Making a Factory Out Of LEGO That Builds LEGO - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQe1hxpRBKs
After spending two videos building a LEGO car factory, I knew that the machine had the potential to pick up and place down most individual LEGO pieces, so I wanted to try turning it into a more general pick-and-place machine to see what kinds of things it would be able to construct.
Paperless-ngx
https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/#features
Paperless-ngx is a community-supported open-source document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.
AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur
AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?
We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of.
The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory – Dan Shapiro's Blog
https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2026/01/the-five-levels-from-spicy-autocomplete-to-the-software-factory/
I’ve now seen dozens of companies struggling to put AI to work writing code, and each one has moved through five clear tiers of automation. That felt familiar, and I realized that the federal government had been there first – but for cars.
Phantom Obligation | Terry Godier
https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation
So let me start with a question that's been nagging at me: why do RSS readers look like email clients?
Computer History Museum Launches Digital Portal to Its Vast Collection - CHM
https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/computer-history-museum-launches-digital-portal-to-its-vast-collection/
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – January 21, 2026 – The Computer History Museum (CHM), a leader in decoding technology—its computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanity—announced the launch of OpenCHM, a new digital portal providing global access to its unparalleled collection.
Please Don’t Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/please-dont-say-mean-things-about-the-ai-that-i-just-invested-a-billion-dollars-in
Guys, enough is enough. Bullying is a serious issue, and it’s time for me to speak out. There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society. This slander is totally unwarranted, and I would really appreciate it if everyone would stop being so mean about this thing I just invested a billion dollars in.
Kroki!
https://kroki.io/
Kroki provides a unified API with support for BlockDiag (BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag), BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), D2, DBML, Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, Pikchr, PlantUML, Structurizr, SvgBob, Symbolator, TikZ, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, WaveDrom, WireViz... and more to come!
lukilabs/beautiful-mermaid
https://github.com/lukilabs/beautiful-mermaid?tab=readme-ov-file#rendermermaidtext-options-promisestring
Mermaid is the de facto standard for text-based diagrams. It's brilliant. But the default renderer has problems:
Aesthetics — Might be personal preference, but wished they looked more professional
Complex theming — Customizing colors requires wrestling with CSS classes
No terminal output — Can't render to ASCII for CLI tools
Heavy dependencies — Pulls in a lot of code for simple diagrams
We built beautiful-mermaid at Craft to power diagrams in Craft Agents. It's fast, beautiful, and works everywhere—from rich UIs to plain terminals.
Using 3D Printing And Copper Tape To Make PCBs | Hackaday
https://hackaday.com/2026/01/28/using-3d-printing-and-copper-tape-to-make-pcbs/
In a recent video [QWZ Labs] demonstrates an interesting technique to use 3D printing to make creating custom PCBs rather straightforward even if all you have is a 3D printer and a roll of copper tape.
Broadcast Channel API - Web APIs | MDN
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Broadcast_Channel_API
The Broadcast Channel API allows basic communication between browsing contexts (that is, windows, tabs, frames, or iframes) and workers on the same origin.
By creating a BroadcastChannel object, you can receive any messages that are posted to it. You don't have to maintain a reference to the frames or workers you wish to communicate with: they can "subscribe" to a particular channel by constructing their own BroadcastChannel with the same name, and have bi-directional communication between all of them.
Submitted for Your Approval
https://intertwingly.net/blog/2026/01/28/Twilight-Zone.html
The blog demo was a real Rails application running full stack in your browser. Action Cable over BroadcastChannel. Active Record over IndexedDB. The editor runs on WebContainers — Node.js and npm, entirely in browser memory. The same patterns, the same code structure, no server.
What originally motivated this is now child's play to build. I want judges to be able to record scores during an event despite unreliable Wi-Fi. Downloading the agenda and that judge's scores entered to date and then running the existing ERB views over IndexedDB just works. Posting updates in real time when possible and batch when connectivity resumes is straightforward. Since each judge records their own scores, there are no merge conflicts. Mount the resulting offline SPA via Rack middleware, and everything works transparently.
Work-from-office mandate? Expect top talent turnover, culture rot | CIO
https://www.cio.com/article/4119562/work-from-office-mandate-expect-top-talent-turnover-culture-rot.html
Effective collaboration can happen remotely when teams have clear norms, strong documentation, and psychological safety, she adds. “I’ve also seen teams sitting next to each other collaborate poorly because decisions are unclear or leaders equate visibility with progress,” she says. “Collaboration doesn’t automatically improve just because people share a building.”
A Codeless Ecosystem, or hacking beyond vibe coding - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/27/codeless-ecosystem/
There's been a remarkable leap forward in the ability to orchestrate coding bots, making it possible for ordinary creators to command dozens of AI bots to build software without ever having to directly touch code. The implications of this kind of evolution are potentially extraordinary, as outlined in that first set of notes about what we could call "codeless" software. But now it's worth looking at the larger ecosystem to understand where all of this might be headed.
Meet the Alaska Student Arrested for Eating an AI Art Exhibit | The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/alaska-student-arrested-eating-ai-art-exhibit/#
A conversation with Graham Granger, whose combination of protest and performance art spread beyond campus. “AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.”
I hotreload Rust and so can you | Kampffrosch's blog
https://kampffrosch94.github.io/posts/hotreloading_rust/
What I really want is to use Rust as a scripting language that I can hotreload. Even if its just for development. This way the API would stay simple, types could be shared directly and marshalling costs either don’t exist or are minimal.
And this is exactly what I am going to show how to set up now.
Deciphering Glyph :: The Next Thing Will Not Be Big
https://blog.glyph.im/2026/01/the-next-thing-will-not-be-big.html
So, please design your open source libraries, applications, and services to run on smaller devices, with less complexity. It will be worth your time as well as your users’.
The Trump Administration wants your DNA and social media | Privacy International
https://www.privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5713/trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media
The U.S. Government intends to force visitors to submit their digital history and DNA as the price of entry. With this much data AI tools will likely be deployed to unlock details of your life for border and immigration agencies.
The head chef model for AI-assisted development - The New Stack
https://thenewstack.io/the-head-chef-model-for-ai-assisted-development/?utm_source=FuckOff&utm_medium=FuckOff&utm_campaign=FuckOff
The head chef model doesn’t create less work, but it allows you to move faster without sacrificing reliability or performance. Your role as a developer shifts from implementation to orchestration, from programming to validating and integrating AI-generated code.
How to Favicon in 2026: Three files that fit most needs—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/how-to-favicon-in-2021-six-files-that-fit-most-needs
For the browser using HTML:
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" sizes="32x32">
<link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png"><!-- 180×180 -->
Places to Telnet | telnet.org
https://telnet.org/htm/places.htm
The text based internet can be exciting, informative, and fun. Using telnet, you can access a variety of these resources on the internet. Below you’ll find lists of a few places to get you started.
ratatui/mousefood: embedded-graphics backend for Ratatui
https://github.com/ratatui/mousefood?tab=readme-ov-file
Mousefood - a no-std embedded-graphics backend for Ratatui!
ratatui - crates.io: Rust Package Registry
https://crates.io/crates/ratatui
Ratatui (ˌræ.təˈtu.i) is a Rust crate for cooking up terminal user interfaces (TUIs). It provides a simple and flexible way to create text-based user interfaces in the terminal, which can be used for command-line applications, dashboards, and other interactive console programs.
Why I Stopped Following the News | Mert Bulan
https://mertbulan.com/2026/01/28/why-i-stopped-following-the-news/
If I have to pick my favourite German word, I would probably pick “neugierig” because it describes me very well. It means curious, but that is not the literal meaning. Like many German words, it comes from two parts: neu and gierig. Neu means new, and gierig means greedy. So the literal idea behind neugierig is being greedy for new things. That fits me well.
Feedsmith — Fast & Powerful JavaScript Feed Parser
https://feedsmith.dev/
Fast, all‑in‑one JavaScript feed parser and generator for RSS, Atom, RDF, and JSON Feed, with support for popular namespaces and OPML files.
Feedsmith offers universal and format‑specific parsers that maintain the original feed structure in a clean, object-oriented format while intelligently normalizing legacy elements. Access all feed data without compromising simplicity.
web-infra-dev/midscene: Driving all platforms UI automation with vision-based model
https://github.com/web-infra-dev/midscene
Driving all platforms UI automation with vision-based model
Introducing LibPDF: The PDF Library TypeScript Deserves - Documenso
https://documenso.com/blog/introducing-libpdf-the-pdf-library-typescript-deserves
Today, we're releasing LibPDF, a modern PDF library for TypeScript that actually works on real-world documents.
as days pass by — Use RSS to read newsletters
https://www.kryogenix.org/days/2025/02/08/use-rss-to-read-newsletters/
There is a solution to this and the solution is called RSS. Andy Bell explains RSS and this is exactly how I read newsletters. If I want to read someone's newsletter and it's on Substack, or ghost.io, or buttondown.email, what I actually do is subscribe to their newsletter but what I'm actually subscribing to is their RSS feed. This sections off newsletter stuff into a completely separate app that I can catch up on when I've got the time, it means that the newsletter owner (or the site they're using) can't decide to "upsell" me on other stuff they do that I'm not interested in, and it's a better, nicer reading experience than my mail app.
A Shiny New Bloggy Home | Ultranormal
https://lawver.net/2026/01/a-shiny-new-bloggy-home/
There's risk there, though. I think the thing people are running into is that we've accelerated the 0 - 90% part of development, but that last 10% is now a lot harder because you still need professional experience to understand security, performance, networking, etc. That's the next hurdle - how do we help people who've gone run into that 90% wall at the speed of sound and made a huge mess? That's a topic for a different post.
Custom Containerized Sandboxes for AI Agents | by Rafael Ben-Ari | Dec, 2025 | Medium
https://medium.com/@rafaelbenari/custom-containerized-sandboxes-for-ai-agents-dd2cd2603b3b
One of the first things I do every morning is to check the news. And almost always I dislike the news quite a bit. So I wanted to have a “newspaper” with topics that cover my interests, and that is also fun to read. This is how “Gradient Descent” was born: a nightly aggregation of (mostly) local-AI news, community summary, links and posts.
Interactive tools in Claude | Claude
https://claude.com/blog/interactive-tools-in-claude
Starting today, you can open and interact with tools in Claude. Build and update project timelines in Asana. Draft, edit and send Slack messages in a formatted preview. Visualize ideas as diagrams in Figma—all without switching tabs.
Cursor is better at marketing than coding • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/26/cursor_opinion/
From where I sit, what makes the Cursor case more dangerous than just a failed hack‑week project is that the hype is baked into its methodology. The "experiment" wasn't presented as what it really was: an interesting, but messy, internal learning exercise. No, it was rolled out as a milestone that conveniently confirmed the company's long‑running autonomous agent advertising. Missing from the story were basics any senior engineer would demand: passing Continuous Integration (CI), reproducible builds, and real benchmarks that show the browser doing more than limping through a hello-world page.
Irreducible
https://irreducible.io/blog/porting-doom-to-wasm/
Anyways… I’ve reached the point that my VM is fully compliant with version 2.0 of the WebAssembly core specification, and I need a large program to stress test it with. The obvious choice for this sort of thing is a DOOM port. For those unaware, DOOM runs on just about every computing environment under the sun. For every calculator, satellite, or turing-complete system, there’s likely a software engineer theorizing about how to get DOOM running on it.
DOOMBUDS
https://doombuds.com/
You know the 1993 classic DOOM? I made it run on an earbud, then I connected it to the internet and made it possible for visitors like you to sit in a queue for hours play the game remotely!.
Don't say this to people with ADHD - by Jesse J. Anderson
https://www.extrafocus.com/p/dont-say-this-to-people-with-adhd
This guide is a quick lesson on some of the things you should avoid saying to people with ADHD.
Subagents, Commands and Skills Are Converging
https://www.vivekhaldar.com/articles/claude-code-subagents-commands-skills-converging/
Claude Code has been shipping at a blistering pace. But buried in the recent 2.1.x releases is a fundamental shift in how the tool thinks about extensibility. The changes to skills, slash commands, and subagents might look incremental, but they’re pointing toward something bigger: these three abstractions are merging into one.
I Was Right About ATProto Key Management - nora's notes
https://notes.nora.codes/atproto-again/
I don’t like Bluesky, or ATProto; I wish we lived in a world were community-driven projects got megabucks and we were all self-hosting little social media servers for our communities. We don’t live in that world, so we have to interoperate with VC-backed, corporate social media. When those platforms call themselves “decentralized”, I think they should deliver.
How to think about Gas Town
https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-to-think-about-gas-town/
So, what do you do if you:
Know your projects get attention.
You also want like-minded people to come on this journey with you.
You don’t want to waste time explaining things to people who don’t get it.
You reach for a tool that many people have used over the years: you get weird with it.
AI tribalism | Read the Tea Leaves
https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/
I frankly didn’t want to end up in this future, and I’m hardly dancing on the grave of the old world. But I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Maybe it’s because the initial tribal battle lines have clouded everybody’s judgment, or maybe it’s because we inhabit different worlds where the technology is either better or worse (I still don’t think LLMs are great at UI for example), but there’s just a lot of patently unhelpful discourse out there, and I’m tired of it.
Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems — Blog
https://www.diljitpr.net/blog-post-postgresql-dlq
The goal was never to replace Kafka with PostgreSQL. Kafka remained the backbone for high-throughput event ingestion, while PostgreSQL handled what it does best—durability, querying, and observability around failures. By letting each system play to its strengths, we ended up with a pipeline that was resilient, debuggable, and easy to operate.
In the end, using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue turned failure handling into something boring and predictable. And in production systems, boring is exactly what you want.
A fun trick for getting discovered by LLMs and AI tools
https://cassidoo.co/post/ai-llm-discoverability/
I have been getting a lot of newsletter responses, DMs, and emails in general saying that people have discovered my work not via traditional SEO, but via LLMs and AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and even GitHub Copilot.
Your App Subscription Is Now My Weekend Project · Roberto Selbach
https://rselbach.com/your-sub-is-now-my-weekend-project/
I’m still skeptical of vibecoding in general. As I mentioned above, I would not trust my vibecoding enough to make these into products. If something goes wrong, I don’t know how to fix it. Maybe my LLM friends can, but I don’t know. But vibecoding is 100% viable for personal stuff like this: we now have apps on demand.
A Solitary Cabin - Deprecation Notice
https://asolitarycabin.org/deprecation-notice.html
"Not exactly," Chet interrupts. His smile has that practiced startup-founder quality, the one they teach you at Y Combinator, the smile that says I'm about to violate the social contract but in a disruptive way. "We're actually transitioning to a fully autonomous development pipeline. Claude Code Enterprise will be taking over the majority of engineering tasks."
A quote from Chris Lloyd
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/chris-lloyd/#atom-everything
Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine".
For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then:
-> layout elements
-> rasterize them to a 2d screen
-> diff that against the previous screen
-> finally use the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw
We have a ~16ms frame budget so we have roughly ~5ms to go from the React scene graph to ANSI written.
Why Designers Can No Longer Trust the Design Process - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u94juYwLLM
For years, designers have been told to trust the process.
Research first. Personas. Journey maps. Problem statements. Then solutions.
In this talk from Hatch Conference, Jenny Wen, Design Lead at Anthropic and former Director of Design at Figma, explains why that model no longer fits the reality of modern design work.
I don't write code anymore - I sculpt it
https://www.jerpint.io/blog/2026-01-24-i-dont-write-code-anymore-i-sculpt-it/
I’ve noticed a shift in how I code. I rarely write code anymore - claude-code does most of the coding for me. I sculpt the outputs into something more durable.
Once the code is in a working state, based on my original prompt/specs, I then proceed to sculpting - remove excess lines, delete bloat, make sure the pieces fit and can be reused. I study the diffs. I think about what we are trying to implement, and if this iteration brings us closer to it.
The Technium: How Will the Miracle Happen Today?
https://kk.org/thetechnium/how-will-the-miracle-happen-today/
Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering on the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, “How will the miracle happen today?”
How I estimate work as a staff software engineer
https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-i-estimate-work/
It is not possible to accurately estimate software work. Software projects spend most of their time grappling with unknown problems, which by definition can’t be estimated in advance. To estimate well, you must therefore basically ignore all the known aspects of the work, and instead try and make educated guesses about how many unknowns there are, and how scary each unknown is.
Many Small Queries Are Efficient In SQLite
https://www.sqlite.org/np1queryprob.html
N+1 Queries Are Not A Problem With SQLite
SQLite is not client/server, however. The SQLite database runs in the same process address space as the application. Queries do not involve message round-trips, only a function call. The latency of a single SQL query is far less in SQLite. Hence, using a large number of queries with SQLite is not the problem.
‘I’m very stupid’: SF tech founder jailed in Davos for bomb-lookalike device
https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/22/tech-dude-davos-bomb-lookalike-device/
Sebastian Heyneman, a Rincon Hill resident, has worked at Asana, Notion, and 11x in data and product roles. He traveled to Davos on Thursday, hoping to pitch an anti-fraud hardware device to the global elite attending the forum. After leaving the prototype unattended in the lobby of the Grandhotel Belvédère, Heyneman found himself detained by Swiss authorities for 13 hours, having his fingerprints checked against a database of international spies.
Codeless: From idea to software - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/22/codeless/
There’s finally been a big leap forward in coding tech unlocked by AI — not just “it’s doing some work for me”, but “we couldn’t do this before”. What’s new are a few smart systems that let coders control fleets of dozens of coding bots, all working in tandem, to swarm over a list of tasks and to deliver entire features, or even entire sets of features, just from a plain-English description of the strategic goal to be accomplished.
Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc_ai_ceo_survey/
Despite the CEOs' repsonses, PwC concludes more investment is required. It claims that "isolated, tactical AI projects" often don't deliver measurable value, and that tangible returns instead come from enterprise-wide deployments consistent with business strategy.
Slop doesn’t slop itself.
https://brilliantcrank.com/slop-doesnt-slop-itself/?ref=brilliantcrank-newsletter
Slop is the result of humans actively deciding to take shortcuts and being okay with the shittastic results. If people genuinely put forth the effort to avoid digital distractions and actually create and make—not as a lifestyle hack, but simple decision making—then we’d have a much better place to live and work. Slop is deliberate, not inevitable.
gaul/s3proxy: Access other storage backends via the S3 API
https://github.com/gaul/s3proxy
Access other storage backends via the S3 API
Radicle: the sovereign forge
https://radicle.xyz/
Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow.
rustfs/rustfs: 🚀2.3x faster than MinIO for 4KB object payloads. RustFS is an open-source, S3-compatible high-performance object storage system supporting migration and coexistence with other S3-compatible platforms such as MinIO and Ceph.
https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs
🚀2.3x faster than MinIO for 4KB object payloads. RustFS is an open-source, S3-compatible high-performance object storage system supporting migration and coexistence with other S3-compatible platforms such as MinIO and Ceph.
seaweedfs/seaweedfs: SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, xDC replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding. Enterprise version is at seaweedfs.com.
https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/
SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, xDC replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding. Enterprise version is at seaweedfs.com.
Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
https://rmoff.net/2026/01/14/alternatives-to-minio-for-single-node-local-s3/
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3 compatibility.
In this blog post I’m going to look at some alternatives to MinIO.
The identity industrialists - DesignObserver
https://designobserver.com/the-identity-industrialists/?utm_source=orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=minimum-viable-newsletter
There’s a new kind of power emerging in culture: the identity industrialist. Not a filmmaker, not a technologist, not a marketer, but a person who manufactures human beings the way earlier generations manufactured steel, automobiles, or celebrities. They don’t manage talent; they produce it. And their raw material isn’t silicone or code but identity itself.
fosrl/pangolin: Identity-aware VPN and proxy for remote access to anything, anywhere.
https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
Identity-aware VPN and proxy for remote access to anything, anywhere.
shellsharks Scrolls RSS Feed
https://shellsharks.com/feeds/scroll-feed.xml
The Zurich protocol
https://werd.io/the-zurich-protocol/
They lined up the editors first, zip tying their hands together and leading them into vans downstairs. Then they began to gather the rest of the journalists. Laptops were gathered from desks. The server room, such as it was in the wake of zero trust and enterprise cloud services, had its door kicked in, switches and rack servers ripped out of their frames. One IT support engineer objected and found a gun in his face, the safety off, its owner ready to make them into an example.
My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/11/answers/#atom-everything
What’s important here is making it very clear to potential users what they should expect from that software. I’ve started publishing my AI-generated and not 100% reviewed libraries as alphas, which I’m tentatively thinking of as “alpha slop”. I’ll take the alpha label off once I’ve used them in production to the point that I’m willing to stake my reputation on them being decent implementations, and I’ll ship a 1.0 version when I’m confident that they are a solid bet for other people to depend on. I think that’s the responsible way to handle this.
Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/news
So, we're still doing this, huh? - Portland Mercury
https://www.portlandmercury.com/i-anonymous/2026/01/13/48252682/so-were-still-doing-this-huh
This whole "talk about politics on the internet" as if it makes a difference thing? We're still doing this? We think the things we say on the internet matter to literally anyone? We think if we craft the perfect anti-Trump argument, maybe one person will change their mind? I mean listen, go ahead. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. I'm just saying it's worse than internet porn. Because at least with internet porn, you eventually achieve end goal with that.
Postal Arbitrage
https://walzr.com/postal-arbitrage
As of 2025, a stamp for a letter costs $0.78 in the United States. Amazon Prime sells items for less than that... with free shipping! Why send a postcard when you can send actual stuff?
I absolutely LOVE woodworking
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/i-absolutely-love-woodworking/
I've been a homeowner for about 20 years, and in that time I picked up a handful of DIY skills, but my work was always sloppy due to my limited experience. I was envious of uncles or neighbors with garages who could build or fix virtually anything as it seemed like having a superpower, like the kid in school who could solve any Rubik's cube.
How to Make a Damn Website
https://lmnt.me/blog/how-to-make-a-damn-website.html
A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype - <antirez>
https://antirez.com/news/158
It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too). It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. It does not matter if this or the other CEO of some unicorn is telling you something that is off putting, or absurd. Programming changed forever, anyway.
How to know if that job will crush your soul - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/12/will-that-job-crush-your-soul/
Last week, we talked about one huge question, “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” That’s pretty specific to this current moment, but there are some timeless, more perennial questions I've been sharing with friends for years that I wanted to give to all of you. They're a short list of questions that help you judge whether a job that you’re considering is going to crush your soul or not.
The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/silicon_shield_versus_silicon_winter/
American doctrine here, as far as such a thing exists, is to reduce its fab yields to zero by using 2,000 lb kinetic contaminants via the B-2 bomber deposition process to turn them back into the sand from whence they came. This would destroy more than half the world's silicon supply and almost all of the latest circuits that drive the most active sectors in IT. It would take ten years to rebuild, assuming that this could even be done with the revenue taps turned off, the world economy in massive recession, and infrastructure scattered to the winds.
Scenes from O’Reilly ETCon 2002 : Global Nerdy
https://www.globalnerdy.com/2026/01/11/scenes-from-oreilly-etcon-2002/
This little trove of photos is entirely Anil Dash’s fault. He recently made a blog post titled How Markdown Took Over the World with a “hero image” featuring a 2002-era iMac setup — the G4 model, which Jony Ive described as the answer to the question “What computer would the Jetsons have had?”
Humanizing AI Is a Trap - NN/G
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/humanizing-ai/?ref=sidebar
Artificial intelligence can improve user experiences and solve problems without being human-like. Modern LLMs are naturally humanizing technologies because of their training, but organizations should recognize this trait and avoid emphasizing it through extra design choices. Even practitioners without control over base models can focus on system prompts that reduce sycophancy, evaluation criteria that prioritize accuracy over engagement, and interface decisions that emphasize usefulness over artificial friendship. Teams should create AI as practical tools, focusing on usability and utility rather than artificial personalities.
The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – no.heger
https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe/
So in the end, the most reliable way to resize a window in Tahoe is to grab it outside the corner – a gesture that feels unnatural and unintuitive, and is therefore inevitably error-prone.
A Software Library with No Code
https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a-software-library-with-no-code.html
But like I said: the whenwords library contains no code. Instead, whenwords contains specs and tests, specifically:
SPEC.md: A detailed description of how the library should behave and how it should be implemented.
tests.yaml: A list of language-agnostic test cases, defined as input/output pairs, that any implementation must pass.
INSTALL.md: Instructions for building whenwords, for you, the human.
The installation instructions are comically simple, just a prompt to paste into Claude, Codex, Cursor, whatever.
Resources for the Personal Web: A Follow-Up Guide · brennan.day
https://brennan.day/resources-for-the-personal-web-a-follow-up-guide/
We must find moments of joy in the horror of our present. Joy is not a prize for getting through it all—joy is a tool that enables us to get through the horror. Our joy is an act of resistance.
The independent web is already here, quietly thriving while Big Tech implodes under its own extractive weight. All you have to do is join it.
ChatGPT as a Digital Wellbeing Tool
https://riggraz.dev/chatgpt-digital-wellbeing.html
In general, ChatGPT with web search can mitigate the problem of the modern web: annoying cookie consents, pages overoptimized for SEO where relevant information is only a fraction of the overall content, pop-ups, advertisements, unnecessarily slow to load websites, and so on. Finally, we can focus on the content instead of employing 99% of our brain resources wrestling against all that mess.
So, I advocate that ChatGPT with web search (or any LLM equipped with web search functionality) can be a new way to interact with the web, a sort of new UI for the web. And it’s a UI that respects users’ sense of agency and time more than most websites do. In this sense, ChatGPT can be seen as a digital wellbeing tool.
Host your own webmention receiver | Brain Baking
https://brainbaking.com/post/2021/05/beyond-webmention-io/
Yesterday’s “Webmentions Beyond Webmention.io” IndieWeb event (see notes) exposed a problem: many bloggers exploring the IndieWeb and Webmention world simply make use of webmention.io, a hosted solution that handles receiving mentions, enabling you to treat the whole system as a black box. Aaron wondered: “why are so many people using webmention.io?” - and the answer is quite obvious: because it’s easy. Just add <link rel="webmention href="https://webmention.io/something"> to your HTML header after signing up and you’re done.
aaronpk/indielogin.com: Sign in with your domain name
https://github.com/aaronpk/IndieLogin.com
IndieLogin enables users to sign in with their domain name by linking their domain name to existing authentication providers.
Various ways to include comments on your static site
https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
Static site generators like Eleventy, Jekyll or Hugo have become a popular choice for a blogging platform or a CMS. When using something like WordPress or Medium, you get a comment section out of the box. It isn't as straightforward in a static environment. In this article, I'll summarize different options to provide your audience with a way to leave a comment.
A Quick Guide to Everything I Know about Webmentions
https://reillyspitzfaden.com/wiki/tutorials/webmention-tutorial/
Webmentions are great! They're a way that personal websites can interact with each other — you can notify another site when you link to them, and receive notifications when someone links to you. I find them to allow for some of the nicer parts of social interaction on the web, but with much more agency and much less inflammatory or harmful material than something like Facebook or Instagram. However, then can also be a bit intimidating, especially for non-developers.
EchoFeed - Cross post your RSS feed to Mastodon, Bluesky, Micro.blog, Discord, and more!
https://echofeed.app/
It supports reading RSS & Atom & JSON feeds and then posting those items to Mastodon & Micro.blog & Bluesky & GitHub & Discord & LinkAce & LinkDing. Or it can send them as Webmentions & Webhooks.
aaronpk/webmention.io: Easily enable webmentions on any web site
https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io#api
Easily enable webmentions on any web site
What the World Got Wrong About Autistic People | Psychology Today
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/positively-different/202601/what-the-world-got-wrong-about-autistic-people
Prejudice is one reason decades of research got autism so wrong. Researchers measured autistic people against neurotypical expectations and called every difference a deficit. They tested empathy by measuring in-group preference and missed commitment to universal fairness. They measured creativity by counting the number of ideas and missed originality. They saw moral consistency and called it rigidity. They saw deep engagement and called it rigidity. They saw sensory richness and called it disorder.
EmNudge/watlings: Learn WebAssembly by writing small programs!
https://github.com/EmNudge/watlings
Learn the WebAssembly Text Format
by fixing a bunch of small programs!
What Happened To WebAssembly
https://emnudge.dev/blog/what-happened-to-webassembly/
On every WebAssembly discussion, there is inevitably one comment (often near the top) asking what happened.
It seems to have been advertised as a world-changing advancement. Was it just oversold? Was it another JVM applet scenario, doomed to fail?
How Markdown took over the world - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/
But the truth is, most people today who make technology are actually still exceedingly normal, and quite generous. It’s just that they’ve been overshadowed by their bosses who are out of their minds and building rocket ships and siring hundreds of children and embracing overt white supremacy instead of making fun tools for helping you type text, like regular people do.
Relax for the same result | Derek Sivers
https://sive.rs/relax
So apparently all of that exhausting, red-faced, full-on push-push-push I had been doing had given me only a 4 percent boost. I could just take it easy and get 96 percent of the results.
A field guide to sandboxes for AI
https://www.luiscardoso.dev/blog/sandboxes-for-ai
Years ago I first learned this lesson doing basic malware analysis. The mental model was blunt but effective: run hostile code in something you can delete. If it breaks out, you nuke it.
Software craftsmanship is dead
https://www.pcloadletter.dev/blog/craftsmanship-is-dead/
I feel like it's been forever since I had a conversation about craftsmanship on the job. It's possible I have just found myself in the wrong places time and time again.
Or maybe, and this is something I really fear, maybe the people who truly focus on the craft of software engineering are retiring or getting run off.
Welcome Back to the Office. You Won’t Get Anything Done | The Walrus
https://thewalrus.ca/return-to-office-mandates/
Employers are so terrified at the prospect of their employees not working or thinking about work that they would risk cutting into their profit margins. Perhaps they are right to be afraid. If people weren’t locked up in offices for eight to ten hours a day, they might have time to take care of themselves. They might have time to reflect on whether their jobs actually bring them happiness or contribute meaningfully to the world. They might have time to discover other ways of experiencing pleasure beyond the fleeting dopamine hits occasioned by retail therapy. Instead of buying things to fill the voids in their lives, they might make art, they might experiment sexually, they might organize a protest, they might read a book, or they might spend time caramelizing onions for a leisurely dinner with their friends—and God, what a frightful world that would be.
Keynote: The Death of the Browser - Rachel-Lee Nabors, AgentQL - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pznpsgZqlGQ
In ten years, Internet Browsers may be a nostalgic memory. As enterprises face mounting API costs and integration headaches, a new paradigm is emerging. The internet's evolution from an open highway into a maze of walled gardens and monetized APIs has created significant challenges for businesses—but it has also set the stage for accessing and organizing the world’s information.
This lightning talk traces our journey from the invention of the browser to the arms race of scraping for data and access to it to the dawn of AI agents, showing how the challenges of today opened the door to tomorrow. See how technologies refined by the web scraping community are combining with large language models to create practical alternatives to costly API integrations.
From the rise of platform monopolies to the emergence of AI agents, this timeline-based exploration will help you understand where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading. Join us for a glimpse of how AI agents are enabling a return to the era of free information with ""the web as the API.
The Agentic Web
https://agenticweb.nearestnabors.com//feed
Don’t feel bad; even the inventor of the term “vibe coding” is overwhelmed by all the AI-driven changes : Global Nerdy
https://www.globalnerdy.com/2026/01/04/dont-feel-bad-even-the-inventor-of-the-term-vibe-coding-is-overwhelmed-by-all-the-ai-driven-changes/
Karpathy’s post came at the end of 2025, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it — in the form of a “battle plan” for how I’m going to approach AI in 2026.
How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? - Anil Dash
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a-tech-career-in-2026/
A lot of us still care about things like the potential for technology to help people, or still believe in the idealistic and positive goals that got us into our careers in the first place. We weren’t wrong, or naive, or foolish to aspire to those goals simply because some bad actors sought to undermine them. And it’s okay to feel frustrated or scared in a time when it seems to many like those goals could be further away than they’ve been in a long time.
2025: The year in LLMs
https://werd.io/2025-the-year-in-llms/
I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away. (This is not to say that there aren’t many issues with AI aside from these things, of course.)
The rise of AI denialism - Big Think
https://bigthink.com/the-present/the-rise-of-ai-denialism/
In other words, we are not watching a bubble expand with blustery vapors. We are watching a planet form from churning magma, and it will solidify into a new framework for society. Denial will only make us unprepared. This is not an AI bubble. This is real.
AddyOsmani.com - My LLM coding workflow going into 2026
https://addyosmani.com/blog/ai-coding-workflow/
AI coding assistants became game-changers in 2025, but harnessing them effectively takes skill and structure. These tools dramatically increased what LLMs can do for real-world coding, and many developers (myself included) embraced them.
How I rebooted my social life - by James O'Malley
https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/this-might-be-oversharing
So what good is there in being a part of a community? It seems almost too obvious to say. I could talk about how there are practical advantages in terms of mutual support. I could point to how communities are engines of trust, which we need for society to function. Or I could recognise how community bestows a sense of belonging or identity as we float through an empty, meaningless, godless, universe.
But this would hardly be revelatory.
Web development is fun again
https://ma.ttias.be/web-development-is-fun-again/
It’s also not the typing of code that I really enjoy, nor is it the syntax or structure or boilerplate that’s required to build anything. It’s the fact you get to build something out of nothing, writing code was just how you got there. And with today’s tooling, that saves a ton of time.
AI really has made web development fun again.
Brandawg93/PeaNUT: A tiny dashboard for Network UPS Tools
https://github.com/Brandawg93/PeaNUT
A tiny dashboard for Network UPS Tools
gluetun-wiki/setup/port-mapping.md at main · qdm12/gluetun-wiki
https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/port-mapping.md
You can access ports of containers connected to gluetun by port mapping ports on the gluetun container.
For example, to access port 9000 of container xyz connected to Gluetun, publish port 9000:9000 for the Gluetun container and access it at localhost:9000.
qdm12/gluetun: VPN client in a thin Docker container for multiple VPN providers, written in Go, and using OpenVPN or Wireguard, DNS over TLS, with a few proxy servers built-in.
https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun
VPN client in a thin Docker container for multiple VPN providers, written in Go, and using OpenVPN or Wireguard, DNS over TLS, with a few proxy servers built-in.
bernardko/mullvad-proxy: Mullvad VPN docker container providing a HTTP and SOCKS5 Proxy
https://github.com/bernardko/mullvad-proxy
Mullvad VPN docker container providing a HTTP and SOCKS5 Proxy
qbittorrent/docker-qbittorrent-nox: Official qbittorrent-nox docker image
https://github.com/qbittorrent/docker-qbittorrent-nox?tab=readme-ov-file
Official qbittorrent-nox docker image
Walking Pad Maintenance & Repair
https://ocdevel.com/walk/guide/maintenance
Walking pads require maintenance. This includes de-dusting the motor chamber, lubricating the belt and deck, adjusting belt tightness and alignment, cleaning and eventually replacing the drive belt. Failure to keep up results in loud noises, jerky motion, and burning smells.
Warframe Mandascore
https://buff0000n.github.io/mandascore/
This is an app for viewing and editing Mandachord songs.
The main motivation was to provide a way to be able to copy my songs into the game without having to pause a video. But while I was at it I went ahead and made it a full blown editor.
Adventure 751 (1980) | Renga in Blue
https://bluerenga.blog/2026/01/01/adventure-751-1980/
Adventure 751 has been, by my reckoning, the most sought-after variation of Crowther/Woods Adventure. It was generally available on the online portal CompuServe from nearly the beginning of the service and it disappeared when they shut down their games in the 90s. Arthur O’Dwyer started a web page in 2012 (with semi-regular updates!) dedicated to hunting down a copy.
To finish off a wild 2025 in game preservation, Arthur O’Dwyer announced the game has been found (by LanHawk, a regular amongst the comments here) and is playable.