Thoughts

Link based "commentary" style posts, commenting on a web link

913 posts latest post 2026-10-12
Publishing rhythm
Sep 2026 | 11 posts
What a doomer take. Hard to argue with with Chris here. Im trying to stay positive a s just do my job to thr best of my ability without getting too wrapped up in negativity. Basically he repeats the claims of ai labs and how many have been eventually correct. If it continues a large portion of us are cooked, if you think your not what do you think happens when half of the population gets displaced?
ascii.rest: animated ascii art for web pages, by @bas3line 240 animated ascii pieces for web pages, in TypeScript with no dependencies: for React, Next.js, Astro, or one HTML tag. MIT licensed. ascii.rest · ascii.rest such a cool collection of highly detailed animated ascii. everything from charts and graphs to bob ross scenary with more detail than any ascii ive see before, verging on the edge of a detailed pixel art.
prs are dead. called it 2026 Predictions. Its sad to see all of these great open source projects die. The bigger the project, the greater the project, the bigger the flood of shit from random people with random harness, random, models I like the idea of keeping issues open. I see a flow in the future of a claw like system for some projects that just kick on investigation right away, auto close duplicates, solved etc. When maintainer approves it just makes it. As cool as this sounds it also sounds sad and souless.
Friday, October 2, 2026 Jack Baty's blog — posts, journal, notes. baty.net · baty.net It’s wild how apple went from there will be no app store and everything will be a web app to walled gardens of native apps that lock users in. And not just users but friends of users. Apple was supposed to lean on the web for all of its apps. It was Jobs’s original vision, but it was shortlived for one version before the app store was launched.
yes Linus, this is the future super optimized personal software using tokens we buy from the big bois. I feel the same feel you can see on Luke’s face, this is here, there’s no going back. It’s one part absolutely amazing and 2 parts scary shit. To answer Linus’s question how do you hire someone, when you run all custom software. We stop hiring experts in adobe suite and hiring expert storytellers who have taste, style, and the ability to create something amazing that users want no matter what suite they are in. Someone who understands the craft of making something good, how to feel when it’s wrong, and turn it around. I can totally see part of this future where someone is making amazing content for and Linus hires them cause they look good, but turns out just had a cracked dev that made the greatest way to click together content for their audience that was foolproof and the guy had no idea what he was doing. I get it, this is not the future that anyone wanted, no one asked for, for every upside, there are so many flaws, but this is now the generation we are working in and we gotta figure out how to make it work.
This, THIS is what I’ve been saying all along. To the point where friends will show me what they are doing and before they can say the word mcp they say,. Almost always I end with that coulda been CLI/REST, or nah it’s auth mcp is fINe, followed by woah that’s some cool shit, I’m gonna ask my clanker to do that too.
The timing of watching this talk is uncanny. Just this week I started building out something that started as a prompt to pull pr data, and as I typed out the prompt in the moment it turned into something that is more like a software factory. I think I have a lot of the general ideas that Matt shares here. Around harnessing up automated review, fix, fix corrections. I need to read through some of his specifics as they seem better and more well honed than what I have. Had I not started just this week I probably would have glazed over during the talk and been like sure sounds good, but having just started this I was pulled in. One of my favorite things I have in mine so far is really good hotkeys. I can fly through reviews, diffs, approve and merge in just a few keystrokes. This was a huge hurdle in existing tools so much that I put off a lot of sweeping changes I’ve needed to do and I’m cranking through them this week.
Claude Opus 5.5 100 HTML Files One hundred self-contained HTML pages made with Claude Opus 5.5: generative art, simulations, instruments, editorial layouts and playful tools, each with the exact prompt that produced it. miaai-lab.github.io This is a really impressive collection of single file sites done by opus 5.5. Miaai-lab even gives you the prompt that she used to make it.
dax (@thdxr) on X in the next version of OpenCode we added /btw which is a long awaited feature it lets you ask a quick question without interrupting the current session - i use it to get status updates on long run… X (formerly Twitter) · x.com oooh, excited for this upcoming feature to opencode to be able to gracefully ask a side question without interruption.
Interesting device from Scott Tolinski here. Looks like a fun, novel build for a problem he has that no one else is going to just build for him. I like how he was able to build it with such cheap and available hardware. I’m not sure how I feel about this single purpose device movement. Coming from a generation who dreamed of the phones we have today it feels weird to go the other way.
The state of agentic coding is one of my favorite new podcasts of late. The name sounds just like the same slop as everything else, but Ben and Armin are top tier hosts that actually do this stuff for work and on the side. slowing down and speeding up Which brings me to the first interesting topic they talked about. Both talked about going slow at work. Ben still reads everything and deeply understands the inside of what he is working on. Home is a different story. At home both are cranking on new side projects, vibing them out quick and fast. The projects work for them and that’s all they need. They dont need to support hundreds of users. All making it much easier to just let the clanker kick new things out fast. open weight An interesting side topic on open weight models. Armin opened with them being too expensive. The big labs have such good subsidies right now that it’s hard to justify not using them. He did have an interesting use case though. He has a side project using cheap Chinese carplay devices. When trying to get openai to work on them it tends to refuse to work for security reasons, but if he starts the session with kimi, openai has no problems continuing. This is next…
Lex Speedman — Lex at 2x, guest at 1x Play Lex Fridman Podcast episodes with Lex sped up and the guest at 1x by default. Lex Speedman · lexspeedman.com This is such a cool site. It parses lex’s transcript and sets the speed for lex and the guest at different speeds, so you can get through his super long episodes quicker without sacrificing the guest responses.
This is the first time I’ve seen or heard of Perry Daniels, I really like his editing style, it reminds me of Good Eats; the tone, tempo, the research, the odd camera angles. I found this video very inspiring to go make something, My wife likes to keep field notes and sometimes has one for a few different tasks at the same time. It would be so cool to make her some custom ones for each.
It’s just the Carpet… Everyone knows when you do anything to a house, you start with a primary thought, such as, "I want to fix the pee-stained carpet." Our kitchen and living room are nearly done a couple thousand doll... Rhiannon Walker · rhiannonwalker.com
Nate Berkopec (@nateberkopec) on X So many people are about to self-retire from our industry as a result of LLMs completing changing how coding is done. They hate it. They hate prompting, managing agents, reviewing. They want it to… X (formerly Twitter) · x.com The world has changed it’s now different and there is no going back. You get to choose to adopt it or not. You get to choose your attitude. But at this point the agents write most average code, better than the average developer, faster than the average developer, and the average developer sucks at steering it. Over time we will get better at steering them, they will continue to get better at breakneck speeds for a long time. We will either learn restraint or they will get better at making that choice not to boil the ocean for us. I really do get this feeling of the self-retire. It’s so easy to let agents do everything, and it is so hard to watch the world turn to slop around us. No one can simply answer a question in a meeting or an interview without referring to their and it’s so irritating from both ends. It sucks to hear no one understands the depth of projects anymore, and at the same time it sucks to get called out on t…
It’s crazy how many people are discovering linux here and are like why would I use this, oh it has tiling, it has workspaces. No shit so does every other good desktop environment that has come out in the last 10 years. All of these reviews are missing the polish that you don’t recognize until you have done it by hand. Full disk encryption setup with nothing more than a password. Agents properly use pkexec to ask for sudo permissions with a message saying what they are running. Out of the box I get snapshots and boot into snapshot. If I like using agents and I add an API key, I get a crash agent when any application fails if I choose to click the notification to have the agent fix my issue. Themes have polish that no other distro can claim. There are many good looking themes that automatically theme so many of the applications. You can do all of this yourself and maybe you should if you really like Linux and want to understand. The magic is how it is all assembled. The community being built to make it work on so many different devices, with a taste for speed and design.
Justin Searls @searls /goal is a special command for OpenAI Codex in which it will keep working toward whatever goal you set until it gradually convinces itself that the stated goal is not what you wanted but rather so... justin․searls․co · justin.searls.co LOL, interesting I just heard DHH talk about how we needed goal for a minute blip in history, it did its job. Then new models come out trained on our use of it and the models just do it whether you ask for it or not it does not really matter much either way. /goal is a special command for OpenAI Codex in which it will keep working toward whatever goal you set until it gradually convinces itself that the stated goal is not what you wanted but rather some much easier objective was the real goal all along. — @justin
A Calendar View For My Blog 807 blog posts across 14 years. That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing. And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my… blog.jim-nielsen.com Love the calendar view for Jim’s posts. I’m on my way to do this, I’ve been using a view like this in plaindown and nvim for my daily notes for awhile, but yet to publish a version on the website. I like how jim has made a visual indication on the different days highlighting posts that have landed on hacker news.
My Mechanical Keyboards My KBDFans DZ65RGB: Custom build, see full built My Kinesis Advantages 2: Ergonomic (Find How I Lubed and Dampered the keyboard) Simon Späti · ssp.sh These are absolutely lovely. They look like they are ready to really get some work done. The Ducky is a little heavy on the gamer side for me looks wise, too much flash, not enough gas.
A quote from Linus Torvalds And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Will models become more stubborn as we use them more and feed us using them as long running agents where we simply ask for what seems to be an impossible task to be spit out by the almighty clanker with all of the time in the world to try every way possible, add obnoxious amounts of telemetry, and somehow digest the flood of data it brings back?
Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Hard to argue this so hard here. For me it’s convenience. I work from a terminal. Most things that are real work get done there, so this provides a convenient proximity to real work. If it’s a developer tool for me to use alongside development work I prefer a tui if it can be done in a text interface. CLIs are different. CLIs provide a great interface into automation, scripting, agent use, interop from two things no one else uses together. Alternatively to the argument for agents making real user interfaces easy I’m going to argue if that’s the case you should have your backend logic hooked into all the interfaces a user could want, CLI, TUI, HTML, and REST/HTTP API. I honestly feel like the training data for a good tui just isn’t there and agents default to making bad TUIs.
Hard agree with Theo, terminals suck to use on a phone. Unless you have an attached keyboard they are unusable IMHO. t3 code ad https://youtu.be/dLhcLqoff6k?t=1354&is=xDCw0PpqH2zkZDou This part of the pitch is fantastic. I think most of the people I talk to can relate to being unsure about when to start work because you want to keep your agents working. My morning process generally includes walking around tmux greeting all of my agents that were working hard last night and unblocking them to get them going for the day. Before even opening team chat, but after checking status pages that’s #1. My going home routine now has to start about an hour before I leave questioning whether I should start a session or not.
I have so much more appreciation for Hetzner after seeing how the sausage is made. Their drive for efficiency is unparalleled. Not top tier performance, straight up well done engineering on the things that matter. No showing off or fancy stuff. The way they rack up their machines on a piece of sheet metal, that Linus likened to a desktop PC case without the front and side panels was a chef’s kiss.
If this existed before, I probably would not have gone down the path of building my own from scratch. A monoblock that can plop down on a laptop is goated, split is nice at a desk, but nothing beats the portability of a monoblock. I don’t like how this one covers up the trackpad with its 4th set of thumb keys. Also there’s no need to make the sides so thin, the height in the middle goes up to the top of the caps. Doing this all the way around makes it so much easier to toss into a backpack without touching any keys. almost there dygma, just a few nitpicks.
DHH is such an OG tech founder, I don’t think I realized his first paychecks from 37Signals was in the form of apple tech. What a shift to being such an apple fanboy to rage quitting and building a great linux distro that is siphoning his followers out of Mac. I love the reminder of Gary V’s Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Meaning that you should build a following first, give, give, teach, show you have value then ask for something. The host mentioned one day they were frustrated with something, his co-founder suggested basecamp, and his response was buy it. Not shop around, see if there’s something better, just buy it. He said these are my people, they’ve already given so much that I have no questions about whether or not we should give them money.
As always with Charity Majors this was a pretty great interview. Lots of repeat ideas with some good nuggets. One common new theme here is getting comfortable shipping code you have never seen before. Pointing out there are few real differences in the before and the now, a lot of the same principle apply to get the right #observability stack set up, the right deployment patterns setup. Now we don’t have a person that immediately jumps up and yells I wrote that, Sorry everyone, and has a fix in 2 minutes because they know the exact failure mode they caused in an instant. Charity truly believes the kids will be alright. She is working with some high school aged kids making some incredible projects right now. The industry will need to learn how to re-embrace juniors and the non grey-beards. Why I’m sharing this link.
A quote from Florian Herrengt But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net We are entering into dark times, dark times I tell ya. An era where we have all the greatest tools to build software by hand, with decades of experience to do it. Yet it’s a time where none of it matters. Machines can spit out glorious amounts of slop in an instant. They can do weeks of the average mans work in minutes. Yet the core principles still apply now more than ever. Observability into our production systems matter more than ever. Things are changing fast, and big. Prs are not the same size they used to be. We have not yet developed the tools and intuition into this new world to manage it effectively. This will come with time, but for now, these are dark times filled with the glitter and glisten of promise, hope, and shiny new things cranked out upon first thought
Blogging and blog setups Jack Baty's blog — posts, journal, notes. baty.net · baty.net Damn this hits. I’m trying to change it up, but I’m far on the right. constantly greasing the pipeline and writing about it. or lately just not writing at all.
Interesting tangent here on sleep, Adam talks about jet lag and his experience taking Ambien to shift his sleep schedule. In his experience it helped fix the sleep schedule, but did nothing to change how he actually felt during that time of reorienting in a new drastically different time zone. He was reminded of all of the sleep studies they did on MythBusters and how they found that it did not matter so much how much “sleep” you got that lying there still and quiet was nearly as effective as sleeping. Knowing this, as others mentioned, will greatly relieve the sleep pressure I feel on nights of restlessness.
Every Dax Raad interview is worth a listen. This one does not disappoint. They talk about running local dev setups in a vm in the cloud. Always connected, seamlessly upgrading hardware without you needing to buy, sell, or trade a thing. They talk about the one model that drove them into psychosis, I’m pretty sure it was 5.6 sol, but it could not be revealed at the time. Software engineering is still required and alive and well, even in the agentic era.
dax (@thdxr.com) so obviously n=1 but anecdotes matter a lot here i gave kimi k3 and sol the same task - simple issue with hovers in the tui being the wrong color sol found and fixed the issue with $0.30 of spend… Bluesky Social · bsky.app So much nuance in model selection. It’s hard to keep up.
Completely missing the point of physical media. I don’t see why preserving physical media is a win for Xbox right now. The game is not on disk. In 30 years when the game servers are gone, I won’t be able to play the game. I won’t be able to buy cheap used copies in 6 months as people beat the game. I won’t be able to trade in games I’ve beaten to get a different game at a low cost. Own nothing and be happy.
Interesting thoughts from a real OG Kent Beck. He argues we are witnessing the biggest advancement in computing in 40 years. For 40 years we have been almost exclusively writing in compiled languages. Languages that output to some sort of binary compiled assembly instructions for each processor type. Before that it was all hand written instructions directly to CPU. Now we are seeing the genie revolution. The genie is good at writing in many different programming languages given English prompts. It loves to complete problems and is not afraid to write lots of code very quickly. It’s quite good at skirting around our best judgement in order to accomplish the goal we set. One takeaway from this talk is that NO ONE knows what the fuck is next. No one knows the best ways to use these things. Everyone has their own opinion wrapped around their experience that might be wildly different than yours. It seems clear this is changing every day in ways no one can measure, predict, or prepare for. So much sits in the hands of model labs and model providers. Without real access to any of it, it’s all magic.
The Internet I Grew Up With Doesn’t Exist Anymore A thorough retrospective of my time on the internet. cleberg.net I align a lot with this post. From growing up in a rural house where internet access was harder to get. It was slow and only had one line, if you were on the internet, no one in the house could recieve a phone call. Idk if what is now the smol webl, the indieweb, is seeing a resurgence, if I’m just noticing it more. It does feel like along there has been a very small number of users willing to get their own domain, their own server, and host their own shit. A few of these are starting to really break out occasionally, see things like wordle hitting mass adoptioun before being swooped up by a giant. I too miss the internet of old, heck I really dont even mind the middle era of fb, twitter, instagram dominance, but what we have now is dominated by political undertones on it all with everyone shouting “Fake News” at each other. These sites are the easiest place to stay in touch with those you have met online, yet they are riddled with so much toxicity its impossible to have a great experience on them. I’m about a year and a half of not having a single one on my phone, and…
The Website Specification A platform-agnostic, full specification of the technical features a good website should have. Built in the open under an MIT licence. The Website Specification · specification.website A solid checklist for agents to implement on most sites. Very few sites need 100% coverage, but most should probably check most of these boxes
Revisiting the closed canon A post I wrote in 2023, the closing of the canon, predicted that LLM answers would replace search results, dramatically lowering traffic to individual sites, thereby removing the incentives to eve... Derek Kedziora · derekkedziora.com This is what makes rss so interesting to me. Its boring old tech that fell out of mainstream popularity years ago, yet many sites still support it. Not all, especially ones that come with a good dickover. At the same time, it’s sad to see the human internet dying, even more quickly than before. Not only do we have rampant bots and sites seo maxxing to get to the top. We have ai search overview that answers mose simple questions pretty good, chat that does good, and agents at our fingertips. The need for tutorials is pretty much dead. What we need now is human experiences shared and documented more than ever. I’ve been writing a whole lot less simply because this transition has been hard. Most of my pre 2024 posts were how to, notes for future me. Things so simple agents just spat out better versions in seconds these days with barely a question.
On Rendering Diffs A technical deep dive into how we built the @pierre/diffs package and CodeView component for zero-blanking diff rendering. Pierre Computer Company · pierre.computer It’s incredible how some problems seem so simple until you load the browser with so much text it just bogs to nothing and how impossibly difficult it becomes after this point. Very cool implementation of a problem that…. who has this problem. If it takes me 2 mintues to scroll through a diff at mach speed like the video, is a diff going to solve my problem?
#tech #coding" playlabel="Play: His presence is still felt in the codebase to this day 😂 #codingmemes #developermemes #tech #coding"> Remember this clip in 5 years, after the churn we just had with RTO and ai this is going to hit. Or AI will just figure is all out for us, who knows anymore. Not that they will figure out the human side, the what does this do, why is it here. A temporary fix is a clear signal to your other devs I didn’t have enough time to do it right, but this works. I think AI will squash a large number of these, especially in big coorporate internal tooling where you are trying to juggle as much as you can and just keep it a float at all times.
How many people watching this sent their clankers out to make a uuid service for them as they were watching it. UUID as a service sounds great, heck @steipete just has to mention it and his claws are on it building out the service, no need to even type anything or directly form a thought, just mention it in the meeting and a new repo will be up by end of meeting.