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Articles I read in 2025

Week 52, 2025

  • Send email with SMTP relay from a printer, scanner, or app
  • 'It's a moment of death and rebirth': The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
    • Ancient monuments across the Northern Hemisphere, some dating back 5,000 years, are precisely aligned to capture the rising and setting sun during the winter solstice.
    • The winter solstice, occurring around December 21st or 22nd, marks the shortest day of the year and symbolizes the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, with days gradually lengthening afterward.
  • I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning.
    • The author's server was compromised and used to mine Monero for 10 days due to a vulnerability in the Umami analytics tool, which is built with Next.js.
    • The vulnerability (CVE-2025-66478) was an unsafe deserialization flaw in Next.js's React Server Components' Flight protocol, allowing arbitrary code execution.
    • Despite the compromise, container isolation prevented the malware from escaping the Umami container and affecting the host system or other containers.

Week 51, 2025

  • LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively
    • Effective writing, especially for experts, is not about adhering to rules but about focusing on the reader and their needs.
    • Experts often use their writing process to aid their complex thinking, a contrast to journalists who typically use writing to convey pre-formed ideas.
    • Academic writing should aim to change how readers see the world, rather than simply conveying the writer's own ideas or demonstrating understanding.
    • Effective academic writing involves understanding and using the 'code' of a specific community of readers to communicate value and persuade them.
    • Academic conversations are dynamic and evolving, with knowledge being constructed and deconstructed by communities, rather than being a static accumulation of facts.
  • 30 Years of <br> Tags - Three decades of making things on the internet
  • AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating
    • AI's real superpower lies not in creation, but in consumption and analysis of vast amounts of existing information.
    • A personal knowledge management system, like an Obsidian vault, can store years of notes, reflections, and insights.
    • Connecting an AI to a personal knowledge base allows users to query their past discoveries and evolving thoughts.
  • Why Your Best Engineers Are Interviewing Elsewhere
    • Hierarchies within organizations tend to filter out bad news, preventing executives from being aware of developing problems until they become crises.
    • Middle managers often suppress bad news to appear professional and 'handle problems at their level,' leading to information latency.
    • Skip-level conversations (executives talking directly to engineers several levels down) are often discouraged due to concerns about undermining middle management, but they provide crucial ground truth.
  • Software Component Names Should Be Whimsical And Cryptic
    • Descriptive names for software components can be misleading as the scope and purpose of a component can change over time, rendering the original name inaccurate.
    • Descriptive names create an illusion of transparency rather than true clarity, leading to incorrect assumptions about a component's functionality.
    • For variables within code that are frequently changed, descriptive names like numCols and numRows are preferable to generic ones like i and j.
    • When a name serves as an identifier for a complex, long-lived entity, it should be an opaque and immutable identifier, similar to using numerical IDs instead of email addresses as foreign keys in databases.

Week 50, 2025

  • Own a Graph - If you are a senior engineer or PM or designer, you should own a graph.
    • Graphs are a critical unit of ownership for senior people to track their progress, communicate outcomes, and get feedback. If you don’t own one, fix that ASAP.
  • Utility First, Component Second
    • 유틸리티 우선 방법론은 컴포넌트 구성 시점을 늦춤으로써, 개발자가 유틸리티로 빠르게 시작하고 중복이 보일 때 컴포넌트를 만드는 '시점'의 문제로 전환했습니다.
    • 유틸리티 우선 방법론에서 'First'는 유틸리티 중시뿐만 아니라, 컴포넌트 구성 시점을 늦추는 관점을 도입하여 CSS 아키텍처의 난제를 해결하는 데 기여했습니다.
  • 21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google

Week 49, 2025

  • $5짜리 프롬프트로 $2,418짜리 취약점 찾은 썰
  • It’s Always the Process, Stupid! - Why AI Won’t Save Your Broken Workflow
    • AI does not inherently make an organization smarter; it only makes processes faster.
    • Implementing AI on a flawed business process will only accelerate the generation of poor outcomes.
    • To effectively use AI for unstructured data, the workflow itself must first be structured and designed.
    • The core recommendation is to map, streamline, and optimize business processes before applying AI to enhance speed.

Week 48, 2025

  • Credit Report Shows Meta Keeping $27 Billion Off Its Books Through Advanced Geometry
    • Meta is structured to provide all material economic support to the project while keeping approximately $27 billion of assets and debt off its balance sheet.
  • 5 Whys Technique: Simple Steps to Find Real Problems - it helps you uncover the underlying reasons behind a problem, layer by layer. By repeatedly asking “why” at least five times, this method digs deep to reveal the root cause of an issue.
  • Someone At YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled
  • Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing - AI won’t solve IT’s management problems
  • Brain has five ‘eras’, scientists say – with adult mode not starting until early 30s

    The study, based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives. This revealed five broad phases, split up by four pivotal “turning points” in which brain organisation moves on to a different trajectory, at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83 years.

  • A Practical Guide to Blobs, File APIs, and Memory Optimization Use Blobs when you:
    • Need to create files on the front end (JSON, CSV, images, exports)
    • Want to stream or chunk large files without loading them fully into memory
    • Implement image compression or format conversion
    • Provide a unified file preview experience
    • Need safe download/export flows for big datasets
    • Care about long-running apps and memory leaks
  • Learning from Running
    • Avoid the 'Bank Metaphor' in training, which assumes linear progress from effort; instead, focus on specific stimuli to trigger physiological adaptations.
    • Aerobic training requires 'low and slow' efforts for adaptation, while anaerobic training demands high intensity, necessitating a balance and majority of time spent at a leisurely pace.
    • Consistency is crucial for long-term improvement, as it signals to the body the need for adaptation and becomes a habit that compounds over time.
    • Improvements in performance are often gradual and non-linear, making it difficult to 'feel' progress from workout to workout, despite underlying changes.
    • Focus on mastering fundamental basics rather than seeking quick hacks or tricks for significant and sustainable improvement.
    • To continue improving, it's essential to step outside your comfort zone and engage in 'desirable difficulties' that challenge you without being overwhelming.
  • Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury
    • If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall.
    • The cheapness of air conditioning (a product of technological abundance) contrasts sharply with the rising cost of repairing it (a labor-intensive service immune to such gains), illustrating how technology reshapes value across the economy.
    • As AI drives productivity in some areas, wages in other sectors will rise, making services like home AC repair more expensive even if the technology for repair hasn't improved.
  • Windows 11 to add an AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders, warns of security risk
  • Fuel Your Creativity With a Dopamine Menu For Artists
    • The author realized that her novelty-motivated brain requires regular short and long breaks to avoid burnout.
    • A 'dopamine menu' is a personalized list of fulfilling activities categorized to help manage creative energy.
    • This post provides examples of activities for each category: Starters, Main Courses, Sides, Desserts, and Specials.

Week 47, 2025

Week 46, 2025

Week 45, 2025

Week 44, 2025

  • Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers - Prioritizing Cognitive Fatigue Reduction at Work. 인지피로 줄이며 일하기 팁들.

  • 'Washington Post' editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties

  • Samsung makes ads on smart fridges official with upcoming software update

  • Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs! Most of the time such cron jobs will run fine, but if they run every Sunday morning, then twice per year they will run at the exact time daylight savings time (aka summer time) kicks in or ends, sometimes with very strange results.

    Just use UTC folks unless you have a really good idea why you shouldn't. - noir_lord
    I put a little analog clock on my desk that's set to UTC time. It helps a lot with converting logs to get a quick reference. - yabones

  • It's insulting to read your AI-generated blog post

    • Making mistakes and learning from them is a fundamentally human experience.
    • AI-generated content creates a sterile barrier between the writer and the reader.
    • This barrier prevents genuine engagement and connection.

    I personally don’t think I care if a blog post is AI generated or not. The only thing that matters to me is the content. I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things, so if someone came up with an interesting set of prompts and follow ups and shared a summary of the research ChatGPT did, it could be meaningful content to me.

    No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

    It would be more human to handwrite your blog post instead. I don’t see how this is a good argument. The use of tools to help with writing and communication should make it easier to convey your thoughts, and that itself is valuable. - alyxya

  • Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter

    • The internet's core business model has historically relied on traffic generation (ads, subscriptions) to reward content creators.
    • Traffic has been an imperfect proxy for value, leading to issues like clickbait and ragebait, driven by the need to maximize traffic.
    • The shift from Search Engines to Answer Engines (like AI chatbots) is fundamentally changing internet discovery, providing direct answers instead of links.
      • This transition is causing significant short-term pain for industries reliant on traffic monetization, particularly media companies.
    • A new internet business model is emerging, potentially rewarding creators of unique, original content that fills knowledge gaps identified by AI.

  • Finding Flow: Escaping Digital Distractions Through Deep Work and Slow Living - A personal guide to reclaiming focus in the age of endless temptation

Week 43, 2025

  • How Complex Systems Fail
    • Complex systems always contain latent failures that change over time due to technological and organizational changes.
    • Complex systems operate in a degraded mode, with continuous failures and repairs, making accidents seem inevitable in hindsight.
    • Post-accident analyses often incorrectly attribute failures to a single root cause, overlooking the multiple contributing factors.
    • Hindsight bias affects post-accident assessments, making it difficult to accurately evaluate human performance during the event.
  • Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue - An AWS outage caused widespread disruptions, including issues with smart mattresses from Eight Sleep.
  • How Deno protects against npm exploits
    • Deno offers a secure alternative by running code in a sandbox with no OS access by default.
    • Deno requires explicit permissions for file system access, network connections, and environment variables.
    • But, deno's current permission model is applied on a per-project basis, meaning if a project has already granted permissions, a malicious package could exploit those permissions. Fine-grained permission control per package (e.g., per-package permissions) is not yet fully implemented, which prevents complete blocking of supply chain attacks.
  • Space Elevator

Week 42, 2025

Week 41, 2025

Week 40, 2025

  • Users Only Care About 20% of Your Application
    • Users typically only utilize about 20% of an application's features, and this 20% varies from user to user.
    • Software often becomes bloated with features that most users don't need, leading to frustration and resentment.
    • VS Code, Slack, and Discord exemplify platforms that provide a foundation for users to customize their experience.
    • Accepting that users will only partially care about your software can lead to more focused and satisfying product development.
    • Embracing the idea that software will be used in unexpected ways can lead to innovative and user-centric design.

Week 39, 2025

  • 시간 관리의 세 단계 진화: 왜 빈 큐를 먼저 만들어야 하는가

    • 시간 구조를 먼저 설계: Deep Work Queue, Creative Queue, Admin Queue
      • 구조는 고정하되 내용은 유연하게 - 이번 주는 기획서, 다음 주는 분석 보고서
      • 좋은 그릇(시간 구조)을 먼저 준비하고 담을 것(할 일)을 고르는 순서의 역전
      • 시간 관리의 비밀은 많이 하는 게 아니라 맞는 일을 맞는 시간에 하는 것
    • 주의
      • 긴 목록이 뇌에 "위험하다"는 신호 → 스트레스 호르몬 분비 → 미루기는 게으름이 아닌 방어 기제
      • 30분 단위는 스트레스 → 90분-2시간 큐가 적정
      • 모든 큐 채우려는 완벽주의 → 70% 채우고 30% 버퍼

  • Give footnotes the boot

    • Footnotes disrupt the reading flow by requiring readers to navigate away from the main content.
    • On the web, footnotes are even more cumbersome due to scrolling and navigation challenges.
    • Readers should be able to easily skip over supplementary content if they choose.

    For example: #

    • 50+% likelihood and content is short? → Parentheses
    • 50+% likelihood and content is medium or long? → note block
    • 20-50% likelihood and content is medium or long? → collapsed note block
    • < 20% likelihood and content is short or medium? → footnote

Week 38, 2025

  • V8과 WebAssembly: 현대 자바스크립트 엔진의 구조와 성능 최적화(상하편)
    • V8의 세대별 힙 구조는 객체의 수명에 따라 최적화된 처리를 가능하게 하며, Young Generation과 Old Generation으로 구분되어 관리된다.
    • V8의 세대별 객체 승격 메커니즘은 Age-based, Size-based, Pretenuring 등의 복합적인 휴리스틱을 사용하여 객체를 Old Generation으로 승격시킨다.
    • React의 Fiber 아키텍처는 V8의 세대별 가설과 충돌하며, Fiber 노드는 컴포넌트가 마운트된 동안 계속 살아있어 Old Generation으로 승격되어 Major GC 부담을 증가시킨다.
    • React Hooks는 클로저 메모리 누수를 일으킬 수 있으며, useEffect와 같은 훅은 클로저가 전체 컴포넌트 스코프를 캡처하여 메모리 누수를 유발할 수 있다.
    • V8의 Orinoco 프로젝트는 병렬 처리, 증분 처리, 동시 처리 등의 기술을 도입하여 GC pause time을 크게 감소시켰으며, 특히 동시 마킹은 Major GC pause time을 60-70% 감소시켰다.
  • Distributing your own scripts via Homebrew
    • Creating a Homebrew tap involves setting up a GitHub repository and using the brew tap-new command.
  • Anycrap - A store that generates products from anything you type in search
  • Many Hard Leetcode Problems are Easy Constraint Problems

    Constraint solvers runtimes are unpredictable and almost always slower than an ideal bespoke algorithm because they are more expressive, in what I refer to as the capability/tractability tradeoff. But even so, they'll do way better than a bad bespoke algorithm, and I'm not experienced enough in handwriting algorithms to consistently beat a solver. The real advantage of solvers, though, is how well they handle new constraints.

  • Proton Mail suspended journalist accounts at request of cybersecurity agency
  • UTF-8 is a Brilliant Design - still be backward compatible with ASCII
    1. Read a byte. If it starts with 0, it's a single-byte character (ASCII). Show the character represented by the remaining 7 bits on the screen. Continue with the next byte.
    2. If the byte didn't start with a 0, then:
      • If it starts with 110, it's a two-byte character, so read the next byte as well.
      • If it starts with 1110, it's a three-byte character, so read the next two bytes.
      • If it starts with 11110, it's a four-byte character, so read the next three bytes.
    3. Once the number of bytes are determined, read all the remaining bits except the leading bits, and find the binary value (aka. code point) of the character.
    4. Look up the code point in the Unicode character set to find the corresponding character and display it on the screen.
    5. Read the next byte and repeat the process.

Week 37, 2025

  • OpenAI’s Product Lead Reveals the 4-Part Framework for AI Product Strategy - Build AI products that scale profitably, retain users, and defend against commoditization
    • AI costs are real and scale with usage, unlike SaaS where marginal costs trend toward zero, making cost management critical in AI.
    • Using OpenAI's API without a unique value proposition can lead to quick commoditization and failure, as anyone can access the same models.
    • The 4D Framework for AI product strategy includes Direction, Differentiation, Design, and Deployment, which help in building defensible AI products.
  • Your target market isn't demographic
    • The actual target market is defined by the characteristics shared by users who benefit from a product, not by demographic factors.
    • For a TV show, the target market is not just females aged 19-29, but those who enjoy the genre, actors, aesthetic, and writing style.
  • Local Server Security Best Practices
    1. An attacker serves a malicious site (e.g., http://malicious.example.com).
    2. A user accesses a site that executes JavaScript served by the malicious site. This isn't limited to top-level navigation; it includes embedding via iframes or scripts on external sites.
    3. The served JavaScript executes fetch('http://127.0.0.1:3000/main.js'), and the response content is sent to the attacker.
    4. The attacker receives the contents of http://127.0.0.1:3000/main.js.
  • iPhone dumbphone - using Apple Configurator for saving about 2 hours of screen time a day.

    Moving all the distractions to another device that I can't carry around with me is a great idea - #

Week 36, 2025

Week 35, 2025

  • Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
    • 레거시 부담과 분산된 생태계, intel 진영은 제조사·MS·하드웨어 벤더가 분리돼 있어 최적화에 한계
  • The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done suggests that consistent, high-focus work is typically limited to about three or four hours a day.
    • The rule emphasizes protecting a block of undisturbed focus time rather than striving for perfection by eliminating all distractions.
    • Modern work culture often demands relentless productivity, but the key is to prioritize focused work hours over extended, scattered efforts.
  • Get More Done With the ‘3-3-3 Method’ - planning each workday around a 3-3-3 model
    • first devoting three hours to deep work on your most important project.
    • Next, complete three other urgent tasks that don’t require three hours of focus.
    • Finally, do three “maintenance” tasks, like cleaning, answering emails, or scheduling other work.

Week 34, 2025

Week 33, 2025

Week 32, 2025

Week 31, 2025

  • Does AI Actually Boost Developer Productivity? (100k Devs Study) - Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Stanford

    • AI's Impact on Developer Productivity: AI increases developer productivity by roughly 15-20% on average, but this varies based on several factors.
    • Task Complexity Matters: AI is more effective for low-complexity tasks, with productivity gains of 30-40%, compared to 10-15% for high-complexity tasks.
    • Context Window Limitations: Even with larger context windows, AI performance decreases as the amount of context increases.
    • Methodology: The study used a model that automates the evaluation of code changes, making it scalable and affordable compared to manual expert evaluations.
    • Surveys are Ineffective: Self-reported surveys are poor predictors of developer productivity, with developers often misjudging their own productivity by about 30 percentile points.

  • Stop selling "unlimited", when you mean "until we change our minds" 🤥

    That "5%" Drives Everything - Who actually gets hit by these limits: - Power users, Early adopters, Team influencers, $200/month Claude Max subscribers

    The real damage: You're not frustrating 5% of users—you're breaking trust with the exact people who drive growth and adoption.

    @dvyio on Twitter/X called this “vibe limiting”

    • ↔ Anthropic never sold an unlimited plan

      The new Max plan delivers exactly that. With up to 20x higher usage limits — Introducing the Max Plan

  • LLM Embeddings Explained: A Visual and Intuitive Guide

I swear if I see another "SEO" guy or some rando web dev who joined the workforce after Covid complaining about SPAs by misrepresenting it, I'm gonna explode.
As someone who's been developing web apps since the 2000s, let me tell you the origin of SPA has few things to do with the "false promise of SPAs" he listed, but largely due to companies in the late 2000/early 2010s wanting to go "mobile first". This usually meant they still had a desktop second somewhere, which implied they were architecting the entire system to completely separate the frontends and the backend.

Before, what web devs meant by frontend was essentially server-side rendered HTML templates with perhaps a little bit of jQuery running on the client-side. Now, since mobile and desktop web apps are to share some business logic and the database somehow, people had to rediscover REST by reading Roy Fielding's Phd dissertation that inspired the original HTTP. This meant now every company was moving to service-oriented architecture and started exposing their backend APIs onto the open internet so their mobile apps and SPAs running in the browser can share the same APIs. This was a cost saving measure.

This period also coincided with the steady decline of full-stack webapp frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django because for a couple of years, these frameworks had no good ways to support an API only applications. Django hadn't even reached 1.0 back then. This was a time when NodeJS was really starting to pick up momentum. Once people had started being more comfortable with JS on the server-side, lots of people suddenly realized they could push a lot of business logic to increasing powerful desktop browsers and phones, application hosts people now call "edge devices".

This is the true impetus of SPA. How is CSS going to kill this need? — wyuenho

Week 30, 2025

Week 29, 2025

  • My bank keeps on undermining anti-phishing education

    my bank sent out emails with websites which looked a lot like phishing mails, so much so that this similarity could potentially be used against them legally by potential phishing victims

  • Rocks, Pebbles, Sand: How to implement in practice
    • Prioritize by impact, not just size: The Rocks, Pebbles, Sand framework emphasizes prioritizing tasks based on their strategic impact rather than just their size or urgency.
    • Use a simple sprint-planning system: Prioritize tasks in this order: time-critical items, Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand. Adjust as needed based on capacity and the readiness of high-quality stories.
    • Avoid common mistakes: Don't let easy or urgent tasks (Sand) crowd out strategic tasks (Rocks). Also, don't assume that the size of a task determines its priority.
  • The sound of inevitability
    • Debating with a skilled opponent can be challenging, as they can control the conversation's framing, leading to a loss of momentum and confidence.
    • Framing a conversation in your terms is a powerful debating strategy.
    • This framing allows inevitabilists to dismiss opposing views and engage only with those who accept their premise.
  • How I build software quickly
  • At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

Week 28, 2025

Week 27, 2025

Week 26, 2025

  • Navigating the unpredictability of everything
    • A robust strategy should include multiple pathways to success, reducing reliance on any single outcome and increasing resilience against unpredictability.
    • Companies should focus on what will not change in the future, such as customer desires and fundamental needs, rather than trying to predict specific changes.
    • Exploring a range of possible futures and simplifying complex plans can help organizations better manage unpredictability and respond effectively to changing circumstances.
  • Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency
    • The Golden Path should be fully supported by the organization, ensuring engineers understand that using non-standard components comes with the responsibility for their maintenance.
    • Emphasizing the need for friction when adding new components can help manage the support burden and prevent unnecessary complexity in the tech stack.
  • Am I unique?
  • Cover your tracks - See how trackers view your browser

Week 25, 2025

Week 24, 2025

  • Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel
  • Password policy recommendations for Microsoft 365 passwords > Some common approaches and their negative impacts
  • A receipt printer cured my procrastination
    • Video games are addictive due to their fast feedback loops, providing immediate reactions and rewards.
    • To combat procrastination, tasks should be broken down into smaller, manageable micro-tasks.
    • Using sticky notes for tasks adds a physical element that makes them harder to ignore and provides satisfying feedback when completed.
    • A thermal receipt printer can streamline the task management process by allowing users to print tasks quickly and efficiently.
    • I'll use 3M Flags, Tabs & Page Markers
  • Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits

    The painter who begins with a blank canvas faces more paralysis than the one who starts with a frame and a palette. One person sets a goal: become a best-selling author. Another imposes a constraint: write every day, but never write what bores me.

    Wut? The constraints are what made it a hard problem, but the only reason they were able to hit this goal in an impossibly short timeline is the huge amount of resources that they put toward a very clear goal (which was, honestly, less "let man explore the heavens" than "beat the Soviets"). — #

    • 결점을 알고도 일부러 썼다면 사기에 가까운 장시논리. 일부에게만 팔려도 이득이라는 betting

    I agree with the author, but I would also say there is something above goals and constraints. Values. A set of things that, when comparing multiple options, make the choice clear. An example of some values I frequently use is "What will give me the most enjoyment the furthest into the future? "What will result in the world being a better place?" "What will make me become someone who resembles Jesus more?" They are different from constraints as they don't knock out any options by default. Instead, they make triaging when there are many different things I could be doing much easier, and circumvent my messy intuition which is based on hormones, hunger, weather, etc.
    I think values, goals, and constraints are all valuable, but it's a hierarchy. We should create constraints that help us become more aligned with our values. We should create shorter-term goals that make it easy to stay within our constraints. — #

  • Tracking the performance of the various coding agents.
  • Pivot Points
    • Contextual Evaluation: Unlike traditional assessments that categorize traits as strengths or weaknesses, Pivot Points recognize that their value is context-dependent.
    • Embracing Constraints: Pivot Points are viewed as enabling constraints that, when embraced, can lead to more fulfilling personal and professional lives, allowing individuals and organizations to thrive by aligning actions with inherent strengths.
  • Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google
  • A look at CloudFlare’s AI-coded OAuth library

    It’s not bad, but I wouldn’t really recommend it for use yet.

  • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation
  • Solo Performance Prompting (SPP)

Week 23, 2025

Week 22, 2025

  • The Recurring Cycle of 'Developer Replacement' Hype

    The pattern is becoming clear once again: the technology doesn't replace the skill, it elevates it to a higher level of abstraction.
    For agency work building disposable marketing sites, this doesn't matter. For systems that need to evolve over years, it's catastrophic.

    • The biggest asset of a developer is saying "no" to people. — #
  • The Copilot Delusion

    Management has an AI shaped hammer and they're hitting everything to see if it's a nail. — #

    This--all of this--seems exactly antithetical to computing/development/design/"engineering"/architecture/whatever-the-hell people call this profession as I understood it.
    Typically, I labored under the delusion that competent technical decision makers would integrate tooling or choose to use a language, "service", platform, whatever, if they saw benefits and if they could make a "case" for why something was the correct approach, i.e how it met some product's needs, addressed some shortcomings, made things more efficient. — #

    My point of comparison of choice is overseas contractors, not pair programming.
    Copilot or Cursor or whatnot is basically a better experience because you do not have to get on Zoom calls (after Slack has failed) to ask why some chunk of your system that cares about root nodes has mysteriously gained a function called isChild (not hasChildren) that returns a boolean based on whether or not the node has children and not whether it has a parent. Or to figure out why a bunch a API parameters that used to accept arrays now don't. — #

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  • The real potential of tools like Suno isn’t in cranking out radio-ready hits. It’s in creating music that doesn't have commercial incentives to exist. Case in point: Functional Music. — kelseyfrog
  • Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC
  • On The Death of Daydreaming
    • 🥱 -> 🤔💡🌱 (Boredom -> Reflection, Creativity, Growth)
    • Smartphones eliminate boredom and dullness, but as a result, creativity and empathy are being impaired.
    • Interstitial time, which used to be moments for meditation, daydreaming, and observation—human activities—has now mostly been replaced by digital consumption.
    • The habit of avoiding waiting and boredom leads to the weakening of our attention, patience, and imagination.
    • With access to an iPad or a smartphone, children in the twenty-first century never had to be bored;

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Week 1, 2025

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