Weeknotes 264

Your documentation is still in your Mum’s filing cabinet

This is so right on. I always start out with a carefully created hierarchy of folders and yet I still can’t find where to retrieve a document or where to file a new one. I’ve considered installing something like paperless-ngx for this reason.

One of the recurring themes in accessibility is that information should never depend on a single path. We don’t rely on colour alone, shape alone, or visual position alone to communicate meaning.

Also, YES.

JURASSIC PARK COMPUTERS IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL

This is what the World Wide Web is for.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds puts foot down on anti-AI comments

Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.

😆

I discovered a big crack in my car windscreen a few weeks ago which was out of the view of the driver but still in new windscreen territory. I’ve been putting off sorting it out because I didn’t want to phone my insurer. I found out you can do it online and it took 5 minutes 😬

Why am I like this?

DON’T YOU MEAN EXTINCT?

The greatest difficulty I have encountered is “context switching”. Working on multiple projects / independent features allows me to drive multiple agents simultaneously. It is quite a mental gymnastics to keep up. I have seen reports of “mental burnout” and I have also personally experienced increased mental fatigue. This is definitely something to monitor.

I have felt this too. There are only so many features I can follow at once.

This week I learnt that there are OpenAI compatible model APIs and Anthropic compatible models APIs. The way you interact with lesser known models is through APIs which adhere to one or the other “standards”. For example, DeepSeek V4 is OpenAI compatible whilst Qwen 3.7 is Anthropic compatible.

Aperture from Tailscale is really cool. If you’re just using a single provider there is less value, but if you are a team or using multiple models from many providers it could be very useful for you.

It’s essentially centralised model provider management with lots of usage stats built-in. Everything is routed via your Tailscale tailnet too, which means you don’t have to copy API tokens around.

Another Ridiculous Interrail Holiday - 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

I’m tempted by this, but the fact remains that almost every time I go on a train to somewhere I’ve really got to be there is some sort of problem and I’m not sure I fancy that if I’m abroad. If you are more train-minded than me you might think otherwise.

TIL about Realtime Trains

An update on the scraper situation

Our article “Fighting the AI scraper bot scourge”, published in early 2025, discussed the problem of widespread scraping of web sites in search of training data for large language models and related projects. This activity overwhelms sites with traffic. Over a year after that article is published, the problem is still growing. The hammering of sites by shadowy actors has reached new heights, and the open web is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Where is this traffic coming from, and what can be done about it?

This is very well written and illuminating.

Introducing Precursor: detecting agentic behavior with continuous client-side signals

A solution to the above?

Anubis

Weigh the soul of incoming HTTP requests to protect your website!

And another!

Two interesting Tailscale security bulletins this week. Both of which seem on the higher end of “bad”. I see these come up quite often but they are usually very specific and don’t apply to me. However, this one:

Specifically, if a user connected with the username -i this would have been interpreted as –no-idn and getent would have printed the entire passwd file contents starting with the root user, causing Tailscale to open an interactive root session.

Oh dear, oh dear.

We would like to thank Anthropic and Ada Logics for reporting this issue.

Coincidence?

I asked my robot friend to convert the web app I’m working on from using the Bulma CSS framework to Tailwind as an experiment and wow. This would take so long to do manually, and the result was, as far as I can tell so far, 95% perfect. Actually, better than what I had too. Another humbling experience.

This is one of the biggest benefits to using LLMs – options. You don’t have to decide everything up front. In the past you’d have to make a load of decisions up front, and if you chose the wrong one, well too bad, because the cost of change is too big. Not so anymore.

Control the ideas, not the code

The battery on my really quite new really MacBook seemed to be performing poorly recently but I put it down to actually doing a lot more development work than I was.

It became painful enough that I looked into it a bit further and found a load of node processes hanging around and they were all hammering the CPU.

Codex helped me find that the --poll argument I’d passed to my build process was the cause. Removing that and my battery is back to regular performance. --poll causes the node process to…poll, but if you leave it out it falls back to the much more efficient macOS file system events APIs.

Claude Design is mind-blowing. I don’t know how this passed me by.

clawk

Disposable, network-restricted Linux VMs for AI coding agents

I often listen to a mix of cafe sounds in order to shut myself off from the world and concentrate on work. So why do I find other people in cafes so damned annoying? The fake cafe people are calming. The real cafe people are annoying 😆

The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE

If your application needs to delete large amounts of data, even very rarely, we recommend moving towards schema designs that let you express that as a DROP TABLE or a TRUNCATE.

lobste.rs is now running on SQLite

Replacing the ink in my fountain pen was becoming a real hassle. It’s a smaller pen, so uses smaller cartridges, and I use a converter which means sucking up new ink every couple of days. This seemed to introduce air into the system and caused problems by taking up space and hindering the ink flow.

I bought some cheap disposable syringes to pair with some Luer lock needles I already had. Now now I can fill the converter directly and there is a lot less mess and the air problems have gone away.

I was sad to hear of Sam Neill’s passing this week. An actor who can put in a great performance in both Jurassic Park and Event Horizon is a great actor.