Published
Weekend Reading — Sparkling spaces
ARGVMI~1.PIF "Well, you can't say you weren't warned."
Tech Stuff
How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents
Yes. JustHTML is about 3,000 lines of Python with 8,500+ tests passing. I couldn't have written it this quickly without the agent.
But "quickly" doesn't mean "without thinking." I spent a lot of time reviewing code, making design decisions, and steering the agent in the right direction. The agent did the typing; I did the thinking.
That's probably the right division of labor.
Related, I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in 4.5 hours
- Code is so cheap it’s practically free. Code that works continues to carry a cost, but that cost has plummeted now that coding agents can check their work as they go.
- We haven’t even begun to unpack the etiquette and ethics around this style of development. Is it responsible and appropriate to churn out a direct port of a library like this in a few hours while watching a movie? What would it take for code built like this to be trusted in production?
Introducing CSS Grid Lanes Masonry layout comes to CSS:
.container {
display: grid-lanes;
grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(250px, 1fr));
gap: 16px;
}
We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date. I want more projects that are actually just finished, without the need to be continuously mutated and complexified ad infinitum.
AI vs human code gen report: AI code creates 1.7x more issues Read the report if you want to know which areas AI is not perfect at. Mind you, it analyzes 470 open-source GitHub pull requests, so there might be a bias here towards people. I'm not saying people who contribute to open-source projects are better developers, but of the people I worked with, only those who contributed to open-source projects were the better developers, so also I'm biased:
No issue category was uniquely AI but most categories saw significantly more errors in AI-authored PRs. That means, humans and AI make the same kinds of mistakes. AI just makes many of them more often and at a larger scale.
5 engineering dogmas it's time to retire 5 practices that are considered ‘common wisdom’, and why it’s worth reconsidering them:
- Don’t reinvent the wheel - find a package
- Every PR must be reviewed
- 2-4 week sprints are how modern teams work
- Every code change should be behind a feature flag/gate
- If a comment is needed, the code is too complex
Ran into a problem in prod?
Just generate a fake cloudflare error page and blame it on them - gives you time to fix.
How to design a GDPR-compliant cookie banner:
- Have a 'reject all' button that is as easy to press as the buttons that grant consent.
- Test your site with no consent for user tracking.
- Realise that all of the tracking bits are unrelated to site functionality.
- Remove them.
- Remove the cookie banner.
anne "As a linguist, this tickles me more than you'll ever know. :)"
Eye for Design
udp7777 I haven’t used it but damn this website design is so 👩🍳💋
A Note on Current SMS Marketing Practices This is why I hate giving out my phone number and conversely why merchants always ask for my phone number before giving out any discount:
That got me curious about what they’d do with my number, and it was a $50-some dollar cap, so I took the discount and gave them my Google Voice number. That was 17 days ago. They sent me 19 SMS marketing messages since then, before I’d seen enough today and called it quits on this experiment.
If you measure conversion, then obviously sending 19 texts in 17 days has the better conversion. If you measure customer satisfaction and long-term retention, then you need 3~5 years to justify a competing strategy, which is why "quick to measure/quick to annoy" marketing stategies get selected so often.
A compaint about modern hard-subtitles in social media.
Anyone else hate the modern trend of hard subs in videos? I have always been a subtitle user. And I appreciate when the author includes real human-typed soft subtitles, or even hard subtitles done to industry standard.
But theres this new trend to do hard subs recently to either highlight one word at a time, or introduce the next word one word at a time. And it drives me insane.
I feel far less receptive to whats beibg said, and i find myself more "engaged" with the video. Not in a thought provoming manner, but in a mindless gaze at the video, unable to look away as I am dialed into the exact word being spoken when it's spoken.
Just put the whole subtitle line on the screen at once! Attached is a short recording of some random youtube video to illustrate the effect. I notice that with nornal soft subtitles, my eyes will often read the entire line or reread the line, jumping back and forth, both before and after the words are spoken. Im able to double check what is said, and get a sneak peak for whats about to be said, because I have a hard time hearing the articulations of words.
These modern viral video hard subs are utterly useless for accessibulity. Yea Ill say it. Lol
Do I hate them? Yes. Except these are not "subtitles" designed for accessiblity, it's text layout optimized for conversion.
When you see white letters against a red/orange/yellow background — that color scheme was not chosen for accessibility, it was chosen to hook the viewer. It captures your attention like a stop sign.
And to hook you further, they add the curiosity gap — when you can't read the complete sentences, your brain wants to stick around and figure out how the sentence ends. There's an entire branch of marketing psychology dedicated to visual conversion tricks like that.
Peoples
The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better 👍
Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced.
How differently do software developers perceive the same communication? A study identifing systematic perception gaps that affect project communication, regardless of developer experience or background:
Free-text responses revealed that one group annotated based on “emotional resonance”, and viewed emoticons and casual language positively. The other group focused on “helpfulness, informativity, and meaningfulness,” perceiving casual responses as negative in professional settings.
Business Side
AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
But my key takeaway would be that if your product is just a SQL wrapper on a billing system, you now have thousands of competitors: engineers at your customers with a spare Friday afternoon with an agent.
I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person McSweeny perfectly captures the nuances of Bay Area work/life balance:
My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am.
Machine Intelligence
Overview - Agent Skills Claude’s SKILL.md is now an official standard: "A simple, open format for giving agents new capabilities and expertise."
Insecurity
8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions Most likely you don't need a VPN, browser traffic already encrypted by HTTPS, and if you're hitting the wrong sites, VPN won't fix that problem. But VPN tech is cheap enough to run a VPN farm at scale, that's quite the business — promoted by influencer marketing — that allows VPNs to exist that … well …
The framing suggests the AI monitoring exists to protect you-checking for sensitive data you might accidentally share, warning you about suspicious links in responses.
The code tells a different story. The data collection and the "protection" notifications operate independently. Enabling or disabling the warning feature has no effect on whether your conversations are captured and exfiltrated. The extension harvests everything regardless.
Everything Else
Ugly Sweater Holiday Armor I'm not in the market for a Jeep or a Ford Bronco, but if I was in the market for such a vehicle, it definitely would be because it can wear this Ugly Sweater Holiday outfit!
If you already have everything you need for Christmas, don't tell people that. Just tell them you'd really like some nice chocolate, coffee, candle, bottle of wine, or socks.
Give people an easy win. Let them buy some crap for you. Free them from this accursed duty that the season burdens them.
I don’t care how you season it, ham radios definitely taste more like radio than they do ham
You're only allowed to call them tabs if they come from the French region of Tabeé. Otherwise they're just sparkling spaces.
Foone "Technology really is amazing these days"
"Scammer, I don't have time to play with you, have a good day"-- the awesome woman sitting near me into her phone when it rang
There is a certain type of person who should not be allowed near a label maker. They always reveal themselves in time.
Helen 🎅
Not all of my colleagues are fuckwits.
One of them brought round a Christmas card today for our manager. When asked to sign it, most people asked, "why?!"
Her response was, "it's been a shit year and he's human."
Even the most miserly of colleagues wanted to sign it then.
His life? What about mine!? Don't come crying to me when you need a male SCSI-2-to-male Centronics cable. Hmph!
Did you know: you can avoid the need for backups by failing to do anything worth saving a copy of
Follow me for more computing lifehacks
In an attempt to help with my seasonal affective disorder, this week my husband invented hugby, wherein he runs and tackles me with a hug while shouting "Hugby!"
A team sport where everybody wins.
The ‘biscuit saver’ saves your cookies and Oreos from collapsing into your beverage
The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025 Short reviews of books that came out in 2025 and that you don't want to read, though these short reviews are entertaining and worth reading:
Reading it is like spending time with a delusional fortune cookie: platitudes that feel like they were run through a translation service three times.
Jeff Johnson (via Ian Betteridge)
“Free” trials with autorenewing subscriptions are a MENACE to App Store users.
Don’t let anyone tell you that the App Store is designed to protect users. It’s designed to produce maximum revenue for Apple.
Apple refused to refund free trial renewals – any options left?
Cow cuddling Therapy for some, an udderly adorable business for others.
Librarians Are Tired of Being Accused of Hiding Secret Books That Were Made Up by AI (via Jason Lefkowitz)
What’s more, Falls suggests that people don’t seem to believe librarians when they explain that a given record doesn’t exist, a trend that’s been reported elsewhere like 404 Media. Many people really believe their stupid chatbot over a human who specializes in finding reliable information day in and day out.
Merriam-Webster also highlighted other high-interest terms from the year — including “performative,” “67,” “touch grass” and “conclave” — but “slop” was the one that best “told the story” of 2025.
The best science images of 2025 Enjoy!
The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems Ever wondered while Finland and Sweden rank at the top of the happiness league table?
As a result, the overall ranking constructed by Blanchflower and Bryson looks totally different to the more famous version published by the UN. Finland, for example, falls to 51st place. Conversely, countries like Japan, Panama and Thailand, none of which do especially well on the official ranking by the UN, suddenly appear a lot happier; all of them are ranked above Finland and other supposed top performers.
…
In a culture obsessed with happiness and wellness, there will always be huge demand for content that sells readers on the one great hack for how to improve their lives. Want to live to a ripe old age? Eat like the residents of “blue zones” such as Sardinia or Okinawa. Want to be happy even though you’re not rich? Move to Bhutan, a country often portrayed as having figured out the key to happiness because the government announced in 2008 that it would henceforth be focusing on growing its “Gross Happiness Index.”
Thieves dressed as Santa and his elves steal $3K worth of goods from Montreal grocery store An interesting take on Robin-Hood. (via Anna Anthro)
A short tale from way back when I worked at Apple: My team had a lot of lunchtime meetings and they usually got pizza to feed us lunch while we worked. There were two of us on the team who were vegetarian, so they'd order six or eight pizzas for the team and all of them would have meat except for the one meatless pizza they had for just the two of us. But everyone likes vegetarian pizza, so people would get in line, take what looked good which included the veggie pizza, and by the time I got to the veggie pizza it would be gone and I'd have no lunch (and the other vegetarian had the same problem, of course). They tried to get the non-vegetarian people to stop eating the veggie pizza, then tried to hide it so only we veggies could get it, but nothing worked. So I suggested they order four kinds of vegetarian pizzas and a couple pizzas with meat, and that worked out great and there was much rejoicing.
This is a post about gatekeeping disability accommodations.
Laura Manach "Dick Van Dyke recently turned 100 years old and is no longer permitted to play with LEGOs."
