Rick Vega made this helpful site to build your own zine.

Love this essay by Conor Dougherty about 40- and 50-somethings who skate a Costco car park before work. Curbs as an excuse to keep showing up for each other.

John Herrick unravel the mysteries of elevators.

An intersting guid for archivist wanting to create disk images of floppy disks with the intention of preserving them for the long-term.

Julia Evans talks about her learnings from using SQLite in production.

Michiyo Yasuda gave Ghibli its colour. This piece finally gives her the credit.

Interesting tutorial by Jonas Hietala on designing a personal Pebble watchface. I like the idea of using a watchface to display personal information, and this tutorial provides a good starting point for creating one.

Mechanical Pencil is a collection of illustrated tear-downs of everyday products by Bryan Macomber. The Zippo tear-down is particularly impressive.

Doug MacDowell writes about drawing data visualisations completely by hand.

“What are you working on these days?”
“Data visualizations.” I told him.
“Ah, you using algorithms, machine learning, cloud computing, things like that?”
“No.” I said. “I’m just trying to draw a line graph.”

My neighbor thought I was getting into some complex sh**. But what’s been more interesting to me lately than using […] is learning to draw data by hand. 50 Hours to Draw Some Lines is about spending more than a week on something that software can accomplish in 20 minutes - and a catalog of resources and methods acquired along the way.

Amanda Shendruk writes about the work that’s done after Burning Man, where 150 people line up, side by side and arms apart, and slow walk the entire playa looking for Moop (Matter Out of Place).

This forensic-style sweep takes weeks; everything they find is removed and logged. At the end, they’re left with a remarkable accounting of what 70,000 people left behind: The MOOP Map. And I’m obsessed.

The Moop Map is a pretty remarkable view of what is left behind:

Mario Zechner writes about the current usage of LLM coding agents in software development and how we just need to slow down our release cycles.

You have zero fucking idea what’s going on because you delegated all your agency to your agents. You let them run free, and they are merchants of complexity. They have seen many bad architectural decisions in their training data and throughout their RL training. You have told them to architect your application. Guess what the result is?

An immense amount of complexity, an amalgam of terrible cargo cult “industry best practices”, that you didn’t rein in before it was too late. But it’s worse than that.

Jacob Filipp writes about a moment in the 1980s when the Ontario Ministry of Education commissioned a computer designed specifically for students.

A time when public institutions believed they could build their own tools, and did.

1984 was an alternative reality where we could do things. Like build a computer in Ontario.

Ladybird (a new web browser), recently migrated part of their code base to a new programming language with the help of Claude Code and Codex (OpenAI’s code model). I thought this idea of human-directed LLM tasks is really great:

I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.

Bruce MacEvoy, has an awesome website for water colour painters.

The Everdeck is a versatile 120-card system designed to support a wide range of traditional and modern card games. Its design weaves together mathematical and linguistic patterns, allowing it to map cleanly onto many existing systems, standard decks, Tarot, Hanafuda, and more, which makes it especially interesting as a piece of universal game infrastructure.

Harriet Baker reviews Sophie Calle’s first book Suite Venitienne, which documents her pursuit of one man through the streets of Venice.

Sharon Ruston surveys the scientific background to Frankenstein, grounding its horror in real debates about resuscitation, galvanism, and ambiguous states between life and death.

Cristian Băluță writes about he moded a Panasonic Lumix G9II into a Leica M-Style camera.

Henry Desroches makes a thoughtful case for reclaiming the Web we actually want by embracing personal, hand-coded, syndicated websites and protocols like RSS & Webmentions.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

Bryan Cantrill shares Oxide’s internal guidance on the use of LLMs in RFD 576.

Empathy: Be we readers or writers, there are humans on the other end of our language use. As we use LLMs, we must keep in mind our empathy for that human, be they the one who is consuming our writing, or the one who has written what we are reading.

Marcus Olang’ reflects on being told his writing sounds like ChatGPT. As a Kenyan, he reframes the comparison: ChatGPT writes like him and like many others shaped by the same educational system.

I am a writer. A writer who also happens to be Kenyan. And I have come to this thesis statement: I don’t write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. Or, more accurately, it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape.

Swiss mapmakers have been quietly seeding their work with little doodles—marmots, spiders, even the occasional hidden hiker—inside official maps.

It also implies that the mapmaker has openly violated his commitment to accuracy, risking professional repercussions on account of an alpine rodent. No cartographer has been fired over these drawings, but then again, most were only discovered once their author had already left. (Many mapmakers timed the publication of their drawing to coincide with their retirement.) Over half of the known illustrations have been removed. The latest, the marmot drawing, was discovered by Swisstopo in 2016 and is likely to be eliminated from the next official map of Switzerland by next year. As the spokesperson for Swisstopo told me, “Creativity has no place on these maps.”

Emily Sneddon on how she designed Fran Sans, a display font inspired by the destination displays on Muni’s Breda Light Rail Vehicles in San Francisco.

What caught my eye was how the displays look mechanical and yet distinctly personal. Constructed on a 3×5 grid, the characters are made up of geometric modules: squares, quarter-circles, and angled forms. Combined, these modules create imperfect, almost primitive letterforms, revealing a utility and charm that feels distinctly like the San Francisco I’ve come to know.

Peter-Ayers Tarantino’s Manhattan apartment is packed with books and artwork in every direction. It’s chaotic, layered, and unbelievably charming.