24 August 2026

37 links · Monday

Bettor Up | Matt Lane

When medical trials get turbo charged with even more capitalism, what could possibly go wrong?

The Observability Pain Cycle

Store-everything-up-front observability produces a recurring pattern of bill shock, reactive pruning, and silent regrowth. A structural look at the mechanics of the cycle and why the usual fixes don't break it.

Do You Miss Writing Code? The Quiet Craft We Are Losing

A nostalgic reflection on what writing code by hand really gave us: the puzzle, the flow, the craft, the pull request anxiety, and the quiet it left behind in the age of AI.

Your "File" Menu Isn't About Files

What is up with calling the first app menu item "File" even though the items do nothing related to actual files? 💡tl;dr – Please consider opting for something better than calling your first menu item "File". Let's dive into a couple of apps on my MacBook an…

Hiding a prompt in a tokenizer

The Hugging Face tokenizer.json spec allows you to hide a prompt in a post processor. In this post, I show you how that works, and how it improves portability for tokenizers.

The end of IPFS at Shipyard

We have some difficult news to share with the IPFS and wider peer-to-peer community. Our IPFS funding was cancelled

Cowboy Clothes and Sunday Best

The question of authenticity in a medium that was supposed to bring us closer together has only pushed us farther apart.

Reclassification :: TLDRisk.com

TLDR ICANN allows reclassification. Reclassification does not eliminate identical renewal pricing protections, aka uniform pricing. Reclassification creates a new category of domains. Reclassification is a discriminatory practice. Reclassification undermines s…

The Real Imposter Syndrome

A reflection on the real imposter syndrome many workers experience when their jobs conflict with their values and the state of the world.

The changing role of finite-state model checking

This post stems from a recent conversation with Heidi Howard where we talked about the changing role of TLA⁺ & finite-state model checking in both research and industry. For a long time, users of TLA⁺ (or other formal specification languages like Quint) had a …

Pinning Claude Code

I prefer boring upgrades when it comes to Claude Code, so I pinned mine back to Opus 4.8 using a small dot-files script that fixes the version and model across all my sessions.

Ox Alpha is GLM

Prompt injection and gzip-NCD compression analysis reveal that OX Alpha, a mysterious LLM on OpenRouter, is GLM developed by Z.ai.

Software Factories Can Handle UX

The hardest thing about running an arm’s length software factory has been anything that touches UX. If your quality bar is high, a human still has to look at...

How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

European Union's new packaging rules threaten to kill the world of makers and micro-entrepreneurs, putting jobs, livelihoods and an entire ecosystem of innovation at risk.

Everything I own, owned

Turning Claude loose on the firmware of five USB and WiFi peripherals, and finding a command shell in a microphone, a defeatable webcam activity LED, and unauthenticated memory writes over the network.