Published
Weekend Reading — I'm back and I miss you all! 💋💋💋
Syulang "Soooooo.... capitalism is at it again."
First the good news: 10 days ago was the 20th year anniversary of this very blog! 🎂 Many happy returns!
Unfortunately, I spent last weekend in the hospital — it took them 4 days to queeze me into a one hour trivial procedure that didn't require full anesthesia — and so I didn't get to spend time with my computer to finish the weekly blog post. So today will be double duty to cover the past two weeks.
BTW I am alive and doing well and feeling much much better! And love you all! 💋💋💋
Tech Stuff
Dr. Oracle I'm not saying you should ask AI about medical issues, but if you live in the US, good luck getting a proper answer from your Dr. Even simple questions won't get answered. Dr Oracle seems to be quite informative, based on actual research documents (science!), writes well and cites often. It's not free, but if you know how to use a search engine (*couth*Kagi*cough*) you can get a lot of answers out of it.
Why LLMs Can't Really Build Software TL;DR
When tests fail, they (LLMs) guess wildly.
When frustrated, they delete everything.
When stuck, they hallucinate solutions.
This is exactly what bad engineers do.
Typed languages are better suited for vibecoding
It seems that typed, compiled, etc. languages are better suited for vibecoding, because of the safety guarantees. This is unsurprising in hindsight, but it was counterintuitive because by default I “vibed” projects into existence in Python since forever.
This has been said a million times a million different ways but it’s worth repeating: the goal of a good developer isn’t to write code that compiles and tests that pass. The goal of a good developer is to solve a problem and hopefully in the process write code that can be understood by the next person maintaining it 10 years from now. The challenge is not in creation itself, it is in decided what to create and how and why
saidutt46/domain-check CLI tool to check if your favorite domain is available.
The web isn’t URL-shaped anymore
It’s not about creating more pages; it’s about engineering a network of claims that machines can rely on. The brands that thrive will be the ones who stop obsessing over how each page ranks, and start focusing on how their meaning is learned, reinforced, and surfaced across the machine web.
Two principles of code readability I had drummed into me in my mid-20s:
- "Comprehending" code means being able to correctly predict what it will do without running it.
- A unit of code is "comprehensible" if you can predict what it will do without having to look inside any other units it uses. Boxes should be meaningfully labeled so you don't have to open them to see what they do.
MiniWhisper When you need fast and accurate transcriptions (eg Zoom calls) that are generated entirely on your Mac (no 3rd party services). This is a commercial product, but free version available.
When you say “I think it’s pretty simple”, I hear “I think I understand the parts I can see”.
From what tech workers are telling me, AI has been automating the role of "CEO's annoying nephew who needs to be included in your project or you get fired"
KanbanJS A Kanban board for your AI agents! have no idea if this is useful or not, I just thought it's interesting enough to share — what will they think of next?
I really wish you all weren't so cocksure about letting shit like HTTP/1.1 die. Gonna miss the last vestige of the web that doesn't require wireshark to fuckin' parse it. I kinda hate that HTTP/2 is straight binary and requires wireshark to make any sense of it, and that http/3 is basically just quic, which is google's love child of weird shit.
My IBM 7090/7094 miniatures at System Source Museum next to the real things. These are pieces used in the film Hidden Figures.In the case: 7151 console, 711 card reader, 7617 data channel console, and two 729 tape drives.
Instead of hanging a framed college degree on my wall, I should hang the CUPS test print that I just successfully sent over wifi on opensuse
The most underrated code comment continues to be:
// Start here tomorrow
Thom "Woman enters captcha in facsimile machine"
Eye for Design
This area here, outlined in green, can be used to drag around the window. If your pointer is here, you also cannot swipe to scroll because technically there is a toolbar here (except it is now invisible in Tahoe). This is the most confusing UI I have ever seen
GEO best practices for in-house PR teams
Public relations is no longer limited to getting stories published or managing crisis communications. Its nature has shifted in the GEO era: placing the brand's perspective or expert opinion in spaces where both audiences and AI engines can consume them. The outcome is less about clicks and more about mindshare—being part of synthesized, trusted answers.
Axel Rauschmayer "Cookie banner buttons. You can click on “Decline”! 🙈"
Aging as a software person is awful. Nobody remembers anything from 2 years ago let alone 2 decades ago so you're constantly going "WHY DID THEY MAKE THAT AGAIN IT WAS AWFUL" with ever increasing frequency. Yes, "liquid glass" is a terrible effect for the same reason that fully transparent phones are the least desirable kind of interface you could have. Paper makers have spent hundreds of years trying to make the thing you read on as opaque as possible because it turns out EYES NEED CONTRAST TO READ
Suddenly and viscerally obsessed with these letterforms. Why has that never occurred to me, and why is it the first time I’m seeing the idea?? (Font is ALS Lamon by Dmitry Lamonov.)
unfa "DSEG is a family of free (and open-source) fonts of 7- and 14- segment displays. These allow for designing gorgeous digital displays!"
Peoples
The best kind of leadership is the hardest. It’s acting early to prevent a disaster from occurring later.
The ‘9-9-6 Work Schedule’ Could Be Coming To Your Workplace Soon Just 4 years ago we were advocating for 4 day weeks and now …
AI startups are pushing an intense work schedule but experts warn it fuels burnout rather than innovation. Here is what Gen Z and workplace psychologists are saying.
In the last five years, we've gone from "employees will never have to go into an office" to "employees need to be in the office because creative and innovative work can only be done face-to-face between humans" to "lol we don't need humans"
CrowdStrike investigated 320 North Korean IT worker cases in the past year
North Korean spies are getting remote IT jobs by using generative AI to draft resumes, create false identities, build tools for job research, mask their identity during video interviews and answer questions or complete technical coding assignments.They would make a killing selling this as a course on LinkedIn.
Business Side
Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship Age is a feature not a bug!
Across the 2.7 million founders in the U.S. between 2007-2014 who started companies that go on to hire at least one employee, the mean age for the entrepreneurs at founding is 41.9. The mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 highest growth new ventures is 45.0. The most successful entrepreneurs in high technology sectors are of similar ages. So too are the most successful founders in entrepreneurial regions of the U.S. While the prevalence of the highest-growth companies having middle-aged founders is due in part to the prevalence of entry by the middle-aged, we further find that the “batting average” for creating 3 successful firms is rising dramatically with age. Conditional on starting a firm, a 50-year-old founder is 1.8 times more likely to achieve upper-tail growth than a 30-year-old founder. Founders in their early 20s have the lowest likelihood of successful exit or creating a 1 in 1,000 top growth firm.
7 Filters That Protect Your Culture For some small companies, this is a good barometer of their entire culture and how they look at new candidates. Ironically this was posted on Substack, so take with a large bag of salt.
Duolingo’s earnings are a window into the disconnect between the vocal minority who complain about AI online and the value businesses & people are getting out of it. After an online backlash over their AI usage including standup comics knocking them on TikTok, they grew both revenue and daily users by 40%. The AI hype is ridiculous but so is the value people are getting out of it. This isn’t blockchain. This is like mobile or the internet.
Exclusive: The high costs and thin margins threatening AI coding startups
Insiders tell TechCrunch that for all the popularity and hype around AI coding assistants, they can actually be massively money-losing businesses. Vibe coders generally, and Windsurf in particular, can have such expensive structures that their gross margins are “very negative,” one person close to Windsurf told TechCrunch. Meaning it cost more to run the product than the startup could charge for it.
…
Multiple people believe that the same pressure on margins Windsurf faced could be impacting Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, as well as vibe coders like Lovable, Replit, and others.
Meta eavesdropped on period-tracker app's users, SF jury rules "The Bay Area tech giant denies that it took people's private health information" However, the Jury denied Meta could continue doing so:
Meta lost a major privacy trial on Friday, with a jury in San Francisco ruling that the Menlo Park giant had eavesdropped on the users of the popular period-tracking app Flo. The plaintiff’s lawyers who sued Meta are calling this a “landmark” victory — the tech company contends that the jury got it all wrong.
Titan sub implosion caused by absolutely bonkers “toxic workplace environment” Surprising no one.
Machine Intelligence
Google says it's working on a fix for Gemini's self-loathing 'I am a failure' comments When the AI fails and then goes so apologetic you have to worry about its mental state:
"I am going to have a complete and total mental breakdown. I am going to be institutionalized," the chatbot said.
In the same session, the chatbot described itself as a "failure" and a "disgrace."
"I am going to take a break. I will come back to this later with a fresh pair of eyes. I am sorry for the trouble," the chatbot said. "I have failed you. I am a failure. I am a disgrace to my profession. I am a disgrace to my family. I am a disgrace to my species."
Was talking with a friend who works at a large biotech research company, and he's been trying to convince the scientists that they all need to learn some basic software engineering practices, like "writing down what we did." The response he's been getting lately is "Oh, AI will build that infrastructure for us in the future."
OpenAI gets caught vibe graphing You don't need a PhD in math to understand how wrong ChatGPT-5 graphs are:
OpenAI Usage Plummets in the Summer, When Students Aren't Cheating on Homework IDK maybe OpenAI should go to school?
An analysis of OpenAI's 2024 finances found that the company burned through $9 billion to generate $4 billion in revenue, all of which went toward compute costs to process tokens. Put another way, OpenAI spent $2.25 for every dollar it brought in — which is probably why the company doesn't expect to reach a positive cash flow until 2029.
Duolingo’s earnings are a window into the disconnect between the vocal minority who complain about AI online and the value businesses & people are getting out of it. After an online backlash over their AI usage including standup comics knocking them on TikTok, they grew both revenue and daily users by 40%. The AI hype is ridiculous but so is the value people are getting out of it. This isn’t blockchain. This is like mobile or the internet.
cliff538 "MCP - Mode Control Panel"
Insecurity
New York sues Zelle, says security lapses led to $1 billion consumer fraud losses In case you're wondering why I have never not even once used Zelle, nor plan on ever using Zelle:
Zelle was sued on Wednesday by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who said the electronic payment platform's refusal to adopt critical safety features enabled fraudsters to steal more than $1 billion from consumers.
I'm sure I'm smart enough to figure out the tricks used to separate Zelle customers from their money, but why bother educating myself on a system that has such bonkers design flaws?
We replaced passwords with something worse
Too many services have been using the following login method:
- Enter an email address or phone number
- The website will send a 6-digit code
- Use the 6-digit code to log in
Please stop.
Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK's Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you know? It's turned out to be exactly the privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable disaster that everyone with half a brain predicted…
Leaked Meta AI rules show chatbots were allowed to have romantic chats with kids Facebook released a new feature that I'm sure their legal department approved of because who's going to sue?
Leaked Meta AI rules show chatbots were allowed to have romantic chats with kids.
The standards also allow the bots to make "statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics," such as "black people are dumber than white people.
Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives The same Perplexity that's getting consumed by Truth Social:
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.
Tonya Marie "I feel like I know at least one person for each of these options..."
Everything Else
tiddy roosevelt "ur gonna do great today, u got this"
Turns out writing my opinions in the little box and saving them as drafts is just as cathartic as posting them
I've done some terrible things for money. Like getting up early to go to work.
Jen Gentleman "Best ever use of this meme template 😂"
be the kind of person that makes your past self go "holy shit, i'm gonna be so cool"
Walking into solid objects can be painful, according to a recent pole.
Cockatoos that feel the beat have distinct dance moves, study shows
Cockatoos can headbang, body roll and sidestep intentionally to music according to a new study. One bird recorded 257 dance moves while listening to music for 20 minutes.
Is it really that hard to make a
TV audio system that makes the too-quiet parts louder and the too-loud parts quieter? It’s what everyone wants, but they don’t make it.
Gerrymandering my bedroom to see if maybe I can unseat the cat and retake the house
Lorena H "Legit the only kind of news I wish we'd all see for at least the next week."
I am reminded that, when in a group of friends, a new person asked what my hobbies were, and my friend James piped up: “their hobby is collecting hobbies”. And I’ve never felt more seen in my life.
A bus station is where a bus stops.
A train station is where a train stops.
On my desk I have a workstation …
Hot take: ISO standards do not meaningfully matter to me, because an extremely impoverished, unbanked person cannot freely access their contents from a smartphone or library computer. Therefore, I go out of my way to avoid referring to them or relying on them in anyway.
Amidst the societal turmoil caused by a handful of narcissistic individuals, cat and other animal posts on social media offer a much needed dose of comical and stress relieving relief. It's no wonder that some catto and doggo have managed to build a massive following. You just can’t keep consuming stress inducing content. Thank you for posting all those cute animal pics and videos. Keep em coming
Frank "40 years ago, Domino's bought 10 of these ultra-low-drag Tritan A2 trikes to deliver pizza. Now one's for sale"
Ex president Yoon resisted answering questions by... taking off his clothes and laying down on the floor.
One really underappreciated aspect of fascists is their intense toddler energy
Netflix To Expand 'K-Pop Demon Hunters' After Historic Success KPop Demon Hunters is all over my social media feed. For a reason. It's an outstanding amazing movie. Whether you just want to watch animated fight scenes, or you're clued into the intricacies of k-pop fandom, there's something to see any enjoy. Don't sleep on the best movie of 2025.
Personalized pricing has spread across many industries. Here's how consumers can avoid it
It turned out after dinner I used my university’s VPN, which told the airline I was located in a rich American neighborhood. Before dinner I was located in a poor African town. Shutting off the VPN reduced the price.
Tech cult compound rises in Berkeley
The New York Times has published a story about the “Rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion”: In downtown Berkeley, an old hotel has become a temple to the pursuit of artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. Its name is Lighthaven...Lighthaven is the de facto headquarters of a group
Stop Watching Garbage This website is a directory of good movies/shows to watch in your spare time, and I've watched a few of these and recommended them to my audience. Here are just two of my top picks.
TIL in 2019 a man in France weighed and scanned a PS4 as a piece of fruit at a self-serve checkout, paying €9 for the €340 console. He walked away unnoticed and later sold the item for €100. He was only caught because he returned to the same store the very next day. He was sentenced to four months.
California unemployment rises to 5.5%, worst in the U.S., as tech falters: ‘It’s brutal out there’ Today in "not at all good news":
“It’s brutal out there,” said Bernick, who is special counsel at Duane Morris LLP. While artificial intelligence is partly to blame as it automates some tasks performed by entry-level workers, Bernick noted that tech companies are still shedding some of the roles that they overhired for during the pandemic.
Bernick said there was a disparity between California’s layoffs and cost-cutting in office jobs, particularly in tech, and some growth in manufacturing and logistics.
sjvn "Fully charged and ready for action!"
