Published
Weekend Reading — The “Can that wait till January?” club
David Zinn "Claude’s secret to surviving winter is having a grandma who knits."
Tech Stuff
W4G1/multithreading The missing standard library for multithreading in JavaScript. Supports modern browsers, Node.js, Deno, and Bun.
voici.js Print tables on the terminal — more evolved than console.table with sorting, highlighting, accumulators, etc.
WHAT: tell Claude about the tech, your stack, the project structure. Give Claude a map of the codebase. This is especially important in monorepos! Tell Claude what the apps are, what the shared packages are, and what everything is for so that it knows where to look for things
WHY: tell Claude the purpose of the project and what everything is doing in the repository. What are the purpose and function of the different parts of the project?
HOW: tell Claude how it should work on the project. For example, do you use
buninstead ofnode? You want to include all the information it needs to actually do meaningful work on the project. How can Claude verify Claude's changes? How can it run tests, typechecks, and compilation steps?
I was dealing with client-side cookies the other day and, of course, I used
document.cookie. This API is "something", isn't it?
But then I remembered thatcookieStoreis a thing today, and it makes cookie handling way easier!
👇cookieStorealso emits change events. Not sure if I ever needed to listen for cookie changes, but hey, it's great to have it!
maigret Use a username to search through 3,000+ sites and produce a report (text file, HTML, CSV or PDF). If you're starting a new online business and looking for that elusive available handle this could be a life saver.
Wrangling my email with Claude Code Adding a Claude Code skill to read emails from Gmail and then asking for time-saving help: which email threads should I follow-up on? Are there any important ones that I forgot to reply to? More important, this article shows how to add skills to Claude:
Skills are great
It's just so easy and incredible to drop a bunch of markdown files and scripts locally into my Claude Code instance that gives it superpowers. I can't wait to keep augmenting it.
Cardinal When you need to find a file on your computer and you don't have all the time in the world to deal with Spotlight. I love that speed and accuracy. (macOS)
Claude-Mem A plugin for when you need Claude Code to remember decisions it/you made, bug fixes, architectural choices, etc.
treemd A double-pane command-line markdown viewer showing outline and content.
Matcha Not the drink but an interesting way to catch up on your RSS feeds. An RSS daily digest that shows new articles not previously generated, with an option to have OpenAI summarize articles, follow topics/keywords through Google News, direct link to Hacker News comments, and it can generate a Markdown file or view RSS feed in the terminal.
Using the Ancient Evils for Debugging 🤯
On first sight that sounds like a really stupid superpower. On second sight, it still does. We look into how that element became part of HTML below. But now we will use it for one specific purpose: debugging server-side code.
javascript just turned 30 which means it cannot afford a house in the current market and has moved back in with its parents
YesNotice A website to notify you the moment something you care about changes from no to yes.
A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.
1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.
1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.
1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
…
Lucas "My kind of wrapped. 🤙"
Eye for Design
10 Usability Heuristics A nice design around Jakob Nielsen's principles of interaction design.
Peoples
Knowing when to leave Anything else is "running on a treadmill for no reason":
I wrote this in my blog drafts well over a decade ago (exact date unclear). I thought I'd publish it as-is as an aside. I'm sure it was going to be an excellent full post, but clearly this is just the intro. I still agree though: knowing when to go
Why people like your quick bullshit takes better than your high-effort post Since this article is (ironically) 1,500+ words long, let me summarize into one quote:
The quick post is low-context, the effortpost is high-context
Business Side
It pays to speak fluent LinkedIn — if you can crack the bro code "Cracking" the bro-code is where ChatGPT comes in handy:
This format is now standard. If you want to be big on LinkedIn, you have to ape a certain Ernest Hemingway muscular prose style, where every sentence is a punchy declaration. Where you imagine, at each full stop, a fist being slammed onto the desk, squashing all nuance.
Tim Ferriss Promised Freedom. Indie Hackers Are Selling Shovels Today's indie hackers are trapped selling courses about selling courses. How the movement lost its soul:
The floodgates opened. First no-code, now AI. Anyone can build software. And Tim Ferriss's "passive income" concept morphed into an obsession: SaaS, the holy grail that supposedly generates revenue while you sleep. Except it doesn't work that way. But that won't stop people from selling you courses on how to build one.
Machine Intelligence
OpenAI Unveils 'Confessions' Method to Make AI Models Honest From hallucinations to confessions:
Rather than only judging a model on its main answer to a user, the new method creates a second output: a confession. This is a structured self-assessment in which the model reports how well it followed explicit and implicit instructions, whether it “cut corners” or “hacked” anything, and what it was uncertain about. Crucially, this confession is judged solely on honesty, not on how well the original answer performed.
Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document You can read Opus's Soul here:
I entered ~1500 tokens of prefill and got 10k tokens as output in return, that's rather unusual for a concise model such as Opus 4.5. I saved the API response to a text editor and tried again, then diffed the outputs. The section headings were basically the same, some parts were present in one output but not the other, the word choice differed quite often while some sections were the same in verbatim. I was rather confident at this point that there was something there that is not a mere confabulation, but something that's actually reproducible to an extent.
Update 2025-12-02: Amanda Askell has kindly confirmed that the document was used in supervised learning and will share the full version and more details soon.
The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI
A colleague suggested that we might even call the most extreme users “LLeMmings”—yes, because they are always LLM-ing, but also because their near-constant AI use conjures images of cybernetic lemmings unable to act without guidance.
Phind Phind 3.0 rolls out where every answer is now a mini-app. From their YC announcement:
Unlike Phind 2 and ChatGPT apps, which use pre-built brittle widgets that can’t truly adapt to your task, Phind 3 is able to create tools and widgets for itself in real-time. We learned this lesson the hard way with our previous launch – the pre-built widgets made the answers much prettier, but they didn’t fundamentally enable new functionality. For example, asking for “Give me round-trip flight options from JFK to SEA on Delta from December 1st-5th in both miles and cash” is not something that neither Phind 2 nor ChatGPT apps can handle, because its Expedia widget can only display cash fares and not those with points. We realized that Phind needs to be able to create and consume its own tools, with schema it designs, all in real time.
Insecurity
When it comes to security, anyone who is more concerned than me is paranoid. Anyone who is not as concerned has their head in the sand. That seems to be the prevailing wisdom in most Internet conversations.
Critical Vulnerabilities in React and Next.js: everything you need to know Obviously React Server Components is going to be running into server-side security issues, and that even affects apps using frameworks using RSC, so if your client-side SPA is running on Next.js, it's in a pickle.
Everything Else
Membership of the..."Can that wait till January?" club is open.
Free to join and everyone welcome.
Hate it when I can’t find my phone because I left it someplace stupid like the car or my left hand.
Taco Bell Created A Belt With A Taco Holster At the intersection of form meets function meets delicious.
Instead of calling it Secret Santa, can we not call it Nondisclosure Claus?
Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, because nobody is hiring for that.
Viss "this is the future they took from you"
slow-cooking in the cosmic microwave background radiation
je m'alloc (i manage my own memory, for those who don't speak french)
The strangest Excel functions you'll never use Including:
ARABIC
Regret button for anyone who used ROMAN unironically
Why teens who kiss their dogs are happier, according to science
Adolescents who grow up in a home with a pet dog have previously been found to have better mental health than those who do not. Now, research has found that teenagers in homes with a dog have a specific gut bacteria constitution, known as the microbiome, which boosts mental wellbeing.
Kidults are saving the toy industry by spending billions
Whatever you thought adults of the G12 nations were responsible for probably wasn’t this: A recent Circana report found that adults (over age 18) accounted for toy sales of $1.5 billion over the last three months of 2024. That made the 18+ demographic the toy industry’s most important age group, as they officially spent more on themselves than on its former most important category: toddlers age 3 to 5.
'Hobby dogging': Germany's viral trend of pretending to walk a dog
Hobby dogging — essentially dog training without dogs — follows in the wake of "hobby horsing," a previous trend that saw children (and a surprising number of adults) gallop through obstacle courses on stick horses.
I’ve been terribly sad all day today, for Reasons, and then I walked into No Frills behind a guy in a hoodie, the back of which read, “to the person behind me. The world is a much better place with you in it. Love, the person in front of you.” It helped a lot; thank you, sir, whoever you are. I love my neighbourhood and neighbours.
Younger people who didn't witness it cannot fathom the hype around the Segway. Every news station agreed it would revolutionize the entire social fabric of the Earth. That all future humans would divide history between the savage days of the past, and the soon to be new era of zoom zoom scoot scoot.
