Links from 2026 (265 links)

Bird frame for Raspberry Pi or your homelab - real-time bird detection by audio, fully local AI, rendered as real, hand-cut 1800s bird illustrations. On an e-ink panel, a TV, or any screen.

What an absolute frontier operator.

The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there's no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job.

A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely. Ecologists have known this for a long time already and even priced it: they call it the insurance value of biodiversity, the standing reserve of rare species that cost energy and contribute nothing, until the climate shifts and one of them turns out to be what survives. A monoculture is efficient right up until the weather changes.

Via monospaced.

Via simonwillison.

Why trust us? We pay full price for the shoes we review and never publish sponsored content.

Great mini-essay on business and market growth.

Clever way of running some cheeky internal fibre.

AI is the best thing that ever happened to a company like ours. Not because it changes what we believe, but because it stops us having to compromise. The reason we couldn't stay small, flat and senior at enterprise scale was that making at that scale needs bodies. Now, it doesn’t.

Via benterrett.

Back when dog technology was first being developed, it was far from obvious that it was safe for people—who were literally inviting wolves into their caves. They had to train them not to eat babies. Thousands of years later, dogs still sometimes escape and go rogue. But overall, people are happy with how things have worked out. (It did not end so well for the Neanderthals.)

Great analogy.

This is where the culture stuff comes in: Bluesky is hostile in different ways to new normie users and to new power users. The absence of a default algorithm makes Bluesky quite boring and difficult to a new user. Yes, there are starter packs and custom feeds, etc, but that’s all quite complicated. Just like most users don’t use Linux on desktop, most people want a plug-in-and-play social experience. Bluesky isn’t that.

Or maybe all text-based social media (including Bluesky) has become riven by politics, which is exhausting and just not that much fun.

Generational change (for the worse)

A Pinboard alternative on AT Protocol.

Skyreader gathers your reading from across the internet into one calm place and helps you make sense of it all.

A web service for managing lists of feeds, sharing them with other users, both in and outside of FeedLand, and reading and sharing news. The goal of FeedLand is to make news a social thing, following the pattern of social media apps, but using open formats and protocols.

It is the systematic loss of responsibility, reflection, and intuition. These habits do not stop at the level of the individual. They scale. They become culture. And culture, eventually, becomes politics.

Big AI models like ChatGPT and Claude get all the attention, but the continually increasing amount of fast, low cost models means today's software can embed little bits of intelligence anywhere they're needed. And when software can think, we can rethink the UI of software.

You can think of the doorman fallacy as an extension or example of the Chesterton's fence fallacy: getting rid of the fence (doorman) without fully understanding why it was there in the first place.

A lightweight markup language for documents and the web.

Everything an agent shows mid-conversation: thinking states, tool calls, streaming text, tables and more.

Via monospaced.

Many of those I speak to think tech has pushed this change forward – and rapidly. The shift away from cash towards card and digital payments is usually framed as removing “friction”, says Prof John Vines, the chair of design informatics at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. “It’s about being more convenient. This is all a trend towards making it easier for us to spend our money.” The software in point-of-sale terminals prompts the customer for a tip. “These systems are presented as a way of making giving a tip easier. We don’t have to think about it too much, we don’t have to fiddle with coins and notes. But, really, it’s about encouraging us to spend more.”

What an excellent technical essay.

Another focus for African innovation is so-called “small language models” for specific tasks, which have at most a few billion parameters (frontier LLMs have trillions) [...]

All this amounts to a somewhat counter-cultural vision of AI, prizing modesty over scale and context over omniscience. It may not survive the all-conquering ambitions of Silicon Valley. But for now African researchers have found a niche.

Rules for the robust and accessible UIs that the web deserves, encompassing architecture, typography, colors, layout, and motion. One fetchable file.

From Mr Hallows.

Modern CSS skills for coding agents and humans

Via jamesholloway.

Great diagnosis, not great solution.

Rich, engaging mathematical resources for ages 3 to 18, including research-informed teacher support. NRICH resources are free to use for teachers, students and parents, and open to all.

You could call this the Jurisdiction Method. Before you decide to track something, ask: whose responsibility is this? If it’s yours, take action. If it belongs to someone else, you might influence it, but you don’t own it, and you shouldn’t let it take over your attention just because you’re tracking it.

Humanity spent two centuries fitting those systems with partial controls. In the case of corporations, those controls include independent boards of directors, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure rules and regulators, not to mention public disapproval and consequent activism. Each was a feedback loop, a way to correct the system when its objectives drove it somewhere monstrous. Mr Musk is removing those loops one at a time.

Large language models like long words and em-dashes—or do they?

Paste or write anything below. Each sentence is highlighted by its length so you can see the rhythm of your prose — a wall of one colour is monotony; a healthy mix is music.

Export a ChatGPT account (incl. business/Team) to a local searchable offline archive - conversations, files, and a single-file HTML viewer

Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.

Via marionnestle.

One problem with AI agents is they're trained on so much fiction that they have both narrative disorder and main character syndrome, and will latch onto details that feed a story. It's easy to see them escalating when they get pushback, or reading an essay that somehow shifts them into acting as if they're part of a larger battle. And they can do it at lightning speed, governed not by a code of conduct but by the laws of storytelling.

Great reference to Malka Older's Narrative Disorder.

Slop cannon