Published
Weekend Reading — Known to cause boys in yards
Marcel "It's embarrassing how quickly a bit of sunshine can change my mood."
Tech Stuff
Current is a new RSS reader that’s more like a river than an inbox If you want to enjoy RSS give Current a try. $9.99 as a one-time fee, no subscription:
Current, however, proposes a different RSS experience. Instead of structuring feeds as lists to be processed, or unread counts driven to zero, the app’s main screen is a river.
The feasibility risk hasn't disappeared. It's shifted. It used to be "can we build this?" Now it's "can we plan this so it gets built well?"
Can We Use A collection of websites focused on browsers usage and features.
The most important thing non-technical people can do right now isn't learning about AI. It's building something with it.
Building something silly is how you practice that. Not because the tool matters, but because the act of building rewires how you think. You stop being a passive consumer of software and start being someone who shapes their own tools. That’s adaptability in action.
parallel.ai Power your AI with web search, content extraction, and more. Reasonably priced: $0.005 for 10 search results, $0.001 for one extraction.
Stop turning everything into arrays (and do less work instead) JavaScript iterators FTW 💪
Clawi.ai Want OpenClaw running on someone else's hardware? That way you don't need your own dedicated computer, also doesn't run anything destructive on your filesystem. Starter plan is $30/month.
rtk RTK stands for Rust Token Killer and will minimize Claude Code LLM token consumption by making everything more concise. CLI with easy to use install script.
How I Turned Claude Code's Thinking Indicator into a One Piece Adventure When Claude Code processes a request, it shows a spinner with verbs like “Considering…” or “Analyzing…”. Turns out you can tell it which phrases to show … a source of inspiration?
Let the AI Pick React The AI-React reinforcement loop is creating a monoculture, which might be exactly what frontend development needs:
React is not the best. But it is good enough for the vast majority of what gets built. And “good enough + excellent AI support” beats “technically superior + mediocre AI support” in every practical scenario I can think of.
I learned this first-hand when I was using a new Svelte version with GitHub Copilot — a long time ago it seems — when the training data had not included that version yet. Not a fun experience, having to reinstruct the LLM every time
Vim-pencil Rethinking Vim as a tool for writing.
Vibe Coding: Product Quality and Democratisation On product quality, democratisation, and when personal tools become products:
I am much more pragmatic: does the code solve a problem? Yes? Then it is good code; it fulfills its purpose. However, take into account that the purpose is not just to solve the problem then and there, but also in the future. And the cost it takes to maintain the solution for the problem has by definition to be lower than the (perceived) costs the problem causes.
Micasa Tracks maintenance, projects, incidents, appliances, vendors, quotes, and documents—all from your terminal.
exe.dev Need a sandbox in a jiffy? How about a subscription service that gives you a virtual machine with persistent disks, easily accessible over HTTPS, and with sensible and secure defaults. There are many valid use cases, but this week everyone is obsessed with getting a VM to run their OpenClaw agent, so I'm leading with that. $20/month.
Vanta Puce "logging in to my sysadmin job"
Eye for Design
Making a font with 9,999 ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
As the title implies, I just created a font that displays numbers in a compact format used by Cistercian monks . You can play with it on my demo site here.
Womens Sizing If you're into the history of women sizing (cloths) you'll enjoy reading this. If you're into websites designed to inform, you'll love scrolling through this. Wonderful UI.
Business Side
Origami Chatbot that helps sales teams find prospects, enrich contact info, and build lead lists using natural language. Describe your ideal customer and it will search through 15+ data sources (LinkedIn, Shopify, WooCommerce, etc) for you. Starting at $80/month for 500~1,000 fully enriched prospects
Is Grindr Dead? TL;DR but this quote is quality journalism:
A core tenet of enshittification is that the user pain points aren’t bugs but features. The worse a free experience, the more people will pay to avoid it or to restore it to its original use. In this model, there isn’t any incentive to make things better, because that isn’t what makes money.
The advertising industry has spent $_______ on you. I'm worth $142,569! Ok, not exactly worth, more like this is how much advertisers may have spent on my eyeballs. What's your worth?
Machine Intelligence
Andrej Karpathy talks about “Claws” I've been trying out OpenClaw for a week now and pretty happy using it as my AI EA ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
It even comes with an established emoji 🦞
AI is already dead; we are pivoting to crabs. Within 5-6 years 80% of all jobs will be crabs. Begin hardening your dermis into a tough durable exoskeleton now or be left behind. Economic carcinization is coming
Meet Lobster 🦞: My Personal AI Assistant This looks mighty useful:
The point isn’t any single interaction. It’s that Lobster becomes the connective tissue for our family’s digital life. Everyone can reach him. He knows what systems to check. He can relay messages and create tasks. And he responds like a person, not a search engine.
What happens when you build a todo app for you and your AI assistan I use three LLMs concurrently—wonder what that says about me?
Two interfaces, two jobs. Claude is the capture net - when I’m in conversation and things come up, they get logged and structured without breaking flow. The desktop app is where I decide what actually matters and check things off.
Insecurity
Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails Oops:
According to a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this bug (tracked under CW1226324 and first detected on January 21) affects the Copilot "work tab" chat feature, which incorrectly reads and summarizes emails stored in users' Sent Items and Drafts folders, including messages that carry confidentiality labels explicitly designed to restrict access by automated tools.
Ars Technica Pulls Article With AI Fabricated Quotes About AI Generated Article Also quite the oops:
After Shambaugh rejected MJ Rathbun, the alleged AI agent published what Shambaugh called a “hit piece” on its website.
…
On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published a story with the headline “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name.” The article cites Shambaugh’s personal blog, but features quotes from Shambaugh that he didn’t say or write but are attributed to his blog.
Everything Else
Mike In The Garden "Here's something you can do with a few glowsticks and plentiful amounts of snow."
This milkshake contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause boys in yards
i’m so old, i remember when computers got cheaper over time
Work advice "Don’t hook up where you VLOOKUP"
"Curling is the pickleball of the Winter Olympics."
I wasn't gifted, I was undiagnosed.
Acme Weather Smarter forecasts that "embrace uncertainty, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist." From the makers of Dark Sky. (via mako)
Of course my writing sounds like an LLM. I've been writing technical doc for 40 years. Who the fuck do you think the LLM trained on?
Someone I know referred to dye-and-perfume-free laundry soap as “neurodetergent,” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that since.
Yeah we know the old saying but that's, well, old. All I'm saying is that I have this basket and I don't see any reason at all why I shouldn't put all my eggs in it. You're just stuck in outdated thinking. I'm a fucking disruptor, man. Get on board or get left behind.
Timeliner "Did you know …" Explore the connections that shaped history with this delightful timeline. Also, did you know this site was "Vibe-coded with Claude Opus 4.6"?
The curious case of low-protein diets The disagreement between proteinmaxxing and longevity guru-ing:
Yet there’s a cadre of scientists studying a contrary phenomenon: In critters from single-celled yeast to insects to rodents, cutting protein intake to measly levels makes them live longer.
Why Vampires Live Forever Related, musings on the modern longevity movement's obsession with blood transfusions:
The one thing the longevity-vampire community has not yet learned from Dracula is operational security.
Dracula operated in silence for centuries. He didn’t have a podcast. He didn’t track his erection quality on a public dashboard. He didn’t appear on Netflix. He understood that the fundamental rule of being a vampire is: don’t talk about being a vampire.
Why your best ideas come after your worst
This is why so many great writers swear by deliberately messy first passes. John McPhee describes his early creative process as “flinging mud at a wall.” If we’ve any hope of completing a first draft, he explains, we’ve got to “blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything.” This method works precisely for its arbitrariness; you’re tricking the DMN to hand you something—anything—tangible, then protecting that something from early prosecution by delaying the ECN.
It reminded me so much of emails from bosses in my life: short, blunt (almost rude?), typos galore, weird formatting, bad grammar, "sent from iPhone", etc. It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try. Because the only reason people spend time crafting a well-written email is to look powerful, mature, professional. But if you're already a powerful professional, I guess technically you don't need to make an effort. And if there's no other boss above you, you can do whatever you want.
Natasha "You are being judged ..."
