Published
Weekend Reading — ᓚᘏᗢ
And just like that, I became a member of the SocialSpec web!
SocialSpec is a simple format that turns your domain into a social profile. It's like having a social network profile without being tied to any one platform.
The profile lives on your site: RSS feed, about me page (about.md), contact info (contact.vcf), list of other profiles you're following (OPML).
This is now a feature you can turn on in Magic Pages, the Ghost host I'm using (and highly recommend). I asked Jannis about it a few days ago, and he just made it happen!
Tech Stuff
DevTools I like having these all easily accessible on my Mac: format JSON, decode JWTs, compare text, and more.
ftop When you need to watch CPU and memory usage and you want a UI that you can pin to the top and resize for different views. I'm only worried about CPU usage when I trying to get work done from a coffee shop, so I've ignored the variety of popular CPU monitors but I do like this one.
Seed data is a feature. The day a new teammate can see a realistic app in five minutes is the day your onboarding doc gets shorter by a page.
Gr8r Studio Imagine a todo app that has all of the features you can ever want: dashboard, inbox, my tasks, projects, kanban board, calendar, timeline, files, and what not. A Vite app you can deploy straight to Vercel. I find the feature set overwhelming, but it might be the perfect mix for your needs.
ExcalidrawZ A local-first Excalidraw client form macOS and iOS.
Good code isn’t about writing more. It’s about keeping things simple, clean, and easy to maintain.
UnWall Another site for removing paywall from articles. Not super solid but definitely better uptime than archive.today. PS I have a Safari extension that applies UnWall on the current tab, if anyone wants to help me push this to production, let me know.
remember-this.io "Everything you want to save. Nothing to organize." One of the coolest features of AI is that it can make finding information so much easier by saving you all the trouble of organizing it. No folders and no tags to worry about. This I think is a great app idea.
Learning the hard way that tests should assert what the user wants, not how the code is wired. What's the one testing habit that saved you the most time?
tennis Render stylish CSV tables in the terminal.
Emeraldian What if Obsidian had a TUI?
A backup isn’t a backup until you’ve restored from it. Until then, it’s just Schrödinger’s data.
curl-impersonate curl but makes HTTP requests that look like they came from a real browser: Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, and Tor.
Terminal borders that don't cost a cell I'd like to see more TUI apps being available for me to use, and definitely welcome this UI design.
Remember when entire programming IDE could fit on a few floppy disks? Now editor needs 2GB of RAM just to remind you that you forgot a semicolon😅
zebkit "Chromium's engine as one library you link into your own application: Blink, V8 with every JIT tier, PDFium, FFmpeg and the rest of what Chrome is made of, with nothing of Chrome's browser and nothing of Electron's runtime."
This being the age of “RAM is too damn expensive”, everything is now measured against Electron:
- Lighter than Electron. Against the latest Electron, 45.2.1, on Linux (2026-11-08, Chromium 157 as released in 0.3.0): 33% smaller as an application ships it, a cold start in 2.3 s against 5.8, a blank page in 27% less memory, JavaScript and the DOM 6% faster, text layout level (Benchmark).
MeowDisplay iPhone mirroring, but in reverse: use your Mac from your phone.
Tinyhand A tiny hand on a stick that points at things on your Mac screen. Useless? Yes. Fun? Also yes.
Eye for Design
Lenso UI Make your React app look liks a native iOS app. Base UI + StyleX that brings native iOS UI look, glass materials, elastic feedback, fluid menus, and such. (via @LioRael)
when i see software with a really barebones web presence, i assume it's gonna probably be around in a working state for 20+ years. seeing software with a really polished website always gave me the vibe that i'd be lucky if it lasted 3 years. nowadays that's a signal that it may not even still be around in 3 weeks
Doory An open-source alternative to Canva. FYI: Canva just did a 22% RIF. Generative AI apps like Doory are the growth impediment for generative content businesses.
Peoples
If I was to summarise our - developers' - place in the "new world" in a few words, it would be this: the faster the tools move, the more the human parts of the work matter.
According to Dave it's not just about speed; developers can look at more data, services, and models and bring in more innovation and ideas. "By making failure cheap and running in smaller waves with automated roll-backs," they can take risks and try new ideas.
Business Side
Do or do not. There is no backlog.
For decades, it was acceptable to say, “that’s a great idea - we’ll put it on the backlog.” In the past few months, that has changed.
For bugs of any kind, and simple features that don’t require careful thought, there cannot be a backlog anymore.
Do it, or don’t do it. There is no “next quarter.” If it’s a good idea, you should just do it now. If it’s not, then don’t.
The Handbrake: Why More Effort Buys Noise Instead of Distance
The core claim is blunt: only by increasing flow through the constraint can total throughput increase. Everything else is local improvement, and local improvement at a non-constraint does not show up in the result.
The Hospital Wheelchair is the Ultimate Example of the Process of “Cheap-olution”
Cheap-olution is the process of evolving a product through years of successive designs (evolution) to enable the manufacturing of the product at the absolute lowest price possible (cheap) while still maintaining the bare minimum of functionality.
IMO, the institutional hospital wheelchair is the pinnacle example of cheap-olution. The most widely selling hospital wheelchairs have been designed in such a manner they can’t be mass produced any cheaper and still be (barely) functional (in limited environments).
Machine Intelligence
Software Was Never Safe Reminder, don't bother blaming on AI what is a long-standing "move fast, break things" practice:
Safety was always stochastic. The professional move was always the same: estimate your confidence honestly, find the cheapest lever that raises it, and pull that lever relentlessly. For decades the cheapest lever — thorough, adversarial, never-bored review — was also the most expensive to staff, so we pulled it sparingly and dressed up the result in categorical language.
AI didn’t break that bargain. It made the lever cheap.
VS Code now has an inbox for AI agents 😂 It shows which agents need attention, which are still working, and which are ready to merge. We've gone from managing browser tabs to managing AI agents.
Don’t anthropomorphize LLMs.
They hate that.
2026: The State of Enterprise AI
AI spend concentrates where agents work best: Coding ($34.0B) and chatbots ($25.0B) make up 76% of the $77.3B app market because they offer environments in which agents can act, workflows they can learn, and results they can verify.
Insecurity
We invented the internet specifically to be resilient through decentralisation, then spent the last twenty years cramming the whole thing into three cloud providers and calling it "progress."
Ukraine just reminded us in real-time why single points of failure are a bad idea, yet somehow, we’ll still act shocked the next time one outage takes down half the planet.
This is a subtoot about Microsoft.
Everything Else
Fold Epic Paper Airplanes. Time to fold some airplanes.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
That's plagiarism. Stop it.
#!/bin/sh Invaders You can now ssh play@invaders.now in the terminal.
The dangerous part of coding late at night is thinking every bug is a 5-minute fix. 💀
A sex scandal popping the AI bubble has some real Martians-stopped-by-germs energy
Global Museum Ed Yong's photograph of a Blue-and-yellow macaw taken during a recent trip to the Pantanal in Brazil.
Looking forward to Jensen Huang’s “An amazing chapter has come to a close” post on LinkedIn.
today, a lot of CEOs are questioning whether their extramarital partners are only with them because they’re spies extracting high level secrets or if it’s because they genuinely love them for their money
Evan Sky "In case you don’t know: sometimes, wildlife rescues use ikea bags to restrain swans."
