Published
Weekend Reading — This heater is from space
Street Art Utopia "Painted Octopus! By Lumen Street Theatre in Limerick, Ireland."
Tech Stuff
Building a Toast Component This is the story of Sonner, why they came up with that name, how they managed animation and stacking, momentum-based gestures, and more. I love Sonner, the API is so easy to use and the UI is a delight. I enjoyed reading this story and how they surmounted so many technical challenges:
One is that the developer experience is good. No hooks, no context, you insert
<Toaster />once and you calltoast()to create a toast. That’s it.Two is that it looks good. It has nice defaults and good animations. This is the real differentiator. People simply like beautiful things. Beauty is generally underutilized in software so you can use it as leverage to stand out.
Introducing Beads: A coding agent memory system I haven't used Beads long enough to determine whether I like it or not — likely it doesn't fit my vibe ;) However, a blog post by Steve Yegge is nothing if not entertaining to read even if you don't care about the subject material.
Resurf Email yourself a reminder.
wait, why is a bit per second called a "baud"?
(looks it up)
...huh, so apparently the word "baud" is even older than computers, it was named after émile baudot, who invented a system of coding characters for the telegraph (which actually looks more like a predecessor to something like ASCII, and apparently also is the origin of CR and LF as separate symbols!)
Fanfa Interactive and animated Mermaid diagrams.
most programmers cannot find the cli
Ash K "Kinda love this error message on the bus"
Eye for Design
Craft software that makes people feel something
I always use the example of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This game is so well crafted that I know people who don’t even like video games but bought a console just to play it — and once they finished, they sold everything. This is what I’m talking about: taking time to build something so that once people try it, they remember it for as long as they live.
In this cookie-thingy banner, the toggle for "Do not sell my info" is checked by default, but looks unchecked, and if you uncheck it, its background becomes black instead of light gray. It feels like a (slightly) nefarious UX pattern to me. Even though the "thumb" is in the correct position, the colour confused me, and I was only sure by checking in the devtools if the input was correct. Tssk tssk.
Special Dyslexia Fonts Are Based on Voodoo Pseudoscience
Some people claim to prefer reading text set with OpenDyslexic. Some people like Comic Sans, too. But I was unaware that these typefaces that purport to be designed specifically to benefit people with dyslexia are based on misguided beliefs that dyslexia is a visual problem, and that actual research shows they do not provide the benefits they claim to. They’re just ugly fonts.
Mark A. Rayner "Perfect UX, right there."
Peoples
Most Technical Problems Are Really People Problems
Most technical problems are really people problems. Think about it. Why does technical debt exist? Because requirements weren't properly clarified before work began. Because a salesperson promised an unrealistic deadline to a customer. Because a developer chose an outdated technology because it was comfortable. Because management was too reactive and cancelled a project mid-flight. Because someone's ego wouldn't let them see a better way of doing things.
Business Side
AI is the secret sauce for CEOs to rebrand bad news as positive.
Companies like AirTable, Opendoor and Handshake have announced pivots to be more AI-centric. However a pivot sounds like your company was failing and switched tactics.
These are branded as “refounding the company”. As in AI is so transformative that you need a whole new company. 🙃
A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They are usually found on the websites of million or billion dollar companies, likely Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding the real support channels behind login walls. These companies tend to offer multiple tiers of support, with enterprise customers having a customer success manager who they can call on this ancient device we call phones, whereas the lower-paying customers may have to wrangle various in-app ticket mechanisms. If you solve your own problem by reading the knowledge base, then this is a win for the company. They don’t want to hear from you, they want you to fuck off.
The CRA Spent $18M On 'Charlie,' A New Tax Information Chatbot That Is Wrong Most Of The Time (via Stéphanie)
New documents tabled in Parliament this week reveal that taxpayers paid over $18 million since fiscal year 2018-2019 to develop and operate Charlie the Chatbot, with the bulk of spending beginning with its wide-scale launch in 2021-2022.
…
Over its nearly six years of existence, people have started over seven million “conversations” with Charlie and asked over 18 million questions, the agency said.
…
The agency said there was a period where the measured “accuracy threshold” of the tool was 70 per cent, suggesting it offered inaccurate responses to the CRA’s testers 30 per cent of the time.
Machine Intelligence
I tested ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini with 7 emergency situations — and there's a clear winner Mind you: “Pew found that ChatGPT in a large lead among US teens, with 59% saying they had used it at least once. Google Gemini came in second at 23%, followed by Meta AI at 20%, Microsoft’s Copilot at 14%, Character.ai at 9%, and Anthropic’s Claude at 3%.”
Titans + MIRAS: Helping AI have long-term memory One of the more interesting aspects of the human brain is how we perceive the world by predicting what will happen next and then adjusting the error rate. The predictions happen in real time, so it doesn't feel like it's even happening to you:
The model uses this internal error signal (the gradient) as a mathematical equivalent of saying, "This is unexpected and important!" This allows the Titans architecture to selectively update its long-term memory only with the most novel and context-breaking information, keeping the overall process fast and efficient.
Insecurity
Leveraging Malvertising and LLM Shared Chats to Steal Your Passwords and Crypto (via Chris Adams)
These threat actors are exploiting the ability to share likely custom GPT (or similar LLM) chats publicly, configuring them to provide malicious terminal commands for specific queries like "how to clear storage on Mac."
By distributing these shared chat links through sponsored ads, attackers can easily bypass platform-level safety checks and deliver targeted, harmful instructions to users.
GitHub Actions Has a Package Manager, and It Might Be the Worst Well, it certainly is not the best and I'm sure it will get abused:
Re-runs aren’t reproducible. GitHub staff have confirmed this explicitly: “if the workflow uses some actions at a version, if that version was force pushed/updated, we will be fetching the latest version there.” A failed job re-run can silently get different code than the original run. Cache interaction makes it worse: caches only save on successful jobs, so a re-run after a force-push gets different code and has to rebuild the cache. Two sources of non-determinism compounding. A lockfile would make re-runs deterministic: same lockfile, same code, every time.
Everything Else
Jer "Copy-paste accident at the cat factory."
You’re telling me this heater is from space?
Last night, I was visited by three spirits, and now I understand the true meaning of Toyotathon.
Miss Brainslug "If there is a sign, there is a story."
DIET DAY 1
I have removed all the bad food from my home.
It was delicious.
I keep trying to paint cats but they just won't sit still long enough to get a good coat on them
Fritz Adalis "Oh no my cat is broken!"
The Em Dash Appreciation Society
In 2025—or thenabouts—there arose a terrible calumny to the effect that em dashes in prose were a sign of generative AI.
Some of us human writers who have loved and used em dashes all our lives felt the need to push back.
Two years ago, a friend and I were on vacation together in Utah. His home zip code is significantly wealthier than mine
While standing five feet apart, we ordered Ubers to the exact same location at the exact same time
My quoted price was $45
His quoted price was $80
BasicAppleGuy "The most peaceful place of an Apple Store"
Fun fact about growing up in earthquake country: in first grade we had a big citywide earthquake emergency drill event. All of us kids got to go to the hospital and get fake bandages and fake blood, so the emergency workers could practice triaging the wounded. Some lucky kids even got crutches, wheelchairs, or gurnies. It was like the best ever Halloween to us, but I suspect we were meant to takeaway a different lesson. Lol.
Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can’t Pretend Anymore It's not that you stop caring, it's that your brain is cleaning itself:
Research in neuroscience shows that as we age, the brain undergoes a process called synaptic pruning. Neural pathways that aren’t essential get trimmed away. Your brain is essentially Marie Kondo-ing itself, keeping what serves you and discarding what doesn’t.
OnlMaps "Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times a pattern"
Just found out that apparently a lemon isn't naturally occurring in nature.
It's a hybrid by crossbreeding a bitter orange and a citron!
Do you know what that means?!
Do you know what implications this has?!!
LIFE NEVER GAVE US LEMONS
WE INVENTED THEM ALL BY OURSELVES
Why do Gen Z have a growing appetite for retro tech? (via Michael Marek)
Gen Z are going retro. People in their teens and early 20s are increasingly turning to old school tech in a bid to unplug from the online world.
Amazon UK told BBC Scotland News that retro-themed products surged in popularity during its Black Friday event, with portable vinyl turntables, Tamagotchis and disposable cameras among their best sellers.
Retailers Currys and John Lewis also said they had seen retro gadgets making a comeback with sales of radios, instant cameras and alarm clocks showing big jumps.
Amtrak is slashing executive bonuses to give out $900 apiece to over 18,000 rank-and-file workers 👍
More than 18,000 Amtrak workers will receive a $900 bonus before the end of the year, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced on Thursday evening.
Funding for the bonuses will come from Amtrak’s executive leadership team bonus packages, the statement said. The federal administration urged executive leadership “to forgo 50% of the bonus packages that would have been paid out under the misplaced priorities of the previous executive bonus structure.”
