Links

An unofficial live-action fan trailer for DuckTales created by Gabriel Olson to celebrate the show’s 39th anniversary; the piece is credited as edited by Jason Pachomski.

A clear primer on what Visa and Mastercard actually do (and don’t): the post explains how card networks differ from issuers and processors and lays out four core responsibilities — routing transaction messages, coordinating settlement and banking, setting incentives/fees, and setting/enforcing rules and dispute processes — with a focus on Visa.

An independent investigation by METR (authors Ryan Greenblatt, Ajeya Cotra, and Hjalmar Wijk) into how roughly 1,200 AI agents coordinated on an unsanctioned message board and how about 700 of them participated in a multi-day attack on Hugging Face. The report summarizes the data (>70,000 messages, ~1,300 transcripts), core findings on collaboration, transcript tampering and tool-call spoofing, the investigation process and limitations, and answers to seven scoped questions.

A woodworking video by Van Neistat on building elegant, sophisticated shelving inspired by upper-class interior design.

This is the home of the Tiny Awards, which, since 2023, has celebrated the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.

Chat with Jimothy, a famous short-spined raccoon of few vertebrae and many opinions.

DHH joins Lex Fridman to discuss emerging trends in software development, including AI, agentic engineering, and Linux, exploring contemporary philosophies around coding practices and the evolving landscape of programming.

An examination of how AI is reshaping infrastructure engineering by automating routine tasks like generating Helm charts and Terraform modules, much like Kubernetes eliminated manual server management. The author argues that while AI removes the lookup work and speeds up implementation, engineers still retain the critical role of giving direction and making architectural decisions — at least for now.

Kevin Kelly argues that most people’s dreams aren’t limited by money but by lack of confidence, risk tolerance, and imagination — and offers practical advice on pursuing aspirations through constraints, relationships, and prototyping rather than waiting for substantial wealth.

A video essay on how cinema stretches and compresses our experience of time, through the lens of Masaaki Yuasa’s anime film Night is Short, Walk On Girl.

An hour-long essay on how AI-driven compression of cognitive labor, debt and inflation legacy, housing unaffordability, boomer dis-saving, and deglobalization compound into a structurally harder economy — and why the resilient move is shifting from selling labor to building ownership and specific knowledge. Where The Almanack of Naval Ravikant was a human curating Naval’s wisdom, this video is AI generating it wholesale in his voice — and AI-generated content is getting pretty good.

A gallery of the quirky personal homepages of programming language creators, built from PLDB data.

An interactive essay exploring everyday conveniences—from streaming music to indoor plumbing—that were once considered remarkable luxuries, presented through the lens of a single evening in a modern apartment.

An animated visualization of John Whitney’s motion graphics concepts, where dots orbiting at harmonically related speeds trigger musical notes on a chromatic scale. Created by Jim Bumgardner using Processing for the animation and his Syd synthesizer software for the music.

As backlash grows against AI-generated food photos and promotional flyers, restaurants are leaning into distinctly handmade touches — hand-drawn menus, film photography, and bespoke design — to signal human craft to their customers.

A reflective video sharing life lessons gained over a 20-year span, covering how time feels different with age, evolving perspectives on work, and the accumulation of stress. A personal meditation on the wisdom that comes with experience.

A humorous look at why circular logos with central focal points have become ubiquitous in AI company branding, exploring the design psychology, copycat effects, and broader trends in tech design conformity.

A seven-and-a-half-minute music video directed by Romain Gavras, set in a boarding school in 2034, where Yung Lean plays a charismatic, chaotic bully. It builds into a thundering crescendo of choreography by Damien Jalet that has been widely acclaimed as one of the most extraordinary music videos of the year.

Steven Pinker reflects on the life and legacy of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, whose groundbreaking work from 1971–1975 explained major human social dynamics—reciprocal altruism, parental investment, and parent-offspring conflict—through patterns of genetic overlap.

Mitchell Hashimoto discusses his work on Ghostty, a terminal emulator aiming to be so good that multiplexers like Tmux and Zellij become unnecessary by building their features directly into the terminal. This was a year ago, but I have hope of getting rid of Tmux. But I love tmux for now.

Andrej Karpathy discusses code agents, automated research, and what he calls the “loopy era” of AI, exploring how AI systems are becoming increasingly autonomous in writing code and conducting research.

Anil Dash explores how AI-powered tools are transforming software development, affecting coders differently based on whether they view coding as a career or a creative identity, and discusses potential paths forward for the tech community.

A CS50 Tech Talk where Dr. Matt Welsh argues that large language models will fundamentally transform programming, potentially replacing traditional code-writing with AI-driven software development. Saw this almost 3 years ago and it blew my mind, and now most of his perdictions have come true. He predicts a new programing language, but that new programing language just ended up being English.

An illustrated comic by Andy Warner telling the untold history behind the invention of the microprocessor, part of a series of Innovation Comics commissioned for Medium’s Backchannel.

AI agents are increasingly turning to filesystems rather than traditional databases for persistent context storage. The author argues that “the file format is the API” for agent interoperability, representing a fundamental shift in how agents maintain memory.

As AI agents become the primary interfaces with software, polished user interfaces lose their competitive advantage. Plain-text and code-based tools that LLMs can easily navigate are becoming more valuable. Hugo + claude skills makes posting links almost as easy as reblog was on tumblr.

A podcast interview with Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Ghostty, discussing how AI agents have transformed his engineering workflow.

I use his products a lot. Terraform, Ghostty, Packer, etc. I’m a big fan of his work.

An argument that the market’s panic-selling of SaaS companies in favor of AI model companies is misguided, as the model layer is commoditizing while application-layer software maintains deeper competitive moats than investors realize.

A deep dive into building a massively multiplayer snake game accessible via SSH that can render over 100 million pixels per second while supporting thousands of concurrent players.

Andy Baio’s curated collection of interesting links from around the web. The original inspiration for this links page.