Here’s What I Found Today – Page 12 – From Pixels to Particles

Daily Links: Monday, Mar 17th, 2025

In my latest blog post, I dive into various topics, including how I use Large Language Models to write code despite others’ struggles. I reflect on changes in how American students get to school, and explore Briar’s secure messaging for journalists. Plus, I discuss career insights, the essence of Kanban, and tips for spotting 2025 March Madness upsets. It’s an exciting mix!

Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code: Online discussions about using Large Language Models to help write code inevitably produce comments from developers who’s experiences have been disappointing. They often ask what they’re doing wrong—how come some …
The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment: Your grandpa probably really did walk 5 miles to school in a foot of snow. A look at the changing numbers for how American students get to school.
How it works: Briar is a messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate. Unlike traditional messaging apps, Briar doesn’t rely on a central server – messages are synchronized directly between the users’ devices. If the Internet’s down, Briar can sync via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or memory cards, keeping the information flowing in a crisis. If the Internet’s up, Briar can sync via the Tor network, protecting users and their relationships from surveillance.
Career advice in 2025.: Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of software professionals. However, I’m also reading Jennifer Palkha’s Recoding America, which makes an important point: decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. (Or, in this context, remain employed.)
Milk Kanban: Original meaning of Kanban is that it’s a visual signal. We tend to think about Kanban in terms of boards, columns, index cards, etc. However, in principle, none of that is needed to design a Kanban system.
How to spot 2025 March Madness upsets before they bust your bracket: These key stats can tell you who fits Cinderella’s slipper for the Big Dance.

Daily Links: Saturday, Mar 15th, 2025

In my latest blog post, I dive into some fascinating reads and resources. I explore Charity Majors’ take on debunking the “10x engineer” myth, delve into statistical formulas for programmers, and revisit the importance of logarithms. I also ponder whether copywriting is a lost art, discuss simplifying fulfillment services, and share lessons from a transformative writing teacher. There’s something here for everyone!

IEEE Spectrum: Charity Majors of Honeycomb.io debunks the “10x engineer” myth, emphasizing team productivity and building inclusive, high-performing engineering teams.
Statistical Formulas For Programmers:
The Lost Art of Logarithms: A book about the history, use, and importance of logarithms
Is copywriting a lost art?: The latest publishing news, jobs, analysis, comment, interviews and in-depth features about UK newspaper, magazine and online publishers.
Changing fulfillment vendors? Consider radical simplification: Fulfillment services for publishers can get very complicated. Do they need to be? Maybe radical simplification is the right choice.
What I learned from the writing teacher who changed my work forever: A reflection on Donald Murray’s timeless lessons — on the writing process and problems all writers must solve — as Poynter turns 50

Daily Links: Friday, Mar 14th, 2025

I just stumbled upon a great read about plyometric exercises and how they can boost our power, balance, and coordination as we age. It’s all about staying vibrant and maintaining physical health with some explosive workouts. If you’re curious about where to begin with plyometrics, this is definitely worth a look!

These Explosive Exercises Can Help You Age Well: Plyometrics are an effective way to improve power, balance and coordination. Here’s where to start.

Daily Links: Tuesday, Mar 11th, 2025

In my latest blog post, I dive into a range of fascinating topics! From AI tools like Composer and evolving agents to tips on understanding technical architecture with AI. I also share insights on productivity hacks, like how 15-, 30-, and 60-minute breaks can boost work efficiency, and even a trick from Google’s productivity expert. Plus, there’s a natural alternative to Ozempic. Curious? Let’s chat about it!

Composer: Unified AI interface that combines Ask, Edit, and Agent modes to help write, edit, and understand code directly in your editor
evolving-agents: Evolving agents is a production-grade environment for orchestrating, evolving, and managing AI agents – matiasmolinas/
How to understand technical architecture with AI: 🧠Knowledge Series #63: A guide for PMs, designers and non-engineers. Practical ways to get up to speed with technical architecture – quickly.
Building an Agentic System:
Natural alternative to Ozempic brings results without side effects: After screening 20,000 protein-encoding genes in the human body, Stanford researchers have identified a naturally occurring molecule that works like semaglutide, most popularly known as Ozempic, to put the brakes on appetite and weight gain.
What to do on 15-, 30-, and 60-minute breaks to boost productivity: If you aren’t taking regular breaks or don’t feel refreshed and focused after taking a break, you might be doing it wrong.
Google’s productivity expert: The 5-minute hack that helps me focus and get more done at work: Laura Mae Martin is Google’s executive productivity advisor. She helps employees and C-suite leaders at the tech giant get more done without burning out.
Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort: Achieving personal growth often requires experiencing discomfort. What if instead of tolerating discomfort (e.g., feeling awkward or uncomfortable), people acti…
qwen2.5-coder:32b: The latest series of Code-Specific Qwen models, with significant improvements in code generation, code reasoning, and code fixing.
qwq: QwQ is the reasoning model of the Qwen series.
On Apple Exclaves: Modern operating systems typically divide their operations into two main protection domains: the unprivileged domain (user mode) and the privileged domain (kernel mode). Software spends most of its…
US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms: Civicus, an international non-profit, puts country alongside Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia
15 Ways To Encourage Creative Idea Sharing From All Team Members: Host creative brainstorming sessions to encourage everyone on your team to share ideas.
How to Empower Your Teammates to Speak Up More Often: These steps will help you encourage others to voice their opinions and concerns.
14 Ways Introverts Can Get More Confident Sharing Their Ideas At Work: Have you ever been in a meeting or read a memo at work and realized that you have the perfect solution to the problem being discussed or an idea you’re sure everyone will love, but then choked and weren’t able to express it?

Daily Links: Monday, Mar 10th, 2025

Hey there! In my latest blog post, I’m diving into really fascinating territory. We’ll explore taking control of our media consumption, with a call to “kill your feeds,” plus my personal 16-month experiment with theanine! Also, discover how social comparison might secretly boost success and learn some tricks to break and form habits effectively. Plus, I chat about impactful reputation strategies and the future of AI in media. 📚✨

Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think:
My 16-month theanine self-experiment: randomized and blinded, N=1
The Hidden Power of Social Comparison: We’ve been told social comparison is toxic, but what if it’s secretly fueling our success? Discover how to harness envy for motivation, growth, and lasting achievement.
Transform the daily grind to make life more interesting – a philosopher shares 3 strategies to help you attain the good life: A shift in mindset as you go through your day-to-day can help you cultivate a psychologically rich life.
To Change a Habit, Get Extreme. Progressively.: Starting a new habit is very different from breaking an existing one. If you want to give something up, try this advice.
Succinct data structures: An overview of a class of data structures I didn’t know about!
5 Ways media companies can boost audience trust when using AI: While AI offers substantial benefits, recent studies have revealed a trust gap between media companies and their audiences around AI use.
WatchTime Selects Creative Licensing International to Expand Globally; Creating New Formats, Audiences: As AI-powered search upends the digital landscape, publishers grapple with declining traffic, legal battles, the erosion of interest, and the decline of curiosity. by: Paul Gerbino The evolution of search engine technology, specifically the shift from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), signifies a fundamental disruption in the online publishing ecosystem. The […]
Former Independent editor says AI will free up reporters to create more ‘guff’: Chris Blackhurst said “guff” would fill the void left as journalism’s business model collapsed.
The Digital Packrat Manifesto: DRM and big tech’s war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too.
The Autodidacts: Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting is rarely discussed
The Meeting Manifesto:
The Post-Performance Review Guide No One Talks About, Part 1: Experienced Engineering leader and International speaker, Allison McMillan, helps companies with gathering design and facilitation to navigate transitions, as a Fractional VP of Engineering or CTO, or providing 1:1 advising and mentorship support. Read more about her thoughts on engineering leadership, conference talks, and services offered.
Chasing Squirrels: Avoiding Strategy Drift: “Can we go for a walk? I think we have a huge opportunity to offer SaaS tools to participants of our marketplace instead of monetizing customers.” – Representative quote from a founder I work with evaluating a change in strategy Building a new company, I find myself faced with opportunities to revisit and modify Beacon’s […]
Advanced Stats 101:: Going to school on what the advanced stats mean
The Reputational Cue Ball: Most people understand reputation matters, but few recognize how it functions as a strategic asset that either unlocks opportunities or leaves you perpetually trapped in impossible situations. The mechanics of this process mirror an unlikely source of wisdom: the game of billiards.

Daily Links: Sunday, Mar 9th, 2025

Hey there! In my latest blog post, I dive into the wild world of ‘age verification’ bills, which aren’t just targeting porn anymore but now even things like skin cream! I reminisce about when these laws were supposedly all about protecting kids, but I’ve always warned about their risks and questionable efficacy. Curious about why they might not be the solution? Check it out!

First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control: I’m old enough to remember when age verification bills were pitched as a way to ‘save the kids from porn’ and shield them from other vague dangers lurking in the digital world (like…“the transgender”). We have long cautioned about the dangers of these laws, and pointed out why they are likely to…

Daily Links: Saturday, Mar 8th, 2025

Hey there! This blog post explores a range of fascinating topics, from leveraging local AI for podcast transcription and the history of a hard-working Manhattan font, to the future of content discovery and AI’s impact on technical debt. Dive into stories about the UX of AI assistants, strategies for newsletter monetization, and how multitasking may be affecting our brains. Plus, there are insights into DIY projects like building a wireless keyboard and the effects of caffeine on the brain. Enjoy!

Blaizzy/mlx-audio: A text-to-speech (TTS) and Speech-to-Speech (STS) library built on Apple’s MLX framework, providing efficient speech synthesis on Apple Silicon.:
How I Automated My Podcast Transcript Production With Local AI: I’ve been running a podcast for close to half a decade now, called The Work Item. Publishing new episodes generally takes a bit of time because of all the prep work that needs to happen beforehand. I now get to use AI to automate a pretty tedious part of the process.
The hardest working font in Manhattan: A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of â and one you probably saw earlier today.
The Demoralization is just Beginning: This is a map of primary trading partners, US vs China, and how it has evolved over the last 20 years. Think about it, and realize this probably reflects your experience.
Bayleaf Wireless Keyboard Build: Read about my journey building a wireless ergonomic keyboard from scratch.
The Deep Research problem — Benedict Evans: OpenAI’s Deep Research is built for me, and I can’t use it. It’s another amazing demo, until it breaks. But it breaks in really interesting ways.
The all-new Alexa+ and more: All the news from Amazon’s 2025 devices event: Catch up on everything we announced at our Devices & Services event, including the new Alexa+.
Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes: A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
Should managers still code?: Ah, the eternal question, straight from the mailbag.
Deep: The UX of AI Assistants: Your ultimate guide to how top companies are designing the latest generation of AI Assistants
How to Monetize Your Newsletter With Ads: Here are a few monetization suggestions for ad formats, rates, and tools that can help your newsletter ad strategy.
How Katelyn Bourgoin Built an Audience of 220k Teaching People “Why We Buy” – Growth in Reverse: Katelyn Bourgoin writes the Why We Buy newsletter, where she shares fun and actionable tips on buyer psychology.
How To Be Antifragile In The Age of AI – Leadership Minute: It’s important to understand AI’s likely disruptions. But certain mindsets, skills and professions will remain resilient during the changes of AI.
Every Entrepreneur Needs to Unplug to Unlock Peak Productivity and Creativity — Here’s Why | Entrepreneur: A digital fast may sound impossible — especially for entrepreneurs. But as painful as it may seem to miss out on an important memo or viral meme, the benefits are even greater.
How Multitasking Drains Your Brain: Renowned neurologist Richard Cytowic exposes the dangers of multitasking in the digital age.
Your PR Process Is Killing Morale and Productivity: Code reviews are supposed to be about improving code quality and sharing knowledge, but when PR comments start hitting the hundreds, something is very wrong….
10-Step Anti-Procrastination Checklist: Despite recent strides in my productivity habits, I still catch myself procrastinating at work more often than I’d like. It’s not that I make a cons…
ARC-AGI Without Pretraining:
Apple’s Software Quality Crisis: When Premium Hardware Meets Subpar Software: Tim, I think we are not cooking
Write to Escape Your Default Setting:
Make Any File a Template Using This Hidden macOS Tool: Stationery Pad is a handy way to nix a step in your workflow if you regularly use document templates on your Mac. The long-standing Finder feature…
How AI generated code compounds technical debt: GitClear’s latest report exposes rising code duplication and declining quality as AI coding tools gain in popularity.
How your morning coffee is changing the structure of your brain: A novel study testing the effects of caffeine on the human brain found daily consumption can significantly reduce the volume of one’s gray matter. Whether this is a good or bad thing is unclear but that daily cup of coffee is certainly doing something.
What’s the Goal of the Goal?: When we lock into a particular goal too quickly, we blind ourselves to alternate routes forward that might have been better and easier. We can avoid this trap by asking ourselves one simple question.
Trump credit card freeze crippling cancer and Alzheimer’s research: On February 26, President Trump issued an executive order expanding the power of the United States DOGE Service (DOGE), the government initiative controlled by Elon Musk.
9 useful AI prompts ❤️: Discover 9 useful AI prompt templates for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini. Overcome writer’s block, edit well, and plan projects with these formulas.
Creating a Sense of Stability: How to help your team stay calm when things feel rocky
20 years working on the same software product: I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has changed since then, but PerfectTablePlan is now at version 7 and still going strong. PerfectTablePlan v1 PerfectTablePlan v7 I have released…
An Expected Goals on Target (xGOT) Metric as a New Metric for Analyzing Elite Soccer Player Performance: Introduction: Football analysis is an applied research area that has seen a huge upsurge in recent years. More complex analysis to understand the soccer players’ or teams’ performances during matches is required. The objective of this study was to prove the usefulness of the expected goals on target (xGOT) metric, as a good indicator of a soccer team’s performance in professional Spanish football leagues, both in the women’s and men’s categories. Method: The data for the Spanish teams were collected from the statistical website Football Reference. The 2023/24 season was analyzed for Spanish leagues, both in the women’s and men’s categories (LigaF and LaLiga, respectively). For all teams, the following variables were calculated: goals, possession value (PV), expected goals (xG) and xGOT. All data obtained for each variable were normalized by match (90 min). A descriptive and correlational statistical analysis was carried out. Results: In the men’s league, this study found a high correlation between goals per match and xGOT (R2 = 0.9248) while in the women’s league, there was a high correlation between goals per match (R2 = 0.9820) and xG and between goals per match and xGOT (R2 = 0.9574). Conclusions: In the LaLiga, the xGOT was the best metric that represented the match result while in the LigaF, the xG and the xGOT were the best metrics that represented the match score.
AI coding tools are quietly reshaping software development: They’re making an economic impact, despite not being very good yet
10 Things I Learned from Sending an Email Every Day for a Year: It takes work to send an email every day — but it also opened new doors for my business. Here’s what I learned from the process.
Robotics for software engineers: What does it take to build and program robots? A look into the exciting, increasingly popular field of robotics. Guest post by humanoid robot expert, Sandor Felber
Wow, have you seen the stock market lately?:
How Do You Plan for a Future That Might Not Exist?: What collective grief looks like.
How dismantling silos gave Metro’s newsletter team room to experiment: Metro’s Newsletter Editor Sophie Laughton explains how a behind-the-scenes reshuffle enabled its newsletter team to find new opportunities.
Should we stop AGI before it destroys us, or just naively hope for the best?: AGI has lots of promise, but there are also a lot of threats. Are we blithely walking into a future we won’t be able to control?
How digital natives changed the game on legacy media: TikTok, YouTube and Substack have rewritten the rules of media, leaving legacy outlets scrambling to survive.
New Neuroscience Reveals 3 Secrets That Will Make You Happier: Your brain doesn’t want you to be satisfied. Seriously. But we can trick it into making you happier. Here’s how…
The Pentium contains a complicated circuit to multiply by three: In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. I’ve been examining the Pentium’…
macOS Tips & Tricks: A collection of 150+ nifty tips and tricks for macOS, for both system features like the Dock, Spotlight, and Mission Control and built-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos.
nRootTag – Tracking You from a Thousand Miles Away!: Tracking You from a Thousand Miles Away! Turning a Bluetooth Device into an Apple AirTag Without Root Privileges
Fine tuning in Apple MLX, GGUF conversion and inference in Ollama?:
Opportunities and perils in the coming content earthquake: the future of content discovery: Content discovery is about to go through a remarkable transformation as AI agents take over the work. Goodbye search. Goodbye websites.
New Jersey Newsrooms Could Be Hit By Walkout: Publishers In Action: They’re Exploring AI And Ways To Grow Revenue – 02/25/2025
Hard problems that reduce to document ranking: There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively1 for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate N-day vulnerabilities—a sufficiently domain-specific problem that can be solved using general purpose language models as comparators in document ranking algorithms. I demonstrated at RVAsec ‘24 that listwise document ranking can be used to locate the specific function in a patch diff that actually fixes a vulnerability described by a security advisory, and later wrote on the Bishop Fox blog in greater defense of listwise ranking by publishing a command-line tool implementation (raink) to prove the idea.
A leap forward for AI in journalism from an unexpected place — small-town Missouri:
A system to organise your life: Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise your life. Find things, quickly, with more confidence, and less stress. It’s free to use and the concepts are the same at home or work.

Daily Links: Friday, Feb 21st, 2025

Hey there! In my latest blog post, I’m diving into some exciting reads and resources. I chat about my current LLM codegen workflow and share a dynamic 15-minute full-body kettlebell workout you can do anywhere. Plus, I touch on the TypeScript AI agent framework and how to leverage AI agents at work. Lastly, I highlight tools to prep your documents for generative AI. Check it out!

My LLM codegen workflow atm: A detailed walkthrough of my current workflow for using LLms to build software, from brainstorming through planning and execution.
A 15-Minute Full-Body Kettlebell Workout: This workout, which strengthens both your muscles and your heart, can be done at home or in the gym.
mastra-ai/mastra: the TypeScript AI agent framework:
How to use AI agents at work: 🧠 Knowledge Series #60: Practical AI agents you can build and use at work. Apply for jobs, conduct market research, draft speaker notes for presentations and more.
DS4SD/docling: Get your documents ready for gen AI:

Daily Links: Wednesday, Feb 19th, 2025

In my latest blog post, I dive into a whirlwind of captivating stories and topics. I share how my washing machine mishap sparked insights into estimating software efforts. The post also discusses the potential triumphs of an AI-driven future alongside a surprising comparison between ChatGPT and seasoned therapists in couples therapy. Stay tuned as we also uncover Japanese work-life philosophies and Warren Buffett’s money wisdom.

My Washing Machine Refreshed My Thinking on Software Effort Estimation: I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future:
In psychotherapists vs. ChatGPT showdown, the latter wins, new study finds: Researchers prepared couples-therapy scenarios and then had responses—from experienced therapists and the AI chatbot—rated by over 800 participants.
How To Be Successful: 4 Secrets Backed By Research: How do you achieve success if you’re a late bloomer? Let’s dig into the research and see what it takes to shine on a different timeline…
uchū: is the color palette for internet lovers, by NetOperator Wibby.
Homemade polarimetric synthetic aperture radar drone: Designing a cheap synthetic aperture radar mounted on FPV drone.
DON’T buy a Track Saw? Build this instead!: The video “DON’T buy a Track Saw? Build this instead!” is by Izzy Swan. In this project, Izzy explores whether a DIY in-feed system for sheet goods can replace the need for an expensive track
Comments on NASA’s 10 rules:
How I Automated My Computer Routine With macOS Folder Actions:
A New Way to Read:
The Last Human Choice: In a world of AGI, there may be only one meaningful choice left: whether to keep choosing at all.
Toast, Trees and a Wassailing Queen: An Ancient English Ritual Is Back: The centuries-old tradition of wassailing is making a comeback in rural England, with rituals and revelry meant to chase away evil spirits and the winter blues.
What if Eye…?:
🏆 100 Most Watched Software Engineering Talks Of 2024: A complete list of the top 100 most watched talks of 2024 ordered by the number of views.
Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture: A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.
We are destroying software:
Why Blog If Nobody Reads It?: What’s the point of blogging?
Next-gen paywalls balance privacy, engagement, revenue growth: New paywall technology now enables news publishers to leverage real-time intelligence to optimise paywall decisions — without requiring cookies.
All-in-one solution for managing your home bar: Impress your dinner guests and unleash your inner bartender! Bar Assistant is a new home for all your favorite cocktail recipes and drinks.
Hoarder: The Bookmark Everything app. Hoard links, notes, and images and they will get automatically tagged AI.
Revised and Extended: What’s Happening Inside the NIH and NSF:
Understanding Reasoning LLMs: Methods and Strategies for Building and Refining Reasoning Models
Simulating water over terrain:
There to Where: Making moving easy.
Why You’re Always Busy but Never Productive (and How to Fix It): You’re always busy, but are you productive? Learn how the four types of work shape your success—and why we often ignore the most important ones.
FT head of newsletters on how title quadrupled email subscribers in four years: Publisher newsletter strategies: A masterclass interview with Financial Times head of newsletters Sarah Ebner.
Introducing memberships to Hearst’s iconic magazine portfolio: “There’s no one-size-fits-all,” says Katie Vanneck Smith: Hearst UK CEO Katie Vanneck Smith talks about communicating membership benefits, putting brands at the heart of the proposition and the importance of publishing teams in making magazine memberships successful.
Are better models better? — Benedict Evans: Every week there’s a better AI model that gives better answers. But a lot of questions don’t have better answers, only ‘right’ answers, and these models can’t do that. So what does ‘better’ mean, how do we manage these things, and should we change what we expect from computers?
Spicy, Creamy Weeknight Bolognese: This pasta sauce captures the soul-soothing essence of a long-simmering Bolognese even though it cooks quickly Searing ground beef gives it a caramelized taste that mimics the depth of slow-cooked meat Adding a few spoonfuls of red curry paste doesn’t make it taste like curry, but gives it instant nuance and depth
Research shows 3 design features predict subscription bundle success: Three elements determine the success of a news company’s bundle strategy: product mix, subscriber experience, and content discovery.
slack-export-viewer: A Slack Export archive viewer that allows you to easily view and share your Slack team’s export – hfaran/
Ingesting Millions of PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 Changes Everything: Sergey Filimonov’s blog
Eggs US – Price – Chart – Historical Data – News: Eggs US increased 1.28 USD/DOZEN or 22.03% since the beginning of 2025, according to trading on a contract for difference (CFD) that tracks the benchmark market for this commodity. This page includes a chart with historical data for Eggs US.
Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT: This is a general audience deep dive into the Large Language Model (LLM) AI technology that powers ChatGPT and related products. It is covers the full traini…
A Coup Is In Progress In America: A coup is underway in the United States, and we must stop pretending otherwise. The signs are unmistakable and accelerating: in just the past 48 hours, Elon Musk’s DOGE commission has seized control of Treasury payment systems and gained unauthorized access to classified USAID materials, while security officials who followed protocols were removed. Career civil servants…
How AI is changing the face of B2B publishing in 2025: Discover how publishers are using AI to create premium products, turn their expertise into goldmines and why waiting on the sidelines could be the riskiest strategy of all
Inside The World Of TOPS News: A Magazine That Helps Members Lose Weight Sensibly. A Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Team TOPS News.: TOPS News is the membership magazine for TOPS Club Inc. TOPS stands for Take Off Pounds Sensibly. Its motto for the last 75 years since its inception is Real People. Real Weight Loss. In 2025, and for the first time, the TOPS News magazine started accepting advertising on the pages of the magazine. Through an…
Training AI to Understand Relevance: What Every Business Needs to Know: Summary: AI struggles with relevance realization, a human ability to prioritize meaning across contexts. Businesses should evaluate AI systems’ relevance handling, integrate human feedback, and ensure human support for key interactions. In the beginning of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” Evelyn Greenslade (played by Judi Dench) has just lost her husband. In the midst of…
Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space: Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do – collect and share as many
fullmoon: chat with private and local large language models
Japanese Philosophies For a Healthy Work-Life Balance: Feeling overworked? Here are 3 Japanese philosophies that’ll help you establish a healthy, sustainable work-life balance through daily rituals.
Short daily walks may reverse cognitive aging by four years, study finds: Everyday physical activity, even light movement, improves cognitive processing speed, equivalent to reversing four years of cognitive aging. This highlights the short-term brain benefits of staying active.
The ‘secret strategy’ that could boost your ability to learn: It may sound illogical, but growing evidence shows the benefits of testing yourself before you start learning new material
GyulyVGC/sniffnet: Comfortably monitor your Internet traffic 🕵️‍♂️:
Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown: Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A…
A quote from Anthropic: While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We …
Everyone knows your location: How I tracked myself down using leaked location data in the in-app ads, and what I found along the way.
DIY plane spotting at home with a Raspberry Pi: Building a plane spotting system with a Raspberry Pi and an old Android phone
seemoo-lab/openhaystack: Build your own ‘AirTags’ 🏷 today! Framework for tracking personal Bluetooth devices via Apple’s massive Find My network. –
Once You’re Laid Off, You’ll Never Be the Same Again: It’s been over a year since one of the most significant turning points in my life, and it’s time to reflect on that.
To Change The System Of Work We Must First Change Leaders’ Mental Models: IT leaders have historically been put in positions to control IT resources, largely due to other execs not being able to fully understand what IT does and through the mis-understanding that it was a…
The Stories in Our Heads (Fact vs. Meaning): Things happen, and then people come up with stories about those things—especially when they are missing information. Our interpretations—the meaning we make—color what we think Reality is. They can make someone a villain or a hero, but they’re often made up. If you’re feeling frustrated with yourself, someone else…
Government Tech Workers Forced to Defend Projects to Random Elon Musk Bros: A recent high school graduate and former Neuralink intern has joined meetings to review lines of code and other work history of career public servants, sparking chaos at a major government agency.
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect:
TEMP-1 Temperature Sensor For Home Assistant: TEMP-1 is a ESP32 controller with a 1.5m waterproof flat temperature probe that can be used with your Home Assistant. Check the specs here.
LLM Course – Build a Semantic Book Recommender (Python, OpenAI, LangChain, Gradio): Discover how to build an intelligent book recommendation system using the power of large language models and Python. Learn to transform book descriptions int…
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog: What’s odd about you is what’s interesting.
Writer RAG tool: build production-ready RAG apps in minutes: The new predefined RAG tool on the Writer platform allows applications to autonomously access and utilize data from a Knowledge Graph through a simple API call.
How to Make Better Decisions Under Pressure: A conversation with Harvard Medical School’s Carol Kauffman on navigating high-stakes challenges effectively.
Design systems: Clear documentation transforms abstract design principles into practical tools. Read how leading teams build and maintain documentation that evolves alongside their design systems.
Bookshop.org launches new e-book platform that exclusively supports local bookstores: Indie bookstores miss out on millions of e-book sales to big companies like Amazon. Bookshop.org’s new platform could help them turn a new page.
AI in Publishing: A 2025 Industry Forecast: As we embrace 2025, the publishing industry should view AI as an ally—a powerful tool that amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it.
Warren Buffett: 6 Best Pieces of Money Advice for the Middle Class: For one of the richest people in the entire world, Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, is surprisingly down to Earth. He famously lives in the same modest house in Omaha that he bought in…
Fix Three Broken Things: Seneca pointed out that people tend to be reflexively stingy with their money, but almost comically wasteful with their time. There are at least two ways to take this. One is that Seneca thought he used his time better than […]

Daily Links: Thursday, Jan 30th, 2025

Hey there! This blog has quite the variety of topics. I’m sharing my journey to mastering a “modern” terminal setup and never losing at Tic-Tac-Toe. I’m delving into documentation frameworks, the impact of libraries, and the fight for your attention in the digital age. There’s a sprinkle of AI tales, room dynamics, and my preference for Sublime Text. Plus, some curated feeds for self-directed learning! Dive in!

What’s involved in getting a “modern” terminal setup?:
Never lose a Tic-Tac-Toe game again in life: Remember playing Tic Tac Toe as a kid? Trying to figure out perfect spot for your next move to outsmart your opponent. Well, then, get ready to become unbeatable at this classic game. Because I am…
The Seven-Action Documentation model: I think all technical writers, at some point or another, feel the urge to base their work on something more systematic than “it’s just the way folks documented stuff since forever”. Toolkits and frameworks provide content types, which is immensely valuable when you know what you want to write, but starting from there is like buying a hammer without knowing that half of the work you’ll do is turning screws. As I find the lack of deeper conversation around this topic rather unsettling, I decided to contribute some verses.
Curated RSS Feeds and Newsletters for Diverse Self-Directed Learning: Explore a diverse list of RSS feeds and newsletters that fuel my self-directed learning journey. Curated to inspire, inform, and sometimes share.
The Art of Calling Out Room Dynamics: Discover how naming what’s happening in the room can defuse tense meetings, improve team dynamics, and elevate your leadership skills. Learn practical tips from an experienced tech leader on using this powerful communication technique to transform difficult conversations and drive better outcomes.
Here’s What the Fight For Your Attention Really Looks Like: One of the largest problems personified by the internet is shifting joy into competition. How does the dissolution of the line between personal and professional time impact our willingness to connect outside of our phones?
My Afternoon Project Turned Into Four Days of AI Lies, USB Chaos, and Hard Lessons: A quick project spiraled into a marathon of AI missteps, hardware headaches, and hard-earned lessons. Welcome to the story of Deskthang.
Seven things I know after 25 years of development:
It’s official: Research has found that libraries make everything better.: Science has backed up what many of us have long been saying: the library rocks. A study from the New York Public Library surveyed 1,974 users on how the library makes them feel and how it affects t…
Why I still like Sublime Text in 2025: I still use Sublime Text in 2025 even after trying a lot of other editors