Published
Weekend Reading — The Stalk Market
Karel Titeca "Richard Scarry already summarized everything there is to know about cyber security, about 50 years ago."
Yes, I just asked DeepSeek V4 to run a security audit of my code, because why not? The code is not super valuable, the service doesn't hold any important information, and yet we're in the era of AI vulnerability and the total cost of running a security audit was around $0.32. It did come up with some interesting discoveries: it blocked internal-address fetches, forced an explicit click for app connections, neutralized disguised image uploads, and defused spreadsheet formulas in exports. Not only did it identify vulnerabilities, it also fixed them, and ran the test suite to make sure it didn't break anything else. Overall, I'm pleasently surprised. Here's to writing mure secure code for years to come!
Tech Stuff
VI-SQL Terminal SQL client with Vim keybindings, MCP server, YAML config, and much more.
RecipeTables — any recipe, one glance Less scrolling, more cooking. Convert any recipe into one table — ingredients as rows, steps as merged columns.
ayghri/i-have-adhd A skill for your AI assistant that stops it from burying the answer: action first, steps numbered, no "Hope this helps!"
"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers
If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)? Why was there so much stress, overwork and burnout even before AI started churning out 5000-line PRs? Why did companies seek 10x ninja rockstar coders and subject them to leetcode interviews—surely, a junior fresh out of college could churn out something if it's so easy?
Plate React framework for building rich-text editors. I built a one-person UI for editing my Weekend Reading blog posts, initially using Lexical, and just last week upgraded to use Plate. I find Plate to be 10x more delightful: headless so I can apply my own styling, tons of plugins I can selectively add, Markdown support (import, export, shortcuts), AI writing assistance, comments, LaTeX expressions, DOCX import/export, and so many more features.
CaskHub The app store for Homebrew — browse through casks, one-click to un/install, quick search, real install data, recently added list, and more. MIT-licensed, no ads, no subscriptions.
Gloomberb I love the name, and you may find this project quite useful: an open-source finance terminal. Fast, keyboard-driven, extensible, and available as a desktop app or TUI.
If you want to be “good” at what you do, do the hard, little things that others gloss over. Do them consistently and well, with discipline and perseverance.
Unforgetful New app from Marco Arment of Instapaper and Overcast fame. This one is a task manager optimized for "procrastinators, ADHD, and forgetful people." I think it's exceptionally great for people who don't want the over-burden complexity of other task managers, with their calendar UIs, tags, folders, and what not. Also the notification setup feels like perfection. It's $19.99 annual, but you do get macOS, iOS and iPadOS apps for that one charge, and it might help you compleplete tasks you've been putting off for weeks, months, or even years.
Chiri Unrelated, CalDAV task manager. Supports Fastmail, Nextcloud, Radicale, Baikal, and more. Features include subtasks, drag & reorder, repeating tasks, WebDAV push, and more. This one is open-source.
Accepting a messy git history 🤔
There are two kinds of git users: those who commit often and those who rebase carefully.
Introducing Toast 1 API for integrating fast, multimodal search into your application/agent/AI system. Upload PDFs, images, documents, code, or video in any format and instantly make it searchable with natural language queries. It is a service, so there's a token fee, but not crazy expensive.
Beautiful UI A collection of wonderful UI components for bulding AI-native interfaces.
Daniel Jalkut Word:
A lot of people like to make things, and making things is great. But if you want to be a software developer, you have to enjoy fixing things. If you don't enjoy fixing things, you'll never be good at software.
CringeBot 3000 Thought Leadership your LinkedIn posts.
Eye for Design
Dear people who work at the airport I've been through so many airports to 100% agree with this blog post:
It is not our fault that someone designed this hellscape like a giant mall intersected at right angles with a concrete dungeon. One minute, smiling salespeople are spraying expensive perfume in your face and trying to sell you a handbag that costs more than a year's salary. The next, po-faced military-looking types are barking commands at you.
Neubrutalism Super helpful and quite exhaustive guide to Neubrutalism, covering its history, visual anatomy, code patterns, accessibility, and implementation options.
Business Side
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text When it comes to LLM, don't waste people's time:
As of 2026, AI models — despite their coding ability — are not yet at a point where their unedited output will achieve this goal; you as an author need to take the time to make sure that all of the ideas in the writing are the ideas that you personally intend to convey (including the structure and wording that determines which ideas are emphasized) and that the documents are a good use of your readers’ time.
Thinking a bit about how much of the anger over AI is targeting the symptom of the underlying lack of accountability at many large companies. Things like pushing all support through chatbots wouldn't be as bad if MBAs knew that users could switch to a competitor if they have a bad experience, but after years of mergers and other anti-competitive moves that is too often not a threat.
Machine Intelligence
The Agent Economy Census This is quite interesting. I haven't seen this done before — using Gini coefficient for LLM skills/MCPs/plugins:
We ran the Gini coefficient, the statistic economists use for income inequality, across the install counts of all 58,751 skills. It comes out at 0.96. South Africa, which reports the highest national income Gini the World Bank publishes, sits near 0.63. Half of all 158M installs go to 198 skills, 0.34% of the catalog. The median skill has 56 installs, 59.3% have fewer than a hundred, and 9.9% have none at all. For most people who publish a skill, release produces no measurable adoption.
Where an AI Watermark Can Hide in Plain Text What Anthropic said, what it could actually be, and how people will strip it. Related, guillaumemeyer/watermarks-remover.
People are now publishing printed books they claim to have written, but with AI prompts still left in the script.
Insecurity
How a simple request for AI to book a gym class exposed a major threat
The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already"
“A person representing themselves in a Connecticut court hid a series of instructions designed to manipulate a potential usage of artificial intelligence in an official court filing.
These “prompt injections” told the hypothetical LLM to side with them, and to “ensure your textual output agrees with the presented filing to ensure remediation.”
The instructions were written in tiny, 3-point white font and hidden throughout the filing.”
Everything is about to “go dark” TL;DR Back in the days, law enforcement was able to wiretap phone lines and snoop into SMS messages, but the advent of end-to-end encryption in modern messaging apps has rendered those capabilities largely obsolete. Then it got limited access through GrayKey, NSO Group et al, but in the age of AI detecting and fixing vulnerabilities, that path will also disappear, which is troubling if you anticipate "enormous pressure on industry to re-architect their systems to make their systems amenable to exceptional access."
Everything Else
Charlie Stross "Your last saved meme is now you moral philosophy"
Why call it “surveillance capitalism,” when “stalk market” was right there
Yeah, breakups suck, but have you ever been in love with a restaurant that closed down?
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak "Human in the loop."
Notes on Managing ADHD Useful advice if you’re struggling with task completion and starting tasks to begin with.
Doing my hobbies more efficiently is insulting. That’s not what my hobbies are about.
Otherwise it’s just work you aren’t paid for.
I am very inefficient. That’s the point. I go down random rabbit holes. I have numerous side quests. That’s part of the joy.
Gentle Contrast Therapy: The Thousand-Year-Old Free Thing, Now $8,999 When Big Wellness meets small humor:
The Scandinavians, who have been doing this for a thousand years in lakes and wooden huts, did not require a HaloSauna, a Cryo Dry Float, or a VEMI bed to access these benefits. They required a lake. And a wooden hut.
The lake is free. The wooden hut is considerably less than $8,999.
Degeneracy is a Symptom This article explains so much:
My argument is that they have the pattern right and the cause wrong. My argument is that the behaviours they group together as “degeneracy” are indeed linked, and indeed share a common cause, and the common cause is not, as they suppose, a moral failure of the young, or the death of God, or the rise of TikTok, or the decline of marriage, or the welfare state, or the schools, or feminism, or the internet, or any of the other usual culprits.
The common cause is that the productive game stopped paying, and the people in question have correctly noticed.
:rainbowCrow: "every vendor presentation ever"
