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You know who else had a Greenland obsession? “Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s.”

I love these collage illustrations of various celebrities and famous characters by artist/designer Fries Vansevenant: Han Solo & Luke Skywalker, Notorious BIG, Heath Ledger’s Joker, Beatrix Kiddo, David Beckham. There are more on his Insta. Tags: art · design · Fries Vansevenant

Cocaine can make you feel powerful and euphoric in seconds, but it hijacks your brain’s reward system and strains your heart. Here’s what really happens inside your body when you take it. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learnwithshorts #science #drugawaren...

I've long been resistant to the idea of accepting sponsorship for my blog. I value my credibility as an independent voice, and I don't want to risk compromising that reputation. Then I learned about Troy Hunt's approach to sponsorship, which he first wrote about in 2016. Tro...

A reader pointed out that the 2026 Formula 1 season starts in Australia on March 8. You will recall from October that Apple TV is now the exclusive broadcast partner for F1 in the U.S. Apple is already dabbling with live immersive sports broadcasting for VisionOS with a limi...

Maybe when you think of Los Angeles you think of mega highways, gridlock traffic, and urban sprawl. But our guest today argues that it is actually an underrated destination for enjoying the outdoors. Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now: Lessons from the City State of Los Angeles, shares his favorite places in the city to enjoy nature, from urban parks to mountain trails…and then he’ll also take us even further out there, to a wilderness survival course and a class on talking to plants.

More about today’s guest: https://www.rosecransbaldwin.com/

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SWE-bench February 2025 leaderboard update SWE-bench is one of the benchmarks that the labs love to list in their model releases. The official leaderboard is infrequently updated but they just did a full run of it against the current generation of models, which is notable be...

No one wants to stick their neck out, but it's getting hard to find abiotic explanations

LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Abandon Swift adoption

Back in August 2024 the Ladybird browser project announced an intention to adopt Swift as their memory-safe language of choice.

As of this commit it looks like they've changed their mind:

Everywhere: Abandon Swift adoption

After making no progress on this for a very long time, let's acknowledge it's not going anywhere and remove it from the codebase.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ladybird, swift

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