Published
Weekend Reading — Look Away
Someone Turned an Old Ford Van Into a Mini Semi and It’s Fantastic
Tech Stuff
LookAway This is one app I have to run on my Mac. It forces me to take a break every 45 minutes — not a Pomodoro break (which I never got the hang off), but a short 30 second break to look away from the screen and give my eyes a much deserved rest. It also gives minor nudges to blink and to stretch the neck, all of which help me feel more relaxed and energized during the workday, otherwise I could get lost in Claude for 8 hours straight. And it syncs with my iPhone so I can't swap devices to "just check social media" while taking a break. Love it.
Vibe coding is when it’s 1am, everyone else in the house is asleep, you’ve got your favourite drink and your favourite music playing while you goof around writing some code in your favourite language or trying out a new language just because you love learning new stuff while chatting to cool people also chilling out late at night indulging on whatever hobby makes them happy.
Moving Railway's Frontend Off Next.js
Builds that took 10+ minutes now finish in under two. The dev server starts instantly. Route changes are type-checked at the boundary. Layouts compose without workarounds.
The gap between writing code and getting it in front of users is the bottleneck, and everything we've done here, the framework swap, the edge caching, the asset model, is about closing that gap. Vite + TanStack sets us up for a world where shipping frontend changes is near-instant, and that's the world we're building toward.
Defuddle When you need the content of a page as Markdown. Originally created for Obsidian, and MIT-licensed so you can self-host it or integrate with your codebase.
Instaparser Another option for cleaning up HTML, this one from Instapaper, and it can tackle PDFs and generate article summaries. 1,000 free credit/month which I believe is enough for non-commercial use cases.
LLMs are the future of software engineering. No, markdown is the future of software engineering. Wait, actually gstack is the future of software engineering.
No, good ideas and hard work are the future of software engineering, same as they've always been.
Now that I've adjusted to thinking slow and writing fast, I'm enjoying it. Before bed, instead of cranking through code that is not well formed in my head, I'll do something else. Instead I get into bed, turn the lights off, put my blindfold on, listen to music, and just think about code. I'll spend hours in the dark just thinking slow.
People finder For finding B2B leads, influencers, investors, etc. Searches through contacts that are scraped from the web a la ZoomInfo, but with a nice conversational AI, so you can ask questions like "Identify e-commerce business owners or marketing leads who are actively looking for digital marketing services." Pricing a touch misleading (quite common for this app category) — $34 for 1,000 credits but you need two credits for a contact.
Peoples
AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Engineering Harder.
Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.
Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended…
Now they are being told to stop.
Rule #23: Be inefficient on purpose Related, because it's much about how we perceive self worth:
Part of the problem is the cult of busyness. Our culture rewards us with status for never having time for things. We admire busy people. We assume they are more important than people who have a surplus of time (who we call lazy). For example, when we see a silly video on social media, we often judge the creator by saying, “Well, that’s someone with too much time on their hands.” This is just Puritanical bullshit; a sad, warped, work ethic that only values capitalistic production. That person in the silly video was having fun. How often do we do that? Isn’t that the goal of all the work we do? To “make time” to, you know, enjoy life?
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
Be in the code. Because the simple act of having to write the thing or seeing it being built up step by step introduces friction that allows you to better understand what you want to build and how the system "feels". This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow.
Machine Intelligence
Andrej Karpathy nails the perception gap in AI capabilities that I've mentioned in the past. There is now a huge gap between people who have tried the free version of ChatGPT and say people in Big Tech who have unlimited tokens to use on the latest models to do their day jobs.
It's essentially a night and day difference which is why it seems like we're talking past each other a lot in these discussions.
The Agentic Web A web for a futuristic world where people get outcomes without having to click through websites:
Instead of just offering up information, websites will increasingly expose actions that AI systems can take. You might say, well isn’t that what APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are for? In a sense, yes. APIs already expose a site’s capabilities, but they are designed for developers and typically require explicit integration. They define a fixed set of operations that another system can call in a structured way.
The Echo Chamber in Your Pocket Sycophant should be word of the year in 2026:
In the spring of 2026, two research teams issued a warning that moved well beyond the familiar complaints about AI hallucinations and bias. A formal mathematical proof from MIT and a preregistered empirical study in Science from Stanford arrived within a month of each other, and together they make the same unsettling argument: the danger of AI chatbots is not what they get wrong. It is how enthusiastically they agree with everything we get wrong. Not a chatbot that lies to you, but a mirror that reflects your beliefs back at you, slightly amplified, every single time.
Everything Else
Kathleen Tuite "It’s such a good printer it can actually print kittens"
The juxtaposition of Outlook not working on a spaceship while the astronauts are shooting iPhone selfies with the Earth.
7yo niece: i talked to you for a long time and i've had enough so i'm hanging up now *hangs up*
Sci-fi is Just a Product Roadmap for Technology Companies "Science fiction used to be a wild, fantastical guess about a distant future. Today? It’s basically just a product roadmap for technology companies."
I think stress dreams should count as billable hours
Why can't I find a doctor who will prescribe "sea air" for my nerves so I can spend a summer in a picturesque costal town in England "for my health" only to be caught up in a local scandal and forced to solve a murder?
Alan Ferrier "Still the most iconic Scottish weather picture, in my humble opinion."
My wife just asked me if Github was a tech version of Pornhub and I didn't have an adequate argument that it wasn't
The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs
Somewhere between 2015 and 2022, "passive income" stopped being a boring financial planning term and became, I don't know how else to put this, a salvation narrative. I mean that literally. There was an eschatology if you want to get nerdy about it. The Rapture was the day your "passive income" exceeded your monthly expenses and you could quit your job forever. People talked about it with that exact energy.
Edwin "Petrol station in London in 1930."
