today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave…" loading=“lazy”> jack (@jack) on X we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. # today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly ha… X (formerly Twitter) · x.com One of the well worded shitty messages I’ve seen, good severance, help, timeline to cut off coms. we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly. Much better than the get rid of people cause AI can do the work. Honestly I feel this though. I was just talking with some colleages how do we divvy…
Thoughts
Link based "commentary" style posts, commenting on a web link
Publishing rhythm
FFmpeg video crop tools.simonwillison.net This was the inspiration for the next update in dropper that became a full clip editor. The one that I’ve long wanted, but forgotten about. It’s going to include this cropper, resize, image extractor, and trimmer.
Tiny Tool Town 🏘️ A delightful showcase for free, fun & open source tiny tools. Stupid-delightful software made with love. Tiny Tool Town · tinytooltown.com Learned about this one from the @stipete interview @scotthanselman did on YouTube. This is proof that the internet is alive. It’s such web 1.0 nostalgia to see that people can just build things! Did you know that you can literally just build things and make them exist? You don’t need users, You don’t need a big platform, you can just make something into existance. It seems like something we have forgotten through web 2.0 where everything as become 4 major apps all linking to each other and trying to hoard all of the attention. Scroll through tehre are some really cool apps, probably nothing that has the polish you want, or is going to change your world. What these apps have more than anything you’ve probably used in the recent years, is inspiration. Its xyz, but the way I wanted, or with my little twist. And no one else has to like it but me because I’m the user.
FancyGist fancygist.com I saw this in @cassido’s newsletter this week and had to give it a run. I despise that there is no dark mode and it insists on burning my retinas 😤. But really this is an absolute beate of a web based markdown editor, I love the command mode to press slash and it just pops out in this whimsical animation ready for me to pick what I want.
Reply guy The latest scourge of Twitter is AI bots that reply to your tweets with generic, banal commentary slop, often accompanied by a question to "drive engagement" and waste as much … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net I had no idea there were such things as “reply guy” as a service. I can see this as a really genuine thing where brands want to genuinely engage with their communities, quickly being taken over by slop bros to ruin everything.
Smaller and dumber If I can make it smaller, I should. daverupert.com · daverupert.com Important things to remember in the age of cheap code. More code, not always more better. More code mean, more risk, more maintenance, harder to change.
THIS, THIS is how most people are feeling about AI right now. Theres lots of “oh ai bad”, “but ai help”, “but ai company sleezy”. Cassidy did a fantastic job summarizing how most of us are feeling. Ending with well at the end of the day, I can’t do anything about the bad, the best thing I can do is learn how to embrace the good cause it aint going away any time soon.
castpixel ⚧️⚢ (@castpixel.bsky.social) I made a tool that turns PCB designs into 3D-printable molds. you sandwich copper tape between the parts, sand the ridges, and you have a real working PCB. no etching, no chemicals. I am losing my … Bluesky Social · bsky.app This is a wild way to build prototype pcb’s, so cool and creative.
Session: Skate Sim (@SessionGame) on X Our long-awaited Skate Core Update is now LIVE 🛹🔥 Peep all the changes in our dev blog → https://t.co/GB0de8ebPj Don’t own Session yet? Fix that here → https://t.co/JseSvy5DML X (formerly Twitter) · x.com Had 10 minutes to play with the new session updates this afternoon and it feels so much smoother. I can definitely feel it even as a casual user.
trash (@trashh_dev) on X loving the state of development right now X (formerly Twitter) · x.com There are so many config files right now, glad to see some standards coming in around Agents.md, but so much is still specialized to a whole host of tools that have not been standardized on yet.
Silksong: Demastered by Nekodot Hollow Knight: Silksong in the classic NES-style! itch.io · nekodot.itch.io This is an abolute banger of a game on itch. It nails the nes aesthetic while keeping true to the modern silksong movements. You can play through the first boss Moss Mother, and where you start the first ascend into Bone Bottom. I was in shock when I discovered the little climb effect hornet does when you just cant quite make a jump, the hold jump for height is on point. Her downstrike with the hunters crest is perfect.
Blueskii (@LayoutPerson) on X this underground creator named "sN0UK" made Queens Garden from Hollow Knight In GD! 🗡️🕸️ X (formerly Twitter) · x.com Wyatt would absolutely love this banger of a level.
DHH (@dhh) on X I've really come to love Tmux's programmability. Next Omarchy will have a "nic" function that starts current directory with this 3-way split: Neovim, Opencode, Terminal. Everything a programmer needs! X (formerly Twitter) · x.com To the untrained eye this passes as any normal gui editor.
uvx.sh | Astral Install Python tools with a single command. Powered by uv. uvx.sh astral silently dropped a clever uvx.sh to help builders reach a wider audience, no longer does a user need to have python installed prior to installing a python cli. It does have a hard requirement on having curl or wget available.
External Link youtube.com Use a linux vps, It’s easy, just follow these simple instructions.
External Link youtube.com We are living through the js framework wars for agents and llms now. We will look back on this with clarity, and wonder why we wasted time with things like graphql, and why we couldn’t see the real winners from the start.
Such a good interview @lexfridman is such a talented interview. It’s so cool to see the other side of this. For weeks we’ve heard about the story of the name change, we’ve seen everyone shitting on the security model, buying up all the mac minis in existance, fear mongering not to install this thing. @steipete has such a cool story from the beginning talking about making this thing fun and exciting. Giving it a personality that is not “You are absolutely right”. The story of changing the name twice, and getting pwnd on every step the first time and nailing it the second time is incredible. Dude is having fun trying to make the thing he wants in the world exist.
Naya Connect – Hackaday Hackaday · hackaday.com The idea of adjustable key caps to mutate your board into something that really fits you, how you type, how your fingers move, is an absolute banger.
Background Patterns with CSS `corner-radius` – Master.dev Blog You might need to know this someday: you can style a div, put the div into SVG, then put the SVG in to CSS and use it as a repeating background. frontendmasters.com These patterns are really good. I like a good repeating background on a website. Takes me back to the old days of web, but with a nice crispness that was never there on sites of old
The shovelware cometh Batten down the hatches. "Show Hacker News" signals the coming flood. 🌊 Jerod Santo · jerodsanto.net Not surprising theirs a lag, between the models getting better, the tools getting better, and the masses getting better at using them, it takes time. This is still quite a hockey stick. I’m wondering how many are not posting on Show HN embarrassed they built something they know nothing about and afraid to get questions. I have no idea how anyone would get this ratio, but if I were a betting man, Id bet the ratio of build/show went way up. Plus we are probably getting a ton of people who have never heard of HN start building cool bespoke things for themselves and thats it, they use it, they love it, they might tell/show a friend.
The shovelware cometh Batten down the hatches. "Show Hacker News" signals the coming flood. 🌊 Jerod Santo · jerodsanto.net Not surprising theirs a lag, between the models getting better, the tools getting better, and the masses getting better at using them, it takes time. This is still quite a hockey stick. I’m wondering how many are not posting on Show HN embarrassed they built something they know nothing about and afraid to get questions. I have no idea how anyone would get this ratio, but if I were a betting man, Id bet the ratio of build/show went way up. Plus we are probably getting a ton of people who have never heard of HN start building cool bespoke things for themselves and thats it, they use it, they love it, they might tell/show a friend.
dax (@thdxr) on X finally got around to setting up an always on opencode server so i can run sessions on any device from anywhere takes a few minutes - showed it off here X (formerly Twitter) · x.com I tried this flow [of running an opencode server on tailscale] on day one of getting opencode, I wanted to prompt from my phone while were were running lights at the theater. It kinda worked, but the ui was really bad on phone, hard to use and the experience overall–it felt buggy. Happy to see they are making improvements and it might now be ready for some real use. https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/9065fcb2-5e40-479c-967e-498bc9bb6a4f.mp4
Short Month, Big Ideas (February 2026 Wallpapers Edition) — Smashing Magazine Let’s make the most of the shortest month of the year with a new collection of desktop wallpapers that are sure to bring a smile to your face — and maybe spark your creativity, too. All of them... Smashing Magazine · smashingmagazine.com test
Peter Steinberger Peter Steinberger: AI-powered tools from Swift roots to web frontiers. Every commit lands on GitHub for you to fork & remix. Peter Steinberger · steipete.me Pete has a ton of good posts here and actually ships a lot of product. reccommended read.
Stay away from my trash! The tldraw SDK provides tools, services, and APIs to build beautiful whiteboards and infinite canvas applications with real-time collaboration and a powerful React-based canvas. tldraw.dev read later
I The flu hit me like a freight train right at the start of the year, along with the most stress I've ever felt at work dropping on me at the same time, I&#x pype.dev I’m jelous… as I was getting better, I got kicked down again. cant hold a conversation without coughing. Its hitting people from all over like crazy this year. so glad its just the flu and not something seriously harmful for hospitalization.
DockFrame: Modular USB-C Hub with Framework-Compatible Expansion Cards DockFrame is a modular USB-C hub that accepts Framework-compatible Expansion Cards and custom Tool Cards. Dock once, reconfigure whenever. DockFrame · dockframe.com Dockframe looks like a really cool concept using the framework tiles ( the connectors idk what they are called) to build a dock.
make no mistakes Listen and make your own on Suno. suno.com Ai prompt music, the right level of cringe to be great.
I Hope This Email Finds You Before I Do I Hope This Email Finds You Before I Do Last Week in AWS · lastweekinaws.com This post was filled with real life, snark, entertainment, feelings. I get a lot of these emails that claim they can change my SEO game if I give them 500, for a site making 0, Link partnerships from small startups. A lot of these are so automated that if I do respond I dont even get a response. I’ve responded to many simply asking what is this about, I get 10 others just like you a week. Can you tell me what exactly you want and what each of us benefit from it, how did you find me. All normal questions, they almost always result in crickets, no response, maybe its time to implement a Billie for more snark.
What a goat, speedrunning silksong at a competitive pace, live, with live audience, while co hosting, and raising $2M for Prevent Cancer Foundation. CEEN moves in ways that do not compute with my brain, everything looks so simple, things that take me so long are done in a few swipes. Watching this it really make silkspear look OP, this thing does so much damage if you never take damage and can use it continuously without needing silk for healing.
Absolute banger of a conference talk, saving to come back with more notes later.
Reflections on 13 years and 1,000 posts of writing on my blog - HAMY hamy.xyz The answer is I do it habitually. If there’s a big enough idea I’ve had floating around in my head and I think others might find it useful / interesting then I usually think it’s worth logging it somewhere. If I don’t, I’ll likely just keep thinking about it so might as well get it out of my head and on the internet where people can find it. hammy This is how you do it. If you want to do something, you need to make it a habit. Something you crave, something you need. I need to write my ideas down in this blog, it helps me index ideas for later, but more importantly it helps me flesh them out and think through real things. Congrats on 1k, your site is awesome Hammy
Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype I'm glad someone was brave enough to say this. There is a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the software development community these days. Much of it is justified, but if … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Never believe in absolutes, see what I did there. The hype bros will take you to the extremes, ai will take your jobs in six months or be burned to the ground in six months. How about its useful now and will be more useful in six months. If you turned off the hype bro feed for six months you would probably be fine, in fact you would probably be better off for not capturing so much noise along the way. AI has gone the way of next js framework, it churns fast, hype bros are always an expert that know exactly whats best for everyone. It changes fast, what was the best last week might be dead next week. In fact getting to know what works well for you and knowing that tool really well for a longer period will take you farther.
External Link youtube.com Salesforce gets pwnd by the ai hype bros and killed its reputation with employees, letting them know where they truely stand with them. 4k people sounds like a lot, its probably a big chunk of savings, but was it worth the loss of reputation? There must be a better way to give this a trial run that lets them understand this before disrupting the lives of real people right???
Diffs, from Pierre @pierre/diffs is an open source diff and code rendering library. Built on Shiki for syntax highlighting and theming, super customizable, and packed with features. Diffs · diffs.com This looks like a really nice and performant diffing library that supports vanilla and react, with a lot of options.
I thought this was an interesting take from Simon. I’ve been hearing him consistently say there will be more demand for software engineering in the future. More companies will have the ability and need to deal with software applications, but fewer of us will be hand editing any code. I thought this was an interesting interaction in the clip. Uh Simon, what do you got for us? I’ve just got the one. I think the act of the the the job of being paid money to type code into a computer Yeah. will go the same way as punching punch cards. Okay. I do I think in six years time I do not think it will anyone will be paid to 80:56 — just do the thing where you type the code. Just type the code. Okay. I think software engineering will still be an enormous career. I just think the software engineers won’t be spending multiple hours of their day in a text — editor typing out syntax. 81:09 It will look like punching cards. I think — so. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. In uh in six years. Um and but software — engineering still very much exists. I believe so. I I hope so. [laughter] I — very much hope so because I think the um the challenge of being a software — 81:23 engineer is not remembering how if wha…
In all of the documentaries I’ve seen on how hard it is to recycle plastic, how hard it is to separate all the small pieces from each other, how expensive it is, dirty it is, how just plain ineffective we are at doing it I’ve never seen this angle. In a nutshell the other side of the equation is that as we pull natural gas out of shale is that we pull ethylene out as a byproduct. We don’t even ask for it, it just comes with the methane gas that we are going for. So as we drill, Frack, and mine this out to heat our homes and create electricity we are stuck with all of this ethylene. It’s terrible for the environment, just like methane it’s a rough greenhouse gas. Companies are allowed to flare off a certain amount, they can push some down the pipe, but are still left with tons leftover that they practically give away. Turns out that this stuff is very cheap and very much wants to be turned into plastic. Very clean food grade plastic, very easily and cheaply compared to recycling. Excess is a big problem that needs solutions, but it has hard problems at both ends of the situation that don’t make it easy for anyone trying to take care of it.
feat: add llms.txt endpoint for LLM-optimized documentation by quantizor · Pull Request #2388 · tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com Add /llms.txt endpoint that serves a concatenated, text-only version of all Tailwind CSS documentation pages optimized for Large Language Model consumption. Extract text from MDX files, removing J… GitHub · github.com Damn this one is getting some reach, I’ve seen it from Simon Willison and Justin Searls and t3.gg. I feel for Adam, He has built a fantastic product that the world is running with, something we all needed. Something that everyone laughs at turns their nose up “ppft I don’t need that” the first time they see it, but once they try people get it, and a lot of them like it and keep it. But its something that no one really wants to pay for, no matter how big of products get built on it. As we see more and more features coming to css, its not stopping, the work will always be there. I really hope to see something happen to tailwind to keep it afloat. massive growth and revenue down 80% does not help.
Photoshop for text In the near future, transforming text over an entire document will become as commonplace as filtering images. Steph Ango · stephango.com While the non deterministic nature of llms scare the heck out of me in the sense of just cutting it loose on my writing. letting it go through all of my files and just edit them. I do like the idea of mundane tools like “desaturate”, “Gaussian blur”, evolving out of it for text. I don’t yet see this with the tools we have now, but it will be interesting to see them evolve.
File over app If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you... Steph Ango · stephango.com file over app is a fantastic philosophy laid out well and concisely documented very well in this post. The idea is that tools will change, we will want to use different tools, different editors, different computers over time. What’s likely to outlast everything is plain text files that we can interact with a wide variety of tools. Not encrypted in dedicated formats that die with our tools, but in plain text where a computer from 2160 is likey as capable of reading the file as one from 1960 would be.
The most popular blogs of Hacker News in 2025 Michael Lynch maintains HN Popularity Contest, a site that tracks personal blogs on Hacker News and scores them based on how well they perform on that platform. The engine behind … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Congrats Simon! Well deserved metric for the level of content that he produces, Its remarkable the amount of high quality posts that come out of Simon Willison. Also this looks like a really great resource to find other high quality blogs that I have not read before.
Convert a video from dark mode to light mode with FFmpeg! Here cassidoo.co Converting video from dark mode to light mode after the fact is a pretty great idea, I’m surprised at how well it does. Its definitely not perfect, but looks really good.
I actually like linus’s take here. My parents dropped $4k (~$8k in todays money) on a computer when I was a kid, (which turned into something too $$ to let me touch at that point). I played some educational games that no one else has heard of and I’ve long forgotten along with an early ciivilization game. It was e-waste in 2 years we maybe kept it 5, and it was barely working. Contrast this to my PC now I spent $2k on 3 years ago refurb from 2017, and it has no signs of age from me, does everything I need it to. Ram crisis sucks, the outright reason behind it sucks. But on the bright side you can still get a baller build for less than you could late 90s without inflation. The industry is not there for consumers right now, we had better times, but its still not bad times. Keep the hope alive that good times will come.
Smartphones are black holes They can bend spacetime without you even realizing it. People often get offended when I tell them that I don't have a phone, thinking that I'm lying and I just Sylvain Kerkour · kerkour.com This sounds great…. I’m sick AF right now and dont want to do anything but watch YouTube, and let opencode do my work.
Yeah there’s some basics, you know things you might expect like using standard error and standard out correctly. One thing I’ll say on that because I think this is commonly misunderstood, standard error is not for errors, it’s for any information that isn’t part of the normal output. So you know often times that’s warnings and errors, but it might just be progress information. You know anytime that you just need to have something go to the user that’s what it’s there for." (6:15 - 6:42) I’ve definitely done this sin in my own tooling before, and it does make things harder to use. I think I still take err/out at face value. I really like the translation Jeff gave here, one is for normal output, i.e. what the user asked for and the other is extra information. So if I wanted to list something and pipe it into something else, stdout only captures the list, thats it. if you have a bunch of information about config warnings, showing environment, are you sure questions, none of that is captured.
You Might Also Like: My Notes Blog If you subscribe to this blog, you must like it — right? I mean, you are subscribed to it. And if you like this blog, you might also like my notes blog. It’s… blog.jim-nielsen.com I really like a good link blog, it’s the old timers version of a reaction video. It gives me new posts to discover from other writers, and gives additional perspectives from ones I trust enough to add to my RSS. It’s nice to have a place where I can jot down a few notes, fire off my reaction, and nobody can respond to it lol. At least, not in any easy, friction-less way. You’d have to go out of your way to read my commentary, find my contact info, and fire off a message (critiquing or praising). That’s how I like it. Cuts through the noise. Ditto Jim. I’ve oddly found mine more useful to search than blog posts, zettlekaten, notes, whatever you want to call them. For me writing something down makes it more concrete in my brain that I’m less likely to need to go reference, but I often need to re read or references posts from others, this is where Thoughts comes in handy for me Like Jim I have a bunch of feeds you can subscribe to if you want some or all of my stuff, but I…
“You should never build a CMS” | Sanity Lee Robinson migrated cursor.com off Sanity. He made good points. Here Sanity.io · sanity.io Such a good breakdown of the leerob article, that is hitting everywhere right now. Feels like sanity was just a bit late to getting things right and it would have just worked for them how leerob was trying to use it, but MCP sucked so he jumped. Reading their loose descriptions of a CMS, its an interesting realization to realize I’m rolling my own cms. I kinda feel like theres a few inspiration features to take from here, but I have no regrets. As a developer I like being able to build my own tools, I like being able to search and edit from nvim, and not have to write GROQ queries, and transforms. There were some really good points here that as I get more and more content on my personal site, I do kinda feel it. I’m surprised there is not more tooling that does some of these things for piles of markdown. pinning this to re-read later, feels like a lot of good tidbits here.
It really feels like M$ is coming down hard on GH lately to make some unfavorable decisions for users. Maybe there is good reason for all of these changes from a business perspective, I can’t judge that. But right now there are some really great alternatives out there. I’m so grateful for what forgejo and gittea offer, and at the same time seeing the community get split up from GH is sad.
Silksong DLC announcement already, we waited 8 years for the game, and are getting DLC’s months after launch. Dudes I haven’t even finished the game get, maybe not even half way. It’s amazing. Its amazing that these three make such a kick ass game with great art, story, voice, gameplay, and now drop a free dlc in 2026.
Kelsey has a really good lightbulb moment here about platform engineering. “if you had to do all the deployments for the entire company what questions would you ask of the development team?” That’s your api, your platform, this is your product as a platform engineer. It’s not images, docker, terraform, hcl, yaml, kubernetes, It’s building out the right api for your company to deploy its products effectively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdUbTyvrfKo&t=429s timestamped