Published
Weekend Reading — 🐧 Tax the Penguins!
Tech Stuff
new.email Get some AI help to build the perfect email template, using react.email which is a super cool email template library, so you can resend your emails away! (If you’re still stuck in MJMLand, give it a try!)
react-international-phone The nice thing about this library is that it can format the international phone number that you type based on the specific style used in that country.
Ferruccio's Emoji Picker When you need an emoji picker for your React app. Style it using Tailwind CSS.
Claude code is pretty impressive. I have it up and running on a side project I use for learning, and it is much better than the free co-pilot, which seems to fail even pretty simple tasks... Claude code makes some mistakes but is able to put together a reasonable first pass on most little feature enhancements I request while I make dinner and come back to do code review and quick human fixes.
⌘K Base Fast, composable, unstyled command menu for React, based on Base UI, which opens new popup on top of the entire page.
Add Command Palette To Any App! OK, that's a cool trick: if you're using Raycast, you can add command palette (⌘+P) to any app and it's super easy: just set the ⌘+P keyboard hotkey for “Search Menu Items”.
Kerlig If you're looking for an alternative to Grammarly that has a slick UI, only kicks in when you need it to, supports all the major LLM models, and isn't in the business of spying on you.
antiwork/gumroad So Gumroad just went open-source. Not full open-source, their license is limited to SMBs with less than $1 million in revenue, but that’s more than I make in a decade, so I count that as a win. The founder of Gumroad is associated with DOGE. Sorry for posting this link.
'I have read and agree to the Terms' is the biggest lie on the web. Together, we can fix that.
Text Rotate Because you always wanted some fun animations in your React app: swapping letters, breathing text, number ticker, typewriter, word scramble, and many more.
Arcade When you need an online product demo that engages the audience. Think of it as a cross between screenshots and videos, with an audio track and interactive features, and it's super easy to create and upload and you don't need to wonder where your demo will go (is it YouTube? Vimeo? S3?)
A love letter to the CSV format My favorite part:
- Excel hates CSV
It clearly means CSV must be doing something right.
OpenNutrition Free, public nutritional database of everyday generic, branded, and restaurant foods.
MindStudio When you need an AI agent to do your bidding and not afraid to setup one from a collection of pre-existing agents (research, content analysis, YouTube, VC, image generation, etc).
Let’s be honest, the number one thing I do with AI code tools is help me remember all the command-line git tools.
Two years ago, I’d be frantically googling.
Today I just asked cursor to help navigate merge conflicts. 🤷♀️
Obsolete Sony “I miss Weird Sony”
Modernbanc What if your business can manage its accounting using something that's more modern looking and has a smarter UI than Quickbooks/Xero?
concept: a show like ramsay's kitchen nightmares, but about software instead
"i'm at spunkchute, a SaaS company that owes $2 million to AWS and is on the brink of closure”
"oh my [bleep] god. the main database server is running Ubuntu 8.04 and has two backdoors and a coin miner. SHUT. IT. DOWN.”
CatSalad “Back in my day PC chassis were more than just cases, they were furniture!”
Eye for Design
The case against conversational interfaces
We spend too much time thinking about AI as a substitute (for interfaces, workflows, and jobs) and too little time about AI as a complement. Progress rarely follows a simple path of replacement. It unlocks new, previously unimaginable things rather than merely displacing what came before.
Les Orchard Story of my life!
That thing where I spend an hour doing a bunch of what feels like clever work - only to suddenly realize, if I make this one smaller change over here, I don’t need anything I did over the past hour
AI Color Match Instantly apply the color and tone of any image to your own.
If you are a game making person, maybe consider how your game plays to someone who is really bad at it. What is the smallest unit of progress that gets acknowledged? Will I still have a good time if I die to every enemy and miss every jump at least once? How long are you going to make me limp around the track after everyone else has already finished, and are you going to keep playing a five-second loop of exciting finish line music the whole time? I am very good at this type of research
UserTour On the one hand I love this concept that you can quickly build an in-app product tour for new users. On the the other hand, I think 100% this will be used by product managers to keep the app UI unnecessarily complex and throw in this library as “proof of simplicity" which it never is and the CEO will nod in agreement.
Peoples
In defense of ruthless managers
Fifth, ruthless managers are easier to predict. Ruthless managers always do what their own managers - and the company in general - values. If company executives set a priority, ruthless managers will always follow it. Empathetic managers have their own priorities, so it’s harder to know what they want or what behavior they’ll reward. It can be nice to work for a ruthless manager because they’re easier to understand (at least, their work persona is).
Why is your boss a narcissist? Blame the job ad that got them hired
The language used in many job postings appeals to people with ‘a grand view of self’, researchers find
Business Side
The Great Liquidity Shift IPOs are going out of style (Klarna and StubHub just delayed their IPO this week):
71% of exit dollars in 2024 came from a new avenue : secondaries.
Historically, IPOs and M&A have been the dominant exit paths for venture backed companies. Some years IPOs dominate, other M&A dominates, but in 2024 secondaries captured the super majority.
When a company sells new shares to investors in exchange for dollars, they create new shares in the company - primary shares. When existing shareholders sell their shares to new investors, we call this a secondary sale.
Modern Agile is Stupid: on why all great ideas are killed by simple-minded idiots, why Jira kills software, and how to be a good manager Don't. Use. JIRA.
What I am saying is that just because you meet every two weeks and have a “retro” that doesn’t actually mean you’re learning from your mistakes. It is possible — indeed likely — to have retros with no true self reflection.
The damage is in thinking that the entire product delivery process can be boiled down to a checklist.
Yesterday I requested a person to pay for support as they desperately asked me for immediate help with their
libcurlproblem (for a huge international company doing an expensive commercial device), seemingly in a hurry.To which the user said no thanks, closed the issue and vanished.
The open source life.
A comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs Q1 is coming to a close so here’s your comprehensive list of 2025 Q1 tech layoffs. Let's see what effect the tariffs will have on Q2.
“We’re firing all the people who weren’t working on important things. We’re keeping everyone who told them what things to work on. This means we will move faster and make better decisions. This is so difficult for me personally.”
-- every layoff announcement.
They’re Not Tariffs, They’re Sanctions US Big Tech R&D comes to an end:
As Tim Wu writes, companies so dependent on government treatment don’t innovate because they don’t have to. Their government relations departments rise well beyond their research and development departments. And as there are only so many favors to dish out, they trend the country toward oligarchy.
Recruiter accidently emailed me her secret internal selection guidelines Keeping information security is so 2024!
Machine Intelligence
Q “Apple Intelligence truly is something”
If there’s any information you don’t want the AI bots to find, put it in the robots.txt file.
My advice about using AI is simple: use AI as an assistant, not an expert, and use it judiciously. Some people will object, “but AI can be wrong!” Yes, and so can the internet in general, but no one now recommends avoiding online resources because they can be wrong. They recommend taking it all with a grain of salt and being careful. That’s what you should do with AI help as well.
Your next job interview may be with an AI recruiter If you want to get paid well to Vibe Code for a living, don't be surprised when it turns out your Vibe Recruiter is an AI avatar:
While similar tools have been used in the past, few have been as lifelike as Zara, with her shoulder-length blonde balayage, trusting glimmer in her eyes, and dimples on either side of a pearly-white smile. As a plus, she works untiringly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and speaks 10 languages.
People: do not obey in adv—
Corporations: your organization can obey in advance up to 5% faster with the help of our new AI
How Japan’s Copyright Laws Allowed ChatGPT to Blatantly ‘Steal’ Studio Ghibli’s Work The problem with journalism — even an otherwise informative online magazine like Yanko Design — is that they fall into the classic trap of being a stochastic parrot, where journalists spend countless words explaining how Japan's copyright laws are insufficient to protect Studio Ghibli against what is essentially a trademark violation — both copyright and trademark are IP laws but much different laws.
Insecurity
In 84% of cases - you know, almost all - attackers use RDP, aka Remote Desktop.
Yes, you think attackers are hacking the matrix and using Generative AI to generate 31337 code... but in fact, almost all of them are using Remote Desktop to point and click hack you.
There's some really good recommendations in that for monitoring internal RDP usage. It's by far one of the biggest ways to catch people internally being naughty. Why is somebody RDPing to a domain controller at 3am?
Oracle attempt to hide serious cybersecurity incident from customers in Oracle SaaS service The S in Oracle stands for Security:
Back on March 21st, Bleeping Computer ran a story around a threat actor named rose87168 claiming to have breached some Oracle services inside *.oraclecloud.com.
AppLovin caught using invasive fingerprinting? 🚨 Muddy Waters report alleges it builds Persistent Identity Graphs(PIGs) by stitching together user IDs from Meta, Google, TikTok, Reddit & Shopify event data—without consent. This allows cross-platform tracking outside platform oversight. Apple bans this under its anti-fingerprinting rules. If enforced, this could be the first real test of Apple’s policy. Industry, regulators, and adtech are watching closely.
I key my code into the terminal and put my left little finger on the scanner. It beeps rejection.
"There was another data breach last night," the cashier says. "All prints compromised. You must use a backup print."
"Sorry about this," I say and bend down to untie my shoe.
"You're not the first.“
ChatGPT's new image generator is really good at faking receipts There are too many real world verification flows that rely on “real images” as proof. That era is over. You can now prove anything with just a simple prompt and few cents to spend on AI.
Everything Else
iFixit “Perfect for💥 Stress relief” — Other uses as well, but if you need to diminish some stress …
Now that April Fool's day is over, I will continue to not trust the internet.
we’ve officially passed through bear market territory into a cocaine bear market 🐻 🧐
Over 200,000 pounds of liquid egg products have been recalled This is the most expensive recall in history: "200,000 pounds of liquid egg product recalled” and all because it "may contain cleaning solution” 💵
ⓘ 𝘜𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘥𝘶𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘴
Best impression of the new neighbours - when you tell them that you use Signal and WhatsApp and they tell you that they prefer Signal because they want to disentangle themselves from Meta. Yay!
I considered charging my neighbors a fee for tomatoes this year to make more money but then I realized that they could respond by charging me a fee for their eggs, plums, and lemons. This is because I paid attention in 5th grade social studies, and also I’m not a blithering dumbfuck.
Society really went off the rails once people stopped caring about dubstep
No thanks, marketing people, I'm not interested in "continuing the conversation" that I haven't engaged in for the last three emails you sent.
Dave Rahardja “This is an autochrome color photo, taken at the Paris Air Show on the 30th of September, 1909, only six years after the successful flight of the Wright Brothers. It has been cleaned up, but all the color is original to the photograph.”
Just spitballing here, but maybe it’s not the best idea to put someone with a very tenuous grasp of reality in charge of things?
Just talked to a student who was completely freaking out about the final project presentation, to the point of having a panic attack. I gently pointed out that since the final project isn't a huge part of the grade (15%) and it's not a required course component, they can just NOT DO IT, and still pass the class. This had never occurred to them, and they were SO relieved.
A totally undervalued part of education is learning what things just aren't worth your time/effort, and walking away.
Finally, an e-bike that charges off USB-C Finally indeed! “The Ampler Nova e-bikes can be charged in three hours using a standard 140W USB-C PD 3.1 laptop charger.”
Guy in a parking lot tried to cut me off even though he had an implied stop and I didn’t. Guy looked mad. It’s turns out we were both going to Chipotle. He gave me a stink eye and I held the door open for him and let him go first. Just wanted to show him I’m not cutting him off because I’m in a rush. I have right of way because I read the manual.
You know you can tax the rich right now, right? Just shift where you spend your money.
Support your local coffee shop instead of a big chain. Shop at farmers' markets. Eat at local restaurants. Buy from mom-and-pop stores. Choose independent brands over corporate giants.
Yes, it might cost a little more, but you're redirecting money away from corporations that thrive on low wages and putting it straight into your community—where it can grow, support jobs, and build something better.
You are effectively taxing the rich.
Penguins, seals and other wildlife only inhabitants of 2 islands hit with Trump tariffs This is not a good day for the Big Penguin Industrial Complex:
Toward the end of a long list of charts displaying the reciprocal tariffs, as shared by the White House on X, Heard and McDonald Islands are listed as being hit with a 10% tariff.
You wonder why we're taxing penguins? Critics suspect Trump’s weird tariff math came from chatbots
A friendly reminder, from a teacher:
Reward the behavior you want to see.
Even if it's not when you wanted it. Even if it's not as great as you were hoping for. Even if the person who's doing it metaphorically shat the bed before.
People learn from doing stuff. That's kinda the whole point of school. But the part they don't tell you outside of teacher training is that people learn two things when they do something:
- How to do the thing you're asking them to do.
- Whether it was worth the effort and risk of doing it.
This is why they teach us not to say "this is great" or "this isn't any good" as part of project feedback, but rather, "you did great work here" or "you didn't put in the effort you needed to." The first set of responses only speak to Item 1 people are learning.
The second speaks to both.
High fees paid by international students help US universities balance their books There's a much bigger story here about cutting visas and chasing immigrants away, because some US universities are primarily funded by full tuition (foreign) students to the tune of $40B. Drop full tuition and these financial institutions with a side-gig of tutoring will have to layoff teachers, downsize programs, and increase prices for US students, which would decimate the Big University Industrial Complex, which is exactly the goal of The Regime.
Shingles is awful, but there may be another reason to get vaccinated. It may fight dementia 💪
