Published
Weekend Reading — Skeletons in the closet
Neatnik "Everything can be accessible."
🎉🎉🎉 Fastmail just approved Expense’s OAuth client.
I believe we's now the first expense tracking app that can collect receipts from Fastmail (and JMAP in general). To me, because I use Fastmail for my emails, it's more exciting than supporting GMail or Outlook.
Click "Connect with Fastmail", takes you to your Fastmail page, where you can authorize Expense to read your mail. Done!
(You can disconnect at any time, and Expense cannot send emails on your behalf, only look at them)
Tech Stuff
neat-annotations Neat hand-drawn annotations for your page: arrows and handwritten labels. Pure CSS, no JavaScript, one small file.
Charts built for Chat An open-source, declarative YAML language for building governed, code-based analytical dashboards optimized for AI chat agents.
Back in college, I had a Systems Architecture and Design professor. The very first day of his class he stood up in front of us and said:
"One day, you're going to be brought in to help optimize a company. You'll see that they're doing things by using index cards in shoeboxes. Then, after you understand their processes, points of interaction, and audits, you'll find out that the most optimal way for them to work is by using index cards in shoe boxes. Walk away."
That was one of the best bits of advice I ever got in my career. Why? Because it reinforced that in order to solve a problem, you have to understand the problem. You have to understand how the problem fits into it's larger ecosystem. You have to understand what the solution breaks and what problems it will cause. Nothing lives in isolation. Everything is interconnected.
The last thing you do as a systems architect is write code.
I wish like hell more folk understood that, particularly the vibe-coding, rapid iteration, "throw code at it" types.
Screendrop Looking for an open-source alternative to Loom? You can capture screen area, window, or full screen, use OCR to extract text, do a screen recording, use a teleprompter, edit video, and it comes with a Cloudflare Worker so you can easily share your videos.
The Feature Flag Graveyard: How a Safety Net Becomes Technical Debt
Fast-forward twelve months.
Your codebase contains 214 feature flags. Nobody remembers who created enable-legacy-tax-calc-fix-final, whether temp-user-profile-v3 is fully rolled out, or why turning off test-dark-mode-override breaks authentication in the staging environment.
You haven’t built a modern, resilient continuous delivery system. You’ve built a dynamic, non-deterministic branching maze—a Feature Flag Graveyard.
losing my community to LLMs I feel the same way. Two factions. I belonged to one: I've spent decades of my life appreciating the aesthetics of code — writing code was my vocation!. Now I belong to the other, more focused on shipping features:
I had a conversation with a friend recently about how the software community seems to be splitting into two factions:
* Developers who like the aesthetics of code (the craftspeople)
* Developers who like shipping features (the LLM folks)"
Neobrutalism.dev Just added Base UI support and a new color theme.
Mailflare Run your own email service on Cloudflare, or self-host as Docker container. Open-source, written in Typescript, supports JMAP.
Why DBAs are right to be skeptical of AI — and where they’re wrong
We’re probably not far from agents that sit and watch a Postgres instance around the clock and rarely need a human to step in. The slower part is trust. For example, look at how long it took people to actually believe AI-written code was any good. I would guess it is the same pattern here, but I don’t doubt for a second that we will get there.
What’s the craic with your AI setup? Share your AI setup and check out other people's setup.
The .well-known Explosion: A Field Guide to the New Agent Standards How .well-known is your AI service?
A field guide to the .well-known family for AI agents: Link headers, API Catalog, OAuth, MCP, skills, Web Bot Auth — with cabuya.org and this site as examples.
No disrespect to well intentioned people but everyone who is telling anyone to self host needs to sit down in front of a computer and walk through all the steps of doing that. Write them all down, every step from "I want to self host my stuff" to "A URL I can share that points to stuff I made that I can get paid for".
And then do it again with a phone.
Wealthfolio Open-source personal finance app that runs locally on your device. There is a monthly charge if you want to connect to your online brokerage account, but everything else is free.
Eye for Design
Dan Lyke 👑
When I am lord high ruler of the universe, "Paste Unformatted" will be the default, and if applications have a "Paste Formatted" option at all, it will be two clicks to get there.
We are all Product Engineers now
I've made this argument before: look at the website of your dentist, your insurance company, your kid's school, or literally any department of any government, and you're looking at software that is terrible not because nobody knows how to build better software, but because the people who need it can't afford to pay for better at current prices. Then think about all the things software hasn't touched at all, which is most things. Every small business runs on a spreadsheet and a group chat and a person who remembers stuff.
Kinderlose Katzenfrau Antonia, MSc "I didn't know they already had CSS in 1583"
Peoples
If you need a feature in something you use, it’s often much easier to persuade someone to take your patches adding this feature than to get the work scheduled within their high-velocity Scaled Agile planning process (of course the plan is already finalized for this quarter as well as the next — it’s our well-run planning process to which we owe our velocity — but in a few weeks, we can discuss the priority of this versus the other features relevant for the quarter after the next one.) Sadly, merging changes might have gotten harder recently, with your well thought-out patch looking no different than random LLM output at first glance, but it shouldn’t be a problem once they get to know you.
Reading and associations with brain health, cognition, well-being, and mental health 📚
Growing recognition of the importance of prevention in mental health has led to increased interest in modifiable lifestyle factors that support brain health, cognition, and well-being. This editorial examines evidence for an accessible and low-cost protective factor across the lifespan, namely reading for pleasure. Drawing on subjective surveys and objective studies using longitudinal, neuroimaging, and behavioral methods, we highlight converging findings that link reading engagement with improved brain and mental health, better cognitive performance, and reduced risk of cognitive decline. …
Business Side
Consider the two big artifacts in the product world: roadmaps – what features we think we need to build and when; and PRDs – what the requirements are for said feature.
Now consider how much of an enabler these artifacts are for thinking we know more than we really do.
I believe that this desire for predictability is at the root of why so many companies continue to focus on output, and also at the root of the lack of trust in those companies.
How VCs Should Judge AI Startups Now That Everything Is Easy to Copy
So stop asking whether a competitor can copy the startup.
Ask whether the customer can.
Then ask who is on the hook when the software gets something important wrong.
Increasingly, I think that person is the moat.
Deceptive patterns, formerly known as dark patterns Each decision makes sense on its own, but together they create a manipulative user experience, and yet nobody in the room did anything wrong.
Machine Intelligence
You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by your CFO who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on six more.
This is about AI.
OH: "Recursive self-improvement in AI is a lot like what the Habsburgs thought they were doing by marrying their cousins."
Everything Else
ahistorical immaterialist "Okay, fair call, this is neat"
that special time of year the skeletons in your closet are considered festive
Move over "this meeting could have been an email"
The new hotness is "this site incident could have been a unit test"
My dog was barking at the robot vacuum the other day, so I scolded the vacuum for being a bad robot.
The dog walked happily away, knowing I had put the robot in its place.
Merriam-Webster gives its dictionary a ‘glow-up’ with 1,400 new words and definitions New words entering the dictionary this year: "looksmaxxing", "meme coin", "vibe coding", and "uncanny valley".
if you want kids to "go outside" instead of being on their devices how about you work to restore 3rd spaces for them instead of trying to ban them from social media
Why Personal Websites Are Coming Back 👍
A collection of personal websites and an RSS reader can produce a surprisingly good Internet. It will probably be a smaller one. That’s fine.
You have to embrace the suck before you can get to the good. You need to find joy in learning, not in reaching your destination. You need to slow down.
None of those things are very 2026.
Something you might remember from childhood is cheap balsa wood plane kits. You would carefully assemble them — no glue needed — and they would actually fly. The fancy ones had a red plastic propeller and were powered by an elastic band. I just happened to think of them, and went and looked, and it turns out that the company that makes them is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
I have never worried about the singularity because I had a single conversation in 2007 with a guy who worked in a chip fab, and learned just the tiniest bit about the physical, mechanical process that goes into actually manufacturing a microprocessor, and how much of it requires direct intervention of human hands despite everyone involved in the process having wanted to automate it all since 1980
'Phonetic' is not.
'Abbreviation' is 12 letters.
'Thesaurus' doesn't have a synonym.
'Monosyllabic' has five syllables.
'Hyphenated’ isn't, but ‘non-hyphenated’ is.Say what you will about English, but it has a sense of humour.
I lost my $2m book deal because people mistook my African dialect for AI I feel the pain. Pangram rates my writing "100% AI" ☹️
In his essay, which The Independent has seen, Falade writes that his first language – Yorùbá – is “a highly lyrical dialect rich in proverbs, aphorisms, metaphors, parallelism” – and “not X, but Y” constructions – many features of which, he notes, are now the hallmarks of AI-generated writing.
The Far Side Bot “What have I told you about eating in bed?”
