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Today's links Code is a liability (not an asset): AI psychosis, tech boss edition. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Coldplay CD DRM; Star Wars Wars; Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism; Transvaginal foetal sonic bombardment: woo-tunes for your hoo-h...

Almost a year ago, I found that N100 Mini PCs were cheaper than a decked-out Raspberry Pi 5. So comparing systems with:

• 16GB of RAM
• 512GB NVMe SSD
• Including case, cooler, and power adapter

Back in March last year, a GMKtec Mini PC was $159, and a similar-spec Pi 5 was $208.

Today? The same GMKtec Mini PC is $246.99, and the same Pi 5 is $246.95:

Today, because of the wonderful RAM shortages¹, the Mini PC is the same price as a fully kitted-out Raspberry Pi 5.

Hello! I am not posting here any more. You can find me here instead. Most Planets should be updated already (I've an MR open for Planet Gnome), but if you're subscribed to my feed directly please update it.

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The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?” There have been mass layoffs that leave more tech workers than ever lookin...

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

Devastating critique of the new menu icons in macOS Tahoe by Nikita Prokopov, who starts by quoting the 1992 Apple HIG rule to not "overload the user with complex icons" and then provides comprehensive evidence of Tahoe doing exactly that.

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

Via Hacker News

Tags: apple, design, macos, usability

A photo essay of 20-something best tech museums I’ve been to… and three bad ones.

Dispatches From The Wormhole

Oxide and Friends Predictions 2026, today at 4pm PT

I joined the Oxide and Friends podcast last year to predict the next 1, 3 and 6 years(!) of AI developments. With hindsight I did very badly, but they're inviting me back again anyway to have another go.

We will be recording live today at 4pm Pacific on their Discord - you can join that here, and the podcast version will go out shortly afterwards.

I'll be recording at their office in Emeryville and then heading to the Crucible to learn how to make neon signs.

Via Bryan Cantrill

Tags: podcasts, ai, llms, oxide

Today's links A world without people: AI is a promise to wire the boss's toy steering wheel directly into the company's drive-train. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Adding exclusive rights make economies weaker; Bloggers after the collapse; Why the...

The best career opportunities don't necessarily come from your manager. They come from seeing potential in the boring work already on your plate.

The setup for my notes blog looks like this: Content is plain-text markdown files (synced via Dropbox, editable in iA Writer on my Mac, iPad, or iPhone) Codebase is on GitHub Builds are triggered in Netlify by a Shortcut I try to catch spelling issues and what not before I...

It genuinely feels to me like GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 in November represent an inflection point - one of those moments where the models get incrementally better in a way that tips across an invisible capability line where suddenly a whole bunch of much harder coding problems open up.

Tags: anthropic, claude, openai, ai, llms, gpt-5, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, claude-4

On the exhaustion of man.

Using Claude Code to port 120k lines of Pascal and 68k assembly to modern C# - and what this means for cross-platform development

With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs.

This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product.

Design your deprecations as migrations with time, tooling, and empathy. Most “API design” is actually “API retirement.”

— Addy Osmani, 21 lessons from 14 years at Google

Tags: api-design, addy-osmani, careers, google

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something usef...

Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on ...

I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hou...

Brief post on a somewhat vexing and irritating C++ problem I ran into some time ago. I hope that this page will help other people deal with this problem more quickly than I did. I’ve long used std::basic_string<uint8_t>, an unsigned char string, for fiddling with bits. You could use a regular char string, but especially when doing cryptographic or sub-byte operations, it is more convenient to not have to deal with sign bits.

Last month, the stars aligned for me to bring the Mono Gateway (a 10 Gbps router that YouTuber Tomaž Zaman and his team at Mono built from scratch) on a trip to Phoenix, and test it with one of the most OP network test boxes I've ever seen, at the ServeTheHome HQ.

In this video, Patrick (from STH) and I put Gateway through a real-world torture test using CyPerf:

Mono Gateway

The Gateway is a small (1U/desktop) router with features like a 4-core Arm CPU, 8GB of ECC LPDDR RAM, and decent expansion options for a compact router.