Published
Weekend Reading — Little Bobby ignore all previous instructions
Frechrotz_Pix 'Lego- bzw. Klemmbausteine'
Tech Stuff
pitchfork A devilishly good daemons manager: start/stop daemon, automatic restarts, health checks, file watching, cron scheduling, and many more useful features.
OH: "Their version of agile is, we can keep changing our mind until it's deployed and even after."
AllThingsSmitty/typescript-tips-everyone-should-know A curated collection of practical TypeScript patterns that improve safety, readability, maintainability, and developer experience.
Luckily I haven't dealt with date handling for a while. If you need to, you're probably excited about
Temporal, which goes stable in Node.js. Luciano's write-up on Node.js 26 is excellent. I didn't know thatTemporalclamps dates!
The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription Applying constraints:
The output was unbridled garbage. Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all.
lowfat Go on a low-fat token diet.
I Got $4.84 From a Class Action Settlement and They Really, Really Didn't Want Me to Have It TL;DR I received several class action settlements spread across multiple debit cards, one of which was set to expire this month, none of which allow cashing at the ATM, paying at gas stations, or using with PayPal/Venmo. They were designed so I couldn't spend them all before they expire. But I do have a Stripe account …
Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:
Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.
Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.
I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.
Chipotlai Max Why pay for a data center when you can run this AI coding agent on free Chipotle compute? Community project to add providers from Home Depot, Lowes, Target, Starbucks & more.
Eye for Design
The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers 🤔
The bottleneck was never legal judgment. It was the document preparation around it. Productize the workflow and the efficiency gains land on the firm’s side of the ledger, not the client’s.
Stop Making Ugly Apps: Simple Tailwind Tricks for Backend Developers This is quite a handy collection of simple tricks that will make the UI look better and help with usability and many of them are as simple as picking a better color.
Peoples
The Counterintuitive Way To Get Better At Anything A collection of useful constraints, for example, here's one:
And now someone’s gonna reply, “But shouldn’t we try to make the best decisions possible?”
Look, nobody’s suggesting you use “good enough” criteria for picking a cardiac surgeon. But a vast chunk of your day consists of choices that aren’t worth the full resources of your inner tribunal.
You can’t think your way into a regret-free life. What you can do is decide what matters, choose according to that, and save the rest of your mind for the few things that are important.
Business Side
Amazon has invented the world's least necessary podcast QVC is going bankrupt but don’t worry, there’s a new shopping channel in town:
Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two "hosts" discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.
There's Still No Silver Bullet
The skateboard isn't a stepping stone to the car. It's a real solution to a real problem. You give someone a skateboard and they use it. You learn something. Maybe what you learn sends you towards a bicycle. Maybe after the bicycle you discover your users need to move fifty people at once, and now you're building a bus. The endpoint was never fixed. The point is to keep solving the problem, not to arrive at a predetermined artefact.
Machine Intelligence
Do Agents Dream of Electric Coworkers?
Split on isolation requirements. Not on functional domains.
Dare Obasanjo "Reddit is undefeated. 😂"
Insecurity
Loupe iOS app to see what other apps can learn about you from reading data your iPhone exposes — languages, installed apps, device sensors, etc. (via Lucas)
mythos has found at least one critical vulnerability: the infosec industry is utterly vulnerable to hype, and extremely unlikely to examine the origins or methodology behind vulnerability disclosures that authorities (regardless of their poor reputation) claim are earth-shatteringly critical
The Newest Instagram "Exploit" is the Goofiest I've Seen
Really, that's it. The first proper zero auth password reset I've seen in production. There appears to be no additional check as to whether the email being given is actually something the user has used before. Once the AI sends the security code to the attacker's email, the attacker passes it right back to complete the verification. The platform hands over a fresh password reset link, granting full ownership to the attacker.
Take9 A 9-second pause helps no matter how busy you are:
Scammers are getting smarter, but you can stay ahead of them. How? Count before you click! Count von Count is here to help you take a 9 second pause and think before you click, download, or share.
Everything Else
Not mine, and I don't know whose it is, and I can't say the premise of the joke has ever caused me an ounce of inconvenience, but this is a great gag..
Hard to think of a more poignant expression of the state of affairs in the industry than the Joy of Coding conference taking a break this year.
oh so when Sleeping Beauty spends all day in bed she's an "enchanted princess" but when I do it I'm "clinically depressed" what kinda crap is that
Little Bobby Ignore All Previous Instructions
Daniel Gibson "a friend gifted me this mug a while ago:"
Gonna be in bed an hour early. You know what that means, an extra hour of over thinking stupid shit and memes on my phone
So tired of blacking out every full moon when I really want to stay up and help the townsfolk hunt for the werewolf
Behold the Fire-Spitting Twizy ‘Unsafety Car’ Leading a 100-Lap Citroen Ami Race on a Velodrome Move over, Indy 500's Oscar Mayer Wienermobile race. The French are here and they brought Citroen Ami mini racers and a Renault Twizy monster truck—on a bicycle track. (via Frank)
this email could have been a pay rise.
You know, it was only when I started to study ants under a magnifying glass that I came to realise how often they spontaneously combust...
Ian Betteridge "That's it lads the robots are revolting"
One Bay Area housing trend is becoming impossible to miss (via Client Challenge)
The property in question is 160 Noe St.: a fully renovated 1907 Edwardian on a tree-lined slow street featuring three bedrooms, two bathrooms and 2,495 square feet full of Calacatta marble, designer lighting and custom woodwork. Listed for $2,995,000, the home has another standout characteristic.
The seller will consider Anthropic or OpenAI stock as payment.
Get-a-Waymo: How a burglar used a robotaxi to flee the scene in a first-of-its kind S.F. case Also in San Francisco:
Farah Issa, studio manager of Hot 8 Yoga, showed the Chronicle a copy of the surveillance video from her phone, noting how the Waymo dropped off the suspect and waited for him to finish the burglary before taking off again.
The video, shot from inside the studio, shows the suspect wearing a light-colored hoodie and did not reveal his face.
“I thought it was quite funny,” Issa said. “He just stole a bunch of men’s shorts.”
Assaf 🌴 "Sending email through a pay phone — 1986"
Meteor as heavy as an elephant causes widespread speculation across New England Quick question: how heavy is an elephant? I forget. The last time I picked an elephant with both hands it didn't weigh much. Did elephants get heavier since?
LG wanted to charge me £1200 for the repair of my 40” monitor, which considering I bought it new in 2022 for £1500, not worth it. We tried replacing the boards ourselves, that wasn’t the problem.
Put it on Freecycle for spares and repair.
The person who comes to collect says “I think it’s the backlight, if I can fix it do you want it back?”It’s a good world!
Mike Sheward "it may look cute but the boeing 787 only does this when distressed"
