Published
Weekend Reading — Low-maintenance passive traffic calming
Sophie Schmieg "Work moved to a new building. I didn't expect to take SAN damage from facilities."
Tech Stuff
Magic Notebook A free app, simple and elegant UI, no cloud sync, just open a folder and get working. Can handle DOCX, Markdown and text files. I love the simplicity of it.
charmbracelet/glow Apropos, simple CLI Markdown viewer.
The Emacsification of Software
I don’t have a grand pronouncement to offer about the Future of Software. But I’m pretty sure nerd software is going to get a lot more interesting. How many clanky terminal apps can we drastically (and easily) improve? I’ll finally be able to understand
iostat! Across a fleet of hosts, even. Andbpftrace! Have you seen the shit Brendan Gregg had to put up with to do terminal visualizations frombpftrace? You don’t have to put up with any of this anymore. In fact, neither do I.
fallow Like knip but more evolved with dead-code analysis, code duplication detection, code complexity analysis, and much more. I'm using this on my projects to improve code quality, which means I copy the reported errors into the LLM so it can rewrite my code — I wish they generated easy to copy prompts but good start as is.
coolify-deploy — Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware I used to host everything on Vercel and honestly it was great. Connect a repo, git push, your app is live — simple enough that it spoils you fast. Then I had to upgrade to a paid plan and I started at the cheaper $20/month pro and by end of month one got charged $41. Why? CPU usage. There's no pay cap, so imagine some random LLM crawler decides to hammer your site and all of a sudden you get charged $10,000 for your hobby project. Grrrrrr … So I switched to a Hetzner instance runing Coolify which hosts my Docker images generated using Colima with secrets managed on Infisical. It's about the same stack but with more assembly, so I automated as much as I can into a single GH action to keep it simple. Enjoy!
(* Yes that's a lot of buzzwords, my goal is to know less and simplify more)
It's OK to Use Coding Assistance Tools To Revive The Projects You Never Were Going To Finish Apropos switching over to a new stack:
In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed. This kind of project falls into the second bucket. Using AI coding assist to reify those projects is sort of a form of wish fulfillment. I never would have gotten to it, but now I can have the project. One less metaphorical book sitting unread on bookshelf.
Veronica Explains True story:
- 2006: rolled our own janky hosting, version control, CMS, and backup systems
- 2016: AWS, GitHub
- 2026: rolled our own janky hosting, version control, CMS, and backup systems
TypeWhisper If you prefer to talk to your AI, TypeWhisper's base version is free (GPL), supports 6 speech engines, can transcribe audio and video files, run workflow automations and more.
TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script
#!/usr/bin/env -S llm -T llm_time -f
Write a haiku that mentions the exact current time
Docs Think Google Docs but without the Google and instead a cute logo with baguette, cheese, and a pretzel!
Announcing ios-linuxkit: Linux on iPad, the Hard Way 🎺
I wouldn’t have had the time or energy to do this without Codex, but I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it without the Orange Pi as a test bed. Having an ARM 12-core SBC with 16GB RAM I could devote to this, despite a tad constraining (I would have preferred 32 so I could run more builds and test matrices concurrently) was a major enabler here.
BREAKING: GitHub switching status page default language to German in order to return to five neins.
Andyyyy64/whichllm Find the local LLM that actually runs and performs best on your hardware. Ranked by real, recency-aware benchmarks, not parameter count.
TabShame "Your tabs are out of control. We're here to judge you." 😅
Peoples
Everyone's a thought leader. Almost no one is thinking. I ran this blog post through AI and published the result on LinkedIn because I love the irony and also I needed to earn some thought-leader points:
One core problem is that folks on LinkedIn want to be seen as thought leaders. If you aren’t trying to be a thought leader, are you even trying at life? The cost of attempting to become a thought leader has never been cheaper. Copy a hacker news post and go ask a nearby slop machine to regurgitate it into some new form - but hold the em-dashes and the “not this, but that” pattern. Or just copy someone else’s double spaced, one sentence per line, monochromatic attempt at writing and have the machine whip up a response. No one is actually reading it, so why care about quality? It’s just clankers in these parts.
IC work is the new career flex (via Dare Obasanjo)
For example, I recently built a prototype of our enterprise pricing page myself and shipped it to prod. In a previous org, that would have required a PM, a designer, and engineers, plus multiple rounds of iteration and at least a week of calendar time. More importantly, it would have pulled a team into something that might not even have been the right direction.
I will say: It messed with my head at first. I kept asking myself: Did I just level up, or did I just give up status? It’s so hard-wired into all of us: Must… have… team… to have… impact! Must have… important… title!
Business Side
Tokenmaxxing, Promomaxxing, and Misaligned Incentives in Tech Apropos "Amazon set weekly AI targets":
However, good software engineering should lean toward simplicity. But promotion rewards complexity. And as frameworks and developer infrastructure keep making engineering simpler (which is genuinely good), engineers run out of adequate complexity to justify their promotions. So you get these irrational decisions for the business that are completely rational decisions for the individual. That’s a textbook misaligned incentive.
YC's Biggest Scandals $23.3B of capital incinerated with the help of 17 frauds and scandals and 5 copycats and grifts. You can filter the list by category and by YC president.
Machine Intelligence
One of the lessons in one of my CS degree AI classes was that AGI was "10 years away since the '50s". Notably all the big AI companies are no longer talking about AGI for the most part. Something about artificlal neural networks makes laypeople froth at the mouth about how it's "just like people" when it's just a black box hill climbing algorithm.
How Dangerous Is Anthropic's Mythos AI? This is actually the stuff that I find more interesting — what happens when we start using AI to detect legislative loopholes?
Even more interesting are the broader implications. The same searching, pattern-matching and reasoning capabilities that make these models so good at analyzing software almost certainly apply to similar systems. The tax code isn’t computer code, but it’s a series of algorithms with inputs and outputs. It has vulnerabilities; we call them tax loopholes. It has exploits; we call them tax avoidance strategies. And it has black hat hackers: attorneys and accountants
Insecurity
they paid a ransom to criminals with nothing but a pinky promise they wouldn’t do more crimes and yet this linkedin notification makes it sound like they entered into a strategic partnership to deliver value for their customers
They: "On a scale from 1 to 10: How lazy are you?"
Me: Using the copy fail exploit instead of sudo to avoid having to type my password
Downloaded Little Snitch to get a better look at my outgoing traffic and maybe manage it more carefully, only to discover Adobe has 5–10 processes constantly pinging servers every 2–3 seconds, even when every Adobe app appears to be closed.
Everything Else
WideEyedCurious "Oh there it is."
They're not pot holes. They're low-maintenance passive traffic calming.
Accidentally left treats in my jacket pocket ONE TIME which has trained my worst cat to climb the coat rack to pat down jackets as they’re hung.
Wallace & Gromit 24/7 LIVE Stream Enjoy!
I'm trapped in bed under morning cat. Send help. Or at least books and coffee.
No one in real life would waste a large sized rug on a dead body. Those things are expensive.
Massimo I need these!
In South Korea, supermarkets often offer bananas at varying levels of ripeness so customers can eat them over several days and reduce food waste.
tv software is the great equalizer. you could buy a $200 walmart tv or a $2500 LG and you’ll still get ads in there and a hard button on the remote to some streaming service that won’t exist in a year
Long works of literature need to have a special index at the back showing the page number when each character was introduced. Otherwise you're thumbing backwards trying to remember who this person is in this huge book you've been reading for weeks.
“Not Medically Necessary”: Inside the Company Helping America’s Biggest Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Care "Frustration with the rules has led some doctors to refer to the company as EvilCore."
The cat has trained me, that, in the mornings, we have a little ritual
I make my latte, then I sit on the couch, put a heating pad on my lap, then a blanket over it so it’s soft. Then she can come, cuddle up the now heated blanket, AND THEN I am allowed to drink my latte, with a cat properly cuddled on my heated lap.
Every day.
Christoph Rauscher "Strong contender for Berlins Best Building™?"
