Published
Weekend Reading — It's gettin' hot in here …
Tjeerd Royaards "Hot. Cartoon from last year."
Tech Stuff
DevCleaner Free space on your Mac that's currently used by the caches of Xcode, npm, Cursor, Claude, et al. Runs local, minimum memory footprint, and there's a free version.
Cotypist Text auto-complete that runs in every app you use. Press Tab to have it complete the next word, repeatedly to complete entire paragraph. You can also set a shortcut for that. For me, it's pretty spot on. It won't guess my exact thinking, but 90% of the text I write is boilerplate that it will nicely auto-complete.
pi-automode: Bringing Claude’s Auto Mode to Pi Claude Code has a cool feature that acts like a safety guard: a separate AI model that watches what the main AI tries to do. This plugin gives Pi the same powers.
OpenKnowledge Open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion. Currently integrated with Claude, Cursor, Codex, but looks like more integrations will come. Designed specifically for AI agents with support for MCP, RAG, and CLI. Sharing and collaboration, and more.
SkyBridge A React framework for your MCP server. MCP is an API, but it can float UIs inside the LLM, which is where React helps.
"Vibe coding has taught me to think more like an engineer" is one of the more chilling sentences I've brushed against today.
BetterCmdTab Cmd+Tab for macOS: open source, free, 3 different view modes, support for apps and windows, and other interesting UI features. I gave up after a few days, since it doesn't work well with Ghostty, but otherwise I found it delightful.
Small E-Ink Reader That Changed My Reading Habit This e-ink reader is small enough to fit in your pocket and hopefully cheap enough to fit in your budget ($69).
overflowy/make-look-scanned Make any PDF look scanned. CLI or in the browser via WASM.
Bringing code comments energy into the pottery studio by writing "Monster can is a structural support, do not remove" on a sticky note.
These macOS-inspired flip flops are weird, playful, and sadly don’t come with apple “find my”
Eye for Design
There are some narrow and very specific uses for AI. Pretending to be a human to do customer support is not one of them. I spent 20 minutes hopelessly confusing a AI customer support agent until it connected me to a human and they solved my problem in 15 secs. Don't tell 10 year old me this, but the future actually sucks.
handwritten.danieljanus.pl A handwritten blog, written entirely on the reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet. Kind of cool if you ask me.
One thing this era of "AI" is revealing is just how few orgs' product design processes involve users, like, at all
TownSquare - Chatting with Strangers I do think TownSquare is an interesting and quite joyful experiment in online spaces.
Peoples
The Saviour-Industrial Complex Boards keep hiring the executives who says yes. An entire market — search, remuneration, coaching, consulting — now manufactures the corporate saviour that has no mechanism for telling the truth about what they can deliver. An interesting exploration of why a lot of executives do not appear tech (or business) savvy.
I would never say this in an interview, but I like working somewhere where it's not only ok to say "I don't know," but also where it's at least sometimes ok to say "I'm not responsible for knowing that."
I strive to be a team player, but I hate the idea that literally anything that lands on literally anyone's plate is theirs to deal with. If you can't answer my question, I don't think it automatically becomes your job to find out just because you're first colleague I happened to bump into.
Business Side
Vibecoding is becoming a deal-breaker test for software acquisitions "According to the Financial Times, the AI-generated replicas are meant to show potential buyers how hard it would be to reproduce a target company's technology." I mean, yes, replicating existing software is not very hard — the challenge is reaching out to customers, closing sales, establishing a growing revenue stream, turning a profit. And that you can't vibe code, but explain that to consulting firms.
Today in AI Discourse Milestones: Inc. magazine has a Gartner prediction that half of AI downsizing decisions will be reversed.
It's almost like they're tiptoeing up to fact that it was vibes to juice stocks and scare workers....
Chris Hillman Where AI fails miserably is in automating that which should never be automated:
This matters for the AI conversation because there’s a temptation, especially under cost pressure, to look at AI and think “great, we can run leaner.” That’s the trap. Use AI to squeeze more out of fewer people and you’ll hit short-term margins while quietly draining the moat. Use it to free people up to do the things only people can do — notice, listen, care, remember — and you’ll build something that compounds for years.
Machine Intelligence
Somebody made a great analogy that calling LLMs AI and acting like we're close to creating a conscious computer is like when ppl in the 18th c. discovered galvanism and thinking bc they could make a dead frog's leg twitch w electricity that they were close to being able to raise the dead.
I wish I could remember where I read that bc it's so fucking apt.
Insecurity
I got email and text alerts from my dentist saying i have an outstanding balance, which is sadly normal in US care.
It kills me how much we're being trained by legit businesses to just click a link and enter info at the same time we're scolding people for getting scammed.
I went through the dentist's site to pay, and this one was legit.
PSA: "pearcleaner .com" is a FAKE site pushing macOS infostealer malware
https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ucstzy/psa_pearcleanercom_is_a_fake_site_pushing_macos/If you Google "pearcleaner," one of the top results (sometimes ranking above the real GitHub page) is pearcleaner .com. It looks legit. It is not. The real Pearcleaner is open-source by developer alienator88 and is distributed only through https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner and Homebrew. The .com domain is fake, which is exactly why it's nowhere to be found on the actual GitHub page.
Everything Else
I hate it when the current weather outside has its own wikipedia page
Be the elephant you wish to see in the room.
It's libido, not libidon't
Ge0rG "From the "Pivot to woodworking" department"
same thing we do every day pinky, try to complete a task
a quantum computer is the one that only works when tech support is observing it
(divorce settlement negotiations) no YOU keep the drafts folder
germans: “uuuuuhhh, we don’t really have proper high-speed rail!!!!”
also germans:
On the trail of the dotcom queen: how Julie Meyer left a pattern of unpaid bills, missing funds and broken dreams in her wake The entrepreneur was once the toast of London’s tech scene, a ‘global leader of tomorrow’ who starred on Dragons’ Den and promised untold riches for the startups she championed. But people she worked with in the last decade, from Malta to Switzerland, describe a very different reality. The US version of Dragons’ Den is called Shark Tank, which tells you everything you need to know about their "global leaders of tomorrow".
The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week Did you guess the root cause of RTO? (via Amy Diehl, Ph.D.)
Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.
Thomas Wodarek "The future we got"
