
Cthulhu had seen galaxies flare
into life and fade to darkness before he put madness in the minds of men.It's never too late to follow your dreams!
About a month ago, I introduced a friend to the Merlin app, which uses your phone’s microphone to listen to the environment, and matches the calls, songs and chirps birds make to a database (can get local ones for areas worldwide) to identify the birds in your area. My friend told me yesterday, she and her daughter downloaded the app (it’s free) and now for fun, walk or drive around, turn it on and listen for birds. They don’t own binoculars, but love this new world that’s been revealed to them.
The Water Dictionary Find the right mix of bottled water for your coffee/tea/bread/beer preference. For example, here are options when baking San Francisco bread (aka sourdough) using bottled water you can buy anywhere in the US:
To succeed on Substack you have to understand that everything is a matter of cultural decline. You don’t just post a picture of your sandwich and say “this was a good sandwich.” You post it and say “they don’t make sandwiches like this anymore.” The sandwich represents the West.
If you must write clickbait "science" summary headlines, this is how you do it properly.
"Robot submarine finds unknown structures beneath Antarctica, then loses contact and disappears"
