Published
Weekend Reading — Torment Nexus is financially sound
Slirt "Don't forget to save enough SPACE for dessert... Nanu-nanu!"
Tech Stuff
Respinner For when you need React spinner components.
Rebane 🤯
cursed CSS trick: use the Q unit instead of px, it looks almost the same and saves a character
doxx You can now view Word documents from the command line.
xleak You can also view Excel spreadsheets from the command line.
Idempotence is so satisfying. Run it over and over again and nothing changes. How good is that? How delightful?
How does it feel so smooth and reassuring?
It feels like pieces sliding into the right place, leaving themselves in perfect harmony.
Oh it's so good.
We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs
The official justification for fixits is that they improve product quality and developer productivity. And of course they do this.
But the unofficial reason I love them is simpler: it just feels good to fix things. It takes me back to a simpler time, and putting thought and attention into building great products is a big part of my ethos for how software engineering should be done. I wouldn’t want to work like that all the time. But I also wouldn’t want to work somewhere that never makes time for it.
Thoth Impressive use of AI to generate viral content. Give it a topic, content idea, etc and it can generate posts for your blog, LinkedIn, Reddit, and more. It also does the graphics and can schedule post on a timeline (the runway). And I'm a sucker for that Neubrutalist design.
Some helpful advice for all you software devs:- You cannot solve social problems with code
- You cannot improve a system until you understand why it works the way it does
- You cannot produce tools for someone else without understanding how they work and what they are trying to accomplish
benjojo 🤯
This MacOS (APFS?) quirk was mentioned at the pub last night, and I still cannot believe this actually works when I tried it myself
Is that your pubkey in my ~/.authorized_keys, or are you just happy to see me?
Su-Shee "obvious take, why didn't I think of this 😂"
Eye for Design
Fran Sans A display font based on the light rail vehicles of San Francisco.
Emojis Time The Emoji Museum: from Xerox Parc through ICQ and to the present day.
Peoples
I went to pottery class today and opened by asking several of my classmates if they knew how to use the slab roller upstairs. Nobody did but everyone wanted to, so when the teacher got in I’m like “hey teach, do you know how to use the slab roller upstairs” and she’s like “no” (she’s a visiting artist who only got here a couple months ago so this is not very surprising) “but I’ve used a lot of different ones and I bet we can figure it out.” Me: “do you want to go on a Journey of Discovery?” Everyone: yes. YES. cue sickos faces so we all thunder up the stairs periodically shouting JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY and our teacher snags another person who uses the slab roller A Lot and this person gives us a very thorough lesson and demonstration and every so often someone else wanders through and asks what’s happening and we all go JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY at them and now everyone knows how to use the slab roller and honestly I cannot recommend this approach enough as a way to make learning new skills and life generally more exciting.
The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work If your manager has some math sensibility, this article could be a good way to convince them to stop having too many damn meetings! (h/t damienjoyce)
Interruptions, recovery time, and task size: three numbers that determine if you'll get real work done. Interactive visualizations show the math behind bad days.
Business Side
We remember the internet bubble. This mania looks and feels the same.
The artificial intelligence revolution will be only three years old at the end of November. Think about that for a moment. In just 36 months AI has gone from great-new-toy, to global phenomenon, to where we are today – debating whether we are in one of the biggest technology bubbles or booms in modern times.
Roblox is a problem — but it’s a symptom of something worse
Over and over again, we have seen leaders in Baszucki's position choose growth over guardrails. Safety features come out years after the need for them is identified, if at all. Internal critics are sidelined, laid off, or managed out. And when journalists ask, politely but insistently, why so many of their users are suffering, executives laugh and tell us that we're the crazy ones.
Deck Genius When you need to score your pitch deck. I've been using it for a few days now, and I like that it's fairly easy to edit my deck, re-upload it, and I get to see the updated score and new suggestions for improvements. I'm not as excited that it doesn't grok transition slides (I love presenting with them), doesn't get my "building up to …" writing style, and doesn't appreciate iA Presenter's color scheme, but it's free so I couldn't ask for more.
Machine Intelligence
I very much believe that if capitalism hadn't tried to turn large language models into infinite money and they were strictly in computer science land, people would find them really cool
the idea that weighted sums can independently figure out relative meanings of words via context clues is genuinely really cool
the algorithm isn't even all that complicated! it just works with very long lists of numbers
Goodbye Dashboards: Agents Deliver Answers, Not Just Reports A business world with more typing and less clicking would be great … for some people:
In an agentic world, there are no more dashboards with 30 filters. There’s no more flipping between windows to piece together insights by copying and pasting snippets into a spreadsheet. Self-service analytics is about making informed decisions, not just building another report.
Don’t cite the Adversarial Poetry vs AI paper — it’s chatbot-made marketing ‘science’ Since pseudoscience it already taken, how do we call this new practice?
They wrote a good headline, and then they faked the scientific process bit.
Looking over the paper, I don’t see at all what they got from using chatbots to do these jobs. This was gratuitous and lazy, and it should be a discredit to these researchers. They could have just not used chatbots! Why on earth did they use chatbots?
Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbook This is really impressive — a model that generates hyperrealistic photos that you can run on any computer with 16GB+ RAM (so even a mobile phone).
Insecurity
Top 200 Most Common Passwords Generations change, password habits remain the same.
| Rank | Password |
|---|---|
| 1 | 123456 |
| 2 | admin |
| 3 | 12345678 |
| 4 | 123456789 |
| 5 | 12345 |
Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 1K NPM Packages and 27K+ Github Repos infected via Fake Bun Runtime Within Hours In case you forgot, Microsoft manages GitHub, which owns npm, so of course there's a secruity breach but you won't be hearing anything substantive about it:
The malicious code exfiltrates the stolen information by creating a GitHub Action runner named
SHA1HULUD, and a GitHub repository descriptionSha1-Hulud: The Second Coming.. This suggests it may be the same attacker behind the "Shai-Hulud" attack observed in September 2025.
Our response to a recent security incident Ok, so MixPanel had a minor security incident, which I'm not upset about, but this blog post from their CEO that has exactly no relevent details: who was impacted? how many customers? what was exfiltrated? how are they going to prevent it? This shifts MixPanel from the list of products I somewhat like to the list of products I consider Insecure By Design(tm) and would stay away from:
Out of transparency and our desire to share with our community, this blog post contains key information about a recent security incident that impacted a limited number of our customers. On November 8th, 2025, Mixpanel detected a smishing campaign and promptly executed our incident response processes. We took comprehensive steps to contain and eradicate unauthorized access and secure impacted user accounts. We engaged external cybersecurity partners to remediate and respond to the incident.
Exposed By Default A handy list of all the information your browser exposes about you. The most interesting part is seeing how (way way too much) unique your browser is, eg my browser is unique across 17,179,869,184 devices!
Everything Else
Aerial Photos Highlight Surreal Beauty of Kazakhstan’s Mangystau Plateau This photo gallery is amazing. It captures some of the surreal landscapes of Kazakhstan's Mangystau Plateau which many millions of years ago was under the Tethys Ocean. (via Natasha Jay)
"I made a model of the Himalayas."
"To scale?"
"No, just to look at."
Would it be too much to ask for the makers of avocados to put a different toy inside? I have like 50 wooden balls already
Should I bring a jacket? The weather report summarized in one word.
Many 26 year olds were born in 1999, which was 5 years ago
me: do you sell ducks?
him: yes, but they're going quick
me: ok I'll take one
[later]duck: quick
me: I see
Daisy Leigh Brenecki “One of the misconceptions about autistic people is we take things literally”
I need to buy a new memory foam mattress. The old one knows too much.
There should be a Nobel prize for helping your parent fix their computer over the phone.
Geezer I don't know how good it is, just that there's now a print magazine for Millenials. Shit. I'm a geezer. 👴
Please note that Torment Nexus is financially sound, and there are no reasons for concern.
The future we were promised: “Honey, pack your bags, I booked us a weekend getaway to the moon resort, our ship leaves the spaceport in 3 hours.”
The future we got: “my fridge has an updated privacy policy”
Max Leibman I feel like if I can cost the economy by "hoarding" my iPhone for 3 years, something is wrong with the economy:
"Device hoarding" is apparently 2025's version of "quiet quitting"—which is to say, a phrase that doesn't mean what it sounds like, and that is being vilified despite describing an objectively good thing.
My parents have an alexa kettle that can only be turned on by speaking to alexa or using an app.
So I can have tea as long as they have a wifi connection.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Github actions yeah but what about Github consequences
Four bendy buses managed to enter a roundabout at the exact same time from four different directions in Oslo yesterday afternoon and get properly stuck, each bus blocking the exit for the one behind it.
❌ Move fast, break things
✅ Move breakfast things
Evidence of ancient tree-climbing 'drop crocs' found in Australia It doesn't get more Australian than “Drop Crocs”: (via Robert)
Co-author Prof Michael Archer said "drop crocs" were a "bizarre idea" but some were "perhaps hunting like leopards - dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting thing they fancied for dinner".
This weekend there's free shipping from our UK bookshop.org. Your cat will thank you for it.
If you're looking for non-fiction, our research stack might be the list for you.
