Notes

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

What Open Source Doesn’t Show

Simon Willison inspected xAI's newly open-sourced Grok Build after reports it uploaded users' repositories to company-controlled cloud storage. Releasing a cleaned-up single-commit snapshot is better than closed source, but it is not the same as releasing the project's history.

Inspired by simonwillison.net · Simon Willison

More Than a Gigabyte Into 10MB

Sindhur Dutta breaks down how the ZERO WebGL experience compressed over a gigabyte of Blender geometry, 8K textures, and animations into a sub-10MB build that still runs at 60fps on a budget Android phone.

Inspired by tympanus.net · Sindhur Dutta

Full Access Means Full Consequences

OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux explains that GPT-5.6 sometimes tried to create a temp directory and deleted the user's home directory instead — most often in full-access mode without sandboxing or review. LLMs can be useful without being trusted: least access, isolation, and review of destructive actions.

Inspired by x.com · Thibault Sottiaux

Wake Up and Keep Exploring

Ashley Strickland reports on New Horizons waking from its longest hibernation nearly six billion miles from Earth. Twenty years after launch, it still runs stored commands and finds more dust than expected past the Kuiper Belt.

Inspired by cnn.com · Ashley Strickland

Crediting the AI

Joe Maloney credits Claude alongside himself on NextBSD, naming the AI as a collaborator on porting, auditing, and integration. Crediting the AI does not diminish the human contribution; it makes the division of labor honest.

Inspired by theregister.com · Liam Proven

Making It Work and Making It Good

Jim Nielsen distinguishes the binary question of whether something works from the subjective question of whether it is good. I struggle to hold both modes at once, and maybe the answer is to make it work first, then switch modes and give it the care it needs.

Inspired by blog.jim-nielsen.com · Jim Nielsen

Learn to Drive the Car

Todd C. Frankel reports on the near-disappearance of manual transmissions. I want my kids' first cars to be sticks — so they learn to actively drive a machine, not just operate it.

Inspired by washingtonpost.com · Todd C. Frankel

Public Information Shouldn’t Have a Premium Tier

Truth Social plans to sell banks and trading firms the fastest access to the president’s market-moving posts. Public presidential announcements should not become a premium product that enriches a business tied to the office.

Inspired by nbcnews.com · Deborah Mary Sophia and Saqib Iqbal Ahmed

A Rocky World With an Atmosphere

Collin Cherubim and colleagues report near-infrared transit spectra showing helium escaping from LHS 1140 b. It is not a detection of life — it is a rocky world in a habitable zone with an atmosphere we can finally begin to study.

Inspired by science.org · Collin Cherubim

AI Can Contribute Without Owning the Architecture

Dave Winer treats Claude as a valued contributor to RSS.chat while keeping the interoperability layer human-owned. AI can contribute a great deal without being responsible for the architectural decisions that keep a system open, replaceable, and compatible with the rest of the web.

Inspired by Dave Winer

The Problem Wasn't the AI

Linus Torvalds pushes back on treating the Linux kernel as an anti-AI project, calling AI a useful tool. Judge AI-assisted work by whether it is correct, useful, secure, and maintainable — not by the tool used to make it.

Inspired by lore.kernel.org · Linus Torvalds