Links from 2025
- The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything ckarchive.com
What this means in practical terms is daring to trust your own curiosity. In creative work, that might mean abandoning the effort to “remember everything you read”, or conducting exhaustive research so as to ensure you’ve considered all the factors other people think you ought to consider, and instead using what naturally interests you as a filter.
- The Pro-Pop Ideology, from Ashlee to Addison culture.ghost.io
Sanneh’s full embrace of commercialism was, then, the cultural equivalent of Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism. In accepting that pop culture is fundamentally an industrial product — and often at its best when in pursuit of extremely cynical financial goals — it became illegitimate to discriminate against pop musicians for being "manufactured." Good pop is good business — and vice versa.
- CJK Typesetting in 2025: Challenges, Workflows, and Best Practices asianabsolute.co.uk
- Chris McCausland: Seeing into the Future – an astonishing look at how tech is changing disabled people’s lives | Television | The Guardian theguardian.com
I love having my perspective shaken up. A glass screen with no buttons sounds like the most excluding device imaginable, McCausland acknowledges, yet his phone became the most accessible tool he’s ever used. He’s similarly excited by the Meta Specs – I don’t think that’s what they’re actually called – which are always on and offer live video interpretation, telling you what you’re looking at. Like a phone but, crucially, wearable. “The one thing blind people never have is two hands free,” he observes.
- How to benefit from the conversations you have at work economist.com
Demonstrable curiosity about other people’s experiences and ideas can benefit everyone. Asking questions, not cutting people off, pausing to digest what someone has said rather than pouncing on breaks in a discussion to make your own point: these are not enough to qualify someone as a supercommunicator. But in plenty of organisations they would still represent good progress.
- Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life joanwestenberg.com
The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of satisfaction when fulfilled. But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been Through It.The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.
- Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others adrianlambert.substack.com
Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing. They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.
- Story Points Revisited ronjeffries.com
The focus on more gets in the way of increasing value. Increasing pressure to do more almost inevitably has a bad result: the team tries to go faster, and wind up skimping on code quality and on tests. They soon begin shipping more defects, slowing down because of the increased rework to fix the defects, and slowing down even more because the code quality rapidly declines. Things get worse and worse, pressure increases, and it becomes a race to disaster.
- The three best bits of data undermanager.ghost.io
One piece of data beats everything else. A quarter of a century ago, my dad taught me the best way to measure the health of our business was to look at the cash figure every day. Each morning at 10am, I get an email from Caroline in the finance team showing the cash we have in the bank compared with the same day last year. This fact offers no hiding place. The year-on-year comparison shows the strength of your cashflow and whether you are truly making money.
- Every organisation has some madness — Katherine Wastell katherinewastell.com
You can design structures, processes and plans, but nothing will take hold unless human behaviour changes too. Behaviours are the foundational levers of change. But they’re rarely taken seriously because they’re hard to attach to quantifiable goals.
- Introducing A2UI: An open project for agent-driven interfaces - Google Developers Blog developers.googleblog.com
A2UI was designed to address the specific challenges of interoperable, cross-platform, generative or template-based UI responses from agents. A2UI allows agents to generate the interface which best suits the current conversation with the agent, and send it to a front end application.
A self-hosted, multi-user digital library with smart shelves, auto metadata, Kobo & KOReader sync, BookDrop imports, OPDS support, and a built-in reader for EPUB, PDF, and comics.
- We should all be using dependency cooldowns blog.yossarian.net
TL;DR: Dependency cooldowns are a free, easy, and incredibly effective way to mitigate the large majority of open source supply chain attacks. More individual projects should apply cooldowns (via tools like Dependabot and Renovate) to their dependencies, and packaging ecosystems should invest in first-class support for cooldowns directly in their package managers.
- 576 - Using LLMs at Oxide / RFD / Oxide rfd.shared.oxide.computer
Measured take, love the public RFDs.
- Let It Burn - by Zoe Scaman - Musings Of A Wandering Mind zoescaman.substack.com
And the stuff that does go out? It’s going to look less and less like big bureaucratic holding companies and more like ragtag groups of brilliant minds. Strategists and creatives and makers who can be assembled for a project, who can move fast, who aren’t carrying the overhead of a Soho office and seventeen layers of account management.
- Discovering the indieweb with calm tech alexsci.com
Blog Quest is a web browser extension that helps you discover and subscribe to blogs. Blog Quest checks each page for auto-discoverable RSS and Atom feeds (using rel="alternate" links) and quietly collects them in the background. When you’re ready to explore the collected feeds, open the extension’s drop-down window.
- Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit – Mitchell Hashimoto mitchellh.com
Being non-profit clearly demonstrates our commitment to keeping Ghostty free and open source for everyone. It paves the way for a model for sustainable development beyond my personal involvement. And it also provides important legal protections and assurances to the people and communities that adopt and use Ghostty.
- Notification messaging | Primer primer.style
Picking a notification message for an experience can be tricky. Reference this flowchart to help pick the best component for your feature. For more nuanced scenarios, reach out to the Primer team.
Wonderful flowchart on this page.
- Stars of the Lid Forever starsofthelidforever.com
A fan-led project to archive their live recordings from over the years, all compiled in one place for your listening pleasure.
- TBM 389: Overthinker! cutlefish.substack.com
From a young age, being accused of “overcomplicating” or “overthinking” things felt like a dismissal of who I was.
Between reality and models.
- The Benefits of Bubbles stratechery.com
Unblah is a little "meeting-buddy"-app that helps you...
* Keep track of how long you've been speaking, * Catch yourself before you talk too much, or too little * Develop a better sense of timing
Tokenscript is a dsl that interprets design tokens.
- Let's stop confusing execution with delivery linkedin.com
Delivery is about output. Tickets closed, features shipped, velocity charts trending up. It's visible, measurable, manageable. Execution is about system design: how your organization actually turns intent into outcomes. It's the invisible architecture that determines whether you're learning or just busy.
Helpful framing when working with feature factory places.
- Extended Collections are here. And you can’t have them designsystemscollective.com
- The single source of truth: why you still need a website in the age of AI offbrandkoto.substack.com
Once you embrace this mindset, your website’s core job becomes clear: to act as the single source of truth for both humans and AI. This is the foundation that gives you the freedom to express your brand fully, creating a memorable, immersive experience that can’t be replicated elsewhere.
Led by artists like DOMi and JD Beck, a generation of rising players is infusing jazz with absurdist online irreverence. But are they playing jazz at all?
- GOV.UK’s firebreak: why and how we spent a month working differently – Inside GOV.UK insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk
- False Tokens | Figma figma.com
False Tokens helps maintain design system consistency by instantly finding elements that aren't using design tokens.
Thanks James,
Ah, the memories.
- The killer feature of Web Components - daverupert.com daverupert.com
Known as “CEM” to its friends, a CEM is a community standard JSON format that surfaces information about your component APIs. The analyzer scans your class-based component to build up a “manifest” of all the methods, events, slots, parts, tag name, and CSS variables you want to expose. It works on a single component or an entire system’s worth of components.
- Decentralizing quality matthewstrom.com
Why moving judgment to the edges wins in the long run
- Frank Chimero · Selling Lemons frankchimero.com
- A threat model for accessibility on the web - Alice alice.boxhall.au
- Adam Buxton: ‘Craft? Expertise? Not that I can see’ observer.co.uk
- Screen Reader HTML Support – Lookup tetralogical.github.io
- Altoids by the Fistful § Scott Smitelli scottsmitelli.com
- Interview with demoscener – 0b5vr 6octaves.com
- Why “Systems Thinking” Isn’t Enough Anymore prairieoyster24.substack.com
Systems thinking emerged in the mid-20th century as a corrective to reductionism. It gave managers a language for interconnections, feedback, and unintended consequences. That was progress, for its time. But now the theory is showing its age.
- Aphex Twin, a Brixton squat and a load of wet mattresses: revisiting Telepathic Fish, the heart of the 90s chillout boom theguardian.com
Before it became naff music for health spas, chillout was cool – and this London club night was key. As a new generation carry its spirit forward, the originators remember the beats and bedding
- A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble linkedin.com