Published
Weekend Reading — The paperwork flood
Tech Stuff
HopTab Open source app switcher and tiler to replace Cmd+Tab. If you Cmd+Tab a lot you may find this app quite useful.
Number, currency, and unit formatting
Did you know that the mathematical value 1234.56 looks different in Boston, Berlin, and Bangalore? Hardcoding formats is a brittle and unsustainable approach to web design.
In our newest article, we break down how you can leverage JavaScript's native
IntlAPI to effortlessly localize numbers, currencies, and units.
Why Banning useEffect Is Really About Agents I find useEffect baffling — one function that tries to solve multiple problems is the opposite of KISS. I prefer to eliminate useEffect and replace it with more appropriate functions (useMount, useTimeout, useOnChange, etc). Secondary benefit is that it also helps LLMs:
Alvin Sng’s post walks through the full rationale and the replacement patterns, so I won’t rehash those here. The short version: direct
useEffectcalls are banned via lint rule. A singleuseMountEffectwrapper exists for genuine mount-time side effects. Everything else (derived state, data fetching, event responses) uses the tool that was always the right tool: inline computation, event handlers, or a data-fetching library.
Open Screen An open-source alternative to Screen Studio.
AI Agent is Our New CRM An interesting slidedeck that covers MCP-first software design and best practices.
Vibe Coding: Programming for the Rest of Us?
Every democratizing technology has its detractors. There were people in 1984 who laughed at the idea of moving a cursor with a small plastic box on your desk. There were people who thought desktop publishing would ruin graphic design. Those who bash vibe coding today, who insist it produces brittle code, that it isn't real programming, that it will lead to disaster, are the modern version of those people. They may not be entirely wrong on the technical details, but they're deeply wrong about what matters.
What matters is this: people who had something to build and no way to build it now have a way. That is an unambiguous good. Though I'll admit it: living inside that good comes with its own uncomfortable questions.
Claudoscope Watch over Claude Code from the comfort of the menu bar. Includes a dashboard that can show your projects, sessions, hooks, MCPs, skills, and everything else.
Dare Obasanjo Right now I have 3 tasks on my todo list that are all about asking Claude to write test cases:
While lots of people complain about the risk of reduced software quality from AI slop code contributions, all I see is a lot of opportunity to improve test automation using AI in ways that were simply infeasible before the age of LLMs and coding agents.
You can actually automate "eyeball this UI change to see if it looks janky" which was quite infeasible prior to AI coding agents.
Flowershow Markdown -> HTML. Flowershow publishes entire directories—blog, Obsidian, knowledge base, whatever you want. $5/month is reasonable for self publishing, and only $0 if you don't care for custom domain.
nanobrew Homebrew package manager only noticeably faster.
last30days-skill When you need to get caught up on a new topic, or stay updated on a topic you're following. With this skill you can ask Claude for a 30 day recap from various sources — Reddit, Bluesky, YouTube, TikTok, Hacker News, etc.
Eye for Design
Should a Contact Form Offer to Send You a Copy? Yes 🙏
1. It gives you instant verification that form actually worked. A random form on a website might just be broken. Wired up to a service that don’t work anymore. Back end code that’s busted. API limits exceeded. Who knows. If you get a copy of what you typed into that form via email immediately, it probably also properly sent to who is supposed to be getting it.
2. When someone responds, it might not include your complete message in the reply. People can do whatever they want with an email reply including alter or remove the original message. Might be nice to have your original copy (assuming that goes unaltered).
Plus, for some people, reading the message you just sent makes you realized you made a mistake, missed an important detail, etc.
Terms and Conditions Sometimes it's all about the simplicity.
Business Side
We Stopped Building Things and Started Building Apps to Talk About Building Things 🔨
The system itself becomes the output. Look at my Notion setup. Look at my task management flow. The system is impressive. What has it produced? Nothing. But the system is really impressive. This is procrastination disguised as preparation. It is fear of creation dressed up as optimisation. It is easier to build the meta than to build the thing.
dan slimmon (via Rob Fahrni)
There's this myth that automated spam detection is hard because spammers are all very clever masters of disguise.
No. Spammers are stupid as a shoe. They have dog shit for brains.
Automated spam detection is hard because the line between spam and "legitimate" marketing activity is a fiction.
Machine Intelligence
Ensu Open-source LLM that runs entirely on your machine. Not as smart as Claude or ChatGPT, but an interesting place to start if you like to keep your privacy and/or hate paying for tokens. I'm going to give try it out this week, see if it's good enough for my daily use:
In the same vein, while we have been itching for a long time to do something about local LLMs, it is only recently that smaller models are becoming feasible to run on consumer devices. We now think there are actionable steps we can take.
This is where the second assumption comes in. While smaller decentralized models improve every day, so do the larger centralized models. However, we think the gap is not what is important - instead, it is about a threshold, and about how the model's capabilities are used. Once smaller models will cross a certain threshold, they will be sufficient to provide joy, utility and convenience in the life of people.
You know what I want from AI models? I want small useful things. If I have never on my phone created a calendar event between midnight and 5 AM, and I tried to schedule some thing at 3 AM (instead of PM), I would love if my phone went "hey, you sure?"
Even keyboard prediction could be a tiny bit better. If a person has been typing about, let's say "Siouxsie and the Banshees" over and over for almost two years, maybe suggest "and" or "Sioux" as the next word ONCE!?
Is AI massively boosting developer productivity across the board?
No. We are not seeing indications that developers as a whole are 100x or even 10x more productive. The bumper crop of new packages, or new package updates, just does not exist!
Relax. You are not missing a party that literally everyone else was invited to.
Rabbit R1’s OpenClaw Update Could Be Its Most Important Moment Yet "The problem OpenClaw always carried was the lack of native voice interaction on dedicated hardware, and the R1 had exactly that hardware sitting in a drawer gathering skepticism."
Insecurity
Physical security and cryptography can learn from each other, part 11367:
Hotels wisely don't put the room number on guest keycards so if someone finds your card, they'd have to exhaustively search the hotel to find the room it opens.
Some hotels now have elevators programmed to only let you call the floor for which your keycard is coded, preventing guests from wandering to other floors.
But it also means the elevator can be used as an efficient oracle to determine the floor of a found key.
Everything Else
Little did you know this was preparing you for a life of plugging cables into the right hole
After buying an electric car, there's no likelihood of me going back to an acoustic one ;)
Interviewer: Can you perform under pressure?
Me: I can do the Bowie part, but I don't have the upper range to sing the Freddie part.
We use debian, that should be age verification enough
Weeknotes #12: Here be monsters (via Mia)
The Library's Access team have given names to our collection trolleys including: Trolly Parton, George Orwheel, Wheeliam Shakespeare, Daphne du Trollier, Rene Descart, Cart Cobain, JRR Trollkein, Cart Vader, and Mary Wheelstonecraft.
Flighty Airports When you need to be on top of major airport disruptions.
we had the radical idea to turn off all the stop lights in the city.
The point of transportation, after all, is to go, not stop. We didn't want to hold our associates and 10x drivers back from their best opportunities to create impact
The 'Paperwork Flood': How I Drowned a Bureaucrat before dinner. Malicious compliance so hilariously written (via J4ck)
Then, page two. Whirrr. Chunk.
Page three. Whirrr. Chunk.
By page fifty, the machine would be heating up. The smell of hot toner would start to fill the cubicle. The rhythmic chunk-chunk-chunk of the printing would become a drone, a mechanical chant of malicious compliance.
By page one hundred, the paper tray would run out. The machine would start beeping. That high-pitched, insistent beep-beep-beep that demands attention. Karen would have to get up. She would have to find a ream of paper. She would have to feed the beast.
SlapMac Slap your MacBook. It screams back. That's it. That's the app. (via Lucas)
Why Being Weird Is Often a Sign of Psychological Health
What we call “weirdness” is often not a pathology but a sign of a more differentiated inner experience. These individuals tend to show higher emotional sensitivity, greater awareness of their internal states, a lower tolerance for superficial interactions, and a stronger need for coherence between what they feel and how they live.
In other words, they are less adapted to social norms but often more connected to their direct experience.
The wandering mind: A gift we squander
The secret is intentional wandering.
Don’t just let your mind drift into the gutter of anxiety. Give it the space to explore the ideas that matter.
