Kind: Reposts
Reposting of content from another site, often with commentary.
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AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say?
Jason Gorman's summarised the state of the art in research into the efficacy of LLM-assisted software engineering, and I was reassured to see that it closely mirrors my own personal experience of these technologies, with which I've now experimented for several years.
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They love RSS
unstory claims that people who, like, me, announce their love of RSS in footers etc. don't actually love RSS, and couldn't handle operating the protocol 'by hand'. unstory is wrong, at least in my case.
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Normal F***ing Sunglasses
DuckDuckGo have gotten into the smart glasses game, and they've come up with a pair that, dare I say it... I would actually buy!
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I Regret To Say That GMail is Now a Spam Farm, or, Why You Should Really Get That Dedicated Email Address Now
John Scalzi observes that GMail is now the source of much of the world's spam, especially AI-generated spam, and GMail-originated messages are increasingly at-risk of going to spam folders. Maybe it's time to ditch that primary GMail address, if you haven't already.
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Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers?
Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold? Cory Doctorow provides a metaphor that shows how the behaviour of the big AI companies is exactly what you'd expect if they didn't actually have great confidence in their own product or its ability to eventually reach profitability.
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How to Set Up Windows 11 Without a Microsoft Account in 2026
James Leighton's provided a quick one-liner to bypass the Windows 11 installer's latest efforts to insist on you having a Microsoft account. I don't anticipate having to install Windows again, but if I do I'll be using this.
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I bought a Sony Walkman
Andreas bought and restored an old Sony Walkman and the entire journey is a wonderfully-written journey down memory lane, coupled with some learnings about the inner workings of these once-ubiquitous devices. Beautiful.
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British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres
In March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time, and doubtless broke a lot of software. Every time I work on better timezone support for Three Rings, this is the kind of story that terrifies me!
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Taking A Dive
I had a second submission accepted to Curious Cones, one of the most-wonderful but also silly blogs I follow. But my third attempt came out blurry and didn't make it to the blog; ah well.
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Garbage for humans
unstory observed that Cloudflare's 'Markdown for machines' feature means that the simplified output given by some websites to LLMs will be superior to the experience afforded to humans. How did we get here? Still... I think I see a opportunity to exploit this...
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Maybe "is AI a bubble?" is the wrong question
Emile Silvis asks 'is AI a bubble?' and delivers a concise and balanced view of the key factors - clocks, in this case - that impact the related question, 'do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?'. There are no answers here, but I've been watching those clocks and they smell like tulips to me... 🌷
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What Was Matt Thinking?
Ernie Smith from Tedium wrote about Matt's Script Archive, which back in the 1990s was a big part of how and why I learned to code in Perl. Let's take a trip down memory lane...
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Setting the width of selects to the width of the selected option
Sometimes a new CSS feature comes along and I immediately "get it". Like: that's a cool new feature, I can already see how it'll save me time, or make things simpler, or improve accessibility, or allow me to do something new. Other times...
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Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme
With thanks to Mark Palko for sharing: this seems like a spot-on observation of Musk's career. Wouldn't it be nice if the world's first trillionaire also happened to be the world's last trillionaire?
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Ad Infinitum
An excellent article by Matthias Ott describes Google's promised AI-first search experience, which dispenses with search results entirely and just uses an LLM (plus sponsored content seamlessly woven in), keeping you entirely within the search giant's ecosystem and minimising how much they cite their sources. As you might imagine, I have some Opinions too.