Published
Weekend Reading — Sell your soul for cuteness and regret nothing
Ricki Crush Bandicute Tarr “1983 was a wild time.”
Tech Stuff
Marginalia Search A search engine that prioritizes non-commercial web sites. And they do have some interesting filters: blogs, academia, small web, plain text, tidle, etc. Operates out of Sweden.
We also migrated from Jest to vitest, and removed 30% of our (indirect) Javascript package dependencies
Error.isError(): A Better Way to Check Error Types in JavaScript Your friendly reminder:
Why the new
Error.isError()method solves important cross-realm issues and provides more reliable error identification thaninstanceof
Tips when generative coding Some helpful tricks so you can write tomorrow's legacy code:
Last weekend, I used AI to help me write a stock analysis tool. With stocks dropping significantly after Trump's tariffs, I wanted a way to simulate different scenarios.
(I have nothing against vibe coding, I actually find it useful and enjoy using it, but I also enjoy making fun of it)
The Hidden Cost of AI Coding Related:
Perhaps what we need is a new understanding of where happiness can exist in this AI-augmented world. Maybe the joy doesn't have to disappear completely — it just shifts. Instead of finding delight in writing the perfect algorithm, perhaps we'll discover satisfaction in the higher-level thinking about system design, in the creative process of describing exactly what we want to build, or in the human aspects of software development that AI can't touch.
Have you ever wished the browser would look at a background color and pick black or white for the text — whichever one provides more contrast? Now, the
contrast-color()function in CSS does just that.
why do something like
<a href="...">click me</a>if you can just
<div role="link" tabindex="0" href="..."><div><div><div><div aria-label="click me">click m<span>e</span></div></div></div></div></div>
Have you ever noticed that the average between 200 (OK) and 404 (Not Found) is 302 (Found) temporary redirect?
Jan Wildeboer "Nero Burning ROM will always stay in my heart as the best product name ever. This is not open for discussion."
TDD is the real vibe coding!
Kaito “cloud storage”
white smoke just came out of our router... this means that the DHCP conclave has ended and a new IP address has been selected
Instead of storing my data in the cloud, I just store it in the bush. It's the same thing, only palette-swapped. More accessible, too.
Eye for Design
Post-Chat UI How LLMs are making traditional apps feel broken:
So yeah, maybe we'll discover that generative UI is a dead end. Or maybe LLMs are powerful enough to overcome these hurdles, and eventually this will be the only kind of UI that matters.
If your forms don’t submit when I hit Enter on my keyboard, your website is broken.
Terry Laire “Designer v. User”
Peoples
Meet the investor running his life with AI For some people, life performs much better when they can show everyone that they are "thinking better thoughts“. Using the AI is itself a very powerful self-affirmation, and this being 2025, is not in your psych 101 textbook but warrants a full magazine article.
Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room I didn’t work at Google, but if I did, that sounds like my type of malicious compliance.
Business Side
Employers have found a sneaky substitute for layoffs
Cynics suspect that RTO mandates are actually a way to get employees to quit. It looks like they may be right.
Klarna changes its AI tune and again recruits humans for customer service
A Verint survey released last year found more than two-thirds customers have had a bad chatbot experience, and in that group, the top complaint was inability to answer questions.
The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail What's your product-market not not? And why is the not not more important than PMF: "Indifference is everywhere you look, once you learn to see it: most people in most situations don't care about you or your solution."
Inside you there are two wolves.
Wolf Basic is free for individuals and includes ad-supported access to all of the classic features of the Wolf platform. Or, for $19.99 per month, upgrade to Wolf Plus and unlock an ad-free experience, Priority Howls, and all of our pro features.
The good times in tech are over 😢
I just want to stress that there is going to be a personal cost to not going along with the vibe shift, particularly for more junior or more vulnerable engineers. As someone who lives in Australia, I feel pretty vulnerable myself.
YC Graveyard Because not every startup makes it out alive.
Machine Intelligence
Coding emerges as generative AI’s breakout star Some estimates suggest that writing code now accounts for half of large language model usage:
The soaring valuations of AI coding startups underscore the momentum. Anysphere's Cursor just raised $900 million at a $9 billion valuation—up from $2.5 billion earlier this year. Meanwhile, OpenAI acquired Windsurf (formerly Codeium) for $3 billion.
Java at 30: The Genius Behind the Code That Changed Tech
Despite AI's advances, Gosling firmly believes programming remains an essential skill. "If I had a young kid today, I would absolutely be teaching them programming," he stated, explaining that "even if AI takes over, people have to understand how their systems work.”
He dismissed claims by tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff that AI will reduce the need for engineers as "entirely self-serving horseshit," seeing such statements as positioning tactics and thinly veiled threats to extract more work from employees.
Lloyd’s offers corporate insurance against AI chatbot errors! Now try to get a payout You can now get insurance to cover your ass when your AI hallucinates, although taking this insurance is a testament that you are short of intelligence:
You won't get a payout just because your bot spat out yet another costly hallucination. The insurer has to agree that the bot has "performed below initial expectations" — say, the error rate is 15% instead of 5%. Broadly. Over a period of time. So Armilla has created insurance that it's very hard to claim on.
If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions? Technically this statement by Nadella is not a lie:
maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software.
Closure Got ghosted? Don't worry, there's an AI that will help you find that elusive emotional resolution. The one case when AI hallucination is a feature not a bug:
An old friend suddenly stopped talking to me. That's how I learned what ghosting was. Closure AI played the role of my friend, and I've got all the answers.
Insecurity
Sam Altman wants your eyeballs Some industries* have really bizarre business models:
Create a machine that turns the internet into unreadable shit, spend years trying figuring out how to make it too addicting to quit, and then when we're hooked, argue we need to kill anonymity online to fix it.
(* the software industry)
It's 2025—Why Are Banks Still Getting Authentication So Wrong?
Authentication flows too often feel like they were designed in a vacuum, engineered by siloed security teams and product managers with no regard users. If a system breaks in common scenarios, like international travel, it's not a secure system. It's a hostile one.
This should be much bigger news.
CrowdStrike discovered that state officials in Rhode Island had been unaware for more than five months that its VPN system, managed by Deloitte, had been hacked. Deloitte didn't know until the hackers asked for a ransom.
Now, it looks like RI will sue Deloitte.
As part of a time-limited trial, yesterday we removed the
www.bbc.co.uk&www.bbc.comrobots.txt "block" on one GenAI crawler.Here's a graph of total daily requests from that 1 GenAI crawler by content-type. You'll note, they've retrieved ~460k web pages in ~16 hours, so a mean of ~28,750 web pages per hour. They'll likely pull ~690k pages today, ~32GB egress.
Whilst this is a drop in the ocean versus our other traffic, I can easily see how this could sink a smaller website.
Flock -- an automatic license-plate-reading service -- is adding tons of data sources ...
... so police could, upon scanning your license, get linked to tons more info about your life, relationships, etc
where did Flock get these additional sources of info?
they're using standard people-lookup tools and data brokers, but also ...
... info from data breaches
so great
A password consisting only of lowercase L's, uppercase i's, the number 1 and the | pipe..
I|l11IllIIllIlIlII|...technically satisfies all password requirements.
Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data and are demanding $20 million ransom Crypto is not a scam, it’s just that scammers gravitate to crypto because …
mia “uh oh”
Inside every QA tester there are:
- Two wolves
- One wolf
- Zero wolves
- 0.5 wolves
- 2,147,483,648 wolves
- -2 wolves
- Beer wolves
- Two coyotes
- 🐺🐺
- Два волка
'); DROP TABLE WOLVES;--<script>alert('Awooooo')</script>
Everything Else
Nike’s Air Rift Black Swan takes flight with balletcore elegance One, I just learned that balletcore is a thing. Two, these are tabi shoes.
I need a 20-year long nap to cope with the current state of the world.
HBO Max, the company producing J.K. Rowling's new project, wants you to respect its second name change in as many years.
I think we should tell Gen Z that Head Cleaner's "Play Both Sides" was the 🔥 album of 1986
Nothing beats wearing exactly the right jacket for the weather
i estimate that so far, in total, i have spent at least 3 whole days of my life "looking for a cable"
Zack Davisson “It sounds better in the original Japanese.”
I'm an actual imposter and I get a bit fed up of the people faking it.
A lot of people think you can't make money keeping a few goats, but actually if you take really good care of photographing yourself with them on instagram, you can develop a parasocial following and eventually sell nutritional supplements.
"The easiest way to succeed is to measure it wrong."
We have a sound strategy. We simply failed to execute. That is why I, the chief executive officer, had to make the difficult decision to lay off everyone at the company who couldn't execute. Except me, of course, the person in charge of executing.
Behold: the humble yet fabulous knitted tea cosy. Not just a warm hug for your teapot, but a whole vibe. British ingenuity at its most delightful. Why just make tea when your teapot can cosplay as a snail?
I appreciate that everyone has kinda like, collectively decided that hot pink-purple with neon cyan is the official colour scheme of the 80s even though it, you know, wasn't
NEW RULE: Anyone pushing for terraforming other planets has to first prove their sincerity and expertise by working to measurably restore Earth’s climate and ecosystems
Heavyweight All of the gravitas and none of the fees: generate professional-looking demand letters with style and snootiness.
Word Calculator A semantic calculator for when you need to compute complex equations, like king - man + woman = ?.
"Here's your shrimp fried rice, sir."
"Are you telling me this rice is fried, and features shrimp as a distinguishing ingredient?"
"Yes."
"Excellent. I'm glad we share mutual understanding in this case. Although it would have been quite amusing had we not."
"Instead of using actual spray cans, some artists are just cleaning dirt off of certain areas to make their masterpieces and they are calling it reverse graffiti"
(This one is by Paul 'Moose' Curtis of the Reverse Graffiti Project )
When it rains after a prolonged period of dry weather, there is a smell created. It's called Petrichor. A wonderful word, and utterly useless trivia item. The smell is caused by something call Geosmin, which is produced by bacteria in the soil. Humans can smell it at 5 parts per TRILLION. In contrast Sharks can detect blood at concentrations of 1 part per million. On this one substance, we have a better sense of smell than sharks do for blood. Humans are amazing!
How video games can help improve well-being
Overall, playing one hour of video games every day can improve mental health and life satisfaction, according to a study conducted in Japan and published last year.
Sol R. “Bonjour, aujourd'hui 12 mai, c'est la journée mondiale de l'art topiaire. Bonne fête aux Nérée, Achille et Pancrace.”
Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities designed for commuters Uber reinvents buses:
The commuter shuttles will drive between pre-set stops every 20 minutes, according to Sachin Kansal, Uber’s chief product officer.
Joke aside, I love the direction we’re heading — Waymo, Uber buses, LA’s Metro Micro, the works — we’re getting away from individual car ownership. Fewer cars means less pollution (and more walkable cities is healthier).
Dragon Head Mountain, located in South Sinai, Egypt 🇪🇬, a striking natural formation that resembles a colossal dragon's head emerging from the rugged landscape.
Why dollar stores are embracing delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash
I do think the economy taking a turn toward recession was already going to be helping dollar stores make their needed comeback, but this doesn't hurt," said Melissa Minkow, director of retail strategy for technology firm CI&T. "In a lot of ways, this is the equivalent to a brand deciding to sell via Amazon in addition to its own channels — it's about visibility, reach and convenience. Many consumers look to these delivery apps first because of how convenient they are."
Millionaire Supercar Owners Are Skipping Taxes And States Are Furious Montana is home to 2.3 million registered vehicles even though it has only 879,000 residents. And collectively they have 5,281 Ferraris, 131 Bugattis, 1,966 Lamborghinis, and 820 Rolls-Royces. For comparison, Washington state has just 2,479 registrations from the same luxury brands.
Spurious Scholar Because if p < 0.05, why not publish?
It's not about income – it's about who sleeps soundly at night, free from that kind of low-grade financial anxiety that has become the background radiation of modern life for so many. This distinction – between those who experience financial stress as an ambient condition versus those who've been inoculated against it – explains so much about our fractured politics.
New study finds that tea and chocolate may help lower blood pressure This is one more reason why I love dark chocolate (north of 80%, and also grapes for breakfast):
We might have another reason to enjoy our daily cup of tea or small piece of dark chocolate, as a new study from the University of Surrey has found that naturally occurring compounds called flavan-3-ols—found in cocoa, tea, apples and grapes—may improve blood pressure and the health of our blood vessels.
h13b “When you sell your soul for cuteness and regret nothing”
