FeedCity

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks. WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your back end requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh. That’s it.

Simplify your integrations with WorkOS Pipes.

Link: workos.com/docs/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Joanna Stern (last week):

After 12 years with The Wall Street Journal, this is my final column and video as a full-time employee. I’m off to build something new and independent. I’ll still pop up on these pages and at WSJ events from time to time. Can’t get rid of me that easily! Before I go, I wanted to reflect on the past dozen years in tech — in a letter to my first-month-on-the-job self.

The video version of her sign-off column is worth it for the Velveeta gag alone.

Link: wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/12-years-consumer-tech-phones-ev…

I'm occasionally accused of using LLMs to write the content on my blog. I don't do that, and I don't think my writing has much of an LLM smell to it... with one notable exception:

    # Finally, do em dashes
    s = s.replace(' - ', u'\u2014')

That code to add em dashes to my posts dates back to at least 2015 when I ported my blog from an older version of Django (in a long-lost Mercurial repository) and started afresh on GitHub.

Tags: generative-ai, typography, blogging, ai, llms, python

We coined a new term on the Oxide and Friends podcast last month (primary credit to Adam Leventhal) covering the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field...

Gwtar: a static efficient single-file HTML format Fascinating new project from Gwern Branwen and Said Achmiz that targets the challenge of combining large numbers of assets into a single archived HTML file without that file being inconvenient to view in a browser. The key tr...

It's wild that the first commit to OpenClaw was on November 25th 2025, and less than three months later it's hit 10,000 commits from 600 contributors, attracted 196,000 GitHub stars and sort-of been featured in an extremely vague Super Bowl commercial for AI.com.

Quoting AI.com founder Kris Marszalek, purchaser of the most expensive domain in history for $70m:

ai.com is the world’s first easy-to-use and secure implementation of OpenClaw, the open source agent framework that went viral two weeks ago; we made it easy to use without any technical skills, while hardening security to keep your data safe.

Looks like vaporware to me - all you can do right now is reserve a handle - but it's still remarkable to see an open source project get to that level of hype in such a short space of time.

Tags: ai-agents, openclaw, ai, open-source, domains

One song from our gig in Aachen last weekend.

I saw yet another “CSS is a massively bloated mess” whine and I’m like. My dude. My brother in Chromium. It is trying as hard as it can to express the totality of visual presentation and layout design and typography and animation and digital interactivity and a few other things in a human-readable text format. It’s not bloated, it’s fantastically ambitious. Its reach is greater than most of us can hope to grasp. Put some respect on its name.

— Eric Meyer

Tags: css, web-standards, eric-meyer

How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt This piece by Margaret-Anne Storey is the best explanation of the term cognitive debt I've seen so far. Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that t...

Launching Interop 2026 Jake Archibald reports on Interop 2026, the initiative between Apple, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla to collaborate on ensuring a targeted set of web platform features reach cross-browser parity over the course of the year. I hadn't realized ho...

Someone has to prompt the Claudes, talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next. Engineering is changing and great engineers are more important than ever.

— Boris Cherny, Claude Code creator, on why Anthropic are still hiring developers

Tags: careers, anthropic, ai, claude-code, llms, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai

A new book for the color obsessed.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article With 200+ Artworks, ‘Rainbow Dreams’ Revels in the Vast Creativity of the Color Spectrum appeared first on Colossal.

The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they a...

Someone asked if there was an Anthropic equivalent to OpenAI's IRS mission statements over time. Anthropic are a "public benefit corporation" but not a non-profit, so they don't have the same requirements to file public documents with the IRS every year. But when I asked Cla...

As a USA 501(c)(3) the OpenAI non-profit has to file a tax return each year with the IRS. One of the required fields on that tax return is to "Briefly describe the organization’s mission or most significant activities" - this has actual legal weight to it as the IRS can use ...

If what you want is to see tiny people all over your plate, you 100% absolutely have to try Lanmaoa asiatica. The mushroom is a popular food during mushroom season, but if undercooked has the same effect worldwide: lilliputian hallucinations.