Published
Weekend Reading — 🎻 World's smallest violin
Scientists at Loughborough University create 'world's smallest violin'
Tech Stuff
TLTD #29 - Vibe Coding Your Way to a Seed Round On the relentless march toward zero-cost prototyping:
Enter vibe coding: now founders can translate ideas into working prototypes by describing what they want to AI tools in natural language rather than code. It offers an alternate path in how early-stage ventures come to life, and it's challenging our traditional notions of technical founders, creating MVPs, and early-stage funding.
In my opinion, one of the most important ideas in product design is to avoid the "nightmare bicycle“.
Imagine a bicycle where the product manager said: "people don't get math so we can't have numbered gears. We need labeled buttons for gravel mode, downhill mode, …”
This is the hypothetical "nightmare bicycle" that Andrea diSessa imagines in his book Changing Mind“.
iamgio/quarkdown A modern Markdown-based typesetting system for compiling a project into a print-ready book or an interactive presentation.
cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider gpus go brrr …
This library (including the schema documentation) was largely written with the help of Claude, the AI model by Anthropic. Claude's output was thoroughly reviewed by Cloudflare engineers with careful attention paid to security and compliance with standards. Many improvements were made on the initial output, mostly again by prompting Claude (and reviewing the results). Check out the commit history to see how Claude was prompted and what code it produced.
"NOOOOOOOO!!!! You can't just use an LLM to write an auth library!“
"haha gpus go brrr“
If you're curious, the repo's commit history contains all the prompts they fed Claude. Related, I Read All Of Cloudflare's Claude-Generated Commits
It's clear there was substantial human involvement throughout this process. We're still far from AI independently implementing libraries of this scope. Almost every feature required multi-shot prompting, some bugs resisted all attempts at automated fixes, certain features would have been completed faster manually, and a human had to create every prompt and provide strategic direction.
Despite these limitations, AI generated the vast majority of functional code in this library. Claude Code was publicly launched just two weeks ago, and it's already enabling this level of collaboration.
ranyitz/qnm Get a good view of your node_modules.
If you're not comfortable with feeling dumb 90% of the time, programming probably isn't for you.
FMail2 If you're using Fastmail on macOS, check out this app. FMail2 is the macOS equivalent of Fastmail's native iOS app. It lives in the dock, supports multiple windows, keyboard shortcuts, notifications, AppleScript support, and more. Fastmail is a PWA so you can run it outside the browser like a standalone app, but PWA do have some minor shortcomings that FMail2 manages to fix.
The JSON value returned by this API will always be a string or an object/map.
Except sometimes it’s a number.
And it might be null.
And you should probably be prepared for an array.
Perl: 37 years old
Python: 34 years old
The 3 kinds of queues are:
- FIFO
- LIFO
- FAFO
luna, only carbon now “meanwhile, in the 1980s...”
Eye for Design
hugomd/parrot.live Try this: curl parrot.live
Stronger Design Principles Start with One Question: ‘Versus What?’
One of the tests that I've developed in thinking through writing down principles, design or otherwise, is to ask the question: "versus what?“.
For example, if you were coming up with principles for your Design team and you chose the principle: "we deliver good experiences", the next question to ask is: versus what? "we deliver bad experiences“?
Chris Wu “It’s 2025 and I can’t sign up for a T-Mobile free trial because their form doesn’t think that a two character last name is a valid name. 🙄”
Peoples
It’s incredible the difference a growth mindset makes on your career success. Facing a setback and asking yourself what you can learn from it and do differently going forward is a huge unlock.
It’s so simple yet so powerful.
How tech workers really feel about work right now Results from a large-scale tech worker sentiment survey reveals why you want to be a founder:
Tech workers are more optimistic than we expected—but optimism is declining: 58.5% of tech workers remain optimistic about their roles, and 54.8% remain optimistic about their careers. However, there has been a significant negative sentiment shift over the past year.
Startup founders are the happiest people in tech: They're the only group growing more optimistic while consistently outranking everyone else in workplace well-being.
Business Side
The hidden time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs
The delayed change to Section 174 — from immediate expensing of R&D to mandatory amortization, meaning that companies must spread the deduction out in smaller chunks over five or even 15-year periods — was that kind of provision. It didn't start affecting the budget until 2022, but it helped the TCJA appear "deficit neutral" over the 10-year window used for legislative scoring.
…
In public, companies blamed bloat and AI. But inside boardrooms, spreadsheets were telling a quieter story. And MD&A notes — management's notes on the numbers — buried deep in 10-K filings recorded the change, too. R&D had become more expensive to carry. Headcount, the leading R&D expense across the tech industry, was the easiest thing to cut.
Most workers globally are at small/medium companies (<250 people) with functional hiring. We obsess over Google/Amazon's bizarre processes, but they're outliers. 90%+ of businesses are small, employing 60-70% of people in developed economies. Why let dysfunctional giants dominate "how work should be done" when most companies actually work?
What's worse: much of this output isn't even for people anymore.
The user isn't the customer. And they're not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization—metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the "content" is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs.
Machine Intelligence
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts 💪
Reading other people's code is part of the job. If you can't metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?
And let's not forget:
but they take-rr jerbs
So does open source. We used to pay good money for databases.
The Prompt Engineering Playbook for Programmers
Prompting an AI coding tool is somewhat like communicating with a very literal, sometimes knowledgeable collaborator. To get useful results, you need to set the stage clearly and guide the AI on what you want and how you want it.
It turns out you can train AI models without copyrighted material It's just a pain in the ass.
Of course, this study won't change the trajectory of AI companies. After all, more work to create less powerful tools doesn't jive with their interests. But at least it punctures one of the industry's common arguments. Don't be surprised if you hear about this study again in legal cases and regulation arguments.
Why LLMs make certain mistakes
These aren't bugs exactly - they're glimpses of how my cognition actually works, which is fundamentally different from human sequential processing.
5 AI bots took our tough reading test. One was smartest — and it wasn't ChatGPT.
And the overall winner is … Claude edged out ChatGPT and left the others in the dust. Overall winner Claude was also the only model that never hallucinated.
Insecurity
Meta Pixel halts Android localhost tracking after disclosure
Essentially, by opening localhost ports that allow their Android apps to receive tracking data, such as cookies and browser metadata, from scripts running in mobile browsers, Meta and Yandex are able to bypass common privacy safeguards like cookie clearing, Incognito Mode, and Android's app permission system.
Samsung could drop Google Gemini in favor of Perplexity for Galaxy S26 Speaking of Android, Samsung is bringing you the browser that wants to vacuum all your data:
Under the terms of the supposed deal, Samsung would integrate Perplexity into its web browser and the Bixby assistant. However, the report also claims Perplexity could simply become the default assistant on the Galaxy S26. As we learned from Google's antitrust trial, most people never change the defaults, which could make this a big win for Perplexity.
Everything Else
Mark K I would buy this magazine.
Hurricanes are nature’s bidet.
Oops, I forgot to have generational wealth again
Tom Gauld 🤦♂️
who called it crispr and not gene hackman
No "whoever needs to hear this" post has ever reached someone who needs to hear it.
Grace Vulpes Alopex “toblerail”
Trust the ones who tell you the uncomfortable truth.
Hot Singles in your area are having the very existential moment of realizing they’re not as hot as they used to be.
kiwa “I wish there was an easier way to save posts”
So yes, maybe I bought a Costco bag of matcha and maybe I've been drinking so much of it that it gave me diarrhea, but I'm a white lady and in my culture we call that a Cleanse
there are two dogs inside you. you are at the costco food court
Genetics Startup Sells Test To Rank Embryos By IQ, Height And Looks For the incredible low price of only $5,999, you too can probabilistically rank your IVF embryos based on metrics like IQ, height, and eye color:
Company materials acknowledge the trait forecasts are probabilistic — IQ predictions, in particular, remain "limited in accuracy" — but founder and CEO Kian Sadeghi, 25, says parents deserve the extra information.
Can you believe it guys? Next week, just a week away. Next week is in a week! Woohoo! I am so happy about this information. Next week, just a week away, oh wow. Can you believe it? Next week! Just in a week! It got here so fast! Next week, just a week away!
David Parkinson “Spotted in Seoul”
