FeedCity

So it didn’t end up being weekly. Here’s some links!

• Duh: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
• Torment nexus is going well: “A significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities”
• Who would have guessed? AI code generation leads to more code, more duplicated code, less cohesive systems, more defects
• Residential networking over telephone

More next ‘week’!

An introduction to the boolean and bitwise XOR operators, their uses, and some advanced topics they lead in to.

A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today. (6,100 words, 600 photos.)

I’m currently looking to add a search feature to my blog. It’s a client-side approach, which means I was planning on using my favorite progressive-enhancement technique for client-side only search: you point a search form at Google, scope the results to your site, then use J...

On the best-kept secret of VC-backed "open source" startups.

Notes on virtualization obfuscation of JavaScript.

IRB you kidding me?

What could've been the largest data breach in the world - an attack chain on Google services to leak the email address of any YouTube channel

We’re thrilled to announce that Jon, from the Secret Lab and Yarn Spinner team will be presenting a talk at the GDC this year in San Francisco: ‘DREDGE’ and Yarn Spinner: Building Narrative with Open Source.

The talk will explore how the indie hit, DREDGE, uses our Yarn Spinner technology for narrative, and how you can do the same.

Join us at GDC! Email me via paris AT yarnspinner.dev if you’d like to organise a meeting, too.

Thoughts on being in my head

People seek certainty before they act, but becoming an outlier requires acting without it.

Hidde de Vries gave a great talked titled “Creativity cannot be computed” (you can checkout the slides or watch the video). In his slides he has lots of bullet points that attempt to define what art is, and then in the talk he spends time covering each one. Here’s a sampling...

Zoals ik schreef in de eerste aflevering van mijn nieuwsbrief: “Het komt een beetje pompeus over om updates over mezelf te sturen, maar het is echt op veler verzoek. En spontaan hebben 248 mensen zich al ingeschreven, dus er is kennelijk behoefte.” Je kunt je hier inschrijven en hier is het archief van eerdere afleveringen. Ik stuur een nieuwsbrief alleen als er wat te melden is: nieuwe posts, praatjes, kamervragen, dat soort dingen.

Today, I got back from the South Australian Game Exhibition 2025 (SAGE). It was an expo and mini-conference with a showcase, and an awards night, run by the South Australian Film Corporation and the South Australian Games Association, respecively. This was the first time at this fantastic weekend of events for me, and I have to say: I will definitely be back.

The South Australian games industry is doing really well. Their events were happy, healthy, passionate, and have a nice community feel that’s often lacking from games industry events as they try and professionalise and grow. It was wonderful to see how much camaraderie there is in South Australia. There were also some fantastic games on display, and many of them were hilarious.

It’s not new, but it’s accelerating. People that used to say that LLMs were a fundamentally flawed way to reach any useful reasoning and, in general, to develop any useful tool with some degree of generality, are starting to shuffle the deck, in the hope to look less wrong. T...

Applying any normal ROI analysis to Brady’s broadcaster contract is difficult for at least four reasons.

We are destroying software by no longer taking complexity into account when adding features or optimizing some dimension. We are destroying software with complex build systems. We are destroying software with an absurd chain of dependencies, making everything bloated and fr...

Quoting myself from former days on Twitter: Businesses have a mental model of what they do. Businesses build software to help them do it—a concrete manifestation of their mental model. A gap always exists between these two. What makes a great software business is their abil...

On pushing through imposter syndrome and overcoming self-doubt as a founder.