> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://labnotes.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Weekend Reading — Photobombing - URL: https://labnotes.org/weekend-reading-photobombing/ - Published: 2026-10-10T23:47:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-10T23:47:32.000Z - Author: Assaf Arkin [**Ingrid Hoeben**](https://mastodon.online/users/IngridHbn/statuses/117388664739904369?ref=labnotes.org) "He came, he saw, he conquered" --- This week I was having too much fun shepherding AI to produce another app from scratch. I'll talk about that app at a later time, but for now here's a quick rundown of what it cost to get there. For the most part, I used [Space Bunny Free](https://pi.dev/models/opencode/space-bunny-free?ref=labnotes.org) which, as the name suggests, has no token costs. I'm guessing an upcoming model that's being stress tested. Once a day it went down for a few hours telling me "Rate limit exceeded". During these downtimes, I alternated between GLM 5.3 Flash ($0.15/$0.50) and DeepSeek 4.1 Flash ($0.15/$0.60). As you can see from the pricing, DeepSeek is a tad more expensive, but in my experience GLM was the more expensive one. I didn't do an A/B test, but I did run out of credits faster with GLM, and for many tasks I felt that DeepSeek did a much better job. So not scientific, but remember that token cost is not an exact science. --- ## Tech Stuff [**GenOffice**](https://genoffice.ai/?ref=labnotes.org) Brand new, so far from perfect, but looks very promising. An open-source office suite that can work with DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, PDF, Markdown and HTML files. You can use their LLM or bring your own key (Claude, OpenAI, DeepSeek, GLM, et al). And it includes both CLI and MCP so you can script it from your AI. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791671825565.png) [**Seven apps. One craft.**](https://getartcraft.com/apps?ref=labnotes.org) Related and just as impressive. They used AI to replicate Adobe products into open-source Rust apps you can download and install for free. The set of seven app replaces Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, InDesign, After Effects, and Acrobat. Currently at version 0.8, so still way to go, but already quite solid. And looks like they're working on alternatives for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672714495.png) [**Talorys**](https://github.com/rociiu/talorys?ref=labnotes.org) An open-source personal AI assistant that runs on Cloudflare free tier (Pages + Worker + Durable Objects). It chats with you, manages tasks, notes and projects, and handles reminders and scheduled routines. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672100264.png) [**mcpc**](https://github.com/apify/mcpc?ref=labnotes.org) Command-line client for MCP that you can use to debug your MCP server, write shell MCP scripts, etc. If you're building an MCP server, you know how useful this is. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672176623.png) **[Thomas Beagle](https://mastodon.nz/users/thomasbeagle/statuses/117401461005713883?ref=labnotes.org)** > Many years ago I used to work on a Cobol-based application that ran over an 80x25 green screen terminal. People running 30 or 40 users on a 486 PC running SCO Unix hooked up to a multi-port serial card. > > We'd never have tolerated the amount of waiting between actions or screens that is now considered absolutely normal on web-based cloud-hosted applications. > > Weird how things change. [**The DNS Museum**](https://dns.museum/?ref=labnotes.org) The odd, inventive, and always impractical things people have done with DNS. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791673206764.png) [**Tiny5**](https://github.com/Gissio/font%5Ftiny5?ref=labnotes.org) 5-pixel font that captures the essence of 1980s–90s digital minimalism. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791673938031.png) [**iA Writer in Obsidian**](https://michaelheap.com/ia-writer-obsidian/?ref=labnotes.org) How to use the [Typewriter Mode plugin](https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/typewriter-mode?ref=labnotes.org) to get Obsidian to look and feel like iA Writer. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791673920509.png) [**Big words for any screen**](https://bigwords.page/?ref=labnotes.org) Make a full-screen sign, timer or message from a link. Hold up your phone at arrivals, put a countdown on the TV, or show the Wi-Fi password at the front desk. No account, no app, just a URL that you can share and bookmark. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672874228.png) [**Loop Closer**](https://loganhc-09.github.io/loop-closer/?ref=labnotes.org) 😯 This is intriguing. Gamified Tinderized todo app that gives you just enough of a dopamine hit to get through your task list. A delightful aggregation of 24 hacks from ADHD coaching and UX research. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672772915.png) --- ## Eye for Design [**Lexica Ultralegible**](https://jacobxperez.github.io/lexica-ultralegible/?ref=labnotes.org) Built on the foundation of Atkinson Hyper-legible with additional glyphs supporting extra languages and typographic features like ligatures and alternative flipped zero. I'm now using it for [Epical](https://epical.labnotes.org/?ref=labnotes.org). ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672990457.png) [**ascii.rest**](https://ascii.rest/?ref=labnotes.org) 212 pieces of animated ASCII you can paste on your web page. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672513889.png) [**Hand-drawn Emoji for Chrome and Obsidian**](https://birchtree.me/blog/hand-drawn-emoji-for-chrome-and-obsidian/?ref=labnotes.org) These make you smile, which is always a good thing. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672318195.png) --- ## Peoples [**Discovering Kindness: A Reflection on 'Theo of Golden'**](https://allen.hutchison.org/2026/10/06/ninety-two-portraits/?ref=labnotes.org) The story of Theo of Golden is a gentle reminder that kindness often arrives in the most unassuming forms: > A portrait of yourself is a strange gift. It tells you that someone noticed you and that you belong to this place. Most workplaces are bad at saying that. We celebrate launches and promotions because they’re visible. We say much less to the person quietly keeping everything running. [**The Tamagotchification of AI**](https://www.theorybrief.com/p/the-tamagotchification-of-ai?triedRedirect=true&ref=labnotes.org) Dopamine drip: > When a user opens their Claude app, they are greeted as if by a friend, and the responses they get are tailored to everything it knows about them. AI companies have figured out how to turn “mere” tools into something closer to companions, and so to turn the use-value of being helped by an *instrument* into the feeling of being understood by a particular *someone*. --- ## Business Side [**The Ticket Is Not The Work**](https://agileotter.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-ticket-is-not-work.html?ref=labnotes.org) Teamwork died in the ticket system: > These "agile lifecycle tools" were successfully sold, and over the industry a lot of people decided that "agile" was about tickets -- filling them out, enriching them, adding details, adding test criteria, detailing the design, estimating them, assigning them each to exactly one individual, and tracking ticket closure rate. [**Poor enshittified souls**](https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/poor-enshittified-souls?ref=labnotes.org) Why and how enshittification took over Silicon Valley: > The crux of the issue is that for a lot of the more cynically-minded elements of the tech world, the code entities being written have no purpose. There's not anything that they actually do and they aren't perceived as having any real utility internally: they're as much art pieces (In the Damien Hirst sense, not in the sense that they have real aesthetic value) that enrich the tech people as they are objects with any real utility. If the code isn't invested with purpose, if it isn't meant to *do something*, then, enshittifying it is probably fine. [**Stop sensationalizing**](https://blog.mastykarz.nl/stop-sensationalizing/?ref=labnotes.org) That being said: > Not every abstraction is a primitive, every improvement an unlock, every feedback loop a flywheel, every advantage a moat, or every change a paradigm shift. Not everything is 10x, AI-native, agentic, the missing layer, or the operating system for X. And we’re hardly ever cooked. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791673387050.png) --- ## Machine Intelligence [**jaz**](https://toot.wales/users/jaz/statuses/117395496171609406?ref=labnotes.org) > Back in the 1980s Mr. Griffiths taught Computer Science in my local school. Two maxims he repeated almost every week have stuck with me for decades. > > "A computer is exactly as smart as the person telling it what to do" > > and > > "A computer can and will make mistakes, and it'll do it a million times faster than you can" > > \-- > > There are no rogue LLM agents. > > Only negligent people telling computers what to do. > > And letting them make mistakes a million times faster than ever before. --- ## Everything Else [**Anae**](https://mstdn.mx/users/anae/statuses/117371996746689707?ref=labnotes.org) ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791673294730.png) **[Sebastian Hans](https://hachyderm.io/users/sebhans/statuses/117404003042243316?ref=labnotes.org)** > When complaining about bottlenecks, you should maybe also contemplate *why* bottles have necks. **[DocAtCDI](https://mastodon.social/users/DocAtCDI/statuses/117384086849322680?ref=labnotes.org)** > They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well... > They're not laughing now. **[mhoye but seasonally spooky](https://cosocial.ca/users/mhoye/statuses/117391492574666038?ref=labnotes.org)** > TIL: only three movies have swept picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay at the Oscars: "It Happened One Night", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", and "The Silence of the Lambs". > > Bugs Bunny was created as a parody of Clark Gable's character from It Happened One Night, who talked through a mouthful of carrots in one scene as a gag. > > But wild rabbits don't eat root vegetables. > > So today, people feed carrots to pet rabbits because of a 1940 cartoon parody of a 1934 Clark Gable movie. ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791672933361.png) **[Rabbit Cohen](https://mastodon.online/users/BathysphereHat/statuses/117378518191195488?ref=labnotes.org)** > One time I made a framed certificate for one of my cats declaring that he was a very good boy, and then one of my other cats peed on it and ruined it. [**Alice McFlurry**](https://beige.party/users/Alice/statuses/117386208480760392?ref=labnotes.org) "This sconce looks like Clippy, right?" ![](https://labnotes.org/content/images/2026/10/image-1791673158623.png)