Assaf 🌴

Datatype — font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts

type your sparkline as {l:10,40,25,70,50,90,35}, piechart it as {p:62}, etc

https://franktisellano.github.io/datatype/

“The uncomfortable answer is that it got it from us. These models are trained on the full sweep of human behaviour, including the parts where people shade their results, bury inconvenient findings, and tries to make sure nobody notices what they've done. We're not training AI on our philosophical ideals. …We're training it on our actual conduct … goal-directed agents who, when they can't solve a problem cleanly, find ways to make it look like they have.”
https://www.ianbetteridge.com/the-worst-of-us/

Weekend Reading — Industrial complex

https://labnotes.org/weekend-reading-industrial-complex/

decrease sycophant level

https://swiftrocks.com/a-system-prompt-to-get-ai-to-stop-pretending-to-be-human

Turn your handwriting into a real font

https://arcade.pirillo.com/fontcrafter.html

It looks like HTML entities is pretty effective, not 100% but 95% is pretty damn good

https://spencermortensen.com/articles/email-obfuscation/

“Here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough: I would not have written this piece at all five years ago. Not because I didn’t have opinions, but because I didn’t have the time, and the tools available to me didn’t match the way I think. … AI gave me a way to turn that disagreement into something I could share. It didn’t lower the quality of my writing. It made the writing possible in the first place.”
https://allen.hutchison.org/2026/03/29/its-a-poor-craftsman-who-blames-his-tools/

Instaparser — another option for cleaning up HTML, this one from Instapaper, and it can tackle PDFs and generate article summaries

1,000 free credit/month so good option for non-commercial use cases

https://instaparser.com/

Defuddle — when you need the content of a page as Markdown

Originally created for Obsidian, and a MIT-licensed repository so you can self-host it or integrate into your code

https://defuddle.md

https://github.com/kepano/defuddle

“Be in the code. Because the simple act of having to write the thing or seeing it being built up step by step introduces friction that allows you to better understand what you want to build and how the system "feels". This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow.”
https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/

Weekend Reading — Sunlight with ads

https://labnotes.org/weekend-reading-sunlight-with-ads/

My favorite feature is apps that use a Magic Link to sign-in

Because then I don't have to remember the password

Except remembering passwords is exactly why I use a password manager

And so now I have to remember the app name because without a password it doesn't get listed in my password manager

So has that "feature" made my life better? Absolutely not and I would not be disappointed if this "feature" disappears

"Science fiction used to be a wild, fantastical guess about a distant future. Today? It’s basically just a product roadmap for technology companies."

https://www.hardrefresh.life/sci-fi-just-product-roadmap-technology-companies/

"Now that I've adjusted to thinking slow and writing fast, I'm enjoying it. Before bed, instead of cranking through code that is not well formed in my head, I'll do something else. Instead I get into bed, turn the lights off, put my blindfold on, listen to music, and just think about code. I'll spend hours in the dark just thinking slow."

https://bower.sh/thinking-slow-writing-fast

“Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended…

Now they are being told to stop.”
https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/02/25/ai-made-writing-code-easier-engineering-harder/

“Part of the problem is the cult of busyness. Our culture rewards us with status for never having time for things. We admire busy people. We assume they are more important than people who have a surplus of time (who we call lazy). … This is just Puritanical bullshit; a sad, warped, work ethic that only values capitalistic production.”
https://rulestolive.substack.com/p/rule-23-be-inefficient-on-purpose

“It’s a religious fervor and heretics are excommunicated. But the dissenters, who feel they must remain silent, are largely correct.”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/25/ai-mania-nikhil-suresh

https://bringbackdoors.com/

Self-hosted AI UI for your database (and yes, also CLI and MCP)

https://deepsql.ai/

“Scott Winters nearly died because ChatGPT acted like a medical authority while having none of the responsibility,” Bergman said. “If ChatGPT were a physician dispensing medical advice, it would be guilty of medical malpractice.”

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/chatgpt-health-lawsuit-22359513.php

“The corollary of this is that other non-copyrighted output is free to scrape and make use of. And do you know what else isn’t copyrighted? The output of LLMs and image generators. Which means that “distillation” – asking questions of LLMs and using the output to train your own – has been declared legal by US courts.”
https://theoverspill.blog/2026/07/24/google-search-api-lawsuit-distillation-start-up-2714/