July 2026

59 bookmarks saved in July 2026

Apple Is the King of AI and Nobody Knows It

https://limitededitionjonathan.substack.com/p/apple-is-the-king-of-ai-and-nobody
But here’s my favorite piece of evidence, the tell I’d point to if I could only pick one: watch what NVIDIA sells now. The DGX Spark — Jensen’s new “personal AI supercomputer” for your desk — is a small quiet box with 128GB of unified memory shared between CPU and GPU. Sound familiar? It’s a Mac Studio. NVIDIA, the company whose entire empire is built on discrete GPUs with discrete VRAM in centralized racks, is now shipping Apple’s architecture, at Apple’s form factor, aimed at Apple’s use case — and even Jensen has started musing that “an AI supercomputer could become common in the home,” name-checking Apple’s M-series as laying the groundwork. The king of the datacenter is hedging into my thesis with his own product line. When your opponent starts copying your homework mid-argument, the argument is over.

The Lost Joy of Music Piracy: WhatCD, Oink, and Spotify | Pigeons and Planes

https://www.pigeonsandplanes.com/read/music-piracy-what-cd-oink-nine-inch-nails-streaming?ref=sidebar
At its core, What.CD was much more than a torrent tracker—it was a community of dedicated music fans volunteering their time, effort, and knowledge to create a labor of love. While the internet has opened up new doors for musicians, the increasing corporatization and algorithmic takeover of online spaces has done irreparable damage to organic music discovery and independent communities. Rather than bringing about the financial stability that was supposedly impeded by piracy, the recording industry has offered meager artist payouts and a product with a sterilized user interface. Nearly ten years since their unexpected goodbye, the magical feeling of logging in to What.CD has yet to be replicated by any streaming service. Though my days of stealing music are well in the past, it’s clear that musicians are still being stolen from.

A perfect mix of 3D printing and woodworking

https://a.wholelottanothing.org/a-perfect-mix-of-3d-printing-and-woodworking/?ref=a-whole-lotta-nothing-newsletter
I love that this might be the last crosscut sled I may ever need to build, because I can replace all the parts that get chewed up over time by saw blades. And I love that this guy from YouTube or other woodworkers might dream up any number of entirely new jigs that I could also plop into the sled someday.

Anyone Can Build - Stuart Parmenter

https://stuartp.org/p/anyone-can-build
That, I’ve come to think, is the sharpest frame available for what AI is doing to software. Anyone can build now. That is not the same as everyone building something that lasts. The distance between those two sentences is the subject of this essay.

The Therapist Pattern — Massively Parallel Procrastination

https://blog.fsck.com/2026/07/20/the-therapist-pattern/
So, how does somebody work on themself in a safe, supportive environment with some level of external guidance and supervision? Yup. That sounds a lot like therapy. And agents know what it means to go to therapy and work on themselves. They know what to expect and how to engage. The Therapist is implemented as a standalone subagent inside Sen.

Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source | Microsoft Open Source Blog

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07/16/microsoft-comic-chat-is-now-open-source/
Today, we’re excited to announce the open-source release of Microsoft Comic Chat, the chat client that automatically turned conversations within Internet Relay Chat (IRC) into comic panels featuring illustrated characters, speech bubbles, and expressions, and helped introduce the world to a little font called Comic Sans.

It's OK to Use Coding Assistance Tools To Revive The Projects You Never Were Going To Finish

https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/its-ok-to-use-coding-assistance-tools-to-revive-the-projects-you-never-were-going-to-finish/
In my mind there are different buckets for personal projects. One is things I do to learn and grow and the other is things I really wish existed. [2] This kind of project falls into the second bucket. Using AI coding assist to reify those projects is sort of a form of wish fulfillment. I never would have gotten to it, but now I can have the project. One less metaphorical book sitting unread on bookshelf.

Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs – Dan Q

https://danq.me/2026/07/10/rescuing-7234-gifs/
I’ve talked about imagemaps before, but the essence of them is that you define areas of an image that, when clicked, hyperlink to different places. The most-common way of doing these was always client-side imagemaps, where the HTML code itself contained all of the coordinates and, crucially, the resulting destinations. But that’s not what kind of imagemap this is.

Dungeons and Dryers · thega.me.uk

https://thega.me.uk/2026/07/dungeons-and-dryers/
But last weekend, while I was running my monthly ‘Storm King’s Thunder’ D&D campaign, I asked one of the group to help me get the dryer down from the shelf. Immediately the group set to work removing the back panel and trying to figure out what was wrong with it, while still playing D&D.

</> htmx ~ Working With AI: A Concrete Example

https://htmx.org/essays/working-with-ai/
With respect to memory, while I can’t remember everything I used to be able to, I can understand things again very quickly with appropriate, er, prompting. AI is very good at helping me with this, and it lets me switch between open source projects and work projects much more efficiently than if I didn’t have it. With respect to the long hours, AI is able to grind in a way that, even as a young developer, I would have had a difficult time keeping up with. This means, for example, I can have a much more extensive test suite for my projects than I would have otherwise. Looking at the tests that Claude generated in this case, they are more extensive than what I probably could have mustered the energy to do myself. So AI has addressed two fundamental (relative) weaknesses I have developed as an older developer.

Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents

https://zeldman.com/2026/07/06/memories-cant-wait-or-how-i-learned-to-keep-worrying-about-the-web/
The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not just tenants. To plant things in soil we control, and to tend them. Because if we don’t, the only record that we were here will be someone else’s ad inventory, and when the ads move on, we’ll move with them—into the quiet, unmarked graveyard of the deleted.

World historic amounts of gamedev talent thrown out to rot – Laura Michet's Blog

https://blog.lauramichet.com/world-historic-amounts-of-gamedev-talent-thrown-out-to-rot/
There is a never-before-seen glut of experienced, highly senior talent just lying around right now, like cuts of meat someone threw out of the fridge to rot on the floor of the restaurant. Game dev teams don't get birthed as fully-formed agglomerations of talent... it takes years for them to come together as effective creative communities and start making material they can be proud of. So we're looking at an industry that's not only hemorrhaging talent, but also hemorrhaging the interpersonal trust and momentum you need to make good games.

The AI Hype Reckoning Is Upon Us

https://karlbode.com/the-ai-hype-reckoning-is-upon-us/
There's useful automation software that makes it easier to code, draft a new resume, or study vast repositories of scientific knowledge. And then there's a parade of technofascist hucksters lying to your face about the imminent arrival of omniscient, sentient, paradigm-rattling supercomputers. There's a tremendous chasm between these two things. And everywhere you look you can see evidence that we've reached a breaking point when it comes to reconciling these two wildly-different realities.

Introducing the Safari MCP server for web developers | WebKit

https://webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-server-for-web-developers/
In Safari Technology Preview 247, we’re introducing the Safari MCP server — a Model Context Protocol server for web developers that makes your web development and debugging workflow faster and more powerful. We know agents are increasingly integral to the coding process and the Safari MCP server gives your agent the ability to know how your code actually renders in the browser by connecting it to a Safari browser window.

Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For | Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one-tools-youve-been-looking
RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around. RSS has come in and out of fashion, been declared dead, and has come back, every time. Open systems are the best way forward to a free, equitable internet, and the resilience and continued reinvention of RSS has shown just how creative the web community can be with open protocols.

What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen? | The Reinvigorated Programmer

https://reprog.wordpress.com/2026/07/05/what-does-jeff-bezos-think-is-going-to-happen/
But of course I won’t buy a new Kindle, when this one is perfectly functional. I’ll just pirate the book that I have already paid for. I will find somewhere that I can download a non-DRM-crippled copy of the book, and put it on my device that I have also already paid for.

sneakerweb

https://sneakerweb.org/
The sneakerweb CLI lets you browse and maintain a local collection of sneakerwebsites. You can export your collection to a .snk file, you can import .snk files into your collection, and you can create new websites.

Magpie by ill omens

https://illomens.itch.io/magpie
Magpie is a visual livecoding tool made in Picotron. You can play with it online in the browser right here, download a binary to run on your computer, or load it up inside your Picotron OS via the BBS. You can use Magpie to make interesting visual effects, and then instantly execute it and show the results on the screen.

OpenTools / OpenPrinter

https://www.opentools.studio/
a repairable, compact, and robust printer designed to last. Fully repairable and equipped with a refillable ink system, it adapts to your needs while reducing your printing costs. Easy to maintain, it offers a sustainable, economical, and eco-friendly alternative to traditional printers.

Legibility of Effort · eieio.games

https://eieio.games/blog/legibility-of-effort/?ref=sidebar
So: Lots of work is easier because of LLMs, and Lots of heuristics we used to gauge effort are broken because of LLMs, so Conveying effort to others is harder because of LLMs And: “Someone spent time on this” is a proxy for “this is worth engaging with” and I appreciate projects that take a lot of effort and I like it when people appreciate that I spent effort on something But also: Making a good thing still requires making lots of decisions, and Making lots of decisions is still very hard, despite LLMs, so Making good things is still very hard As a creative technologist I’ve found this paralyzing. And as someone who loves novel internet projects I’ve found it frustrating. I’ve heard similar things from many of my friends.

Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/07/01/boffins-peg-narcissistic-leadership-as-the-real-driver-behind-return-to-office-demands/5264222
Ego-driven management also relies on the old factory mentality that holds that the best workers are the ones who arrive early, work late, and are seen hustling by the bosses. Putting in 80-hour workweeks may be necessary at a startup, but in most businesses, that's as stupid as measuring programmers' productivity by lines of code or, more recently, by how many AI tokens they use.