Published
Weekend Reading — The battle at Git's Hub
elle "All I saw was cheesecake boat and ocean for at least 5 minutes"
Tech Stuff
sonner When you want a nicely designed React toast component. I just started using it in my project and it's pretty slick looking with an elegantly simple API.
Apple’s biggest announcement today was Memory Integrity Enforcement 👍👍👍
Here’s how it works in practice: every piece of memory that gets allocated on your iPhone now gets tagged with a secret code. When an app or process wants to access that memory, the hardware checks if it has the right code. If the codes match, access is granted. If they don’t, the system immediately shuts down the attempt and terminates the problematic process. The system constantly verifies that every memory access request is legitimate and authorized.
github/spec-kit (via Ara Howard)
Spec-Driven Development flips the script on traditional software development. For decades, code has been king — specifications were just scaffolding we built and discarded once the "real work" of coding began. Spec-Driven Development changes this: specifications become executable, directly generating working implementations rather than just guiding them.
Midday Personalized email inbox for invoices and receipts, vault for storing contracts and such, time tracking, and dashboard for your key financial metrics. Affordable pricing starts at $29/month and this is open source so you can self-host it yourself.
I said this when I first started getting into electronics and I’ll say it again: software libraries need something akin to Datasheets. A technical document which lists facts about the operating parameters and intended uses, meant for a technically-minded person to evaluate “is this suitable for my use case?” and “what all would be involved in integrating this into my product?” in my experience too much of this material for software reads like marketing fluff, making empty promises about ease or scale or whatever without any context under which those promises apply we talk about software “engineering” and this sort of technical document strikes me as fundamental to that practice
What if artificial intelligence is just a “normal” technology? What if that's absolutely right? (the article is conflicted)
Whether a given output is harmful often depends on context that humans may understand, but the model lacks, they argue. A model asked to write a persuasive email, for example, cannot tell if that message will be used for legitimate marketing or nefarious phishing. Trying to make an ai model that cannot be misused “is like trying to make a computer that cannot be used for bad things”, the authors write.
MaxBondABE/attempt If at first you don't succeed, here's a CLI for retrying fallible commands:
attempt --retry-if-contains "server not ready" sqlx migrate
samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? Here's a little utility that shows the angle from the sensor and, optionally, plays a wooden door creaking sound if you adjust it reeaaaaaal slowly.
BasicAppleGuy "The Apple Polishing Cloth has been updated to support the iPhone 17, iPhone Air, 17 Pro models, the new Ultra 3, SE 3, and Apple Watch Series 11."
Eye for Design
“Your” vs “My” in user interfaces Use “your” when communicating to the user; use “my” when the user is communicating to us.
Two Slice A font that's only 2px tall and somewhat readable! (via Marcin Wichary)
Cosmic UI When you want to build a dashboard app that looks all sci-fi.
Business Side
Gabe Rivera's 20-year-old headline site, Techmeme, has never been hotter.
Yes, it’s hard to do nothing. And yes, sometimes the best changes come from following the urge to tinker. But we can also learn this from Rivera’s two decades: More often than not, less is more.
From a “million dollar idea” to realizing I had 10 competitors The smartest thing to do is ask a sycophant ChatGPT about your startup idea:
When I first asked ChatGPT about my app idea, it told me I was the first and that the concept could even be worth millions. I felt unstoppable.
I built the prototype, mapped the features, and started thinking in terms of big valuations. Then I actually did the research. Turns out there are at least 10 apps out there doing almost the same thing, some with thousands of users and even funding.
Machine Intelligence
How AI Is Changing Search Behaviors
Our study shows that generative AI is reshaping search, but long-standing habits persist. Many users still default to Google, giving Gemini a fighting chance.
…
This is representative of a consistent theme we observed during the study: participants (especially those with limited previous experience) were excited when they realized they could use genAI for information seeking and planned to try it out more in the future. One of our least-tech-savvy participants asked the facilitator for help bookmarking Perplexity so she could return to it later.
Anthropic's CEO says that in 3 to 6 months, AI will be writing 90% of the code software developers were in charge of Anthropic's CEO made this prediction 6 months ago. So is today AI writing 90% of our code, or can CEOs get articles published when they make boisterous statements devoid of facts?
The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes The new profession: vibe coding cleanup specialists.
Developers joke about “coding like cavemen” as AI service suffers major outage The less exciting profession: coding like a cavemen. (Claude was down for a few hours)
AI salespeople aren't better than humans… yet The profession that's not getting replaced quite yet:
A new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business shows that AI-powered "digital streamers"—virtual salespeople who appear in livestreams to promote products—don't perform as well as human streamers. In fact, they barely outperform having no streamer at all.
AI's free web scraping days may be over, thanks to this new licensing protocol Maybe. Maybe not. We'll see where RSL goes …
As anyone in publishing knows, a lone freelancer, or most media outlets for that matter, has about as much leverage against the likes of OpenAI or Google as a soap bubble in a wind tunnel. But a collective that represents "the millions" of online creators suddenly has some bargaining power.
Albania has figured out how to avoid corruption in awarding government contracts; replace the minister in charge of awarding them with an AI chatbot.This is one of those decisions where you can’t tell if it’s a stroke of genius or insanity.
Vibe coding keyboard Let me introduce you to the only keyboard you need!
Insecurity
crk "I.T. Security in the 1990s"
Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency FYI in case you're using Proton Mail because you're concerned about privacy and security and you think them being Swiss is a bonus point.
Hackers hijack npm packages with 2 billion weekly downloads in supply chain attack TL;DR hackers sent a deceptive email to the owner of multiple packages, then used their credentials to stuff some crypto code in these packages, affecting 18 oft-used Node modules (over 2.6 billion downloads every week). Fortunately, the hack was quickly discovered and fixed, but clearly we need something better to manage npm releases. For example, pnpm is now adding a delay timer:
To reduce the risk of installing a compromised version, we are introducing a new setting that delays the installation of newly released dependencies. In most cases, such attacks are discovered quickly and the malicious versions are removed from the registry within an hour.
Serverless Horrors Stories you never want to feel on your own skin.
Everything Else
Glen Malley "So help me, I laughed"
WHAT DO WE WANT
people being nice to each other in low-stakes situations
WHEN DO WE WANT IT
ideally every day, as an ambient thing that just happens
Never forget that just 3 years ago people were justifying paying $20,000 for a jpeg of an ape
"Data doesn't lie" is, usually, a lie.
My mom was telling me not to leave the food out or the cat will eat it but she switched to Chinese like my cat can understand English.
anycrap The best use of AI — search for a product and this site will generate it for you! Want a fish shaped spam? Laser screwdriver? Dildo for dogs? Medieval lightsaber? This and many more are yours for the price of "just imagining".
I ask the librarian if he had any books on paranoia. He whispered.
"They' re right behind you!"
The “school shooting industry” is one of the most depressing terms I’ve ever heard.
B.C. man arrested for allegedly driving a pink Barbie truck while impaired Welcome to Canada:
An officer at the scene stopped the vehicle and found that the man had a suspended license and was likely impaired.
Ever notice that if you have even a small amount of knowledge in a subject you discover that many of the "experts" in the subject are not, in fact, experts?
Their schools banned phones. Out came the iPods and cassette players. The kids are alright.
Enterprising students have been bringing the contraband of yesteryear to school in what they see as a "loophole" in cellphone bans.
LillyLyle "This!"
you can split tech company names in the middle and add an 's and thus turn them into old sounding place name: the battle at git's hub. the haunting of code's berg.
Why Do People Want Mental Illness Diagnoses These Days?
The shift happened gradually, then suddenly. Somewhere between the 90s "Adult Children of Alcoholics" trend and today's TikTok psychology, mental health diagnoses became identity markers instead of medical conditions.
Foone "this is getting ridiculous"
TIL that Mister Rogers began saying “I’m feeding the fish” on his show after a blind 5-year-old wrote to him, worried she couldn’t see if the fish were okay. He kept doing it so she would always know they were cared for.
Envisioning a Neutrino Laser Neutrino laser 🤯 (via Soh Kam Yung)
To address such questions experimentally, Benjamin Jones of the University of Texas at Arlington and Joseph Formaggio of MIT suggest that a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of radioactive atoms could offer a platform for building a “neutrino laser”. The scheme would generate an intense, coherent beam of neutrinos that could be a transformative tool for neutrino studies.
Catbus "I will never apologize for a post"
