October

via Assaf 🌴 (@assaf@mas.to): Attached: 1 image

Badgey turns your iPhone into a conference name badge that stays upright whether you’re wearing it on a lanyard (upside down) or carrying it in your pocket. You can keep multiple badges for different occasions and flip one over to share a QR code. A delightfully specific little app.

A short video tour of Quinta da Regaleira, the moss-covered Gothic estate in Sintra, Portugal, with its spiral Initiation Well, hidden grottoes, and underground tunnels. It isn’t actually connected to Tolkien, but it’s hard to argue with the Rivendell comparison. Worth bookmarking for a Portugal trip.

via RustTrending (@RustTrending@yuri.garden): magnitudedev / magnitude: Open source inference engine that tunes its kernels on your hardware to find the fastest way to run each model. 2x faster than Ollama. Works on Apple Silicon, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, or just a CPU. ★7588 https://github.com/magnitudedev/magnitude

Magnitude is an open-source local inference engine that auto-tunes its kernels to whatever hardware you’re running — Apple Silicon, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, or plain CPU — and claims roughly 2x the throughput of Ollama. If you run models locally, it’s worth benchmarking against your current setup.

via Assaf 🌴 (@assaf@mas.to): Attached: 1 image

Survival LLM bundles a local language model with an offline emergency library — FEMA and CDC guidance, medical and repair references, and about 930,000 Wikipedia articles — so you can ask how to purify water or treat a burn with no internet connection. Every answer cites the source articles it read, with the relevant passage highlighted, which is a smart hedge against small-model hallucination. Free, open source, and available for Apple Silicon Macs and Windows.

Rachel Laycock argues that experienced developers’ hesitancy about coding agents isn’t nostalgia for writing code or fear for their jobs — it’s hard-won knowledge that “built” and “works in production” are very different things. The questions she lists (Are these the right boundaries? Will we be able to evolve it? What happens when something breaks?) are exactly the ones that agentic workflows tend to gloss over.

via j-r conlin, in the shadows (@jrconlin@mindof.jrconlin.com): The Esteemed Raw Signal Group (who definitely have a good sense of managerial direction) predict in their latest newsletter

Raw Signal Group predicts the pendulum will swing back toward attracting and retaining opinionated employees. JR Conlin, having lived through several of these cycles, offers a bracing caution: don’t mistake the swing for a change of heart from management, and invest your loyalty in your peers instead — they’re the network you’ll need when it swings back.

via Assaf 🌴 (@assaf@mas.to): > This is where our industry is headed: Owning a software system will depend a lot less on having written it (or similar systems) by hand; instead, what will become most important is knowing just enough to know when something is wrong, and being willing and able to dive as deep as needed, when needed.

Adrian Quiroga uses a SonarQube complexity failure on agent-written code as a jumping-off point for a bigger question: what do you still need to know when agents write most of the code? His answer — fundamentals and breadth to recognize when something’s wrong, plus the ability to dive deep on demand — feels like the right frame for how ownership of software is shifting.

via Assaf 🌴 (@assaf@mas.to): Attached: 1 image

magpie is an open-source macOS menu bar app that runs a local gateway translating between OpenAI Responses, Anthropic Messages, and Gemini APIs, so any coding agent can talk to any model provider. Point Codex at DeepSeek or Claude Code at Kimi with one click, and it rewrites just the config key you changed. It also masks secrets from .env files and logs before requests leave your machine.

via Kent Lew (@kentlew@typo.social): Well, friends, now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve launched my own foundry and website.

Kent Lew has been designing typefaces since 2001 — including the lovely Whitman family — and has now launched his own foundry to sell them directly. His tagline, “crafting extraordinarily ordinary typefaces,” is a perfect description of type that’s meant to be read rather than noticed, and his journal entries on slow fonts and becoming a foundry are worth a read.

via Clearleft (@Clearleft@mastodon.social): Attached: 1 video

Clearleft’s “This hue shall pass” builds a matrix of every colour combination in your brand palette and flags which pass WCAG AA or AAA contrast. What sets it apart from other contrast checkers is the wand button: it nudges a near-miss combination’s Oklch lightness just enough to pass, preserving the hue (and thus the brand personality) while you watch the whole grid update.

via Mark Levison (@mlevison@hachyderm.io): 📊 Understand why your team is stuck and where. Combine Kanban and Scrum to make the invisible visible.

Mark Levison’s one-day workshop on layering Kanban practices onto an existing Scrum process: visualize the workflow, find the bottlenecks, set WIP limits, and replace some of the ceremony overhead with continuous coordination. It earns dual credentials from Kanban University and Scrum Alliance, and the hands-on, no-PowerPoint format is a nice change from the usual certification grind.

via Assaf 🌴 (@assaf@mas.to): Attached: 1 image

A tiny office suite — word processor, outliner, spreadsheet, drawing tool, calendar and more — where the document is the URL. No accounts, no servers storing your work: everything lives in the link itself, and there’s even an llms.txt explaining how agents can author documents as links.

Matt Weagle’s trip report from twelve days driving a rented Hilux in a loop around Namibia — Sossusvlei and Deadvlei, the coast at Swakopmund, Damaraland’s desert elephants, and Etosha. It’s part travelogue, part practical guide, with notes on gravel roads, colonial history, and renting a 4x4.

via InOtterNews (@In_Otter_News@mastodon.social): Attached: 1 image

A short Mastodon post sharing “wise words from Steve” — a bit of quotable wisdom that made the rounds on the fediverse. Worth a moment’s reflection between longer reads.

via Ib Aage Toft-Iversen (i47i) (@i47i@social.i47i.cc): Following up on Denver: Finland is the classic proof that homelessness can be solved.

A University of Melbourne commentary contrasts Japan’s approach of simply building a lot of housing quickly with Finland’s Housing First policy, which grants permanent housing without preconditions like sobriety or employment. Finland’s rough-sleeping numbers have dropped dramatically since 2008, and Japan’s official street count fell from 25,000 in 2003 to under 2,500 today — though the piece is careful to note the two countries measure very different things. A useful reminder that homelessness is largely a housing supply and policy problem, not an intractable one.

Rust’s error story forces an awkward choice: precise enums that demand boilerplate, or opaque anyhow-style errors that hide what can actually fail. Dillon McMahon argues error types should compose as easily as the functions that return them, and shows how the eros crate expresses a function’s failure modes as an ad-hoc “error set” without declaring a new type.

via leyrer (@leyrer@23.social): Attached: 1 image

A beautifully-presented data visualization that puts hard numbers behind the famous xkcd “Dependency” comic: the team pulled a year of commit history from 23 projects that Android, iOS, browsers, and servers all rely on, and found that 11 of them are kept running by just one or two people. The profile of Paul Eggert, who maintains the time zone database in his spare time for four billion phones, is worth the visit on its own.

via Tim Bray 🇨🇦 (@timbray@cosocial.ca): I listen to music mostly on Qobuz and have plugged it on here and the blog several times, for example https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/06/22/Qobuz-and-Others#p-1

Tim Bray makes the case for Qobuz as a streaming service built by people who actually love music — better artist payouts, album-oriented curation, and classical music treated as a first-class citizen. The real revelation is Qobuz Connect, which lets the phone app control playback on a cheap Mac Mini wired into a home audio system. His aside is the best part: when was the last time an app added a feature that was genuinely delightful and didn’t feel like it was strip-mining your life for profit?

via Seths.blog (@thisissethsblog@c.im): Create a handoff doc

Seth Godin suggests that the handoff doc — the thing nobody ever has time to write — is exactly the kind of work an AI assistant should be doing continuously in the background. He includes a ready-to-paste prompt that asks the AI to maintain a structured document covering current state, where things live, decisions and their rejected alternatives, unverified assumptions, open questions, and how to unwind the whole thing. The insistence on recording the “why” and marking inferences separately from stated facts is what makes it more than a status report.