This month I started playing Slay the Spire. It’s a roguelike card game, which I never thought I’d find appealing, but it turns out it’s fun and very addictive. It’s a time sink, be warned.

I also read El brillo de las luciérnagas (available in English as The Light of the Fireflies) by Paul Pen, about a boy who’s always lived in a basement with his family, all of whom were disfigured in a fire, without knowing much about the outside or the reasons why they’re there. The premise, and the story as it develops, is really engaging, but I found most characters lacking in depth and development. The moral takeaway feels off, but I don’t think that devalues it. I recommend I Who Have Never Known Men if you’re looking for a book with a similar premise, it’s much better, although avoid it if you expect a feel-good read.

Observability

I’ve been getting more into observability lately. I found these two articles from the same author about best practices. They cover similar ground but explain things differently.

• Logging Sucks - Your Logs Are Lying To You
• Observability wide events 101

AI

• where good ideas come from (for coding agents) • Solving the decision problem. Amazing article about agentic coding best practices. Follows a hypothetical programmer for a week, showing how they level up their agentic coding workflow each day.
• Do not give up your brain. Be careful not to delegate tasks to LLMs excessively, or you’ll atrophy your skills. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Delegate, but don’t abdicate.
• A fun trick for getting discovered by LLMs and AI tools. Cassidy asks LLMs for recommendations about topics she covers, and then asks them why they didn’t recommend her content. Then adapts her site and LLMs do recommend her. Fascinating, although I’m a little worried we might be entering the SEO for LLMs phase.
• Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure “intact mental health”. (Reddit thread). If you read some examples of these bogus reports, you’ll find the maintainers of cURL have the patience of a saint. There’s a very insightful Reddit comment about how LLMs break the social contract in these cases: it takes more effort to read the prose than to write it. Given these reports are guided by a financial incentive, I think a plausible solution might be having a refundable fee to report vulnerabilities. Of course, there’s cons to this too.

Sound on the web

Why is the web mute, but native apps use sounds for UX? Here’s an article advocating for their use, and another one by the same author about generating these sounds with AI. Josh Comeau shares that wish in his article Announcing “use-sound”, a React Hook for Sound Effects. If you’re looking for sounds, you might find this library useful SND: Crafted UI sound assets for UX developers.

Others

• Processing 11 million rows in minutes instead of hours and the follow up Once again processing 11 million rows, now in seconds
• That boolean should probably be something else
• How Markdown took over the world
• Vitamin D & Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants. I wouldn’t take medical advice from the web, but the discussion about effect sizes is very interesting. Also see the Hacker News thread where you’ll find reasoned skepticism and counterarguments.