👓 What I read in 2025

Week 27, 2025

• Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate (2021)
• The Death of the Middle-Class Musician
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44408552

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

• Animating zooming using CSS: transform order is important… sometimes
• The Grug Brained Developer - A layman's guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained
• How to give a senior leader feedback (without getting fired)
  • Before giving feedback, assess your own role in the situation and consider if the issue is worth addressing.
  • Use the "even more" technique to frame feedback positively, suggesting enhancements rather than criticizing past actions.
  • Share personal experiences instead of directly telling the leader what to do to reduce defensiveness.
  • Employ diplomatic language that invites collaboration, such as "What are your thoughts on..." or "Perhaps we could..."
  • Offer concrete examples and data to support your feedback, making it more persuasive and actionable.
  • Position your feedback to focus on future improvements rather than past mistakes to prevent a defensive reaction.
• Why Generative AI Coding Tools and Agents Do Not Work For Me
  • reviewing AI-generated code takes as much time as writing code from scratch, if not more.
  • interns learn and improve over time, while AI does not retain knowledge from past tasks.
  • Claims that AI increases speed or productivity often come from lowering quality standards while accepting additional risks, or stem from the interests of AI vendors.
• If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
• How do I give back to people helped me when I was young and had nothing?
  • Keep the gates open that were not gatekept for you
  • simply telling them "you were incredibly kind to me and you are a big reason for me trying to be kind to others" might just make their day
  • Pay it forward

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
  • Password expiration requirements for users
• 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

• Disclosure: Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android - Meta and Yandex

  These native Android apps receive browsers' metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites.

• Typing 118 WPM Broke My Brain in the Right Ways (A Year-Long Journey)

  Every morning, before I even think about opening VS Code, before Slack starts destroying my soul, before the daily standup where we pretend we know what we're doing, I just type. Five minutes. That's it.
  rushing makes everything worse.

• The rise of judgement over technical skill

  AI is democratizing a wide range of creative and professional tasks.
  The key differentiator is no longer technical skill but judgement.

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. — #

Week 21, 2025

• 불만족의 해독제 - 감사함
• Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey (2011)
  • Simplicity in software design is about focusing on one task or concept, avoiding the intertwining of multiple functionalities.
  • Choosing simpler constructs and avoiding complex artifacts can lead to more reliable and maintainable software systems.
  • The need for clear separations between "what" a function does and "how" it is implemented is vital for creating effective abstractions in programming.
• Animated Factorization
• My new hobby: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane
• The behavior of LLMs in hiring decisions: Systemic biases in candidate selection
• ReScript - Difference vs TypeScript
• WHAT THE HELL ARE PEOPLE DOING? - Live-ish estimates based on global population dynamics & simulated day/night cycles
• I think the ergonomics of generators is growing on me.
  • Generators encapsulate state management, reducing tight coupling between components and allowing for cleaner, more modular code.

    Since state and logic are self-contained, you could have multiple, distinct generators being used in parallel with no issue.

  • The document illustrates how generators can replace complex patterns like recursion or callbacks, simplifying code and enhancing readability.
• Mystical - is more like a way to write PostScript that looks like a magical circle.

Week 20, 2025

• Here Is Everything That Has Changed Since Congestion Pricing Started in New York
  • New York's congestion pricing benefits all commuters and drivers and others without a balloon effect.
• How to have the browser pick a contrasting color in CSS
• base65536
• Internet Artifacts
• Product Purgatory: When they love it but still don’t buy
  • Even if a product could be implemented effortlessly and at no cost, customers may still decline due to perceived risks and implementation challenges.
  • Products must provide significant value that far exceeds the penalties of adoption; otherwise, customers will not prioritize them.
  • Identifying which customers have an urgent need for a product. Companies often delay purchases until they address higher-priority issues.
• Bus Stops Here: Shanghai Lets Riders Design Their Own Routes
• I failed a take-home assignment from Kagi Search
  • The applicant wanted to communicate thoroughly and made efforts toward it, but the hiring manager brushed it off.
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43980036
• 상남자식 마크다운 공유 웹서비스
  • DB따위 쓰지 않고 URL로 모든 정보를 저장하는 호방함과 안전함, 그리고 간단함
  • .md파일 업로드 혹은 textarea에서 직접 마크다운 문서 작성 가능
• Reservoir Sampling
  • Sampling method to use when you don't know how many samples will come in.
• One-Click RCE in ASUS’s Preinstalled Driver Software

  I asked ASUS if they offered bug bounties. They responded saying they do not, but they would instead put my name in their “hall of fame”.

• (t,i,x,y) => "creative code golfing"
• (7화) 부동산이 흥하면 나라가 망하는 이유 | The Civilization 위대한 문명사 7화 | 서울대 김태유 명예교수
  • 가치를 창출하는 투자보다 부동산 투자가 더 이득이 크면 그 쪽으로 자원이 쏠려 점점 비생산적 사회가 된다.
  • 분업화. 인간성 말살 비판이 있었지만, 포드의 생산성 폭증으로 기사 계급이 되어야 겨우 타던 말을 거의 모든 사람이 탈 수 있는 차로

Week 19, 2025

• 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;

Week 18, 2025

• NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages - https://notebooklm.google/
• Novel Universal Bypass for All Major LLMs
• The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet

  looking to buy a specific item, only to find the layout confusing? Perhaps you ended up aimlessly strolling around, purchasing other items?

• The Alliance

  The employer-employee relationship is broken. Managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: You can’t afford to offer lifetime employment. But you can’t build a lasting, innovative business when everyone acts like a free agent. The solution: Stop thinking of employees as family or free agents, and start thinking of them as allies on a tour of duty.

Week 17, 2025

• AI Horseless Carriages

  Their app is a little bit of AI jammed into an interface designed for mundane human labor rather than an interface designed for automating mundane labor. “Horseless carriage” refers to the early motor car designs that borrowed heavily from the horse-drawn carriages that preceded them.

• Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken

  Certain companies recruit app developers to create botnets by injecting “network sharing” SDKs into their apps. These botnets then use the network bandwidth of unsuspecting users of said apps to crawl the web, brute-force mail servers and other nasty things.

• Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial Human - “Centaur chess” pairs humans with AI chess engines, creating teams that outperform both solo humans and solo AI systems playing on their own.
• Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work - AI 기반 바이브 코딩은 혁신적이지만, 품질 없는 속도는 위험하다는 경고의 글
  • 품질은 자동으로 따라오지 않음
  • 속도는 품질 없이는 무의미함
  • AI는 대체자가 아니라 인턴입니다 (사람이 루프 안에 있어야 함)
• Cozy comfort - New research backs up what gamers have thought for years: video games can be an antidote to stress and anxiety.
• How to pack ternary numbers in 8-bit bytes

  log(3) / log(2) bits per ternary digit

• Some features that every JavaScript developer should know in 2025

  arr
    .values()
    .drop(10)
    .take(10)
    .filter((el) => el < 10)
    .map((el) => el + 5)
    .toArray()
  

Week 16, 2025

• The Problem with “Vibe Coding”
• Understanding JavaScript Memory Management: Deep Dive into Garbage Collection Techniques

  Generational Garbage Collection

  • Core Principle: The Weak Generation Hypothesis suggests younger objects tend to die faster.
  • V8 Specific Implementation: Objects that survive several GC cycles in the "new generation" are promoted to the "old generation."

• Making :visited more private
  • with partitioning, browsing on Site A and click a link to go to Site B, the combination of "Site A + Site B" is stored in your :visited history
• New Vulnerability in GitHub Copilot and Cursor
  • "Rules File Backdoor," which injects malicious instructions into configuration files used by AI coding assistants
  • The attack exploits hidden unicode characters and evasion techniques
• Anubis works
• Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market
• But what if I really want a faster horse?
  • YouTube. YouTube: Once a video catalog with social discovery. Now? TikTok.
  • LinkedIn. Once a network of resumes. Now? TikTok.
  • Substack. Yeah, a newsletter platform... now launching TikTok-style videos. Seriously.

Week 15, 2025

• Tailwind’s @apply Feature is Better Than it Sounds
• Photographs of 19th Century Japan
• Apache ECharts is a powerful, interactive charting and data visualization library for browser
• Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being
• Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

Week 14, 2025

• Why I don't discuss politics with friends
  • https://news.hada.io/topic?id=20131
• Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
  • The expectation for programming to be simplified through "natural language programming" is misguided; formal symbolism is essential for accuracy.
  • Formal texts provide a structured framework that helps eliminate nonsensical statements, which are more prevalent in natural language.
• An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
• curl-impersonate - A special build of curl that can impersonate the four major browsers
  • https://github.com/lexiforest/curl-impersonate - An active fork of curl-impersonate with more versions and build targets.
• 절대 Cron에서 표준 출력을 사용하지 마세요 - root 볼륨 포화 괴담
• Minimal CSS-only blurry image placeholders
• TV Garden - your gateway to free live TV streaming from anywhere.
• 13 Animals Made From 13 Circles
• Life Altering Postgresql Patterns
• AI Agents: Less Capability, More Reliability, Please - Turning such a straightforward process into a mysterious AI black box isn't innovation—it's a headache.
• Terms of Service Didn't Read
• Everyone knows all the apps on your phone
• Et Tu, Grammarly?
• Why you should use modeling [with TLA+/PlusCal]
  • Modeling shows you how sloppy your "design" is.
  • Being smart does not scale; exhaustive model checking comes to the rescue
  • Don't trust your deduction abilities for proving that each action preserves the safety conditions you identify.

Week 13, 2025

• How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

  • Hyphens connect things, such as compound words: double-decker, cut-and-dried, 212-555-5555.
  • EN dashes make a range between things: Boston–San Francisco flight, 10–20 years: both connect not only the endpoints, but define that all the space between is included. (Compare the last usage with the phone number example under Hyphens.)
  • EM dashes break things, such as sentences or thoughts: 'What the—!'; A paragraph should express one idea—but rules are made to be broken. — mmooss

• You should know this before choosing Next.js
• Inside Google’s Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up With OpenAI
• BANEX 템플릿 - 사업부터 개발까지 모든 스테이크홀더의 눈높이를 맞추는 프로덕트 플래닝
• 한국어 몰라요 - 글로벌 협업의 4가지 패턴
• Coding Isn't Programming - Closing Keynote with Leslie Lamport PDF
• Stoop Coffee: How a Simple Idea Transformed My Neighborhood
• Do viruses trigger Alzheimer's?
• I won't connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud
• 63 Chinese Cuisines: the Complete Guide

Week 12, 2025

• A guide to image overlays in CSS
• Why You Should Choose HTML5 article Over section
• An Opinionated Guide on Which AI Model to Use in 2025
• Breadcrumbs Are Dead in Web Design
• FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
• AI Blindspots
• The Lost Art of Research as Leisure
  • Research as leisure involves cultivating curiosity, developing meaningful questions, gathering evidence, and creating tangible outcomes from research efforts.
  • The act of reading should be seen as playful and intentional, moving beyond mere consumption to active engagement with ideas.
• HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere
• Recommendations for designing magic numbers of binary file formats

Week 11, 2025

• Relative Colors - An interactive guide to learn CSS Relative Colors.
  • OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL
• In Memoriam: Mark Klein, AT&T Whistleblower Who Revealed NSA Mass Spying
• Succinct data structures

Week 10, 2025

• Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it
• My LLM codegen workflow atm
• ACM A.M. Turing Award Honors Two Researchers Who Led the Development of Cornerstone AI Technology - Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton Recognized as Pioneers of Reinforcement Learning
  • The Bitter Lesson by Richard Sutton - http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
    1. AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents,
    2. this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but
    3. in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and
    4. breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning.
• Rendering the Simulation Theory: Exploring Fractals, GLSL, and the Nature of Reality
• Comparing local large language models for alt-text generation
• Hacking Gemini's Memory with Prompt Injection and Delayed Tool Invocation
• SQLite-on-the-Server Is Misunderstood: Better At Hyper-Scale Than Micro-Scale
• How I Automated My Computer Routine With macOS Folder Actions
• The housing theory of everything
• The $100 Trillion Disruption: The Unforeseen Economic Earthquake
• Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office
• Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
• localsend - An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop

Week 9, 2025

• How the UK is Weakening Safety Worldwide
• How Core Git Developers Configure Git

Week 8, 2025

• I put my heart and soul into this AI but nobody cares
• Trust, 2-Party Relays, and QUIC
• The Hidden Costs of Running a Global Engineering Team and Recipes for Mitigation

  • A 3-hour gap is manageable.
  • A 6-hour gap starts breaking things. Someone’s always sacrificing their schedule, and a one-day delay easily turns into two.
  • A 9-hour gap? This is where things fall apart completely. Simple decisions that should take 30 minutes turned into multi-day sagas. By the time you got an answer to your question, the context had changed so much you needed to ask new questions.

• Svelte is not Javascript
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions

  So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.

• No Startup Has Ever Failed Because it Didn’t Have a Blog
  • Airbnb tackled crappy check-in rates by bringing their cameras into homes and taking better photos, not by blogging about the future of holiday stays.
• The Deep Research problem - OpenAI’s Deep Research is built for me, and I can’t use it.

  LLMs are good at the things that computers are bad at, and bad at the things that computers are good at.

• When Imperfect Systems are Good, Actually: Bluesky's Lossy Timelines
• Watt The Fox?
• Dust from Car Brakes More Harmful than Exhaust, Study Finds

Week 7, 2025

• AI Founder's Bitter Lesson. Chapter 1 - History Repeats Itself
• The year I didn't survive
• Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji
• 8 Design Breakthroughs Defining AI's Future
• How I Built an Open Source AI Tool to Find My Autoimmune Disease (After $100k and 30+ Hospital Visits) - Now Available for Anyone to Use - github
• Advertising is a cancer on society
• Deep dive into LLMs like ChatGPT by Andrej Karpathy (TL;DR)
• MODERN-DAY ORACLES or BULLSHIT MACHINES? - How to thrive in a ChatGPT world
• Copilot stops working on gender related subjects
• I’m done with Ubuntu

Week 6, 2025

• WikiTok - creator's comment
• Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
  • Yes, and they should state that they also don't use AI in the selection process.
  • It’s cause they wanna use the data to train AI on and traininy AI on AI is useless.
• Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads
• How to Train an AI Image Model on Yourself - It takes less than an hour and $3.
• Things people get wrong about Electron

Week 5, 2025

• A phishing attack involving g.co, Google's URL shortener

Week 4, 2025

• The 7 Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
• KRDS v1.0.0 - 대한민국 정부 디자인 시스템
• https://shapecatcher.com/ - Unicode Character Recognition
• Psychological Safety and the Only Pyramid Scheme That Works

  As people feel more and more secure in doing deployments, raising issues and speaking confidently in a company, the amount of failure goes down.

• Kind Engineering - How To Engineer Kindness
• UK's elite hardware talent is being wasted.
• DoubleClickjacking: A New Era of UI Redressing - get users to commit to clicking twice, but the pop up page only accepts a single click before closing. Their second click goes to the page underneath the pop up, which is e.g. an authentication button. — nneonneo
• Thoughts On A Month With Devin

Week 3, 2025

• Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free — but raising the price of Workspace - The B2B AI wars are heating up, and Google’s trying to make sure everyone gets a taste of Gemini.
• Norepinephrine-mediated slow vasomotion drives glymphatic clearance during sleep
• Announcing Six Day and IP Address Certificate Options in 2025
• Five years of React Native at Shopify
• Double-keyed Caching: How Browser Cache Partitioning Changed the Web
• Take the pedals off the bike - the most important and fundamental skill first – balance
• Adobe Lightroom's AI Remove feature added a Bitcoin to bird in flight photo
• How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
• CORS is Stupid

Week 2, 2025

• Unoffice Hours
• JavaScript Benchmarking Is a Mess
  • The garbage collector and its tendency to pause everything randomly
  • The JIT compiler’s ability to delete all of your code because it “isn’t necessary”
  • Terribly broad flame graphs in most JavaScript devtools
• Use "translate" to turn off element translations
  • translate="no" attribute
• Relatively New Things You Should Know about HTML Heading Into 2025
• CSS margin-trim and line height units
• The underrated <dl> element
• The search input: They almost got it right

Week 1, 2025

• An Unreasonable Amount of Time - A method for magic.

  Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect. — Teller

• Passkey technology is elegant, but it’s most definitely not usable security

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Backlinks

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