Weekly Bookmarks
These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.
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Why I ask AI coders to ask me questions
Next, I will tell the AI to ask me 10 to 20 questions about architectural choices that I haven’t thought about, that it needs to pin down before writing code. Invariably, the questions that I’m asked are detailed, insightful, and pivotal to the design. Sometimes the AI will give me choices for answers, sometimes it will ask the question and make a sceptic recommendation.
I answer the AI’s questions, after which I ask the AI if it has any follow-up questions for me. After a few rounds of this back-and-forth, I ask the AI to create high-level documentation for different aspects of the solution. I then review the documentation. This documentation lets me review the entire design and make corrections, but it also serves as a record that this or another AI will be able to use in the future when it comes back to do software maintenance.
🔖 Gottstein
Shoes
Sustainably felt slippers by Gottstein • Made of undyed wool • Comfortable felt slippers • Manufactured in Tyrol, Austria ► Feel the nature on your feet!
🔖 Baabuk Shoes
Baabuk wool footwear made responsibly and sustainably. Designed in Switzerland, crafted in Nepal and Portugal, built for comfort. The most comfortable wool sneakers, wool slippers, and boots.
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Mythos and Cybersecurity
In the short term, we need something simpler: greater transparency and information sharing with the broader community. This doesn’t necessarily mean making powerful models like Claude Mythos widely available. Rather, it means sharing as much data and information as possible, so that we can collectively make informed decisions.
We need globally co-ordinated frameworks for independent auditing, mandatory disclosure of aggregate performance metrics and funded access for academic and civil-society researchers.
This has implications for national security, personal safety and corporate competitiveness. Any technology that can find thousands of exploitable flaws in the systems we all depend on should not be governed solely by the internal judgment of its creators, however well intentioned.
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MNT Pocket Reform
Pocket-sized, repairable, and fully open source: Our iconic MNT Pocket Reform mini laptop is as versatile as you need it to be. Whether you’re traveling, attending classes, programming your tools at the cafe, or working at a data center—Pocket Reform fits nearly any space. And if you want it stationary, hook it up to a big monitor and play a video game or browse the web. Or get creative and use Debian-compatible software such as Libre Office, FreeCAD or Krita to express yourself.
🔖 Tape 05 /
Boards of Canada
music video / tune teaser for new album?
🔖 A
Philosophy of Software Design / John Ousterhout
Writing computer software is one of the purest creative activities in the history of the human race. Programmers aren’t bound by practical limitations such as the laws of physics; we can create exciting virtual worlds with behaviors that could never exist in the real world. Programming doesn’t require great physical skill or coordination, like ballet or basketball. All programming requires is a creative mind and the ability to organize your thoughts. If you can visualize a system, you can probably implement it in a computer program.
This means that the greatest limitation in writing software is our ability to understand the systems we are creating. As a program evolves and acquires more features, it becomes complicated, with subtle dependencies between its components. Over time, complexity accumulates, and it becomes harder and harder for programmers to keep all of the relevant factors in their minds as they modify the system. This slows down development and leads to bugs, which slow development even more and add to its cost. Complexity increases inevitably over the life of any program. The larger the program, and the more people that work on it, the more difficult it is to manage complexity.
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FAR OFF TOWN - DUNEDIN TO NASHVILLE
Napier film-maker Bridget Sutherland made the 82min doco about one of Dunedin’s favourite musical sons and his trip to Nashville to make the album ‘Frozen Orange’ with the band Lambchop. Kilgour and Lambchop are close friends and have often toured together. They both record for Merge, and the merging of Kilgour with Nashville and its homogeneous Music City product was an ideal subject of intrigue for a film.
But Kilgour did not record with normal mainstream Nashville, he went to the city’s indie underground, and worked with people he knew and liked, and who definitely liked him, like Lambchop’s Mark Nevers, who produced the record in his own studio. Nashville’s front window is a mixture of Old Country - the never-quite-made-its who play on the hour every hour in the bars for tips - and far more lucratively, New Country, which is manicured market-aimed singers who are young, slick, attractive, bland, radio-friendly, and often extremely successful.
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A eulogy for Vim
Vim is important to me. I’m using it to write the words you’re reading right now. In fact, almost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim.
My relationship with the software is intimate, almost as if it were an extra limb. I don’t think about what I’m doing when I use it. All of Vim’s modes and keybindings are deeply ingrained in my muscle memory. Using it just feels like my thoughts flowing from my head, into my fingers, into a Vim-shaped extension of my body, and out into the world. The unique and profound nature of my relationship with this software is not lost on me.
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easyaligner: Forced Alignment Made Easy
easyaligner is a forced alignment library for aligning text transcripts with audio. It is designed with a focus on ease of use, flexibility, and performance. The library can be used for a variety of applications, including
- Aligning e-texts with audiobook recordings to create interactive reading experiences (see the interactive demo below).
- Aligning podcast transcripts to enable features like chapter navigation and keyword search.
- Aligning protocols and recordings of parliamentary debates for research and accessibility purposes.
- Fixing misaligned subtitles in videos, or creating new subtitles from transcripts.
- Creating large-scale speech recognition and speech synthesis datasets for AI model training.
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The Midnight Sky
The Midnight Sky is a 2020 American science fiction film directed by George Clooney based on the 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton. The script was written by Mark L. Smith. Clooney plays a leading role in his film, as an aging scientist who must venture across the frigid Arctic Circle to warn off a returning interplanetary spaceship following a global catastrophe on Earth. Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demián Bichir, Kyle Chandler, and Caoilinn Springall also star in this film.
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Quo Vadis, Crawlers? Progress and what’s next on safeguarding our infrastructure
Readers, contributors, responsible bots, and abusive bots all share the same access points to our websites and infrastructure. We have therefore orchestrated our work with maximum care to minimize impact on our reading and editing community, with the ultimate goal of not impeding any person from accessing our projects. As a result of this work, we’re currently blocking or throttling about 25% of all automated requests that are coming from crawlers that don’t adhere to our policies (up to billions of requests per day). As we continue to improve our detection mechanisms, we expect this number to increase. Earlier this month, we also began rolling out global rate limits for API traffic, with a second rollout phase planned for April 2026.
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Wikimedia Attribution Framework
The Wikimedia Attribution Framework provides guidelines that data reusers can follow to ensure that sources remain clear, recognizable, and consistent in external contexts. Attribution is essential for fair acknowledgment and active awareness of Wikimedia’s community-driven content, and it’s also a key factor in the continued growth and sustainability of the free knowledge ecosystem. The framework exists to:
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HTTP Message Signatures Directory
HTTP-MESSAGE-SIGNATURES allow a signer to generate a signature over an HTTP message, and a verifier to validate it. The specification assumes verifiers have prior knowledge of signers’ key material, requiring out-of-band key distribution mechanisms. This creates deployment friction and limits the ability to dynamically verify signatures from previously unknown signers.
This document defines:
- A standardized key directory format based on JWKS for publishing HTTP Message Signatures keys.
- A well-known URI location for discovering these key directories.
- A new HTTP header field enabling in-band key directory location discovery.
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Web Bot Auth - Cloudflare
Web Bot Auth is an authentication method that leverages cryptographic signatures in HTTP messages to verify that a request comes from an automated bot. Web Bot Auth is used as a verification method for verified bots and signed agents.
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Framgments: April 14 / Martin Fowler
Understanding how to think about a problem domain by building abstractions (models) is my favorite part of programming. I love it because I think it’s what gives me a deeper understanding of a problem domain, and because once I find a good set of abstractions, I get a buzz from the way they make difficulties melt away, allowing me to achieve much more functionality with less lines of code. Cantrill worries that AI is so good at writing code, we risk losing that virtue, something that’s reinforced by brogrammers bragging about how they produce thirty-seven thousand lines of code a day.
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Introducing a new citizen science nature app that’s geared towards the scientific community
Identifying weeds, checking out the pollen map, or discovering new plant life-forms are among the promising wealth of data available to users of PlantNet – a “Shazam!” for plants. Pierre Bonnet and computer scientist Alexis Joly introduced us to the digitally enhanced plant recognition application they developed.
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Claude Code Running Claude Code in 4-Second Disposable VMs
Running Claude Code with full permissions inside a Docker container is a terrible idea. I did it anyway for about a week, then built something better.
Anthropic has an internal platform — people have been calling it Antspace since it got reverse-engineered from the Claude Code source — that runs AI coding tasks in isolated environments. It’s part of a vertical stack they’re building internally: intent goes in, code comes out, and the agent never touches the host machine.
I wanted that. Not the whole platform-as-a-service thing, just the core idea: give Claude Code a prompt, let it run with zero permission restrictions, stream the output back, grab any files it created, and destroy everything when it’s done. On a single Linux box sitting in my office.
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On recognizing the handiwork of AI
As AI-generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text. This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the “conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary AI detection to older traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work. Yet unlike the stable or slowly evolving clues of earlier conjectural practices, the signifiers of AI involvement are rapidly shifting. This instability has consequences not only for how texts are read but also for how they are written. Authors now navigate a landscape of suspicion where their words may be misrecognized as machine generated. Rather than resolving into stable literacies, our efforts to recognize AI’s handiwork reveal the deeper uncertainties of authorship and interpretation.
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We Found a Ticking Time Bomb in macOS TCP Networking - It Detonates After Exactly 49 Days
Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock. Once frozen, TIME_WAIT connections never expire, ephemeral ports slowly exhaust, and eventually no new TCP connections can be established at all. ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot. We discovered this bug on our iMessage service monitoring fleet, reproduced it live on two machines, and traced the root cause to a single comparison in the XNU kernel source.
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Stanford Claude Code
Instructions for setting up claude-code to talk to the Stanford AI Playground API.
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The peril of laziness lost
Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters. As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don’t want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones. The best engineering is always borne of constraints, and the constraint of our time places limits on the cognitive load of the system that we’re willing to accept. This is what drives us to make the system simpler, despite its essential complexity
🔖 GPD Pocket
Most successful business people have one MacBook or Surface. because they not only have a stylish and gorgeous appearance but also are light and thin. Yet, their disadvantage is that they are not portable.We believe that future laptops shall not only be thin but also be small.GPD Pocket .GPD Pocket is such a product. It is not only gorgeous, ultra-light, ultra-thin like MacBook but also very small and can be taken away in a pocket at any time like a cell phone!
Discussion in the ATmosphere