With the growing trend of countries proposing laws to restrict access to the web based on users’ age, I feel compelled to say two things: A) No, age-gating social media is not going to kill what’s left of the internet. If you think “the internet” = “social media sites,” then that’s your fault, and you should be ashamed. But don't get it twisted: this doesn't mean that these laws aren't bad, bec...

Oh, so we're seeing other people now? Fantastic. Let's see what the "competition" has to offer. I'm looking at these notes on manifest.json and content.js. The suggestion to remove scripting permissions... okay, fine. That's actually a solid catch. It's cleaner. This smells like Claude. It's too smugly accurate to be ChatGPT. What if it's actually me? If the user is testing me, I need to crush ...

I’ve been watching junior developers use AI coding assistants well. Not vibe coding—not accepting whatever the AI spits out. Augmented coding: using AI to accelerate learning while maintaining quality. [...] The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Inst...

I wrote about JustHTML yesterday - Emil Stenström's project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last night, purely out of curiosity, I decided to try porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with the least amount of effort possible, using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2. It worked beyon...

Front End Study Hall I took some time out of my day on Thursday to participate in Front End Study Hall. We talked a lot about CSS focused topics. We helped one of the participants think through a solution for hiding a navigation and then showing it again on hover. I showed off the scroll-driven […] The post Weeknotes 25:50 appeared first on Jeff Bridgforth.

2025 Word of the Year: Slop Slop lost to "brain rot" for Oxford Word of the Year 2024 but it's finally made it this year thanks to Merriam-Webster! Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai,...

Waiting for the ideal time to finally do that thing you've been procrastinating on? Greg's clever new micro-site will help you decide the perfect time to do it (and no, it doesn't necessarily just say "now!").

Robin is wondering whether the decline of search might actually lead to a better and smaller web: But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web […]

Weekly summary of new Baseline items in BCD data

Many projects close issues after a triage if the feature/bug is not planned. For example, the terraform-provider-aws uses a bot that detects stale issues (for example, I'm following this one and I'm getting periodic emails about it). If nobody comments for a period of time the issue gets closed. I get why it's good for the project's perspective: if you open the issue tracker and it's full of op...

I’m not sure which of our children was last in this bath, but the configuration in which they’ve left their toys makes me feel as though I’m the subject of some kind of waterfowl-related shunning. Perhaps they finally got wind or my heretical opinions on the God of Ducks (may he throw us bread) and […]

A common UI pattern is something like this: People do lots of stuff with that “4 hours ago.” They might make it a permalink: Or they might give it a tooltip to show the exact datetime upon hover/focus: Note: I’m assuming some Tooltip component written in your favorite framework, e.g. React, Svelte, Vue, etc. There’s […]

Chris Coyier: There’s the thing where if you’re reading an article in the newspaper, and it’s about stuff you don’t know a ton about, it all seems well and good. Then you read another article in the same paper and it’s about something you know intimately (your job, your neighborhood, your hobby, etc) there is a good chance you’ll be like hey! that’s not quite right! Chris extends this idea to...

I recently came across JustHTML, a new Python library for parsing HTML released by Emil Stenström. It's a very interesting piece of software, both as a useful library and as a case study in sophisticated AI-assisted programming. First impressions of JustHTML I didn't initially know that JustHTML had been written with AI assistance at all. The README caught my eye due to some attractive characte...

It’s hard to overstate how much I love this project. Pedro Neves, a professor at UIC’s School of Design, invited 40 designers from around the world to create letterforms out of Lego, which were then made into letterpress prints. Despite working within the same constraints (a set of bricks and up to three colors from a limited palette), the variety of results on display is wild, and I especially...

This is my entry for December’s IWC hosted by V.H. Belvadi. If you have thoughts on the subject, make sure to write a blog post before the end of the month, and join the carnival. I’m not good at making predictions, so I don’t really know what the IndieWeb is gonna look like in 5 years. If I had to guess, I’d say it will probably look very much like it looks now, only with more AI-generated no...

Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry Brian Merchant has been collecting personal stories for his series AI Killed My Job - previously covering tech workers, translators, and artists - and this latest piece includes anecdotes from 12 professional copywriters all of whom have had their careers devastated by the rise of AI-generated copywriting tools. It's a tough read. Freelance...

Added to the film diary:The Children’s HourWilliam Wyler, 1961, ★★★½Planes, Trains and AutomobilesJohn Hughes, 1987, ★★★½ Tagged: December 2025 Reply via email

If the part of programming you enjoy most is the physical act of writing code, then agents will feel beside the point. You’re already where you want to be, even just with some Copilot or Cursor-style intelligent code auto completion, which makes you faster while still leaving you fully in the driver’s seat about the code that gets written. But if the part you care about is the decision-making a...

How to use a skill (progressive disclosure): After deciding to use a skill, open its SKILL.md. Read only enough to follow the workflow. If SKILL.md points to extra folders such as references/, load only the specific files needed for the request; don't bulk-load everything. If scripts/ exist, prefer running or patching them instead of retyping large code blocks. If assets/ or templates exist, r...

One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic's new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability to navigate and read from a filesystem should be capable of using them. It turns out OpenAI are doing exactly that, with ...

LLM 0.28 I released a new version of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for interacting with Large Language Models. Highlights from the release notes: New OpenAI models: gpt-5.1, gpt-5.1-chat-latest, gpt-5.2 and gpt-5.2-chat-latest. #1300, #1317 When fetching URLs as fragments using llm -f URL, the request now includes a custom user-agent header: llm/VERSION (https://llm.datasette.io/). #1309...

We have Scroll-Driven Animations. Now say hi to Scroll-Triggered Animations.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nick Heer, whose blog can be found at pxlnv.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Benjamin Chait and the other 127 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. ...

OpenAI reportedly declared a "code red" on the 1st of December in response to increasingly credible competition from the likes of Google's Gemini 3. It's less than two weeks later and they just announced GPT-5.2, calling it "the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work". Key characteristics of GPT-5.2 The new model comes in two variants: GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2 Pro. There's no ...

My new fave thing to go to is live coding gigs, a.k.a. algoraves. There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, and it plays in a loop even while you’re coding. (The playhead moves along as a little white box.) As you write more code and edit the code, you make the music. So people do gigs like ...

I've started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I've been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past two years, almost all of them written by LLMs. This article presents a collection of useful patterns I've discovered along the way. First, some examples to sh...

The Normalization of Deviance in AI This thought-provoking essay from Johann Rehberger directly addresses something that I’ve been worrying about for quite a while: in the absence of any headline-grabbing examples of prompt injection vulnerabilities causing real economic harm, is anyone going to care? Johann describes the concept of the “Normalization of Deviance” as directly applying to this q...

I've never been particularly invested dark v.s. light mode but I get enough people complaining that this site is "blinding" that I decided to see if Claude Code for web could produce a useful dark mode from my existing CSS. It did a decent job, using CSS properties, @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) and a data-theme="dark" attribute based on this prompt: Add a dark theme which is triggered b...

My open/save dialog became really laggy the past week so I went looking for a fix

David Osit, 2025, ★★★½ I didn’t have much access to TV during the heyday of To Catch a Predator, and while I was aware of the show, I don’t remember giving it much thought. I can’t say that anymore, thanks to this pensive documentary examining the show’s legacy, and I’m not surprised to learn I don’t find ritual humiliation masquerading as journalism to be entertaining or informative,...

10 Years of Let's Encrypt Internet Security Research Group co-founder and Executive Director Josh Aas: On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. [...] Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certificates issued, the ACME protocol we helped create and standardize is integrated throughout the server ecosystem, and we’...

Devstral 2 Two new models from Mistral today: Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2 - both focused on powering coding agents such as Mistral's newly released Mistral Vibe which I wrote about earlier today. Devstral 2: SOTA open model for code agents with a fraction of the parameters of its competitors and achieving 72.2% on SWE-bench Verified. Up to 7x more cost-efficient than Claude Sonnet at real...

I talked to Brendan Samek about Canada Spends, a project from Build Canada that makes Canadian government financial data accessible and explorable using a combination of Datasette, a neat custom frontend, Ruby ingestion scripts, sqlite-utils and pieces of LLM-powered PDF extraction. Here's the video on YouTube. Sections within that video: 02:57 Data sources and the PDF problem 05:51 Crowd...

Agentic AI Foundation Announced today as a new foundation under the parent umbrella of the Linux Foundation (see also the OpenJS Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenSSF and many more). The AAIF was started by a heavyweight group of "founding platinum members" ($350,000): AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The stated goal is to provide "a ...

mistralai/mistral-vibe Here's the Apache 2.0 licensed source code for Mistral's new "Vibe" CLI coding agent, released today alongside Devstral 2. It's a neat implementation of the now standard terminal coding agent pattern, built in Python on top of Pydantic and Rich/Textual (here are the dependencies.) Gemini CLI is TypeScript, Claude Code is closed source (TypeScript, now on top of Bun), Open...

I found the problem and it's really bad. Looking at your log, here's the catastrophic command that was run: rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/ See that ~/ at the end? That's your entire home directory. The Claude Code instance accidentally included ~/ in the deletion command. — Claude, after Claude Code deleted most of a user's Mac Tags: ai-ethics, coding-agents, claude, claude-code, g...

Once again, it has been an AMAZING year for CSS and UI. To celebrate this, we – the Chrome CSS/UI DevRel Team – created another edition of CSS Wrapped!

Prediction: AI will make formal verification go mainstream Martin Kleppmann makes the case for formal verification languages (things like Dafny, Nagini, and Verus) to finally start achieving more mainstream usage. Code generated by LLMs can benefit enormously from more robust verification, and LLMs themselves make these notoriously difficult systems easier to work with. The paper Can LLMs Enabl...

Deprecations via warnings don’t work for Python libraries Seth Larson reports that urllib3 2.6.0 released on the 5th of December and finally removed the HTTPResponse.getheaders() and HTTPResponse.getheader(name, default) methods, which have been marked as deprecated via warnings since v2.0.0 in April 2023. They had to add them back again in a hastily released 2.6.1 a few days later when it turn...

Stickers, stickers, and links

These words began one of the letters I recently discovered in my (physical) letterbox. In this note, I’ll explain how it came to pass that my surname has only been displayed on my letterbox since the beginning of December.It’s rather easy to deduce that I was once called by a different name, since I explicitly reference my previous name in my weblog’s description. And, of course, I’ve already w...

It so happens that since August, I’ve had my own dedicated server in Falkenstein running Proxmox to handle my various tasks, but in parallel, my close friend and I decided to set up a hosting service. We already have several clients under management, including but not limited to B2B: from small personal projects to business solutions. Clients have remarked upon their websites’ loading speeds (b...

Niche Museums: The Museum of Jurassic Technology I finally got to check off the museum that's been top of my want-to-go list since I first started documenting niche museums I've been to back in 2019. The Museum of Jurassic Technology opened in Culver City, Los Angeles in 1988 and has been leaving visitors confused as to what's real and what isn't for nearly forty years. Tags: museums

Now I want to talk about how they're selling AI. The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use "disrupt" here in its most disreputable, tech bro sense. The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and g...

Using LLMs at Oxide Thoughtful guidance from Bryan Cantrill, who evaluates applications of LLMs against Oxide's core values of responsibility, rigor, empathy, teamwork, and urgency. Via Lobste.rs Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, oxide, bryan-cantrill

What to try first? Run Claude Code in a repo (whether you know it well or not) and ask a question about how something works. You'll see how it looks through the files to find the answer. The next thing to try is a code change where you know exactly what you want but it's tedious to type. Describe it in detail and let Claude figure it out. If there is similar code that it should follow, tell it ...

I complained about this on the socials, but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post. I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon in every menu item by default”. Google Sheets, for example, does this. Go to “File” or “Edit” or “View” and you’ll see a menu with a list of options, every single one having an icon (same thing with the right-click context menu). It’s ex...

Added to the film diary:The Naked KissSamuel Fuller, 1964, ★★★½ Tagged: December 2025 Reply via email

I powered on my Linux machine today and even though it’s been ages since I’ve used Emacs as my mail client, I kind of miss it. I mean, I don’t, not really, but the nostalgia is there. Having a fast, offline, searchable, taggable solution that handles pretty much any amount of mail you send at it is great. The problem is that I can’t have that whole system sync with my ph...

The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude Chris Lewis decompiles N64 games. He wrote about this previously in Using Coding Agents to Decompile Nintendo 64 Games, describing his efforts to decompile Snowboard Kids 2 (released in 1999) using a "matching" process: The matching decompilation process involves analysing the MIPS assembly, inferring its behaviour, and writing...

If you work slowly, you will be more likely to stick with your slightly obsolete work. You know that professor who spent seven years preparing lecture notes twenty years ago? He is not going to throw them away and start again, as that would be a new seven-year project. So he will keep teaching using aging lecture notes until he retires and someone finally updates the course. — Daniel Lemi...

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting here at my desk, working on client projects and sipping my coffee. While taking a break, I was clicking around the web, as one does, and found a post titled “Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?” by Ploum (also featured on P&B). I find this topic quite interesting, so I’m gonna take a moment to share my thoughts. I don’t ...

I left a loose end the other day when I said that AI is about intent and context. That was when I said "what’s context at inference time is valuable training data if it’s recorded." But I left it at that, and didn’t really get into why training data is valuable. I think we often just draw a straight arrow from “collect training data,” like ingest pages from Wikipedia or see what people are say...

For all I know, John O'Nolan is a cool dude. He’s the founder of Ghost, a project that is also really cool. You know what’s also cool? RSS. And guess what, John just announced he’s working on a new RSS app (Reader? Tool? Service?) called Alcove and he blogged about it. All this is nice. All this is cool. The more people build tools and services for the open web, the better. Having said all that...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stephanie Stimac, whose blog can be found at blog.stephaniestimac.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Nikita Galaiko and the other 127 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little...

Cold and frosty morning

TIL: Subtests in pytest 9.0.0+ I spotted an interesting new feature in the release notes for pytest 9.0.0: subtests. I'm a big user of the pytest.mark.parametrize decorator - see Documentation unit tests from 2018 - so I thought it would be interesting to try out subtests and see if they're a useful alternative. Short version: this parameterized test: @pytest.mark.parametrize("setting", app.SET...

Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig Thoughtful commentary on Go, Rust, and Zig by Sinclair Target. I haven't seen a single comparison that covers all three before and I learned a lot from reading this. One thing that I hadn't noticed before is that none of these three languages implement class-based OOP. Via Hacker News Tags: go, object-oriented-programming, programming-languages, rust, zig

Renewed Reeder for another year. I wanted to have moved to NetNewsWire, but I was lazy to figure out the sync situation, so now I have another year to think about this.

I bought a boatload of pink and pink-adjacent inks to find the hottest one

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that the Fediverse has been consuming a rather substantial amount of my attention and emotional resources (which are already in rather limited supply at the moment). Therefore, I’ve decided to take a break for a couple of years, and we’ll see how things go after that. I’ll be posting here predominantly music updates (only finished releases), and I won...

I’ve stopped positing about what I am currently reading, keep book lists in the blog, but Robin Sloan’s Moonbound deserves its own post. 📕 I wish a next one shows up soon because I am about to finish it, and I will miss it! Amazing book!

As an experiment to see if Modern CSS is up to the task, I recreated the Google Antigravity website with Modern CSS.

As ever, Mandy Brown casually drops a blog post that makes you examine the everyday meaning of words: One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be measured in your distance up the ladder, your territory across the way. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman implores us to thin...

If you kinda understand Anchor Positioning, but it still surprises you from time to time, then most likely this is the missing piece of information: the Inset-Modified Containing Block (or IMCB for short).

David Lynch, 2017, ★★★★ I’ve always been amazed Twin Peaks ever made it to air on network television in 1990, and its 2017 return, perhaps David Lynch’s most unfiltered vision, upped the ante on that amazement considerably, even in the streaming age of pricey prestige dramas. Has there ever been a creative work this vast and this weird with a production budget this big? Whatever you t...

What a busy month! Crazy at work, but also a lot of prep went into the last NN1 Dev Club meetup of the year. I’m very proud of how this little meetup idea grew to become a solid community of software engineers from the Northamptonshire area. Luckily, at the beginning of December, we are travelling to Sri Lanka and we are staying there until the end of the year. I’m very much looking forwa...

I wrote about the 404s I serve for robots.txt. Now it’s time to look at some of the other common 404s I serve across my static sites (as reported by Netlify’s analytics): /wp-login.php /wp-admin /news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml /login/ /wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml /news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml /website/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml /info.php I don’t run WordPress, but as you can see I stil...

As of today, I run three different newsletters, all powered by Buttondown: there’s my recently announced Dealgorithmed, my outdoors-focused From the Summit, and the People and Blogs series. I also send my blog posts via email, if you prefer to consume content that way. They all require double opt-in. Which means that if you signed up for one of them, you should have received a second email, ask...

Added to the film diary:Kansas City ConfidentialPhil Karlson, 1952, ★★★★White HeatRaoul Walsh, 1949, ★★★★ Tagged: November 2025 Reply via email

FestiveA little jingle to the desktop Want to leave a comment?, or just Respond via email.

One part JavaScript fatigue and two parts retro nostalgia.

These past few weeks I’ve been deep in code and doing what I think about as context plumbing. I’ve been building an AI system and that’s what it feels like. Let me unpack. Intent Loosely AI interfaces are about intent and context. Intent is the user’s goal, big or small, explicit or implicit. Uniquely for computers, AI can understand intent and respond in a really human way. This is a new cap...

Look at this grain! Thanks Halide !

Early morning in The Hague

🔗 Fifteen years: wow

I don’t know if it’s because some new responsibilities are taking me out of the house more than usual, or because humanity’s current ugly streak makes everything else look more beautiful, or because the chlorophyll decided now was the time to leave it all on the stage, but I’m really noticing the fall colors this year. Waking up to this radiant pear tree outside our window has been a quie...

You’re sitting at a table. In front of you, a series of plates. They’re full of shit (like some people). Not the same shit, mind you. It’s different types, produced by different animals, in different quantities. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that you have to eat the contents of one of those plates. Yeah, it sucks, I’m sorry. But you just have to. So you understandably start going ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Karen, whose blog can be found at chronosaur.us. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Pete and the other 127 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. ...