15 April 2026

31 links · Wednesday

Open Source Isn't Dead. | Strix

AI has changed vulnerability discovery, but closing source code does not remove the attack surface. Continuous AI defense is the better response.

Google Broke Its Promise to Me. Now ICE Has My Data.

In 2025, Google gave Amandla Thomas-Johnson's data to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose

In 1986, a corporation that made women's lingerie bought every backpack brand you've ever trusted.

God sleeps in the minerals

I took this snapshot, and the rest of them, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Unearthed: Raw Beauty exhibition yesterday. Enjoy.

Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers.

Imagine you don't know anything about programming, and you want learn how to do it. You take a look at Amazon.com, and there's a highly recommended set of books by Knute or something with a promising title, The Art of Computer Programming, so you buy them. N…

An Arm Mainboard for the Framework Laptop

Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end x86 option (a Ryzen AI 5 340 Mainboard), the fastest RISC-V option (DC-ROMA II), and today I'm publishing results from the only Arm Mainboard, the MetaComputing AI PC, which has a 1…

Stop Flock

Flock Safety markets its devices as "AI-powered precision policing technology" - far beyond basic license plate readers (ALPRs) (Flock Safety). The system uses AI to create a "Vehicle Fingerprint" - identifying cars not only by…

Moats Don't Work When Bridges Are Free

## The prompt that changed my perspective I recently used Perplexity Computer to link my investment accounts together and build a portfolio tracker. Not a la...

Your codebase doesn't care how it got written

[10 min read] Every design team I’ve worked with has had the same complaint about clients. “They sent over a PowerPoint with mockups.” Eye rolls. Crossed a...

How can I keep from singing?

This is a story of a most unexpected journey — one that is just starting. If somebody had told me four years ago that I’d be writing this today, I would have stared at them in astonishment or laughed dismissedly. Yet here I am, writing about a late-found hobby…

Why My WordPress? – Alex Kirk

Most WordPress plugins are built to grow your audience. I’ve been going in the opposite direction for years: building tools not to increase reach, but for personal reasons: to stay connected to people I care about, to keep memories that would otherwise scatter…

New Twin Dad — Edward Champion

Being a new dad is so hard. Things change drastically from day to day, you're getting such broken sleep, and you have a whole new person to love. Being a twin dad is like x2. So I wanted to offer what little advice and reassurance I can, and hope that this hel…

Sam Baumann

I created an automation that pulls my highlights from kindle and drops them into my obsidian vault.

SVG based Vector Scope

I was gifted a Sencore SC62 oscilloscope from the mid-80s. It had spent a good chunk of its 40+ year life in a barn. This beautiful device along with many similar models are being discarded since modern scopes have become so cheap and capable. To avoid that fa…

The Vibes Don't Scale

Vibe coding works great for the first few PRs. Then you do it two hundred more times and the codebase quietly stops making sense. The fix isn't better prompts — it's building a machine that compounds.

Please don't vibe code your personal website

I have experimented enough with AI coding agents that I have come to pick up on their design style, and I've been noticing it on the internet more and more. Some of its stylistic choices I can articulate: too much animation, pointless elements, too many colors…