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Access large language models from the command-line

A command-line tool to download photos from iCloud

I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.

Via linkmachinego.

I hope this article would be helpful in avoiding common mistakes in icon design, which Apple managed to collect all in one OS release. I love computers, I love interfaces, I love visual communication. It makes me sad seeing perfectly good knowledge already accessible 30 years ago being completely ignored or thrown away today.

A rant, but a completely justified one.

All-in-one Typst integration for Astro

Via russelldavies.

I put together this list of prioritization anti-patterns and traps to watch out for. If we can detect and filter out a meaningful percentage of the duds and traps, it can make a big difference.

A Ranking from Most to Least Evil

...which is actually still pretty evil.

What this means in practical terms is daring to trust your own curiosity. In creative work, that might mean abandoning the effort to “remember everything you read”, or conducting exhaustive research so as to ensure you’ve considered all the factors other people think you ought to consider, and instead using what naturally interests you as a filter.

Sanneh’s full embrace of commercialism was, then, the cultural equivalent of Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism. In accepting that pop culture is fundamentally an industrial product — and often at its best when in pursuit of extremely cynical financial goals — it became illegitimate to discriminate against pop musicians for being "manufactured." Good pop is good business — and vice versa.

I love having my perspective shaken up. A glass screen with no buttons sounds like the most excluding device imaginable, McCausland acknowledges, yet his phone became the most accessible tool he’s ever used. He’s similarly excited by the Meta Specs – I don’t think that’s what they’re actually called – which are always on and offer live video interpretation, telling you what you’re looking at. Like a phone but, crucially, wearable. “The one thing blind people never have is two hands free,” he observes.

Demonstrable curiosity about other people’s experiences and ideas can benefit everyone. Asking questions, not cutting people off, pausing to digest what someone has said rather than pouncing on breaks in a discussion to make your own point: these are not enough to qualify someone as a supercommunicator. But in plenty of organisations they would still represent good progress.

Astro Nano is a static, minimalist, lightweight, lightning fast portfolio and blog.

The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of satisfaction when fulfilled. But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been Through It.The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.

Via Popular.

Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing. They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.

The focus on more gets in the way of increasing value. Increasing pressure to do more almost inevitably has a bad result: the team tries to go faster, and wind up skimping on code quality and on tests. They soon begin shipping more defects, slowing down because of the increased rework to fix the defects, and slowing down even more because the code quality rapidly declines. Things get worse and worse, pressure increases, and it becomes a race to disaster.

One piece of data beats everything else. A quarter of a century ago, my dad taught me the best way to measure the health of our business was to look at the cash figure every day. Each morning at 10am, I get an email from Caroline in the finance team showing the cash we have in the bank compared with the same day last year. This fact offers no hiding place. The year-on-year comparison shows the strength of your cashflow and whether you are truly making money.

Via russelldavies.

You can design structures, processes and plans, but nothing will take hold unless human behaviour changes too. Behaviours are the foundational levers of change. But they’re rarely taken seriously because they’re hard to attach to quantifiable goals.

A2UI was designed to address the specific challenges of interoperable, cross-platform, generative or template-based UI responses from agents. A2UI allows agents to generate the interface which best suits the current conversation with the agent, and send it to a front end application.

An open-source, Qt-based eBook reader for Kobos (and other devices).

A self-hosted, multi-user digital library with smart shelves, auto metadata, Kobo & KOReader sync, BookDrop imports, OPDS support, and a built-in reader for EPUB, PDF, and comics.

TL;DR: Dependency cooldowns are a free, easy, and incredibly effective way to mitigate the large majority of open source supply chain attacks. More individual projects should apply cooldowns (via tools like Dependabot and Renovate) to their dependencies, and packaging ecosystems should invest in first-class support for cooldowns directly in their package managers.

Measured take, love the public RFDs.

And the stuff that does go out? It’s going to look less and less like big bureaucratic holding companies and more like ragtag groups of brilliant minds. Strategists and creatives and makers who can be assembled for a project, who can move fast, who aren’t carrying the overhead of a Soho office and seventeen layers of account management.

Blog Quest is a web browser extension that helps you discover and subscribe to blogs. Blog Quest checks each page for auto-discoverable RSS and Atom feeds (using rel="alternate" links) and quietly collects them in the background. When you’re ready to explore the collected feeds, open the extension’s drop-down window.

Being non-profit clearly demonstrates our commitment to keeping Ghostty free and open source for everyone. It paves the way for a model for sustainable development beyond my personal involvement. And it also provides important legal protections and assurances to the people and communities that adopt and use Ghostty.

🐳 Matrix (An open network for secure, decentralized communication) server setup using Ansible and Docker

Picking a notification message for an experience can be tricky. Reference this flowchart to help pick the best component for your feature. For more nuanced scenarios, reach out to the Primer team.

Wonderful flowchart on this page.

Measured’s website

Containerized Minecraft Bedrock Dedicated Server with selectable version

A fan-led project to archive their live recordings from over the years, all compiled in one place for your listening pleasure.

The open-source communication infrastructure for agents and products

From a young age, being accused of “overcomplicating” or “overthinking” things felt like a dismissal of who I was.

Between reality and models.

Unblah is a little "meeting-buddy"-app that helps you...

* Keep track of how long you've been speaking, * Catch yourself before you talk too much, or too little * Develop a better sense of timing

Tokenscript is a dsl that interprets design tokens.

Delivery is about output. Tickets closed, features shipped, velocity charts trending up. It's visible, measurable, manageable. Execution is about system design: how your organization actually turns intent into outcomes. It's the invisible architecture that determines whether you're learning or just busy.

Helpful framing when working with feature factory places.