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I Don’t Like Office Politics - NSCT

Saving this for future reflection, especially on the first section.

https://notsocommonthoughts.com/blog/2026-09-14-i-dont-like-politics/

How To Write With An LLM

I’ll be trying to incorporate some of this into my writing, but it still won’t solve the problem of not having any time to write.

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17/how-to-write-with-an-llm/

There’s no such thing as Just a Tool | deadSimpleTech

“the way a software developer would do things is the way they should be done, and that other approaches to the task are necessarily inferior”

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

マリウス . The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services

"this doesn’t matter when you don’t think long term, but fast fashion instead. Also, none of this is to say that an experienced engineer cannot use these tools well, because they certainly can. The issue is what happens when the same tools are used by someone who does not know what good looks like in the first place, and there is nobody downstream of them who does either."

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/the-temu-fication-of-software-digital-goods-services/

Everything I own, owned - schlarp.com

The downside of the 'implementation is free, now build something' world we find ourselves in. Last paragraph is really interesting.

https://schlarp.com/posts/everything-i-own-owned/

The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit

Who’d have thought in a system where capital makes the rules, that capital would be more valuable than labour.

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-american-sports-plutocracy-is

#223. Research into Child Psychology is Largely the Study of Effects of Captivity.

This is one of my personal interests. I found school to be possibly the most negative experience of my entire life, and am still trying to work through how such an experience at a formative age has impacted my perspectives throughout the rest of my life. As a father of a toddler who's yet to go to school, I want to understand how to minimise the harm that will inevitably be done to my daughter as she is forced into this system. I highly recommend Peter Gray's writing and leave this (longer than usual note) with a quotation: "It Is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society" - Krishnamurti

https://petergray.substack.com/p/223-research-into-child-psychology?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1304855&post_id=209832542&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2n5xt7&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Devtools must be open source - exe.dev blog

This reflects a lot of the same thoughts I've been having recently. Being able to customize software more easily is a hugely different future for products than we have today.

https://blog.exe.dev/devtools-must-be-open-source

The computer at the bottom of a canal

Great story about what drives success and adoption, the idea or the market or the cycle?

https://negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/the-computer-at-the-bottom-of-a-canal/

If it cites em dashes as proof, it came from a tool. § Scott Smitelli

Linking for the useful definitions of what en dashes, em dashes, and hyphens are useful for. I've found myself reacting negatively to a number of 'AI tells' in various text I've read recently, and I feel like I need to come to a more firm position before I start responding to friends, family, and colleagues in a very irrational way. After all, it's not this, it's that.

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/

You don’t have to if you don’t want to. § Scott Smitelli

"If you do knowledge work, your brain is your livelihood. Don’t rent your brain from some third party, especially a third party that may not have your best interests at heart."

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/you-dont-have-to/

Most Large Organisations are Hostile to Truth — Entropic

"Do not pretend to manage systems you cannot understand." Complex systems are the most interesting things humans have ever built. The fact that they go wrong so often should be a warning, not a challenge.

https://entropic.mataroa.blog/blog/work-at-the-coalface/#fnref:gtn

Altoids by the Fistful § Scott Smitelli

The best kind of long form writing; captivating, intriguing, introspective, and not slapping you about the face with the point. Instead it's worth a read and a re-read, then some contemplation on what it means. Craft and care and cat turds, what a way to sum up modern life and work.

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/altoids-by-the-fistful/

Signalbox - Live Train Map

I'm a sucker for a good map, especially one built on what I know is a pretty hard to work with dataset.

https://www.map.signalbox.io/?train=202607066729957&location=@51.16929,-0.73735,7.629Z

Introduction - inkwell

Another thing to add to my self-hosting experiment list.

https://kendal.codeberg.page/inkwell/

Please stop the AI Confidence Theater

I think this is a pretty reasonable take, though I think they could have been harsher about LinkedIn. The other thing I’d add is if you want AI benefits, you need to take the data and infrastructure seriously and invest in the before running off to do “AI Use Cases”.

https://www.elenaverna.com/p/please-stop-the-ai-confidence-theater

On Picky Bits and National Decline

I’m not so sure I completely buy the ‘how this relates to management’ angle, but the infantilism of language is one of my pet hates. At least ‘winningest’ hasn’t crossed the pond yet.

https://martinrobbins.substack.com/p/on-picky-bits-and-national-decline

They're Made Out of Weights

Amazing, also make sure to read the original before you read this (at the link at the top of the post) if you don't know it.

https://maxleiter.com/blog/weights

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

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/

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/

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/

Spectre

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

nial.se/blog/less-human-ai-agents-please/

How do we train the AI agents that we want when the training data makes it easiest for them to imitate humans?

https://nial.se/blog/less-human-ai-agents-please/

solar pi

I’ve always wanted to do a solar based machine and love the idea of this just running in memory. My one slight issue is that you are, of course, dependent on power for your internet connection. I might see if I can set up something similar.

https://hackaday.io/project/205403-solar-pi

@adlrocha - How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

I think this is really perceptive - my dream is to run something fully locally that can match the performance of the current Claude Sonnet. I have a box that can run very small models on it, and would happily invest in something powerful to run more capable models. I suppose I'm waiting for the models and hardware to align. I'd prefer to run something like a Framework Desktop than a Mac Mini, and then deliberately give it context instead of just letting context be my Apple / iPhone / iCloud account.

https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-how-the-ai-loser-may-end

Protect Your Shed · dbut2

I’ve really enjoyed getting more into side projects, mostly enabled by LLMs. Either in fixing problems or helping me triage tech choices. My other thought would be why we seem unable or unwilling to make similar spaces to try and fail in professional environments.

https://dylanbutler.dev/blog/protect-your-shed/

Multi-agentic Software Development is a Distributed Systems Problem (AGI can’t save you from it)

I’m not sure my brain was really in the right place to process this at 8am, but I do like some formal rigour as opposed to lots of LLM hot takes. I don’t think I’m qualified to comment as to whether this is true or not but it seems reasonable as a real concern for agentic swarm development. Maybe a single superintelligence wouldn’t have such problems, but that feels like running away from reality to a safe, warm delusion that just feeds more of the economy into the AGI dream.

https://kirancodes.me/posts/log-distributed-llms.html

Bad vibes

Interesting as always, especially the part about Labour losing their traditional base because of their continued stance on Brexit.

https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/04/bad-vibes.html?m=1

The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here

"The death of the AI industry would be cataclysmic to venture capitalists, bring about the end of the hypergrowth era for the Magnificent Seven, and may very well kill Oracle, but — seriously — that is nothing in comparison to the scale of the Great Financial Crisis. This isn’t me minimizing the chaos to follow, but trying to express how thoroughly fucked everything was in 2008." Not sure this is a bad thing.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

AI Agents Could Make Free Software Matter Again | George London

I am finding being able to quickly build and modify my own software massively liberating, but hadn't thought of how this impacts 'free software' more philosophically.

https://www.gjlondon.com/blog/ai-agents-could-make-free-software-matter-again/

Do LLMs Break the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

This guy's content is amazing. Such depth and really understandable. Is there an underlying logic for how we structure concepts? Who knows, but it looks like there might be for LLMs.

https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/sapir-whorf/

Zack Shapiro on X: "The Input Layer" / X

If something is good enough that I am prepared to cross post something from X, it's worth a read. The blending of technical and domain knowledge is key to any successful 'digital transformation', and getting it right is almost impossible. That's why I don't think I've ever seen one.

https://x.com/zackbshapiro/status/2036791156915290271

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