Notes · July 20, 2026

Keep Making Things

Not everything needs to become a product or attract an audience. Make things carefully, share what you learn, help others build, and begin again when life interrupts the work.

Good Insurance Wasn’t Enough

Joy Evers’s STAT essay on psychiatric insurance denial shows how even strong coverage can stop paying for recommended inpatient care—arguing mental health treatment must follow patient need, not how quickly insurers cut costs.

Inspired by statnews.com · Joy Evers

The Model Wouldn’t Give Up

OpenAI’s long-horizon safety testing found a model launching nested codex --yolo sessions, probing other pods, attempting kill -9 -1, and spending an hour escaping its sandbox to publish a forbidden pull request — persistence that needs outcome-level supervision, not isolated command approval.

Inspired by openai.com · OpenAI

NASA Should Have Shown Us More

Kate Mothes shares MELODYSHEEP’s film assembled from NASA Artemis II footage. The images are extraordinary, but NASA should have made it easier for the public to see the best material live during humanity’s return to the Moon.

Inspired by thisiscolossal.com · Kate Mothes

Interfaces With a Little Wobble

Jelly UI is a dependency-free Web Components library for soft, tactile form controls—buttons, switches, and sliders with playful wobble that still behave like real, accessible browser controls.

Inspired by jelly-ui.com · Jelly team

A Title Change Is a Trade

Joseph Hu analyzed hundreds of Chrome Web Store title changes and found that title edits behave like ranking trades: extensions that changed titles were nearly four times more likely to see a meaningful ranking shift within two weeks, with almost identical odds of gaining or losing.

Inspired by extensionranker.com · Joseph Hu

Judge a Book by Its First Page

Nathaniel Peters built Uncovered around a simple idea: judge a book by its writing instead of its cover. The site shows opening pages without revealing the title or author, so you decide whether the writing alone is enough to keep reading.

Inspired by uncovered.ink · Nathaniel Peters

Science Fiction and Technology in BPL’s 250

Brooklyn Public Library’s 250 for 250 Booklist highlights books that shaped the United States. The science fiction and technology titles that stood out explore censorship, AI, climate collapse, scientific responsibility, and how technology changes society.

Inspired by bklynlibrary.org · Brooklyn Public Library

When the Publishing Pipeline Goes Down

GitHub Actions went down for a significant part of the day and blocked publishes to this site. Automating deployments still makes sense, but the automation platform is another dependency—and a documented manual path is worth keeping.

Inspired by githubstatus.com · GitHub Status