Published
Weekend Reading — I’m afraid you don’t have enough tokens to do that, Dave
I had the weirdest dream last night. I installed an app on my phone so I can look up the prices for couches. That makes sense, it's time to get a new couch in our living room. It installed itself onto a fresh new screen, as apps often do, because the primary screen is already full. And next to it was the Fastmail client, but with an app name that had too many emoji and exclamation marks. Whatever. Much later in the dream, I deleted both apps, and my regular old trusty Fastmail client was still around on the primary screen, except it was blocked with a red notice that the password was changed. Apparently, the app I installed with the too many emoji read all my email and changed my password, and I was trying to remember whether I have any emails with sensitive information, do I need to cancel credit cards, change bank account numbers, etc. So in my dream I was phished. 2026 is a very weird timeline.
Tech Stuff
Crest Browser Arc is back! Sort of. It’s a new browser but follows the Arc UI. And it can use Chromium or WebKit, although I'm not sure why they couldn't just chose one. Open source, available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
Tiny Little Office An office suite with no accounts and no servers — the document is the URL! Includes a word processor, outliner, spreadsheet, presentation builder, calculator, drawing tool, diagram maker, animator, calendar, and … a trip planner.
My age verification? I remember when GitHub had multiple nines of uptime.
Here's a funky learning from a couple of years ago: do you know that there's a
CSSnamespace in JavaScript that includes a method toescapeCSS selectors?
SocialSpec.org APIs for social engagement on the World Wide Web (of websites). Built on open standards. (via Caleb Hailey)
Pomerado Turn any website into an API or MCP. Reasonable pricing with a free plan that allows 100 requests per day, $50/month subscription to get to 1,000 requests/day. And it’s open source so you can self-host.
Purge Finds the junk on your mac and clears it out. It just helped me clean > 28 GB of junk from my Mac.
Feedhouse Another delightful feed reader. You can also subscribe to newsletters and they will show up in your feed. Supports YouTube, podcasts, Mastodon and Bluesky user accounts. Full-text search for things you remember but can't locate the exact post. (via Raymond Camden)
One for the Linux nerds out there:
🎶
Ra-Ra-Rasputin,
ls /usr/local/bin
🎶
Most people don't understand just how different computing used to be in the early 2000s. This is Commodore PET 2001, one of the popular computers of the era.
REA Reverse engineer an app for you, so your AI can build it from scratch.
Fake Meeting This app will make it look like you’re busy in a meeting. Because you deserve a break sometimes.
Eye for Design
Doory Canva except this one is open-source so you can also self-host it. Easy website if you just want to try it out and get a feeling for it.
Good grief. I made a plot using an "accessible" colour scheme. I hope that people with colourblindness can see something, because people without it sure can't.
Isn't the point of accessibility to make things better for everyone?
FigCraft Rust open-source alternative to Figma.
Business Side
Argentina's top news app was made by two 23 year olds using AI 2026 journalism in a nutshell, and also applies to other industries in this age of AI:
The second is that it’s not a success story for incumbent newsrooms. Clearly, a short, personalized news briefing is something people wanted; every existing newsroom could have built it, at least using their own content, but they didn’t. The gap they left meant that two newcomers could come in with very few resources and gain an audience off the back of existing journalists’ work. The app credits stories in audio and leaves citations in the chat, but my guess is that most people aren’t looking at their screens as they listen to their audio briefing. Very few people will click through; I think these listens won’t translate to pageviews or subscriptions.
nobody should type code by hand anymore. here's what's left. This entire article is great if you're interested by the current stage of software engineering (ie you're not married to the "AI is god/AI is devil" dichotomy), but specifically I like this quote (read the article for full context, it all makes sense):
Cloning three or four companies to write a conference talk is not unhinged. That's the baseline now.
Machine Intelligence
thanks to ai, saying you're "dating a model" is a lot less likely to impress anyone nowadays
Assaf According to this graph I’m using quite the tokens. Today alone I used 469 million. This chart is from Token Monitor, a handy menu-bar app if you need to monitor token usage, costs, remaining credits, etc across a variety of different LLMs.
Insecurity
Nowadays, I am happy to find a spam mail between all the CVE announcements. Makes for a nice break.😌
i don’t know what DNS is (do NOT explain it to me) but the way people talk about it i imagine it as a little humanoid creature thing named dennis whose job it is to absorb blame for everything
Everything Else
OpenFatigue Open is the new closed. Between OpenChamber, OpenAI, Open WebUI, OpenDoor, OpenTable, OpenClaw, open this and open that, the word lost all meaning. Introducing the first fully Open-branded platform for people who are exhausted by fully Open-branded platforms.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then vibe-coded in rust.
I’m afraid you don’t have enough tokens to do that, Dave.
This one goes out to whoever created the number zero!
Thanks for nothing.
Andy L. "I don't know a LOT about farming, but I was sure I knew where eggs come from."
just learnt the french created the word "vroomer" for people who like car centered infrastructure a little too much and i think the english language could benefit from this
You may be married, but you aren’t married married until you’re in IKEA together and you brought your own tape measure.
Odoben "mum bought me a glasses holder"
Sometimes I think about that time I took my jacket to a seamstress to ask if she could replace the zipper, and she said in a somewhat cold tone that it would cost the same as getting a new one.
I said "Deal. When do you think you can have it done?"
And she just kind of lit up. When I came back to pick up the jacket she had also mended all the little tears.
I moved away shortly afterwards and have not returned since but I feel like a little tiny bit of magic may have happened at that moment.
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt
Neither Cartier-Bresson, Banksy nor Cold War Steve could have come up with such an image. Absolutely perfect composition and lighting (even the road signs are perfect)! 😍
