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Baby koalas rescued in wake of storm
Tech Stuff
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
The best way to learn LLMs is to play with them. Throwing absurd ideas at them and vibe-coding until they almost sort-of work is a genuinely useful way to accelerate the rate at which you build intuition for what works and what doesn't.
Did I mention that I'm really vibing with Claude Code? For code that I'm not too invested in, asking the LLM to write it is so much fun. I can always throw it out and ask the LLM to generate something else. And while the LLM is doing its magic, I can watch a YouTube video or play a game. And as it's getting better with every release I think vibe coding is going places.
prompting claude to build a sleep journal I can't guarantee this article won’t put you to sleep :)
I basically talk to Claude as though I was talking to myself, or to a colleague. That seems to help - at least it helps me frame questions/responses, and Claude seems to parse the nuances from that kind of prompt pretty well.
Is Cursor worth it for developers? Yes! "Everything you see here was done in just 6 hours! I vary rarely touched any code and all corrections and features were done through prompts in Cursor”
PostHog/posthog .cursorrules Love it! Posthog’s open source project includes their Cursor prompt.
Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it + limit of 800 locs
Not sure if LLMs know what they are for (lol), but doesn’t matter as a much as a fact that I can’t go through 800 locs. Anyone had similar issue? It’s really limiting at this point and I got here after just 1h of vibe coding
When Config Becomes the Code: The Trap of Over-Abstracting Logic
At a certain point, you’re not simplifying development — you’re just moving logic from one place to another.
And often, that “other place” has no syntax highlighting, no type safety, and zero version control.
Mem I'm always looking for something that's smarter than Notes yet lighter than Notion and less finicky than Craft (yeah, I tried each app for several months), so taking a turn back to good old Mem which at 2.0 is a significant improvement over 1.0. It’s not perfect, but so far better than the rest.
Notepad.js An offline-capable notepad PWA that's been operating for 9 years! Privacy-focused, full-screen mode, supports monospaced and dyslexic fonts, and more.
Presenterm Use Markdown to create presentations that you can run in the terminal.
Briskine A text expander for the Web — insert text templates with a shortcut. Works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and others, supports GMail, Outlook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Zendesk, and more. Free for individual use, $7/month if you're sharing templates with your team
Kristopher Johnson
“Do you have any plans to fix this bug?”
This bug that you are just now telling us about for the first time?
How to write exceptional documentation I wouldn't link to this article if it wasn't by itself a good piece of documentation on how to write better documentation.
Introducing Kadomaru A goal-tracking app. Super simple: just add an item, begin working on it by selecting the right eye, complete it by selecting the left eye, and burn all your completed goals whenever you’re ready. The process mimics that of real daruma, which are a type of Japanese doll.
Tresorit I'm not advocating for this service because I don't know much about it, but it does look like they take your security seriously and it's only $4.75/month for 50GB of encrypted storage:
Tresorit is designed to meet the needs of enterprise users and individuals alike, providing a secure environment for confidential files, allowing you to safeguard your data while enjoying convenient and file management with admin-friendly automation-features.
garry “do not turn off the bus.”
Why extracting data from PDFs is still a nightmare for data experts You might as well LLM your OCR:
This context-based approach enables these models to better handle complex layouts, interpret tables, and distinguish between document elements like headers, captions, and body text—all tasks that traditional OCR solutions struggle with.
Useful Uses of cat Kittens are adorable, but cats are useful … talking about the cat command:
Kopi Command-line journal for the coffee enthusiast: track coffee beans, equipment usage, brewing methods, and individual cups. There's no mobile app (because it’s a CLI) but you can write it down on a piece of paper, take a photo, and Kopi will LLM-OCR it for you!
Here is your duck! There’s a website that gives you a random photo of a duck (reload the page to get a new one) and it even has an API so you can incorporate the ever-changing-duck into your website, and also a duck photo for every HTTP status code (including 418).
Eye for Design
The EAS Framework for Simplifying Forms
Use the EAS framework — Eliminate first, Automate where possible, and Simplify what remains — to minimize user effort and improve form completion rates.
Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters Time for AX, not the affordable Armani Exchange, but the UX for AI Agents:
For all software companies, this shift demands a fundamental change in mindset: start consciously designing the AX of their products, or risk being replaced by tools that empowers their customers to harness the exponential power of seamlessly collaborating with agents.
As builders, we need to start focusing on AX or “agent experience” — the holistic experience AI Agents will have as the user of a product or platform.
The Shape of AI Exploring how patterns and experiences will change in a world driven by Artificial Intelligence.
Data Looks Better Naked Remove to Improve because data looks much better naked (data tables, bar charts, pie charts, choropleth maps).
Charmbar Lets you put anything you want on any icon in the dock.
Googly Eyes If you have someone sitting next to you watching as you do something on your computer, maybe scare them with this watchful pair of eyes?
Peoples
Stefan Bohacek
In 2019, Iceland became one of the first countries to approve a four-day workweek. Here's how things have been going for them.
2021: "Trials of a four-day week in Iceland were an "overwhelming success""
2024: "Iceland’s economy is outperforming most European peers after the nationwide introduction of a shorter working week with no loss in pay."
2025: "The effects of the shorter workweek in Iceland have extended far beyond the office."
Why Everyone Can (and Should) Be a Great Storyteller Speaking of writing:
The best products, designs, and ideas come from people who can clearly articulate their vision, regardless of their role. Here’s why writing matters—and how to be a storyteller who brings ideas to life.
seven39 I have no idea what this social media looks like because it won't open for another 6 hours — on seven39 you can only post between 7:39pm and 10:39pm EST — but I find the concept fascinating, like the happy hour of the neighborhood bar vibe.
Business Side
Startup-CTO-Handbook/StartupCTOHandbook.md Handbook covering leadership, management, and technical topics for leaders of software engineering teams. You can buy the print version or read through this Markdown file, which is about 1,900 paragraphs long.
Tim Bray
Substantial layoff at Google this morning, locations around the world. IT and helpdesk hit hard. To be fair, they’re hard-pressed, last quarter’s earnings a mere $26.54B, that’s a narrow 27.51% profit margin.
Apple’s Siri Chief Calls AI Delays Ugly and Embarrassing, Promises Fixes The thing is, once upon a time, Apple was the company that would under-promise and over-deliver, and that’s how they got a stellar reputation. The new Apple is doing the exact opposite of that. And that’s even though anyone with half a brain told them AI might not work and could not deliver on the promises. So Apple is stealing a powerful PR move (lie now, apologize later) out of the Microsoft playbook.
Stanford students used to chase jobs at Meta and Google. Now they want to work on defense Silicon Valley is going back to its roots as a Cold War weapons development laboratory:
At Stanford, building tech for the U.S. government is cool again. Students are dropping out to form defense tech startups and compete for coveted internships at government security agencies or major private contractors. Undergraduates, business school students, recent alumni now working in defense tech, and faculty show a booming interest in building war machines for the United States.
OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use OK. Speaking of unfettered access to copyrighted material, it’s not like OpenAI wants to repurpose your content to create their content, but also that sounds exactly like what they’re doing: Dave Eggers on OpenAI’s new creative writing bot: ‘A cheap party trick’
The story’s overabundance of metaphors, to name one literary crutch, felt like a mockery of a certain “writerly style,” Steinberg said. (The Standard asked ChatGPT to count the metaphors in the story; at first, it said 17, then at least 21 and, at most, 38.)
Machine Intelligence
People are just as bad as my LLMs Once you analyze the data, LLMs are on average not much different than your everyday person, and if you think LLMs make a lot of silly mistakes, did you not watch the election in the US?
Surprising? Ok, maybe not in retrospect. So what if humans who can’t distinguish two TTS voices have a bias toward the sample presented to them on the right hand side of the screen. Indeed, “preferring stuff on the right hand side” has even been studied.
Less is more: How ‘chain of draft’ could cut AI costs by 90% while improving performance The idea is to get LLMs to accurately solve reasoning problems with as few as 7.6% of the tokens usage of present day methods:
COD draws inspiration from how humans solve complex problems. Rather than articulating every detail when working through a math problem or logical puzzle, people typically jot down only essential information in abbreviated form.
Jason Lefkowitz
Annals of AI Slop: Halfway through, an article about psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) starts talking about how to upgrade Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) software
Manus I you want to understand how Agentic AI works, give Manus a go. Ask it a question and watch as it generates a Markdown todo list, runs through all the steps, writes Python code to grab and crunch data, writes HTML + CSS to visualize it, even builds you a publicly accessible dashboard. The way it works and the screen on the right-side pan showing working code is really a great UX. (If you want Agentic AI do something useful for you, I think you might have to wait a lot longer)
Tesla Stock Analysis Dashboard Here's the public dashboard Manus generated for the query "Comprehensive Tesla Stock Analysis and Investment Insights”.
This dashboard looks good and it totally reminds me of everything I learned in business school about analyzing stocks – if you need a A- grade on your school assignment, I think Manus is a useful cheat. Of course Manus is not following the news so it can't tell that TSLA just took a strong dive due to its Nazi problem. (This post was originally written during dump TSLA day earlier this week)
A Categorical Archive of ChatGPT Failures
Insecurity
Developer convicted for “kill switch” code activated upon his termination Pro tip: DO NOT name the kill switch after your initials:
This kill switch, the DOJ said, appeared to have been created by Lu because it was named "IsDLEnabledinAD," which is an apparent abbreviation of "Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory." It also "automatically activated" on the day of Lu's termination in 2019, the DOJ said, disrupting Eaton Corp. users globally.
My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting A Romance Fraudster This is quite the story:
Romance fraud has been growing as an issue for years. It's not uncommon to see news stories with bewildered victims explaining just how deeply they'd been sucked in. After receiving a number of openers for the same scam, I decided to reply in order to see what social engineering techniques the scammers were using, as well as applying a few of my own.
See if you can guess what the man behind ‘anti-money laundering’ bitcoin was convicted of I'm not saying crypto is a criminal activity, just pointing out how criminals gravitate towards crypto. And it’s quite rich that the anti-money laundering Bitcoin boss gets convicted of money laundering.
Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 Fantastic news for people who are ever concerned about their privacy: “Amazon is killing a privacy feature to bolster Alexa+, the new subscription assistant.”
Thousands of Records, Including PII, Exposed Online in Healthcare Marketplace Connecting Facilities and Nurses Data Leak On the one hand, this is really bad, having some 3rd party service “accidentally” lose all your health information. I don’t think this is the same “Uber for nurses” as exposed in Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app. On the other hand, in the US in 2025 does it really matter that criminals stole your private information, now that the government is just handing it over? Should I even bother covering security breaches in the future?
Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges File under Reason #34869 I Will Never Buy An HP Printer:
HP, along with other printer brands, is infamous for issuing firmware updates that brick already-purchased printers that have tried to use third-party ink. In a new form of frustration, HP is now being accused of issuing a firmware update that broke customers’ laser printers—even though the devices are loaded with HP-brand toner.
Facefail
Meta goes to arbitrator to prevent whistleblower from promoting tell-all book Facebook is trying to block a book from getting published because it expresses some undesirable truths about Zuckerberg and Sandberg, and alleges sexual harassment by Kaplan. Which is a brilliant strategy, because while the court ruled in favor of Facebook (the author did sign a non-disparagement agreement), the publisher can proceed, and so the book now ranks number 1 and number 2 (hard copy and Kindle) on Amazon. To honor Facebook’s request I would not mention “Careless People” is the book name, and I wouldn't link to it.
One of Facebooks complaints is, and I’m quoting Meta spokesperson Erin Logan: “she called the book ‘defamatory’ and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped ‘the industry’s standard fact-checking process.’” While Facebook preaches how others should behave and what standards others should follow, Facebook takes a very liberal view towards following “industry standard fact-checking”:
In the coming months, we will end the current third-party fact checking program in the United States and begin moving to a community-based program called Community Notes. We are beginning with rolling out Community Notes in the US, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year before expansion to other countries
Henry Edward Hardy
Really, asking "what should replace Facebook" is putting things the wrong way around.
A more interesting way to ask the question is, "what did Facebook replace."
People used to build their own websites. People used to have blogs. People used USENET which was truly distributed and un-censorable.
Facebook and Google took the open internet and open standards and monetized and made everything crappy. Enough of that. Nothing should replace Facebook, it's done, stick a fork in it.
What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds? Former Meta Devs Share Surprising Insights -- And A Solution To Still Save It I won’t fault Facebook employees for doing the most logical thing when they’re directed by their supervisor to pretend play in Horizon Worlds because their supervisors have all the salary money power and none of the sense:
So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on.
Everything Else
12 Wow-Factor Wedding Cakes
I scroll through hundreds of gorgeous cakes every week, and after 10+ years it can be tough to find 10 or 11 to fit a specific theme each Sunday. So this week, my only requirement? Wedding cakes that made me say "WOW." Starting with this sweet and airy Art Deco number:
StillIRise1963
It really doesn’t matter what you DID in the beforetimes. It all comes down to now and what you DO. It will DEFINE YOU FOREVER.
nicegnome
When I was younger I thought "prima donna" was "pre-Madonna"
Like Madonna was so important things were categorized into what came before her and what came after.
Retro Photography Kits For $199 you can turn your iPhone into a vintage looking camera and tell me this is not the most amazing looking case!!
Aram Sinnreich
Turns out Pink Floyd was wrong. We do need education.
Florian Gilcher
Most jokes about typography are unjustified.
Paul Turnbull “I love you @CARROT@mastodon.social !”
Jess
SI Units of angles
Radian
Deciradian
Centiradian
Miliradian
Microradian
Nanoradian
The angle between way too hot and way too cold on my shower knob
Picoradian
Gavin Logan
Having a quick lie down is a gateway to having a long lie down
Haribo Gummy Bear Crocs I guess it's a matter of taste …
Souvlaki Space Station
The phrase "sex on the first date" refers to sex on January 1st, 1970.
DocAtCDI
I love the phrase "bear with me"
because it either means "be patient"
or
"the zoo heist was a success"
Who Created Bubu and Dudu? Meet the Bear and Panda Creator
Have you ever wondered who brought the adorable panda Dudu and bear Bubu to life? These charming characters, known for their cute love stories and heartwarming adventures, were created by none other than Chinese artist Huang Xiao B (黄小B). What started as a small project in 2018 has blossomed into a global sensation …
Emmy Beoulve
My 4 year old told my sister something cool she did, and then said "that's big kid shit." 😂
Her mom, who was present for the exchange, said "I think we're in trouble, because she sounded so cool when she said it." 🤣
Matthew Haughey
my kid's school wouldn't let her register for fall classes until she produced proof of a MMR vaccine, which is how things should operate in a modern society
Courtside tickets, private jets: Startup kids spoiled by deal-hungry investors Silicon Valley is a very weird place:
Eric Zhu, the teenage cofounder of analytics startup Aviato (yes, it’s a “Silicon Valley” reference), who has received funding from Bahn, ticked off a list of the activities he’s been treated to by investors, including glitzy parties and boar hunting on one prominent funder’s Texas ranch.
Matthew Strawbridge
No, LinkedIn, I don't want to have to choose between "smiling face with smiling eyes" and "grinning face with squinting eyes" and 101 other variations. I just typed :-) like it's the 1990s again instead.
internetarchive
Websites vanish. Links break. But knowledge can live on with your help. Use the Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now tool to archive webpages that are important to you.
TELO Trucks Now this is super cool: a tiny truck (about the size of a Mini) yet quite large (5 ft bed), motorcycle fast (0 to 60 in 3.5s), EV yet affordable ($34,000 with the tax credit applied), developed in California. Now available for pre-order.
Waymo was slapped with nearly 600 parking tickets last year in SF alone The problem with SF is that parking tickets have one price and it matters not whether you're a billion dollar business with ton of illegally parked car or just a poor soul with no choice but to sleep in your car. And this is why corporations never learn a lesson and never get better.
Judge Uses D&D’s Failure To Make Him Worship Satan To School Florida On Social Media Moral Panics Of all places, this exceptional form of judgment takes place in Florida:
When Florida’s lawyers tried to defend the state’s social media age restriction law by claiming it’s “well known” that platforms harm children, they probably weren’t expecting to get schooled on moral panics by a judge citing his own experiences with… Dungeons & Dragons. But that’s exactly what happened in a recent hearing challenging Florida’s unconstitutional law barring teenagers from social media — and it perfectly illustrated why we should be deeply skeptical of laws based on unproven claims of harm to children.
Compare Countries With This Simple Tool When you need to visualize the true size of a country. Type the country’s name and drag & drop it anywhere else in the world — the map uses mercator projection but when you drag the country around it sizes up to its real measurements.
Amazon rainforest cut down to build highway for COP climate summit Not the Onion:
A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.
Why I love Bluey (and hate Cocomelon) These are the two most-streamed children's shows. One has a personal touch, which is why I love Bluey, while the other employs all the engagement-hacks you can imagine by thanks to their Distractatron:
It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.
Fowl Play: How Chicken Genetics Barons Created the Egg Crisis High egg prices explained, and yes this all started with Reagan, the Republican who destroyed economic sanity:
By the end of the 1990s, we had gone from there being a dozen or more primary breeders of layer chickens active around the world in 1980 — with most of them being based in the United States — to there being only two who control an estimated 90% of the market, both of whom are based in Europe.
(PS if you want to know why Costco is totally out of eggs while gourmet grocery shops still sell eggs at reasonable prices — they come from local growers)
Drake The Lawyer I saw this sign by 880 in Oakland yesterday, though this image I downloaded is from a different city in CA, but same Drake.
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