Stream
A selection of articles and links I've read recently with quick thoughts and reflections
I'm partway through Anthony Shaw's NDC talk, "Are LLMs good software engineers?"... | Hacker News
This is one of the things that needs to be really understood if you're going to make progress with LLMs. Every time you call one, you need to give it a version of this kind of briefing so they can go from nothing to having these lessons embedded. I'd love to see a way for agents to truly learn rather than just spending more tokens on context.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278419
The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden - ByteHaven - Where I ramble about bytes
I was intending to migrate from Bitwarden to self-hosted Vaultwarden, but it looks like I'm now in the market for a whole new password manager.
https://blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-renovation-at-bitwarden
Leaving the Physical World | Electronic Frontier Foundation
"In the Silicon Valley, I never know whether I'm in Mountain View or Sunnyvale or Campbell. They all look the same, and, in fact, they all look more or less like what one finds outside Austin or Boston. Most Americans can't be said to come from anywhere at all." This desire to be involved in something physical, to have place and presence, is powerful stuff. Could it be why I've gone quite deep on 35mm film photography?
https://www.eff.org/pages/leaving-physical-world
MacBook Neo Review: The Laptop For The Rest Of Us — fireborn
This says everything I’d want to say about the MacBook Neo. I’d not buy one for myself, but I’d recommend it to anyone who fits in the segment described here.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/macbook-neo-review-the-laptop-for-the-rest-of-us/
AI Slop is Killing Online Communities
Shared for the kids drawings.
https://rmoff.net/2026/05/06/ai-slop-is-killing-online-communities/
agents need control flow, not more prompts | brian’s thoughts
This is the heart of what I'm working on at the moment, trying to build reliable systems that combine the benefits of LLMs for language processing, but don't require them to define their own workflow.
https://bsuh.bearblog.dev/agents-need-control-flow/
The Boring Internet (text) | Terry Godier
I think I'm going to incorporate a finger service into this site.
https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet/ascii
Adding a feature to a closed-source app - Stavros’ Stuff
Interesting to see someone try and modify a closed source app with Claude. I’m far more interested in the implications of LLMs for Open Source, but this shows that closed source as a protection mechanism for your app isn’t quite what it was.
https://www.stavros.io/posts/adding-a-feature-to-a-closed-source-app/
This is truly the best of the internet. Far too much detail, abstract mathematical concepts and lots of diagrams.
https://www.revk.uk/2026/04/spectre.html?m=1
If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad?
So much to unpack here, it’s probably worth a proper blog post. Well worth the read (lots of good charts too).
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-get-so