Matt Glassman on influencing politics (by talking with policymakers). Liked this.

Rob Henderson on how he reads. Also see James Marriott’s similar post. I love these kinds of posts.

L. M. Sacasas on reading as counter-practice. “By counter-practice, I mean a deliberately chosen discipline that can form us in ways that run counter to the default settings of our techno-social milieu.”

Hollie on commonplace books. I’m trying to do more of this when I’m reading. (Normally I just read and don’t take notes.)

Sebastian Pagel’s Termcraft, a 2D sandbox survival game in the terminal. Wow.

Ibrahim Diallo on being comfortable modifying hardware to meet your needs. “If you own a tool, whether it’s a car, a computer, or a line of code, you own the right to change it. The manufacturer designed it for the ‘average’ user, but you are a specific human with specific needs.” I don’t think I’m comfortable filing down the edges of my MacBook (at least in part because I might want to trade it in eventually), but the mentality here is still good to remember.

The No CSS Club. Fun! So much nostalgia. While I don’t think I’m realistically going to join the club, lately I’ve been itching to scale back the amount of CSS on this site, to go as minimal as possible while still being something I’m happy with. We’ll see!

David at Raptitude on how social media is the opposite of social life. “This is because social media doesn’t really allow you to interact with people. People are living beings with beating hearts and live emotions. Social life has always been about engaging in the immediate physical presence of such beings. Social media avoids exactly that part, while allowing you to exchange information and symbols of approval.” Yep. I don’t regret leaving social media behind.

Chris Ferdinandi on the anti-work movement. “But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.”

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Isaac Kolding on how reading is good for you and how it expands your effective freedom. I also enjoyed the post on inefficient books and very much agree.

BDM on how sometimes books are hard to read. “Being easy to read is not the only virtue a book must possess to be enjoyable. If something is not easy to read, that is not a sign that the reader is stupid. Sometimes it is the knowledge that you will need to return to a text over and over that forms the basis of your enjoyment. You are encountering something that cannot be grasped in a single experience.”

Mat Marquis on the end of responsive images. “I’ve been waiting for fourteen years to write this article. Fourteen years to tell you about one relatively new addition to the way images work on the web. For you, just a handful of characters will mean improvements to the fundamental ergonomics of working with images. For users, it will mean invisible, seamless, and potentially massive improvements to front-end performance, forever stitched into the fabric of the web. For me, it means the time has finally come to confess to my sinister machinations — a confession almost a decade and a half in the making.” A fun read.

Sal on cleaning scratches off ceramic dinnerware. I did not know this was possible.

Justin Parpan on painting loose at first. Also enjoyed the post on thinking about texture.

Marco on putting custom firmware on the Xteink X4. I haven’t gotten 0ne yet but it’s getting more and more tempting. (Mostly because of the size, I think. And the weight — 74 grams! My phone is 171 grams, for comparison.)

Ben introduces Bubbles Briefing, a finite-edition blog aggregator. I’ve been subscribed for the past week or two and have found the form factor to be nice.

JTR on writing emails to other bloggers. I need to do more of this.

Jim Grey on how your blog is like a radio station. “Every time you publish a post, you are programming your station. You are choosing what goes into rotation. Some post types are your familiars, the topics and themes readers already associate with you. Some are deeper cuts, things that matter to you but may not matter to everyone. Some are experiments, signals sent into the dark to see if anyone recognizes them.”

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Craig Mod on the MacBook Neo and the iPad. Yes, this. I rarely use my iPad these days but could see myself doing so if iPadOS were a better fit for the device.

David Aerne’s Charcuterie, a cool visual Unicode explorer.

ReadBeanIceCream on serving up text files instead of HTML for websites. While I kind of love this delightfully retro idea, the lack of clickable links does make the UX a bit onerous. If you used a browser that automatically linkified URLs, though, then it would work, I think. But at that point you may as well just use the Gemini protocol instead.

John Gruber on how to format ten-digit phone numbers. Hyphens all the way.

Pinery, a macOS app for making ebooks (EPUB and PDF). I haven’t used it, but it looks like it could be nice.

Benjamin Breen on the handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations, with some lovely work from William James’s books among others.

Screen Wake Lock API. Had no idea this existed. At the moment it doesn’t work on iOS, though, which is sad. (I want to use it in Scroll, my ebook reader.) Hopefully someday!

Attic, a command-line tool for backing your iCloud Photos up to S3. I don’t use iCloud Photos because I want to have my own copy of the files, but with this maybe it’s now worth looking into.

The making of iA Notebook (video). Enjoyed this. The notebook itself looks very nice, but oof, that price tag. $79 would get you around fifteen Field Notes notebooks (from the National Parks set, naturally), 720 pages altogether. Even though I know the comparison isn’t fair, still I find I’d rather have the Field Notes.

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Adam Singer with more evidence that short-form video rots your brain. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Kyle Orland on AI use leading to cognitive surrender. “Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time.” Another reason to steer clear of AI.

Jim Nielsen on skill issues and human-centered design. “Whereas a human-centered approach flips that: the technology exists to serve people as they actually are, not as we wish them to be. Confusion is allowed to be seen as a design failure, not a user failure.”

Ink & Switch’s dither explorer. Cool.

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Teddy Macker on David W. Orr and a healing vision for America. This was so, so good. Highly recommended. This quote from Orr at the beginning sets the tone: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”

Matt Glassman on how you should invite people over to your home regularly. This is good advice.

Han Lee on the AI Great Leap Forward. This really resonated. I really do not like AI mandates.

Becca Rothfeld on how you don’t have to use AI. “I am saying that the bar for using AI for anything, even something stupid and mindless, should be extraordinarily high.”

Henry Oliver’s post of someone else’s comment about teaching poetry to Latter-day Saint students raised on the KJV.

Christopher Drum on CAD-3D on the Atari ST. Particularly liked the parts about friction and UI density.

David Cain on enjoying things on purpose.

kqr on slide rules for kitchen measurements. After reading this, I ordered a slide rule. (Still need to learn how to use it, though.)

Photonist on documentary photography in the age of AI. This feels more human to me.

Elisa Gabbert on the essay as realm.

Ross Barkan on fiction and AI.

James O’Sullivan on writing with AI. “If you need a large language model to write, you are not a writer.”

Aubrey Hirsch’s comic on ChatGPT dads. Ha.

Alan Jacobs on redistributing your media portfolio (going analog, mainly).

Open Printer, “an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair. You can print on standard sheets or paper rolls and choose between black or color cartridges, refillable at your convenience.” Cool.

W. Evan Sheehan on LLM-generated code in Neovim.

Niels Leenheer wrote a DOOM with CSS. Wow.

Analog cameras that can be 3D printed.

Alex Chan’s personalized garbage collection calendar via a Python script.

Frank Elavsky on why people should stop saying AI is just a tool. Yep. His post on prototyping is also good.

Lisette, a little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go.

Heerich.js, a tiny engine for 3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG.

Playbit Runtime, an interesting “runtime designed for highly dynamic graphical apps that are collaborative, with a really good set of developer tools.”

Den Odell on Pretext, that shiny new text layout JS library.

Tracy Durnell on personalized computing and agentic AI.

Audrey Watters on AI. “The future that the vast majority of people want – for themselves, for their children – is not one in which we can only afford to buy digital replicas of products and digital real estate (Facebook board member Marc Andreessen has been quite explicit about this goal) because everything that’s actually real is only accessible to the rich; where we’re all yanked around by algorithms; where there are no jobs; where there is no art, only slop; where there is no green space, no wilderness, no water because the planet is covered in the data centers that power this destruction.”

Sharif Shameem on how willingness to look stupid is a moat in creative work.

Matthias Ott on AI and the shape of friction.

Christopher Butler on making art by hand.

Brian Leli on how LLMs are antithetical to writing and humanity.

Pavel Laptev on shiny new CSS features.

ReadBeanIceCream’s plain text kanban reading board.

Cory Doctorow on AI psychoses.

Audrey Watters on AI again.

Marcin Wichary on AI autocomplete suggestions.

Jonas Hietala on one-bag travel for work.

Hyperwood, open source furniture.

Alexander Petros on how XML is a cheap DSL.

Lisa Charlotte Muth on moving all her content back onto her site.

Scott Smitelli on generative AI.

Sean Boots on generative AI vegetarianism.

zkbro on slowing down.

Marcin Wichary on web haptics on iOS.

Ada Palmer on why all science fiction and fantasy writers are historians.

Lev Grossman from 2014 on getting to the halfway point in NaNoWriMo.

Michael Uloth on switching configs for Neovim.

Rusty Foster on how AI isn’t people.

Robin Rendle on how the world is still so full of dinosaurs.

Marcin Wichary on Lotus 1-2-3 and two-line menubars.

Lyra on how you no longer need JavaScript for a lot of things.

Matthias Ott on LLM bots scraping the web incessantly. I’ve run into this as well. Ugh.

Dave Gauer on the love of programming (in the face of AI). This resonated.

A post on holding on to your hardware since the AI data centers could very well make it hard to get in the future.

Mandy Brown on specialists.

Scott on Gopher. Ah, nostalgia.

Halvor William Sanden on anti-intellectual tech.

Marcus Hutchins on the reasons he hates AI.

Bret Victor on AI. “If we take ‘AI’ to mean the current trend of deep-learning models trained on large datasets, there are a number of ways in which these techniques are incompatible with our values.”

Eliot on Henyapente and binary biology in the Gameboy OS.

An HTML quine. Also see Markdown CSS.

Rich Hickey on AI.

Matt Sephton’s WebGL CRT shader.

Matthew Walther on reading one hundred pages a day.

Oliver Burkeman on the power of immediacy.

Jim Nielsen on the anchor element’s href attribute.

Virginia Postrel on libraries of matter.

Fontquant, a tool to quantify what fonts can do.

Whew!

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Brad East on how AI changes us. “The relevant questions to ask about AI and any and all usage of the variety of tools that go under its name are moral, theological, and formational. What kind of person is it likely to make me to be? What virtues or vices will it develop or diminish? In what ways is it likely to expand and enrich my (our) humanity—the good life—and in what ways is it unlikely to do so?” An angle I haven’t seen mentioned nearly enough.

John Scalzi’s thoughts on AI. Liked this.

Juha-Matti Santala on having different notebook sizes for different ideas. I like this. Lately I’ve been all-in on Field Notes, but I still have other sizes of notebooks (including other sizes of Field Notes) and have been trying to figure out how I want to use them.

Maxime Heckel on halftone shaders. Fun.

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Bob Nystrom on knitting. “Let’s say that, like me, you are a person who stares at a computer and writes code for a living. As a straight male who grew up in a time where knitting was very strongly female coded, it for the most part never occurred to me that knitting was a thing I could do and might enjoy. Regardless of your demographic categories and background, it’s possible that you have also not really considered knitting. This article exists to get you to do so. Specifically, I’ll try to convince you, one software person to another, why it might be a good fit for your life and brain. This is a pitch for knitting, but—for better or worse—an extremely nerdily argued one.” I read this, promptly bought a needle and yarn, and spent an hour learning how to knit. (Have I done anything with it since then? Um, no. But someday soon I hope to get back into it.)

Henrik Karlsson on political power and Robert A. Caro’s books. “But Caro’s subjects are willing to do anything to win, so they will, so to speak, pump fracking fluid into the ground. They will press it into every little crevice, forcing drops of power mixed with sand to the surface. And as it turns out, if you extract all the small things and pool them together, it can be a massive reserve of power, indeed.”

Marcin Wichary on Flickr’s URL scheme, which had a strong influence on me back in the day.

Wm Morris on the current opportunity for Latter-day Saint writers. “There are pockets of interesting Mormon culture happening everywhere. And the lack of a true center for it limits material resources and access to audience, but also liberates artists from the slim hope of wide acclaim and the imprimatur of respectability.” I found this inspiring.

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Jason Gorman on how coding is not necessarily the most productive part. This line especially resonated with me: “And if we’re producing code faster than we can validate it — either by exploring the problem ourselves, or learning from user feedback if our release cycles are fast enough — then we’re piling assumptions on top of assumptions.”

Jeremy Keith on frontend libraries and frameworks and LLMs. “Is it really all that different? With npm you dialled up other people’s code directly. With large language models, they first slurp up everyone’s code (like, the whole World Wide Web), run a computationally expensive process of tokenisation, and then give you the bit you need when you need it. In a way, large language model coding tools are like a turbo-charged npm with even more layers of abstraction.”

Marcin Wichary on Roger Wong’s post about Anthropic’s findings that using AI to write software seems to lead to less understanding of the code. Which makes sense, at least to me.

Elizabeth Goodspeed on analogue creative work. “As a longtime fan of all things analogue, I should be thrilled. There have always been contemporary artists committed to doggedly tactile work – more of them would be even better! But when I look closely at much of the purportedly handmade work floating around these trend reports, I can’t help but wonder how much of it is made by hand at all.” I don’t try to pass my digital art off as being actually handmade, but trying to make digital pieces look analogue? Guilty. Very guilty. For me it’s been a matter of convenience and familiarity and back pain, but more and more I find myself wanting to make real things instead, physical things. Maybe 2026 will be the year where I finally make the leap. Also, I love Goodspeed’s “doggedly tactile” phrase, which I’m taking as a reminder that making things by hand is good, hard work.

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Scott Shambaugh on how an AI agent blogged a hit piece on him after he turned down a matplotlib pull request from the agent. Apparently innocuous intentions aside, I worry how much damage and chaos these agents are going to cause across the internet.

Sophie Koonin on AI-generated code. “As I see more and more people generating code instead of writing it, I find myself wondering why engineers are so ready and willing to do away with one of the good bits of our jobs (coding) and leave themselves with the boring bit (reviews).”

Secrets of Privacy on ads in AI chatbots. Disturbing. Yet another reason to avoid LLMs.

Joe Crawford on how we’re in a web renaissance now. And it’s a wonderful thing. Visiting people’s personal websites is, for me, so much more delightful than social networks ever were.

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Raptitude on covering your twenty-five miles and then resting up. I read this and liked it a lot — this is how you do big things — and then some time later as I was nearing the end of War and Peace I came across the original passage, which was fun.

James Brown on what makes programming great. Liked this.

Matheus Lima on life happening at 1x speed. While I think this is good advice — efficiency often has downsides, and slowing down can enhance the quality of one’s experience — I do also think some things can be consumed at a slightly faster clip without lossiness, and sometimes the qualitative changes that accompany the speed increase are worth it, at least in my experience with reading.

Alex Harri’s deep dive into rendering higher-quality ASCII art. Fun. Using the shape of the characters to effectively bump up the resolution seems so obvious in retrospect.

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