What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks @ tautology.town
tautology.town is a blog that contains tautologies.
Saved
on: 2026-09-09
Methods for random gradients
An overview of techniques I’ve used to generate random gradient images.
Saved
on: 2026-09-07
The Real Luxuries In Life
Labor Day weekend has always been the back to school marker for me. I'm 60, closing in on 61, and thinking a lot more about what I actually care about. Amy texted me a list yesterday.
Saved
on: 2026-09-05
Can Guitar Frets Perform Multiplication?
I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement. Such was the case with the cover of a book I recently bought entitled Calculating with Tones: The Logarithmic Logic of Music:
Saved
on: 2026-09-05
Sonic Pi - The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone
Sonic Pi is a new kind of instrument for a new generation of musicians. It is simple to learn, powerful enough for live performances and free to download.
Saved
on: 2026-09-02
“I just chose words carefully.” – Unsung
A blog about software craft and quality
Saved
on: 2026-08-31
507 Mechanical Movements
Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements, now Animated for the Internet.
Saved
on: 2026-08-27
Nebula Sans
Nebula Sans is the brand typeface for Nebula, available under the SIL Open Font License.
Saved
on: 2026-08-27
GlassBox: what your browser reveals to every site you visit
See every signal a website can read from your browser, and how identifiable it makes you. Runs entirely in your browser, nothing is sent.
Saved
on: 2026-08-24
My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality
Saved
on: 2026-08-24
What is a Harness? | EARENDIL
An agent harness is a piece of software that provides an environment for an AI model to operate within.
Saved
on: 2026-08-23
typ.ing
A clean and simple typing trainer that cares about how you feel. Type to find out.
Saved
on: 2026-08-22
HTMLcat — Compact notes on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
A small, opinionated collection of compact notes about useful HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features.
Saved
on: 2026-08-21
My HTML boilerplate in 2026 - Manuel Matuzović
Every element I use for the basic structure of a HTML document, with explanations why.
Saved
on: 2026-08-19
PostgreSQL for Everything
You need simplicity if you want to move fast. PostgreSQL can very well replace Kafka, Redis, Clickhouse and Elastic. And many successful companies are doing exactly that. Let's check out how.
Saved
on: 2026-08-19
And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all ostensibly from the network provider Vodafone. All pro-regime and all with the…
Saved
on: 2026-08-19
Ordinary Abundance
A walk through a modern apartment, through the eyes of the people for whom everything in it was new.
Saved
on: 2026-08-17
How AI text watermarking works
A gentle visual guide to how a statistical mark hides inside generated text, and what erases it.
Saved
on: 2026-08-16
Understanding is the new bottleneck
Agents can write code faster than we can absorb it. Here's why it still matters for humans to understand what they build — and some techniques for doing that efficiently: explainer docs, quizzes, micro-worlds, and shared spaces.
Saved
on: 2026-08-14
Felix and I – Jacob Filipp
Saved
on: 2026-08-12
The hardest working font in Manhattan
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
Saved
on: 2026-08-12
Taste Is All That's Left | Blog
On what is left to do once the machine can make anything, and why taste is the last craft worth keeping.
Saved
on: 2026-08-07
The Title Cards in Blade Runner Are Fucking Amazing
Appreciating typography is a study in paradox. The primary goal of well-designed typography is to help you read the words, not appreciate how the words are comp
Saved
on: 2026-08-06
What Colors Are We? Constructing A Color Space For Skin Tones
Simple equations and a color picker to inclusively select simplified skin tones in a custom color space for digital art or game development.
Saved
on: 2026-08-05
Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI - ACM Queue
Saved
on: 2026-08-05
Beauty In My Backyard - Works in Progress Magazine
Ugly architecture stops homes getting built – but not in the way you think.
Saved
on: 2026-08-04
You don't need React: creating a minimal UI library
Saved
on: 2026-08-04
AARomanov1985/Audio-Cassette-Simulation: This project simulates cassette tape audio profiles using ffmpeg
This project simulates cassette tape audio profiles using ffmpeg - AARomanov1985/Audio-Cassette-Simulation
Saved
on: 2026-07-27
An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud
A look inside the gray-market reseller economy that gives mainland China cheap, structured, B2B-grade access to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and beyond
Saved
on: 2026-07-26
How my images are dithered | dead.garden
Hello there! This is my personal website and it is allergic to SEO.
Saved
on: 2026-07-25
Jay su X: "I’m going to punch you in the stomach" / X
Saved
on: 2026-07-21
I Built an LLM From Scratch
In this video CJ explains chat bots, neural networks, tokenization, embeddings, transformers and more. He shows real working code for everything and gives hi...
Saved
on: 2026-07-21
Prompt caching: 10x cheaper LLM tokens, but how? | ngrok blog
A far more detailed explanation of prompt caching than anyone asked for: how tokens, embeddings, and attention make cached LLM tokens 10x cheaper and faster.
Saved
on: 2026-07-21
11,700 Free Photos from John Margolies' Archive of Americana Architecture: Download, Use & Re-Mix
Many connoisseurs of architecture are enthralled by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I M Pei, who shared a belief that form follows function, or, as Wright had it, that form and function are one.
Saved
on: 2026-07-20
The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired
On reward functions, dopamine, and what it actually feels like when the code starts writing itself
Saved
on: 2026-07-17
Explore 1,300+ Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century, Now Restored and Available Online
Today, if you want to know about any of the flora or fauna that surround us, you have only to look it up online.
Saved
on: 2026-07-16
Laravel Zero-Downtime Migrations: Expand and Contract Pattern | RichDynamix
A step-by-step guide to Laravel zero-downtime migrations with the expand and contract pattern: nullable expands, batched backfills, and flagged reads.
Saved
on: 2026-07-14
How To Write an Email
This is not about grammar. It is about speed, clarity, and judgment.
Saved
on: 2026-07-09
TLS certificates for internal services done right
No self-signing headaches, no TLS erros.
Saved
on: 2026-07-09
1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
Take online courses from the world’s top universities for free. Below, you will find 1,700 free online courses from universities like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Oxford and more.
Note: This page includes a lot of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Saved
on: 2026-06-23
JSON-LD Explained for Personal Websites
A guide to implementing JSON-LD on your personal website for better SEO, covering WebSite, Person, BlogPosting, and more with ready-to-use code snippets.
Saved
on: 2026-06-22
tamnd/kage: Shadow any website for offline viewing, with the JavaScript stripped out
Shadow any website for offline viewing, with the JavaScript stripped out - tamnd/kage
Saved
on: 2026-06-15
LATHE CUT RECORDS - LATHE CUTS
Lathe Cut Vinyl Records Diamond Embossed With Our Westrex Stereo Cuter Head No Minimum Fastest Turnaround Time 2 Days
Saved
on: 2026-06-08
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
I'm a software engineer, completing 10 years of professional experience this year. I started my career as a web frontend engineer (it was easier for me to de...
Saved
on: 2026-06-07
How LLMs Actually Work
A from-the-ground-up walkthrough of how modern LLMs work, from tokens to transformer blocks to the next-token loop
Saved
on: 2026-06-06
The Website Specification
A platform-agnostic, full specification of the technical features a good website should have. Built in the open under an MIT licence.
Saved
on: 2026-05-31
I Read the Claude Code Source Code. Here's Everything You Can Configure That the Docs Don't Tell You.
Hook fields that rewrite commands mid-flight, persistent agent memory, auto-mode rules in plain English, self-improving dream loops, and every example is copy-paste ready.
Saved
on: 2026-05-29
A few interesting modern pixel fonts – Unsung
A blog about software craft and quality
Saved
on: 2026-05-27
Beyond the Prompt: Claude Code
A deep dive into Claude Code for daily users. Covers the .claude directory, CLAUDE.md the way Boris writes it, CLAUDE.local.md, Skills with real examples, custom subagents, plugins, underused commands like /goal and /insights, MCPs, and the workflow patterns the Anthropic team actually uses.
Saved
on: 2026-05-27
The Cost of Safetyism
What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.
Saved
on: 2026-05-26
Using AI to write better code more slowly
A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs, and merge them unvetted. Ship it! But t…
Saved
on: 2026-05-26
Canada is about to weaken every lock on your private messages — dontsurveil.me
Bill C-22 would force every messaging app in Canada to build a second key, and give the copy to the government. What's changed, what's happening now, what's next.
Saved
on: 2026-05-17
Old matchboxes are igniting new ideas for these Indian creatives
Inspired by the visual language, cultural history, and format of matchboxes, three contemporary Indian projects are reimagining this object in strikingly different ways.
Saved
on: 2026-05-07
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like
I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit’s High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my …
Saved
on: 2026-05-07
Reading code with AI, not generating it
Most posts about AI coding are about generating code. This one's about pointing Claude at an existing codebase to read it. The tools, the prompts, and where AI got it right and wrong.
Saved
on: 2026-05-06
Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It.
40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.
Saved
on: 2026-05-06
Appearing Productive in The Workplace — No One's Happy
AI can produce work that looks expert without being expert. The failure arrives in two shapes, and both are reshaping the workplace.
Saved
on: 2026-05-06
Bootstrapping a Frameworkless PHP Application
A single bootstrap file. A PSR-11 container. No fullstack framework required.
Saved
on: 2026-05-05
Your website is not for you — Websmith Studio
A note from a developer who keeps watching good design die in boardrooms.
Saved
on: 2026-05-01
Composition Shouldn't be this Hard — Cambra
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.
Saved
on: 2026-04-24
Drunk Post: Things I’ve Learned as a Senior Engineer
Everything your mentor wants to say but HR won't let them
Saved
on: 2026-04-22
Writing Your Own Framework in PHP: Part One | Blog by Dominik Chrástecký
A hands-on intro to building your own PHP framework entirely from scratch — handwritten, with minimal dependencies.
Saved
on: 2026-04-21
Laws of Software Engineering
A collection of principles and patterns that shape software systems, teams, and decisions.
Saved
on: 2026-04-21
Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people
I spend a lot of time negotiating this in the software world:
And if you're wondering why this happens, it's normally because:
1. people aren't talking to people
2. people aren't listening
So lots of designers and product people have leapt onto 1, basically trying to turn talking to people
Saved
on: 2026-04-20
Six Characters // a.s
What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains — and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.
Saved
on: 2026-04-16
Reinventing Payment: From One Table to DDD
How I evolved a PHP payment system from a single table to channels, state machines, and hexagonal architecture. Real code, real trade-offs.
Saved
on: 2026-04-15
Most people can't juggle one ball — LessWrong
TLDR: A complete guide to juggling, from zero to siteswap notation, by someone who juggles in nightclubs. …
Saved
on: 2026-04-13
S3 Files and the changing face of S3
Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files
Saved
on: 2026-04-08
How to turn anything into a router
I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router.
Fortunately, you can make a router out of basically anything resembling a computer.
I’ve used a linux powered mini-pc as my own router for many years, and have posted a few times before about how to make linux routers and firewalls in that time.
Saved
on: 2026-03-30
A 1977 Time Capsule, Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder
Right now, more than 15 billion miles from Earth, a 48-year-old spacecraft is hurtling through interstellar space at 38,000 miles per hour.
Saved
on: 2026-03-30
CSS is DOOMed - Rendering DOOM in 3D with CSS | Hello my name is Niels Leenheer
Every wall, floor, barrel, and imp is a div — DOOM rendered in 3D entirely in CSS. Using 3D transforms, CSS math functions, @property, clip-path, anchor positioning, and SVG filters to build a fully playable 3D first-person shooter in the browser without Canvas or WebGL.
Saved
on: 2026-03-29
Anatomy of the .claude/ Folder
A complete guide to CLAUDE.md, custom commands, skills, agents, and permissions, and how to set them up properly.
Saved
on: 2026-03-27
PHP Logging with Monolog: A Complete Guide · Dash0
A practical guide to Monolog 3 covering structured logging processors handlers exception logging and OpenTelemetry integration for production PHP applications
Saved
on: 2026-03-25
Landbook - website design inspiration gallery
Find the best hand-picked website design inspiration. We're a curated website design gallery for Creatives, updated daily.
Saved
on: 2026-03-13
I'm Building Agents That Run While I Sleep
I Have No Idea If What They Ship Is Any Good
Saved
on: 2026-03-11
Why use static closures?
Why use static closures? (Published on March 3, 2026 - Version française)
Saved
on: 2026-03-04
the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds
53MB of source code leaked from a government endpoint. 269 verification checks. biometric face databases. SAR filings to FinCEN. and the same company that verifies your ChatGPT account.
Saved
on: 2026-02-25
What is OAuth?
Wherein I [try to] answer a seemingly straightforward question: "WTF is OAuth, anyhow?"
Saved
on: 2026-02-21
modern.css
A collection of modern CSS code snippets. Every old CSS hack next to its clean, native replacement, side by side.
Saved
on: 2026-02-16