New Zealand Passed a Generational Smoking Ban in 2022, But Repealed It Before It Went Into Effect(opens in new tab)
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Word of the Year(opens in new tab)
Pluralistic: A free, open visual identity for enshittification (24 Apr 2026)(opens in new tab)
Today's links A free, open visual identity for enshittification: No mere poop emoji! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIAA v little girl; Portal turret Easter egg; Atari v indie games; Chabon's Phantom Tollbooth intro; The 0.1%; ...
RollerCoaster Tycoon Optimizations are Insane(opens in new tab)
Masters of Albion and Sintopia show god games are nothing without a deity's twitchy fingers(opens in new tab)
I've been thinking a lot about hands this week. Weird little things, covered in fingers and nails, always clenching and unclenching. Though, for once, they're not on my mind because I can't shake the realisation that they're basically boney squids ...
Self-Host Weekly (24 April 2026) (opens in new tab)
Big tech giveth, and big tech taketh away
Friday, April 24, 2026(opens in new tab)
Laying the Foundation with Joe Beda(opens in new tab)
Fork Around and Get EmailSponsor FAFOFM"Everyone is a beginner at one point." Even one of the creators of Kubernetes. If you're listening to this podcast then Joe has had an impact on what you do. He's worked on everything from ...
At Machine Speed(opens in new tab)
Yesterday, I opened Discord to a message from my friend Bastian Allgeier that I had never quite seen in all the years I’ve been building sites with his Kirby CMS. “Today we are releasing our biggest security release in the ...
DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price(opens in new tab)
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Both models are 1 million ...
Millisecond Converter(opens in new tab)
Tool: Millisecond Converter LLM reports prompt durations in milliseconds and I got fed up of having to think about how to convert those to seconds and minutes. Tags: tools
It's a big one(opens in new tab)
This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 ...
I don’t really like GPT-5.5…(opens in new tab)
russellromney/honker(opens in new tab)
russellromney/honker "Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like ...
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports(opens in new tab)
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems. The models themselves were not to ...
United Kingdom to Enact Smoking Ban Only for Those Who Are Not Yet Legal Adults(opens in new tab)
Serving the For You feed(opens in new tab)
Serving the For You feed One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like ...
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career(opens in new tab)
Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web(opens in new tab)
LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse ...
Trump’s Blog Has Somehow Lost $1.1 Billion(opens in new tab)
Nilay Patel: ‘Beware Software Brain’(opens in new tab)
A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API(opens in new tab)
GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, ...
Eight for Eight(opens in new tab)
llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0(opens in new tab)
Release: llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0 Hijacks your Codex CLI credentials to make API calls with LLM, as described in my post about GPT-5.5. Tags: openai, llm, codex-cli
Kubernetes v1.36: User Namespaces in Kubernetes are finally GA(opens in new tab)
After several years of development, User Namespaces support in Kubernetes reached General Availability (GA) with the v1.36 release. This is a Linux-only feature. For those of us working on low level container runtimes and rootless technologies, this has been a ...
While I was looking for something else - Shelby Foote(opens in new tab)
Microsoft Offers Voluntary Retirement to Long-Serving Employees(opens in new tab)
Unauthorized Users in Discord Group Had Weekslong Access to Anthropic’s Supposedly-Super-Dangerous Claude Mythos Model(opens in new tab)
Add missing terminal prompt in code block (opens in new tab)
2.5 Admins 296: Beware of the Leopard(opens in new tab)
Paul Graham, Lisp, and Clojure(opens in new tab)
Paul Ford on AI and the Asterisk(opens in new tab)
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced doesn’t include the Freedom Cry DLC, Ubisoft say they made a “clear choice” to focus on Edward’s adventure(opens in new tab)
Yep, after years of messages in bottles washing ashore in the form of reports claiming Ubisoft are remaking Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, it’s finally coming on July 9th. I've seen the newly dubbed Black Flag Resynced and all the tweaks ...
Is this Linux Distro REAL? 💀(opens in new tab)
Quoting Maggie Appleton(opens in new tab)
[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool ...
Recreating Apple’s Vision Pro Animation in CSS(opens in new tab)
Putting CSS’s more recent scrolling animation capabilities to the test to recreate a complex animation of the Apple Vision Pro headset from Apple's website. Recreating Apple’s Vision Pro Animation in CSS originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You ...
Encouraged to break the rules(opens in new tab)
Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026)(opens in new tab)
Today's links The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software: You can't add ANY license to a public domain work. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pimp My Snack; Abandoned Soviet missile silo ...
(opens in new tab)
I’ve had my head down these last two weeks. Long shifts in the WordPress mines. WordPress is still “yikes” for bespoke development. I’m tempted to write a follow-up but not much has changed. Pro tip: disable anything Automattic has added ...
Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay(opens in new tab)
Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, but ...
It’s a lot to process(opens in new tab)
… everything. I need to know less, but I know more. Trying to cultivate a life which allows me to know less while still participating in society requires me to...
Add List PRs Awaiting Your Review as a GitHub TIL (opens in new tab)
What I did on Parental Leave(opens in new tab)
I get this question a lot so wanted to summarize what I've been up to all in one place. In 2026.01 I started my 16 week parental leave for my first born. Here's what I did. Parenting First and foremos...
Equity for Europeans(opens in new tab)
If you spend enough time in US business or finance conversations, one word keeps showing up: equity. Coming from a German-speaking, central European background, I found it surprisingly hard to fully internalize what that word means. More than that, I ...
I released a song for the first time in 15 years(opens in new tab)
Everyone should make music in some shape or form. You don’t even have to be very good at it.
Own Your Web – Issue 18: Curators(opens in new tab)
Hi All! 🤗 The Latin word curare means “to take care of.” It’s the root of curator – a person whose work is not to create, but to care. To select, to arrange, to provide context. In a museum, the ...
Paul Ford - Too many apps(opens in new tab)
Norman Merz 1926-2026(opens in new tab)
We are heartbroken to share that my father, Norman Merz, passed on April 20. He was 99. Dad was born in Newark, grew up in South Orange during the Depression, served in the Navy during World War II, and then ...
DF T-Shirts and Hoodies: Get Them While the Getting Is Good(opens in new tab)
Wednesday, April 22, 2026(opens in new tab)
