Links from 2026

Contrary takes.

An interesting fact I learned at the time: The median delay between human speakers during a conversation is 0ms (zero). In other words, in many cases, the listener starts speaking before the speaker is done. You've probably experienced this, and you talk about how you "finish each other's sentences".

Top voice agent facts

Nobody's asking the harder question: what would a commercial model look like that rewards measurable plumbing and creative risk? That captures the incremental certainty of optimisation and the asymmetric upside of fame?

Coding agent tools can help with most of this, but there is still a substantial burden on the developer driving those tools to ensure that the produced code is good code for the subset of good that's needed for the current project.

Good guide on hacking old Kindles.

DarkSky is back!

But not in the UK yet, it appears.

A simple, open format for guiding coding agents.

The genie is good at exploration. So good in fact, that Atsign engineer Chris Swan wrote “getting from idea to code is cheaper than it’s ever been.” But good ideas are a new constraint. “The set of people who have ideas for apps worth building is not everybody. It might be a larger set than the people currently making apps, but it’s finite, and probably not much larger,” Swan suggests.

What happens when a large open source project dies.

This is a great software ecosystem/evolution post.

I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.

When the interface is a natural language conversation, years of muscle memory become worthless. The switching cost that justified $25K per seat per year dissolves. For many vertical software companies, the interface was most of the value. The underlying data was licensed, public, or semi-commoditized. What justified premium pricing was the workflow built on top of that data. That's over.

Some truth in this but lacks nuance.

The word “brand” is used so broadly that its meaning has become elusive. Everything from logos and imagery to worldviews, social media popularity, and market capitalization gets labeled as “brand.” However, what constitutes a brand is not appearance or popularity, but the reason people continue to choose it.

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.

What does it mean to keep practicing a craft you love when you suspect it's dying?

A collection of small details that make a big difference.

I were to leave you with one idea, it is to go back to the ideas in How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. The basic idea there is that you can measure far more than you think, but only if you’re clear about what decision the measurement is meant to support, accept uncertainty instead of chasing false precision, and choose measurement approaches that reduce uncertainty at the lowest possible cost.

I shut down my Clawdbot AI agent after an experience that made me question what I was willing to hand over in exchange for autonomy.

These fictions were functional adaptations to real constraints. The job, the credential, the expert, each solved a genuine problem in a high-friction world. But the constraints changed. And now the adaptations are decaying.

Employment among “business operations specialists, all other”—a grab-bag combining process design, co-ordination and analysis—has jumped by almost 60%, with solid wage growth to match.

I probably didn't.

I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.

I hope this article would be helpful in avoiding common mistakes in icon design, which Apple managed to collect all in one OS release. I love computers, I love interfaces, I love visual communication. It makes me sad seeing perfectly good knowledge already accessible 30 years ago being completely ignored or thrown away today.

A rant, but a completely justified one.

I put together this list of prioritization anti-patterns and traps to watch out for. If we can detect and filter out a meaningful percentage of the duds and traps, it can make a big difference.

A Ranking from Most to Least Evil

...which is actually still pretty evil.