Published
Weekend Reading — Reefer Madness
OnlMaps “Air traffic in the Middle East”
Tech Stuff
Fireflies.ai When it's a meeting that you need to capture, transcribe, summarize, and turn into meeting notes, try Fireflies.
Wispr Flow Typing: 45 wpm. Talking: 220 wpm. I know some people love talking to their computer and Wispr will catch your speech and transcribe it and will even AI correct your ramblings.
Field Notes From Shipping Real Code With Claude 👍
Vibe-coding, despite its playful name, is serious business. It’s a new way of thinking about software development that amplifies human capabilities rather than replacing them. Master it, and you’ll ship better software faster than you ever thought possible. Ignore it, and you’ll watch competitors lap you while you’re still typing boilerplate.
Wordtune If you'd rather type it out, Wordtune can paraphrase it, summarize it, humanize it, check your grammar and everything else you'd want AI to help you with.
Convert Words to Time Size your presentation by converting word count to reading time. It can calculate both aloud and silent reading times based on slow, average, and fast reading speeds.
SnoopJ So true.
the hardest problem in computer science is getting someone to clearly describe a problem
humanize-this A lightweight, zero-dependency package that transforms machine-readable data into human-friendly formats: bytes, currency, ordinal, time ago, url, plural, and more.
Riffo AI that will organize files for you: auto-names your files and sorts them into the right folders.
Who wants a cassette of the noises of different mail servers?
I'm creating a mxtape.
Tritium An IDE for your legal docs, because if there’s one thing legal doesn't have it's good version control.
Gumloop Automate your workflow with the power of AI. Use cases include scraping websites, sending Slack updates, reading PDFs, accessing Google APIs, and more. I don't exactly get what Gumloop does, but am intrigued enough to find out.
David Larlet “Zen quote of the day.”
sjvn “Database management 101: The difference between zero and null.”
Eye for Design
Danielle Foré “Design is my passion”
In my universe, 24 year-olds are not allowed to design UIs until they have proven they can handle the responsibility of making it usable by people over 40.
Liquid glass looks pretty cool. I hope they continue adding more materials to the OS. Perhaps linen or felt. Maybe even leather
Peoples
Traits and Habits I’ve Observed Among High Achievers
You see, you have to be lucky. But if you stay active and try a lot of things, luck will find you at some point.
morganth TIL
I went to a talk lately that was mostly about something else, but the speaker came out with:
“If you only remember one thing from this talk, remember this. Everyone in this room who likes helping people, raise your hand.”
Every hand, or nearly every hand, went up.
“If you like asking other people for help, keep your hand up.”
Almost every hand went back down.
“As you can see, people like helping you. When you ask for help, you’re making them feel good, even if you don’t like asking.”
I’ve genuinely forgotten the rest of the presentation but I won’t forget that.
Workspaces Explore the workspaces of creative individuals.
Business Side
Startup Equity 101 Because if you work for a startup there’s equity involved and it’s not as simple as purchasing shares in a public company and there’s a lot to know if you want to have a good exit.
Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are reversing course Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are bullish on AI, while the other half is realistic about what their customers really want:
Within a couple of years, 50 percent of the organizations that had planned to replace their customer service personnel with AI models are expected to reverse their decision. According to a recent survey from Gartner, the original goals were overly ambitious – and ultimately unachievable. The transition to an AI-focused business world is proving to be far more challenging than initially anticipated.
I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days A story of corporate greed and dysfunction. Mind you, this article ends with a fancy backwards acronym (acronym invented to make a point), which is something that typically “high level, low on detail” management does, so I wouldn’t read too much into this story, but it is entertaining nonetheless:
Think about the implications of that statement. HP's own technical staff, the people closest to our innovation work, believed that senior leadership couldn't be trusted to make sound technology decisions without someone there to provide oversight and guidance.
They weren't wrong. The numbers proved it in the most painful way possible.
Machine Intelligence
Version of o3 with more compute for better responses o3-pro is now live! Not to be confused with o4-mini, GPT-4.1 nano, ChatGPT-4o, GPT-4o mini Audio, GPT-3.5 Turbo, or GPT-4o mini Realtime. So which AI is naming all these models?
Detecting AI-Generated Text by Uncovering Its Statistical “Tells” How to tell if an article was written by an LLM, and also, how to tell if an article was written by a paid influencer, because they both use the same techniques to maximize reader influence:
• Signposting: At the very top of the list are words like here’s, break down, and let’s…
• Authoritative qualifiers: Words like crucial, comprehensive, key, and primarily appear far more often …
• Enthusiastic affirmations: … Bigrams like great question and that’s fantastic appear with significant frequency …
Kiln AI Fine-tune your LLM (Llama, GPT-4o, Anthropic, etc), generate synthetic data, get it to reason, and more. Free to use (up to $10M revenue).
You’re worried that a robot is lying to you. Or making it up. You know who else does this? Humans. Like… all the time.
ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977 LLMs are not designed to play chess, but also people use LLMs for many things they were not designed for, so this article is worth bookmarking:
For an hour-and-a-half, ChatGPT "made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club" while insisting over and over again that it would win "if we just started over," Caruso noted. (And yes, it's kind of creepy that the chatbot apparently referred to itself and the human it was interfacing with as "we.")
Insecurity
AI v Phishing Using an LLM to detect whether that email you just received is a scam. Of course it's a scam, and this article's author knows it's a scam, but sometimes you have to warn family members to ignore these scams and so we're always looking for ways to better explain scams, and even better give people an easy to use self-diagnosis tool, and seems like an LLM can be very helpful here.
Hear me out.
Upper case numbers.
Roni Laukkarinen “Every website in 2025.”
Everything Else
Dianora “I just noticed a neighbour in our area has a python in their front lawn.”
Transparency should be used transparingly.
Math lecturer: So we've got t, T, i, L, l, a, A, Α, and α...
Me, in the back row: "Name your variables better you hack…
Mr. Encyclopedia “How it feels to have executive dysfunction”
Relieved to see the 41st café open in our Brussels neighborhood. I was getting worried we might drop below 40.
If you are cutting, shaping or doing other measured work, measure dimensions twice as often as you need to.
A runaway pet zebra has been captured in Tennessee
The zebra quickly became the subject of internet memes. One fake posting showed Ed dining at a Waffle House, a southern staple. Others had him visiting other Tennessee cities or panhandling on the side of the road.
The pursuit of Ed came a month after a runway kangaroo shut down a section of Alabama interstate.
My wife was one of the first women to receive an architecture degree from Berkeley in the mid 70s. The buildings for the architecture and engineering programs only had restrooms for men. She had to go find a building that contained secretaries. One professor told her to her face that he would not give an A grade to a woman as a matter of policy, so she should be extremely happy with her A-.
This group wants our gadgets to chill TF out I'm all for this new industry standard and for only ever buying products that are CTI certified:
CTI is offering a certification program for mindfully designed products, which it calls “calm tech”: basically, tech that blends discreetly into our life, rather than pulling us out of it.
LOOK: AI Real-Time Fashion Design Tool Sketch on your iPad and it will generate high-fidelity images of that outfit.
I just deleted the last news app off my tablet. I think that at peak, I had about 7, including RTÉ, BBC, Irish Times, TheJournal.ie, The Guardian.
In every case, the app
1/ added no useful functions over a web browser
2/ omitted some key browser functions, e.g. zoom, select©, open in new tab
3/ generated annoying notificationsI was surprised. These apps are expensively built and heavily promoted. Yet in my experience they are crap.
Have I missed something? Does anyone use news apps?
Every generation discovers the same monster.
The panic I hear from some folks today around the dangers of interacting with AI remind me of the 80s when the media and churches propagated the story that Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal contained hidden messages that would turn children into Satanists. A few isolated incidents became proof that tabletop games and music were gateways to evil. But millions of other kids rolled a d20 and listened to Black Sabbath without sacrificing goats or joining cults.
Jim Nielsen “new captchas just dropped”
Man convicted of posing as flight attendant to score over 120 free flights Apparently not giving you the pretzels pack is perfectly acceptable, but posing as a flight attendant is illegal:
A man who posed as a flight attendant for four different airlines scammed 120 free flights over the course of years, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida announced Tuesday.
Propaganda wars True according to my TikTok FYP:
Beijing is paying for US influencers to visit and collaborate with local counterparts as part of a program to boost cultural exchange, according to Chinese state media.
Shark fins appear to slice through a golden wheat field along Highway 8 west of Dublin, Ontario. Installed by 75-year-old landowner and retired nurse Anne Melady, the piece is titled Great Wheat Sharks. She created it to lighten the mood for drivers during the pandemic and continues the now-local tradition with humor and simplicity.
