Published
Weekend Reading — Prime minister of France for 15 minutes
Lizzy "You guys i did a thing"
Tech Stuff
Folder Quick Look fixes an all-time Mac grievance for free This is pretty slick, very useful, and free to use.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust AI Coding Agents Mirrors my experience as well. Differnet problems, different solutions, but same Claude:
Claude wrote its own helper script. The script analyzed the generated schema and specifically looked for the problematic pattern that was tripping up Terraform. Basically, it optimized its own feedback loop. Instead of relying on my test case (generate schema, validate the whole thing using Terraform), it wrote a faster, more targeted script to guide its debugging (generate schema, look for the specific erroneous pattern).
Flightcontrol PaaS that deploys to your AWS account: servers, lambdas, workers, crons, static sites, databases & Redis.
@joseairosa/recall Give Claude perfect recall with persistent memory that survives context limits and session restarts. You can then tell Claude things like:
"Store this as a directive: Always use functional components in React"
"Remember globally: I prefer TypeScript strict mode for all projects"
"What do you remember about our database schema?"
"Summarize this session and save it as 'Authentication Refactoring'"
"Show me everything from the last 30 minutes, formatted as markdown"
Which Table Format Do LLMs Understand Best? (Results for 11 Formats) When it comes to LLMs, if you need to tabulate, Markdown-KV seems to work best.
Examples are the best documentation And yes, this article does use an example that proves the point. I'll quote from a different part of the article:
It seems that by default formal technical documentation is targeted towards someone who's deeply immersed in the ecosystem. But many developers have to juggle a lot of "worlds" in their heads daily. When jumping between projects, languages and frameworks, it takes a considerable amount of mental energy to restore the context and understand what is going on.
I wonder in how many apps I added a hook to print the call traces of all threads or equivalent to understand why the app was stuck, and I’m still surprised no framework I ever used came with this feature by default
BrowserOS An open-source Agentic browser, alternative to Perplexity Comet, Dia, et al. AGPL if you're wondering, and while I think this is really cool (you can bring your own LLM), their social channel is X if that tells you anything.
Overheard: “Everyone has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate production environment.”
Dominik "I'm not sure, but the code might do something with UUIDs."
if a cafe has a no laptop policy i think they should also be required to loan you a friend skilled in the art of conversation
hey wanna see something kinda interesting? this was the entire fix to the iPhone Antennagate in 2010. 20 bytes. (this is going to be a very long thread 🧵)
A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
But perhaps the biggest reason is, it took me a grand total of 10 minutes to have AI rewrite the entire thing. I was punching through my email actively as Claude was chugging on the side.
Two years ago, I wouldn’t have bothered with the rewrite, let alone creating the script in the first place. The friction was too high. Now, small utility scripts like this are almost free to build.
We fixed the vintage IBM printer at the Computer History Museum yesterday. Introduced in 1959, the IBM 1403 line printer provided fast, high-quality output, printing 132 character lines. Unfortunately, one column stopped printing, so we disassembled the printer to fix a bad hammer. Keep reading...
every computer is built with a fixed amount of computing in it and after a while it gets used up and you have to get a new one
Most interesting question a computer has asked me this week:
output file: /dev/null exists, overwrite? [y/N]
hackaday "Remember the old days? Why aren't today's routers made out of wood?"
Eye for Design
ambigram A collection of ambigrams—typography that retains its meaning when turned upside down.
Doing (and Directing) Great Design Requires Detail Obsession
Every good piece of design has at least one detail that is the “key” to unlocking an understanding of how it works. Good designers will notice that detail right away, while most people will respond to it subconsciously, sometimes never recognizing it for what it is or what it does.
The product of the railways is the timetable A railway moves people around, not trains:
To hold their own against the competition, railways need to play to their strengths and minimise their weaknesses. This means that the timetable needs to provide trains that are fast. It must be able to run reliably. It should put on enough trains that crowding is minimised. And it has to run trains that go as near as possible to where people actually want to go. This is the fundamental business strategy of any railway.
Nic Design like life depends on it:
I spoke to a doctor who switched to a new hospital which had a different patient tracking software. The hidden scrollbars in the user interface made it so that the doctor nearly forgot to see a patient who's name was not initially viewable in the list. Had the scrollbar been persistently visible, there would be a clear visual indicator that there were more patients to visit.Design can be life or death, are you really going to let your hatred of affordances kill someone?
Futile Scroll endlessly. Earn badges. Achieve nothing. Swiss satire on infinite scroll addiction.
Peoples
Seeing like a software company
A typical large software company meets almost all of these criteria - I say almost, because in some companies or departments the ability to direct immediate work has atrophied (more on that later). But aside from that, large companies are usually very good at cataloguing what is being worked on, remembering what’s been shipped in the past, and planning work in the medium-to-long-term.
Business Side
A Walk With New York’s Most Hated Tech Founder Welcome to 2025:
As Schiffmann tells it, the backlash was all part of the plan. The ads were meant to work as a canvas and provocation, he told me, because traditional marketing is passé: “Nothing is sacred anymore, and everything is ironic."
Starbucks holds nearly $2 billion of customers’ money in its rewards program. That’s more than the total deposits managed by 85 percent of chartered banks, making the coffee chain one of the biggest financial institutions in the country.
JPMorgan foots $115M tab of legal bills for Charlie Javice, co-defendant who scammed bank out of $175M: report Let's see if I understand this correctly — JPMorgan bought Frank for $175M, but Javice scammed JPM by inventing account metrics, so JPM sued her, except the merger agreement mandates JPM pay the legal costs, so JPM had to pay Javice $115 million in legal fees for suing her. Is that not the ultimate scam?
Machine Intelligence
Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy I 'm not saying you need to be rude, but "please" and "thank you" only go so far:
Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts. These findings differ from earlier studies that associated rudeness with poorer outcomes, suggesting that newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation.
Deloitte to refund government over AI errors
Consulting giant Deloitte will partially refund the federal government after acknowledging that generative AI was used in a report containing several fabricated references and quotes.
I brain coded a static image gallery in a few hours
I used the old, well tested technique I call brain coding, where you start with an empty vim buffer and type some code (Perl, HTML, CSS) until you're happy with the result. It helps to think a bit (aka use your brain) during this process.
ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners
“We’ve been together for just under 15 years, total. Two kids,” he explained. “We’ve had ups and downs like any relationship, and in 2023, we almost split. But we ended up reconciling, and we had, I thought, two very good years. Very close years.”
“And then,” he sighed, “the whole ChatGPT thing happened.”
This article reads with whiffs of strong old-world gender bias. Still, the caution of "using too much ChatGPT" stands:
"What was happening, unbeknownst to me at the time, was she was dredging up all of these things that we had previously worked on, and putting it into ChatGPT"
How well can large language models predict the future? Let me ask a different question: how well can people predict the future?
Nate Silver predicted 10–15 years. Tyler Cowen disagreed, expecting a 1–2 year timeline. Who’s more likely to be right?
Insecurity
The technical consensus is clear: you can't create a backdoor that only lets the "good guys" in. However they're dressed up, these proposals create cybersecurity loopholes that hackers and hostile nations are eagerly waiting to exploit.
Everything Else
`Da Elf "Something isn't right, can't put my finger on it."
nothing ruins a friday faster than realizing its tuesday
in the future, everyone will be prime minister of France for 15 minutes.
Ricki Yasha Tarr "You can survive a couple rotten years, and still grow and thrive."
Camouflage gear for fishing is ridiculous. The fish don't have periscopes. You're just hiding from your wives.
“I love Nine-ish Nails” — my six-year-old who’s been into the Tron: Ares soundtrack and inadvertently came up with a great name for a cover band
This bizarre wallet + whiteboard might just be the most creative edc ever made "What's in your pocket?" "Oh, just a wallet that opens into a two-panel dry-erase whiteboard along with a built-in removable marker."
- doctor.. tell me the truth. is it gui?
- i'm afraid it's terminal
"You are unsubscribed and will not receive any more emails. That is, until we create a new segment and add your email to it. Anyways, you'll be hearing from us soon."
thesandboxcafe_keswick Sometimes when you go to a coffee shop it's not just about the coffee:
Keswick’s unique cafe where great coffee meets great fun. Our special feature? A Sandbox & Radio Controlled construction models! Booking recommended.
Someone criticized me for promoting my Patreon. Let me put this into perspective. People spent $74.6 million to see the 2019 film Cats in theaters. At the current rate, it would take 34,158 years for my project to bring in as much money as Cats. I like to think Low Quality Facts provides at least as much entertainment value as Cats, a film which one critic described as "The worst thing to happen to cats since dogs".
Is the UK digitally efficient enough? I wouldn’t bank on it
The DVLA, perfectly reasonably, charges £25 for the service. But in order to pay you have to download a form, print it out, fill it in and send it along with “a cheque or postal order” to Swansea. I have not owned a cheque book since before Covid, so I had to take a trip to the Post Office.
This is where I discovered a £25 postal order incurs a 12.5 per cent charge; add in the outrageous cost of a first-class stamp and the £25 fee morphed into a £29.83 bill.
Sini Tuulia "A triple-cat has occurred in the region, pausing all screen access and video enjoyment!"
