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You may have heard the phrase 'third place' being used more often as the world started opening up post-pandemic. People were craving somewhere that was neither their home or work, but still a place to focus social connection. But the Barbican, in London, was WAY ahead of its time.

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Last month I added a feature I call beats to this blog, pulling in some of my other content from external sources and including it on the homepage, search and various archive pages on the site.

On any given day these frequently outnumber my regular posts. They were looking a little bit thin and were lacking any form of explanation beyond a link, so I've added the ability to annotate them with a "note" which now shows up as part of their display.

Here's what that looks like for the content I published yesterday:

I've also updated the /atom/everything/ Atom feed to include any beats that I've attached notes to.

Tags: atom, blogging, site-upgrades

Research: Starlette 1.0 skill

See Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills.

Tags: starlette

Research: PCGamer Article Performance Audit

Stuart Breckenridge pointed out that PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading, highlighting a truly horrifying example of web bloat that added up to 100s more MBs thanks to auto-playing video ads. I decided to have Claude Code for web use Rodney to investigate the page - prompt here.

Tags: web-performance, rodney

Research: JavaScript Sandboxing Research

Aaron Harper wrote about Node.js worker threads, which inspired me to run a research task to see if they might help with running JavaScript in a sandbox. Claude Code went way beyond my initial question and produced a comparison of isolated-vm, vm2, quickjs-emscripten, QuickJS-NG, ShadowRealm, and Deno Workers.

Tags: sandboxing, javascript, nodejs, claude-code

Tool: DNS Lookup

TIL that Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service (and 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, which block malware and malware + adult content respectively) has a CORS-enabled JSON API, so I had Claude Code build me a UI for running DNS queries against all three of those resolvers.

Tags: dns, cors, cloudflare

Tool: Merge State Visualizer

Bram Cohen wrote about his coherent vision for the future of version control using CRDTs, illustrated by 470 lines of Python.

I fed that Python (minus comments) into Claude and asked for an explanation, then had it use Pyodide to build me an interactive UI for seeing how the algorithms work.

Tags: vcs, pyodide, bram-cohen, crdt

Starlette 1.0 is out! This is a really big deal. I think Starlette may be the Python framework with the most usage compared to its relatively low brand recognition because Starlette is the foundation of FastAPI, which has attracted a huge amount of buzz that seems to have ov...

The sitting president of the United States, on his blog:

Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP

As the elderly descend further into dementia, they lose their sense of propriety and simply speak their mind. (They also get confused and think they need to “sign” their text messages and social media posts.) Say what you want about Trump’s truthfulness generally, but here, he’s just being brutally honest. Let’s keep his “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” post bookmarked for when Trump himself finally keels over — after he chokes on a hamburger or whatever it’ll be that finally does him in — and the good people of the world rejoice and celebrate.

Link: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/116268334535345382

Stuart Breckenridge, examining a web page at PC Gamer:

Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.

This is so irresponsible and unprofessional it beggars belief. Web browsers ought to defend against this. Why not cap page loads by default at, I don’t know, 5 MB? And require explicit consent to download any additional content?

Link: stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss…

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Video isn’t just something to watch; it’s a boatload of context and data. Mux makes it easy to ship and scale video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows. Unlock what’s inside: transcripts, clips, and storyboards to build summarization, translation, content moderation, tagging, and more.

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Link: mux.com/?utm_campaign=fireball&utm_source=DF

Honestly, this was very entertaining. I was pretty tired, but this kept me awake, no problem. It's just so bizarre and funny. The daughter and her father are absolute comedy gold. And that policeman! The costumes are so good, too. I don't know, I had a great time and would most definitely watch it again.

👍 Recommended!

Plot is all over the place and there's quite a few scenes that make little sense. But yeah, for a trash-movie night, certainly not the worst flick. "Wait, how did they lift those enormous logs and … ?" "WHO CARES, ACTION, AHHHH…!". The finale is like Home Alone but in the woods and pretty entertaining.

Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters: The latest effort, known internally as “Transformer,” is being developed within its devices and services unit, according to four people familiar ​with the matter. The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that c...

Here's a mildly dystopian prompt I've been experimenting with recently: "Profile this user", accompanied by a copy of their last 1,000 comments on Hacker News. Obtaining those comments is easy. The Algolia Hacker News API supports listing comments sorted by date that have a ...

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Git is a key tool for working with coding agents. Keeping code in version control lets us record how that code changes over time and investigate and reverse any mistakes. All of the coding agents are fluent in using Git's features, both ...

Another HWC Düsseldorf has taken place this week, where we shared what we’ve been up to with our personal sites. Nina continued to write more and more for her homepage as well as work on the code. She started adding music to her blog posts. Jochen continues to make selfhosted tools and recently added a (private) “Archive” site where he adds podcasts episodes to, and transcribes the audio into text. I recently added the latest Polaroid to my homepage.

We also talked about Kagi’s Small Web initiative, AI, how much personal information to share online, and easter eggs. Links mentioned:

• Kagi Small Web
  • rss.social
  • powrss.com
• lynnandtonic.com/archive/ (re: general inspiration)
• florian.photo/2025-11-20 (re: sound on websites)
• zachleat.com (re: easter eggs)

We wanna hear your stories about the times you’ve accidentally broken the rules somewhere foreign to you. 

Maybe you went into a temple with your shoes on, when you weren’t supposed to. Maybe you had a drink at a sacred place and were forbidden to enter again. Or maybe you even wound up in a brush with the local police  for something minor that’s not against the rules where you live. 

Tell us where you went. What happened? Why did you get in trouble? And how did you ultimately get out of it? Give us a call at (315) 992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Or leave us a voice memo at hello@atlasobscura.com. 

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