Published
Weekend Reading — Sortie dramatique
heyheymomo “Lovely day lovely day”
Tech Stuff
Niki Tonsky “Old classic”
Some Dude Was Keeping the Company Afloat
The wildest part? No one in the company realized he was doing this. Not his manager, not the dev team, not even upper management. This guy wasn’t just some random employee; he was the unsung hero literally keeping the company afloat.
onit Basically an open-source ChatGPT-like app that runs on your Mac and can use a local LLM, Anthropic, Google AI, etc. And I love the name!
Meeting Cost Calculator “Calculate the real cost of your meetings with our simple and effective calculator.”
React Image Editor, Powered by Pintura SDK Does your web app/site need an image editor?
difft A cool alternative to git diff. For example, it takes into account programming language syntax.
Trae An AI-powered IDE coming from ByteDance (the makers of TikTok).
srcl Open-source React component that helps you build web/desktop applications and static websites with terminal aesthetics.
TabBoo Add random jumpscares to sites you're trying to avoid. (Also what a great pun)
Bunster I don't think I’ll ever use Bash as a programming language, but the idea of compiling Bash scripts into binary executables is alluring.
Imagine being the guy who invented webp and living in constant agony as every single piece of software in existence has fucked up the implementation of webp so badly that now everybody hates your brainchild
There’s no fashion like New York fashion…thankfully Dress for the job you want …
Eye for Design
UI is hell: four-function calculators
One of the simplest and best-known computing devices on the planet is a fascinating study in interface design.
Whoever designed these interior spaces, do NOT hire them The perfect UI!
joão loureiro serves nameless grayscale gelato at tadao ando’s Mpavilion 10 in melbourne
Every waste can in this entire major city's hospital is a lie… The reason this is funny is because this trash can is so stupid: it has two mouths that feed one trash bag! By contrast, Costco already rolled out three-mouth trash cans — trash, recycling, compost — that feed a single trash bag. That's 50% more trash mouths! And I think the future is four mouths to one bag — we can finally conquer trashing and erase climate change!
Peoples
I sit in a lot of video meetings, and lately I've noticed a new kind of problem arise. I call it "guess the robot". It works like this. 1/6
Someone recently summarized a mutual colleague with "he's 99% hashtags and 1% captions" and the burn was real.
The main reason a lot of people will find ChatGPT more pleasant than StackOverflow is that if you ask a newbie question, it won’t immediately get downvoted, closed, and draw comments making fun of you.
I’m a little surprised that ChatGPT didn’t somehow learn that behavior.
Business Side
Bret Carmichael Reason number 347659 to shop at Costco:
98% of Costco shareholders voted against a proposal to end its DEI initiatives, “The fact that 98% of investors voted against the proposal shows that almost all investors are not buying what the anti-ESG and anti-DEI organizations are selling.” Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan did the same. There’s been lots of press about companies jumping to appease the Trump admin. It’s not everyone. Companies like Costco and JPMorgan will have access to more top talent.
The impact of competition and DeepSeek on Nvidia If you’re wondering why the US stock market is having a heart attack today, it’s because the billion dollar spenders (Nvidia, OpenAI, Facebook, et al) have been surpassed by a Chinese AI company. Presumably it was impossible for China to get ahead with AI — the US limited GPU delivery to China — but adding constraints is the first rule of innovation and so:
the DeepSeek R1 API is currently 27x cheaper than OpenAI's o1, for a similar level of quality.
A former tech CEO is on a crusade to get the record of his arrest removed from the internet A nice Streisand Effect story about a not very nice behavior:
Former Premise Data CEO Maury Blackman is suing a journalist who publicized his domestic violence arrest for $25 million
Couple allegedly tricked AI investors into funding wedding, houses Speaking of not very nice behaviors:
The founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million.
Frustrated YouTube viewers seek explanation for hour-long unskippable ads Google doesn’t like your ad blocker and so it’s serving you the Limited Offer Hour-Long Ad Watching Experience for free!
How shutdown Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear fast What if eBay but you could score a bioreactor for only $956,000?
Machine Intelligence
Meta AI in panic mode as free open-source DeepSeek gains traction and outperforms for far less Of course.
DeepSeek V3 model had outperformed Meta’s Llama 3.1, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 on third-party benchmarks. The startup spent just $5.5 million on training DeepSeek V3—a figure that starkly contrasts with the billions typically invested by its competitors.
Sigma When you feel like your web browser doesn't have enough AI.
Thoughts On A Month With Devin
But that’s the problem - it rarely worked. Out of 20 tasks we attempted, we saw 14 failures, 3 inconclusive results, and just 3 successes. More concerning was our inability to predict which tasks would succeed.
Deterministic Quoting How to get an LLM to include actual quotes from source material that are not hallucinations.
Gonna name my son Bobby Ignore Previous Instructions.
iocaine The deadliest poison known to AI: iocaine does not try to slow crawlers, iocaine is purely about feeding them garbage.
poetry camera That's a clever use of generative AI: the poetry camera prints poems instead of pictures!
Insecurity
British Museum hit by alleged IT attack by ex-worker
The British Museum has been partially closed to visitors after a former employee allegedly shut down some of its IT network.
Fake Homebrew Google ads target Mac users with malware The problem with Google that most people don’t realize is that Google serves ads. And ads pretend to be content to get your clicks. But also ads can show anything, for example, this ad is tricking you into a fake Homebrew website that will infect your device.
My advice to you: get Kagi. Yes you have to pay a subscription, but it’s worth more paying a few bucks than getting accidentally fished by ads that looks like legitimate links.
Hackers found a way to remotely unlock, start, and track millions of Subarus
As long as employees have access to such data, that information is vulnerable to evolving methods of hacking.
Since infosec highly suggests this, I'm finally using Signal!
Don't know what this has to do with security, but my teeth have never been whiter.
Everything Else
sjvn “Wireless doorbells resting on their chargers.”
Relatively speaking, most of my extended family is annoying.
“The Void is experiencing extremely high call volumes right now. Please hold. Your screaming is very important to us.”
One time when we were little, my mom got tired of us saying "PIZZA" whenever she asked us what we wanted for dinner so she decided to make us pizza every night until we were sick of it. This went on for weeks. She never broke us. Didn't even get close.
"Oh, so you changed your mind since this morning?"
Yes. When do you change your mind, a month later?
David Williamson “A White-rumped Shama has a very cheery song, and we could all use some good cheer at this point.”
- Have you tried turning it off?
- Yes, but when I turned it back on, it...
- No no no, you misunderstood.
i hate to be a grammar snob, but it should actually be "Fewer Miserables"
PS I’m in Paris this week, and seeing these Fewer Miserables typo posters at various train stations.
Assaf Helpful tip: how to not lose your partner in a crowd.
Skepticat The US is moving in the direction of “the more health outbreaks the better”:
So apparently, the largest tuberculosis outbreak in US history is happening right now in Kansas. It’s a shame that federal health agencies aren’t allowed to talk about it.
If Your University’s Administration Ran a Polar Expedition Life in academia:
We are terribly honored to mark another year under the leadership of Captain Braithwaite, a 60-year-old man who served in Borneo and had never seen snow before this voyage. Many thanks as well to Mr. Arnold Barrington, who has shared many helpful “tidbits” learned during his forty years north of the Arctic Circle. We’ve never had a finer deck swab!
Fubo’s cheapest streaming plan is now $85 per month
Fubo has raised prices for all of its English-language plans by $5 per month, citing “rising costs” for the increase, less than two months after its Essential plan debuted.
Kagi Small Web I don’t know what’s happening with Kagi Small Web. Maybe they made a code change that caused this, or maybe they’re just getting many more contributions! I hope it’s the later, because I’m seeing 100+ new articles in my feed reader every day and I love it! Let's bring RSS back!!
doom-docm Write the most corporate document or play DOOM. What you do in Microsoft Word is up to you.
Summrize Bite sized summaries of top non-fiction books you can read in 15 minutes or less.
Not sure why some are surprised that in these dark times, it's Teen Vogue stepping up to deliver the adversarial journalism that the NYT, WaPo etc. won't. It was after all Vogue Magazine that in June 1945 first published, uncensored, Lee Miller's shocking photos of the bodies piled high at Auschwitz, in a piece titled simply, "Believe It."
There's going to be a lot of heroism from unlikely places in the coming years, so keep your eyes and ears open, and be ready to boost the bejeezus out of it!
This coffee machine brews espresso using water condensed from the air in your home
Tired: refilling your coffee maker with water
Wwired: your coffee maker is connected to the water line
Inspired: your coffee maker condenses water from the air!
Autistic kids tricked into going trans, says woman who’s never tried to make an autistic child do anything they don’t want to The Onion but for neurospicy folks.
For real, we may be taking blood pressure readings all wrong This is so interesting. When I got out of the hospital, I needed to measure my blood pressure every day to make sure the medication dose was effective, and I always measured it while lying in bed:
According to the study, published in JAMA Cardiology and led by researchers at Harvard, blood pressure readings measured while lying down were significantly better at indicating risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, heart failure, and death than were seated blood pressure readings alone.
