September

via Matthias Endler (@mre@mastodon.social): Forgot to share this here: https://corrode.dev/blog/named-arguments-at-home/

Responding to Steve Klabnik’s post on named and optional arguments, Matthias Endler argues Rust already has most of what you’d want — without new language features. Argument structs, builders, and newtypes get you 80% of the ergonomics while keeping the names attached to types rather than to every function’s calling convention.

via El Perro Negro (@elperronegro@shmg.online): For 9 months I have been using RapidRaw as part of my RAW image workflow. So much so that Rawtherapee and Lightroom have fallen by the wayside.

RapidRAW is a non-destructive, GPU-accelerated RAW photo editor that ships in about 20 MB — smaller than many of the images it edits. Built with Rust and Tauri by a solo developer, it offers AI masking, presets, batch edits, and optional generative tools that can run locally, via your own ComfyUI server, or in the cloud.

via Assaf 🌴 (@assaf@mas.to): “A collection of personal websites and an RSS reader can produce a surprisingly good Internet. It will probably be a smaller one. That’s fine.”

A thoughtful case for owning your own corner of the web: a website is a place you control, while a social media account is space inside someone else’s place — including the audience, which was never really yours. Refreshingly, it avoids simple nostalgia and acknowledges that the old web had real problems too.

via Barney Dellar (he/him) (@BarneyDellar@mastodon.scot): “Do you still read the code?” This is a very interesting article on the state of software development, and what it means to write software. https://zanlib.dev/blog/do-you-still-read-the-code/

A familiar state of affairs: teams now share codebases without agreeing on whether anyone is still expected to read the code. Zanlib draws a useful distinction between “accelerators,” who use AI to translate their own understanding into code and stay responsible for it, and “vibe coders,“ who delegate implementation and its revision entirely. The costs of either choice won’t be visible until the code has to survive changes in requirements, tooling, and people.

Crit is a local, browser-based review surface for AI agent output: point at line 47 of the diff, type “this drops the refresh token,” and the agent picks up the comment and fixes it. Beyond code diffs it also handles plans and docs, running dev servers, and static HTML artifacts — each of which terminal scrollback handles badly. Self-hostable and works with git, jj, and sapling.

via Xamanismo Coletivo (@eliasulrich@hachyderm.io): “One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.

Marginalia is an independent search engine with its own crawler and index that deliberately surfaces non-commercial, off-the-beaten-path corners of the web. No AI, no tracking, no cookies, and the whole thing is open source under AGPL. A refreshing antidote to the SEO-optimized sameness of mainstream search results.

via Bob 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 (@bielsubob@infosec.exchange): Canada built 44 bridges and tunnels across a single stretch of highway so that animals could cross without dying, and collisions with wildlife there have fallen by more than 80%, with grizzly mothers now teaching their cubs to use the crossings like a route the family has always known

Banff National Park’s 44 wildlife crossings — six vegetated overpasses and 38 underpasses, paired with fencing along the Trans-Canada Highway — have cut wildlife-vehicle collisions by more than 80% (96% for elk and deer). What I find most interesting is the multi-decade feedback loop: 250,000+ camera-logged crossings show animals learning the routes and passing that knowledge to their offspring, so the infrastructure gets more effective over time.

via Assaf 🌴 (@assaf@mas.to): Throughout a single piece of writing you’ll face two different questions: What context does the reader already have? and, crucially, What context does the reader need? The gap between those two answers defines the piece.

Addy Osmani has distilled eighteen rules for clear writing into an open-source Agent Skill that can interview you, rewrite a draft, or simply critique one without touching your file. There’s also a private browser-based editor that flags AI writing tells, readability problems, and gaps in substance. The underlying essay stands on its own as good writing advice, whether or not you ever install the skill.

Anshu Chimala, who led engineering and design teams at Apple for 12 years, argues that AI models aren’t bad at design — we’re just prompting them into design-by-committee. Because LLMs predict the most likely next token, they default to the blandest possible choices; this piece lays out an end-to-end process for pushing past that toward genuinely distinctive work.

via Jules she/her (@afewbugs@social.coop): I did this through https://ivsgb.org/ who are still going by the way, and I highly recommend the experience - spend a few weeks to a few months living and working with a bunch of other young people from all over the world, doing something useful. I probably learned more about being a human in a diverse world from this experience than I did from my subsequent four years as an undergrad.

International Voluntary Service is a UK charity, founded in 1931 as the British branch of Service Civil International, that places volunteers on community projects worldwide. Its listings range from short-term workcamps of a few weeks to long-term placements of up to a year, with a solidarity fund to help volunteers who couldn’t otherwise afford to participate.

via mako (@mako@social.seattle.wa.us): So, is Apple Passwords and Uplock still the best path from 1Password?

Via RustTrending: A feature rich, native desktop, YouTube Music client. Tauri + Rust + SvelteKit, ad-free playback through libmpv, Last.fm scrobbling and Discord Rich Presence, no Electron.

CodeScene combines static analysis with behavioral analysis of your version-control history to surface the hot spots where technical debt actually costs you — and it scores maintainability with a “CodeHealth” metric that’s validated against defect and delivery data.

via John Voorhees (@johnvoorhees@macstories.net): Hybrid compute for Perplexity’s Personal Computer is an exciting development that runs on Apple silicon Macs and blends cloud-based frontier models with local AI. Details on MacStories.

Perplexity’s new “hybrid compute” runs agent tasks in the cloud by default, but a local classifier flags potentially sensitive data and offers to route that portion to a model running on your Apple silicon Mac — and it works for sessions started from an iPhone or iPad, too. Data privacy is the next big blocker for agentic tools in regulated industries, so it’s good to see someone tackling it directly rather than asking customers to trust a cloud endpoint.