FeedCity

Love this cool JS pattern-making script.

New from Neal Agarwal: Sandboxels. “It’s a falling-sand game with hundreds of elements, heat simulation, electricity & a lot more. I like making little cities and then adding tons of rats.”

Paul Ford, in an op-ed for The New York Times (gift link):

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?unlocked…

Some modern collective nouns: a cringe of Cybertrucks, an anxiety of authors, a migraine of toddlers, and “a group of two or men is called a podcast”.

Business/product advice: launch it three times. “The vast majority of the time, the single biggest problem you have is that nobody knows you exist, and nobody gives a damn about what you do.”

25+ years into my career as a programmer I think I may finally be coming around to preferring type hints or even strong typing. I resisted those in the past because they slowed down the rate at which I could iterate on code, especially in the REPL environments that were key to my productivity. But if a coding agent is doing all that typing for me, the benefits of explicitly defining all of those types are suddenly much more attractive.

Tags: ai-assisted-programming, programming, programming-languages

With music by Max Cooper and visuals by Conner Griffith, A Sense of Getting Closer is a music video that was inspired by a quote submitted to Cooper’s On Being project:

I have a sense of getting closer to something which my life depends on. I can sense it but I cannot tell if I should be excited or terrified about what will happen.

Mesmerizing. Like literally, given that it’s based on “a hypnotic light show we can’t look away from, yet we know is made up of low-quality content fed to us by engagement algorithms.”

Tags: Conner Griffith · Max Cooper · mesmerizing · music · video

Searching for Birds, an engaging visualization of eBird and Google Trends data that reveals human curiosity about birds.

The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived New opinion piece from Paul Ford in the New York Times. Unsurprisingly for a piece by Paul it's packed with quoteworthy snippets, but a few stood out for me in particular. Paul describes the November moment that so many ...

LLMs are eating specialty skills. There will be less use of specialist front-end and back-end developers as the LLM-driving skills become more important than the details of platform usage. Will this lead to a greater recognition of the role of Expert Generalists? Or will the ability of LLMs to write lots of code mean they code around the silos rather than eliminating them?

— Martin Fowler, tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat, via HN)

Tags: martin-fowler, careers, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming

How to raise children. “It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is.”

Team Pursuit speed skaters used to trade off leads like cyclists but the sport has been revolutionized by the US team’s invention of the “bump drafting” technique.

The excellent Poster House museum in NYC currently has an exhibition up of posters by Peter Strausfeld. Between 1947 and 1980, Peter Strausfeld, a German refugee interned on the Isle of Man during World War II, created unique, compelling posters for London’s Academy ...

This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron & Wine in the fall of 2022 about the song "Flightless Bird, American Mouth." And there are a couple of reasons. One, there’s a new Iron & Wine album that’s coming out this month, called Hen’...

Paul Ford on AI and the Infinite Software Era. “All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.”

Current is an interesting new RSS reader that doesn’t function like an email inbox. “There is no count because counting was the problem.”

A giant salamander has been lurking in the rivers and streams of Appalachia for more than a hundred million years.  And in just the last few years – after surviving one of the worst hurricanes in decades – they've become a local symbol of pride.

This episode was produced in partnership with Visit North Carolina. 

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Hartley Charlton, MacRumors: Apple invited select members of the media to the event in three major cities around the world. It is simply described as a “special Apple Experience,” and there is no further information about what it may entail. The invitation features a 3D ...

Introducing Claude Sonnet 4.6 Sonnet 4.6 is out today, and Anthropic claim it offers similar performance to November's Opus 4.5 while maintaining the Sonnet pricing of $3/million input and $15/million output tokens (the Opus models are $5/$25). Here's the system card PDF. I ...

Rodney v0.4.0 My Rodney CLI tool for browser automation attracted quite the flurry of PRs since I announced it last week. Here are the release notes for the just-released v0.4.0: Errors now use exit code 2, which means exit code 1 is just for for check failures. #15 New r...