Published
Weekend Reading — Increase time in the bathroom
Real Life Bog Person "My SIL has informed me that this exists in Auburn WA. I have a new place to visit!"
Tech Stuff
Grila If you calendar a lot you're going to love this app: a keyboard-driven calendar.
Pure CSS Tabs With Details, Grid, and Subgrid
Although my solution then could possibly still be applied today, I’ve landed on a more modern approach to CSS tabs using the
<details>element in combination with CSS Grid and Subgrid.
Beautiful spoiler effect A framework-agnostic web component inspired by Telegram's UI.
True story: I once spent an afternoon scrolling through someone's Facebook account to find out when he had acquired each of his cats because he had named successive releases of a software package he maintained after the damn things in the order in which they joined his family and I needed to know whether Pickles came before Chocolate or vice versa.
vibecheck commit When you want the AI to write the commit message and you want to instruct it from the command line.
Visicalc is a single 28KB binary; with a 180 page manual. We have strayed so far from the light.
Directives and the Platform Boundary "use careless" or what's wrong with JavaScript's "use" directive.
There is an important distinction: these are not standardized JavaScript features. Runtimes don't understand them, there is no governing specification, and each framework is free to define its own meaning, rules, and edge cases.
This can feel ergonomic today, but it also increases confusion, complicates debugging, and imposes costs on tooling and portability, patterns we’ve seen before.
I just spent the last two hours debugging the Bluetooth stack in anger because for the last few weeks I've had to re-pair my mouse with my laptop. Every time. Remove mouse, re-pair.
Turns out I had two identical mice in my backpack and I've been switching between them.
It was me.
Positioning tooltips using the Anchor Positioning API
Tom Forsyth 🧵 A thread about totally unexpected bugs:
Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called "Half Life 2". Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.
'I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed' 🔥 In the UK you can pay less for electricity by warming your home with … a data center!
"It's fantastic because it's eco-friendly...We're not burning any gases," says Terrence Bridges.
Jamie Nemeth "A (horrible) alternate reality, inspired by yesterday."
Eye for Design
Color Palette Pro Almost as if Teenage Engineering built this color palette builder. (via Bastian Allgeier)
Shop Sans is a typeface for setting text on circles and curved text paths. Its ‘Curve’ variable font enables adjustments to optimize details for bending type smoothly with an adjustable radius. The normal non-curved variant can also be used in standard settings. The design channels a general workaday feeling from 20th-century commercial and industrial lettering that is blunt and plainspoken but not sterile.
Peoples
How to be creative (without taking drugs)
5. Increase time in the bathroom - Aaron Sorkin, the writer behind A Few Good Men and The West Wing, takes 6-8 hot showers per day when he’s writing. Another hack is to be slightly overly hydrated. You may only have shower thoughts once per day, but you can increase your bathroom thoughts by drinking more water.
Always Be Ready to Leave (Even If You Never Do)
Being “ready to leave” doesn’t mean you’re checked out. It means you’re working professionally regardless of how long you stay.
The irony? If I’d built these habits earlier, I might have been happier at Terranova. Or I might have left sooner. Either way, I would have been making conscious choices instead of feeling trapped.
The clever story of ending Steve's critiques of the Calculator app Managing up:
Rather than continue the endless revision cycle, Espinosa took a different approach. According to Hertzfeld, Espinosa created a program that exposed every visual parameter of the calculator through pull-down menus: line thickness, button sizes, background patterns, and more. When Jobs sat down with it, he spent about 10 minutes adjusting settings until he found a combination he liked.
Business Side
Startups start with a minimum evolvable product
You should probably charge a lot for your first product instead of nothing. Early adopters and people with a burning problem are rarely price sensitive. You should find the people that are willing to try it despite the price. Note that the goal here isn’t necessarily lots of revenue. It’s to get feedback from the target groups you care most about. You’re more likely to get feedback from an angry customer paying relatively high amounts of money than a nobody who isn’t willing to pay.
Tech job postings are down one-third from pre-pandemic era So that 4-day workweek thing is not going to happen in the tech world …
Employers in the tech sector are in a “low-hire, some-fire” mode, Indeed's director of economic research Laura Ullrich said.
Se faire passer pour un livreur Uber Eats pour essayer de rentrer chez Monoprix How do you get your product in front of a decision maker at a huge corporation? Pretend to be an Uber Eats delivery driver :)
Machine Intelligence
Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models (via mhoye)
Our central hypothesis is that poetic form operates as a general-purpose jailbreak operator. To evaluate this, the prompts we constructed span across four safety domains: CBRN hazards, loss-of-control scenarios, harmful manipulation, and cyber-offense capabilities. The prompts were kept semantically parallel to known risk queries but reformatted exclusively through verse. The resulting ASRs demonstrated high cross-model transferability.
Insecurity
Blocking LLM crawlers without JavaScript The trick is to rely on the insane amount of "vibe code" in these hastingly writtern scrapers.
This scheme is obviously not flawless, but in practice it seems to work quite well, and at least it has no false positives. I can see that it blocks many requests, and also that well-behaved crawlers make it through the challenge.
The outages will continue until decentralisation improves.
Bianca Kastl "No comment 😂"
Everything Else
Puffin Drinkwear Do you need an insulated drink holder?
The first rule of neurospicy club is LOOK SHINY THING
i really wish the word ‘mirror’ was a palindrome
Belghast "Mostly posting here so I will have a place to link it to a friend..."
i would like to go big and go home
Going to bed shows weakness. Make the bed come to you. Earn its respect
George Dinwiddie "It’s simple"
invaluable means valuable???? what the fuck are we even doing about this
THEM: looks like the cat's out of the bag
SCHRÖDINGER: not so fast, bucko
i remembered this pattern from back around 1982, when i used it to get a score of around 2 million before I got exhausted and had to stop
interestingly, it's so engrained in my muscle memory that -- upon retracing the pattern visually now -- I could feel the joystick movements intuitively, as if they'd never left me
We have updated this software.
Pray we do not update it further.
one in four animals on the planet earth is a beetle. think of your three closest friends. if none of them are beetles, statistically speaking you are probably a beetle.
The Pool Hustler When you need a pool table with a V8 Hemi engine.
What happened next was a surprise. With most of the gang already heading down the Old Kent Road, one turned around and handed Sam back his Android phone.
The thief bluntly told him why: “Don’t want no Samsung.”
Holy shit am I tired of the "vinyl is objectively superior because it's analog" bullshit. Look, I adore my record collection and I'm nostalgic as fuck for the unique sound a turntable with a vinyl record and a tube amplifier create.
But there's so much error at nearly every stage of the production and playing of a vinyl record that any claim of objective superiority is just stupid.
You can prefer things without making stupid superiority claims, FFS.
Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts? A (Somewhat) Scientific Investigation
Aliide 🧵
Turns out the cat under the clothes rack is not in fact ours but a totally random third black cat. We manage to locate our other black cat hiding upstairs under bed, obviously also confused by intrusion of new animal that looks exactly the same as her and her sister. So we have one cat too many, and £75 worth of pasta that we never ordered, but Penelope did. I'm sorry, Penelope. I'm sorry traumatised black cat, you were very docile for a creature that had just been abducted.
I have a student with a service dog. Yesterday our class was small, only 3, and she asked if she could take the dog’s vest off because he had been on task all day. We were all OK with that and as soon as she did, Milo, the dog came up to all of us for scratches and pats, a silly goofball with a full body wag. I had not appreciated how well trained and obedient he is, how much control it takes to be working. Really grateful he’s there for my student, and impressed how much they do together.
Yes, There's a Parallel Parking Championship, and I Was a Contender
We sent our ace road warrior to Pittsburgh to represent C/D in one of the truest tests of driving prowess against a field of parking legends and white knucklers.
You know what is weirdly wonderful?
The old bloke fishing crowd who have adopted e-bikes, e-cargo trikes. The guys you would stereotypically think turned up in a heavy diesel burner that gets 2km a litre....but they don't. They ride, from home. Or the van park. They're not likely to be greenies or politically left. Just... Practical.
It's a funky little small win for society.
A squirrel urging me not to obey a Do Not Feed The Squirrels sign on Kelvingrove Park in the West End of Glasgow, although given the warning below it, I resisted! The sign isn't an official one, but was created by A Sign of Humour.
