We all know that smart TVs phone home but it’s far more invasive (and illegal) than you could possibly imagine. Unplugging the network is not even safe because they’ll secretly connect to open neighbour mesh WiFi.

My LG TV is 10 years old and I only use it as a dumb screen; never accepted the terms and conditions. Never updated the firmware now that I think about it. It probably doesn’t have all the new spyware. Problem is it’s suffering OLED burn-in and due an upgrade. What do I buy though? It’s almost guaranteed that other brands are doing the same.

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• Murder in the Crooked House (Sōji Shimada)
• The Decagon House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji)
• The Mill House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji)

Shimada’s second book (translated into English) is far less serious than his first. It’s entertaining but far-fetched and I doubt anyone could realistically solve it. The story itself is a big tonal shift but I wonder if a different translator had an effect.

The Decagon House was uninteresting. I don’t see why this book is considered one of the best. There aren’t all that many clues to dig into. The answer is narrowed down and given unceremoniously. The Mill House is far better. Great narrative structure and a satisfying mystery. Plenty of clues to catch on to what’s happening before the reveal.

I’ve got two more Ayatsuji books then I’ll have to research more authors!

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The only podcast capable of an intellectual discussion. Chris and Dave are prone to slop-talk but at least they’re not having an LLM script their opinions.

Every other podcast I know has pivoted to glazing AI as if the singularity is holding a gun to their head. Either that, or astroturfing the latest fasc-tech. It seems like half the web industry has decided to throw away everything and dedicate their careers to funding the next Epstein-class of tech elites.

Please let me know if you’re aware of other podcasts!

Edit: English language podcasts to be specific :)

Edit 2: Suggestions from the socials:

• Igalia Chats
• Wonders of Web Weaving
• Kevin Powell’s General Musings
• For a Better Web (with Bruce Lawson)
• What the Spec?!

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This is the first physical novel I’ve read in years (I read ebooks). And the first novel I’ve read — not listened to — in months (I prefer audiobooks).

I bought the paperback because the genre is shin honkaku detective fiction. Pages include a dramatis personae, maps, diagrams, and tabular data as reference that require flipping back to often, if you’re playing along.

The story itself is terrifyingly gruesome. The mystery behind who committed the murders is a seemingly impossible series of events with a deceptively original explanation. After re-reading the details more than once I “solved” the mystery. At least, I got the gist of how things happened and arrived at the correct name(s). The exact explanation is far more elegant than I pieced together myself.

Highly recommended if the genre is your cup of tea. The story had too many red herrings for my taste, but I’ve not read anything similar so maybe that’s par for the course.

I’m now reading The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji. Will I enjoy more Japanese detective fiction, or was this just a good standalone book? I gave LitRPG a whirl after Dungeon Crawler Carl but other popular LitRPG bored me.

Update: notes on further reading.

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Software developers haven’t all switched to using agents for their coding, but they do seem to have all switched to error-prone, backwards-facing, nondeterministic chatbots for what now passes as web dev “education”.

Every time I thought to myself “maybe it isn’t that bad, those two are still selling their courses and ebooks so there obviously continues to be a market for this” I’d find out a while later that their business had indeed collapsed and that they had been coasting on fumes. Then they would give up as well and quit the industry.

Moreover, the field of web development has regressed overall. React and framework-oriented development is back in full force. Novelty and research now focuses exclusively on some variation of getting a Large Language Model to regurgitate some old thing into the gutted, hollowed-out skinsuit of some other old thing. “Let’s use an agent to port it to Rust! Let’s make a WordPress replacement in JavaScript! Let’s port this project to a more convenient license!”

The story of this blog so far: ‘AI’, the death of web dev, and feeling like an outsider - Baldur Bjarnason

It’s shocking how quickly the industry gave up.

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Penpot has a bug when moving objects with the keyboard. Maybe I’m just unlucky but it’s impossible to miss for me. They never fixed it but the new WebGL rendering doesn’t reproduce it. That’s good…

Except there is now one almighty memory leak. I’ve never seen this macOS dialog until today. Credit to macOS for sustaining 100% memory pressure and swapping out my entire free disk space before I noticed.

Sigh. Penpot has been going heavy on the “AI” marketing and word is the app itself is increasingly vibe-coded. Would explain a lot.

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Baldur Bjarnason sums it up nicely:

These once serious people didn’t have to turn themselves into clowns but they just had to go through the effort to pratfall in public, thinking that wouldn’t end our respect for them

@baldur@toot.cafe - 15 Aug 2026

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They use a seeded pseudo-random number generator to ensure the next word is still random, but can be matched back to the seed. It’s clever, and hilarious how often Anthropic use “random” to explain how LLMs work.

The current crop of “AI detectors” are absolute bogus. When Anthropic releases their watermark detection API a strong positive should be fairly trustworthy for long prose. In theory the same API could help to lower a watermark score with trial and error. Use a second LLM to replace potential watermark candidates with synonyms; frankenslop.

I really don’t like vibecusation. That is just as dehumanising as everything else the AI industry has polluted our culture with. AI disclosure should be mandatory, watermarks and auto-detection warnings are the second best option (if they work).

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I keep seeing the word “taste” pop up in conjunction with AI usage in web development.

According to Syntax episode #1027 it is “taste” that now defines the “design engineer”.

I do think that this role in particular is such a huge role in the future now, of the world that we exist in with AI and all these things. And somebody who has design taste and design style is gonna be able to create some really amazing stuff.

5:57 - Scott Tolinski

Scott and Wes define a “design engineer” as someone who uses AI to be an expert in all roles.

It’s like, can somebody just look at a website that you’re building and say, that’s not the right tagline. That’s not the right copy. You don’t have to go through this whole thing of, like, oh, let’s get the copywriter involved.

7:15 - Wes Bos

You must listen to the audio to hear the disrespect dripping off that last line.

I’m guessing these are vibe-transcribed quotes so listen to the first 15 minutes for the full conversation.

Forget expertise, forget qualifications. Forget a career of research and training to deeply understand a profession. It’s all fair game for a design engineer with taste.

I hate to burst your bubble lads, but that is not a “design engineer” you’re describing, that’s a Jackass of all trades with an LLM addiction. Your “taste” is defined less by knowledge and more by financial privilege to afford another round of crackers to feed the stochastic parrot.

Wes stops reading the Vercel article being referenced before the important part:

We collaborate on everything because of each person’s unique background and skills. While each person can execute independently, we’ve found that our best work is done through collaboration. None of us is process/tools-driven. We care about the outcome, not the process/tool.

Design Engineering at Vercel

Vercel stress collaboration, not “tools” (AI is not just a tool.)

The reality is that LLM-driven development is the great leveller. Developers with access to the same LLMs are hitting their heads on the same skill ceiling. For those suffering imposter syndrome this is a relief. AI work mandates enable the quiet quitting their bosses feared.

The 10x unicorns love the taste of their own slop. Their dilemma is attesting superiority. The coping mechanism has become: “You’re prompting it wrong!” — think “MCP”, “skills”, “loops”, etc. Everyone believes they can rub the magic lamp more effectively. “Taste” in this context is the opposite end of the extrusion. They go off vibes because they never learnt what it takes to reason about good design. They’re overconfident in their ability because of limited exposure to real expertise. They don’t know what they don’t know.

So yeah, this design engineering defined by AI and “taste” is a bit silly, if you ask me.

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I’ve written for years about how WordPress breaks CSS and how horrendous theming has become the norm. I tried to raise issues but they went nowhere. My last remaining issue was closed today, unresolved.

After all this time the only manageable way to build bespoke WordPress themes is to disable the block editor entirely. I haven’t bothered to write up my approach but it’s very similar to Amber Weinberg’s “Building Modular Themes with ACF Flexible Content” — pair that with Terrence Eden’s “A big list of things I disable in WordPress” and you’ve got a similar base theme to mine.

I shared a tip recently to wrangle plugin CSS into a cascade layer. Perhaps a similar approach, with hooks or output buffering, can rein in WordPress pollution. It’s such a moving target though, I’d hate to maintain that.

These days I strongly advise clients to question whether WordPress is worth the investment. Most websites can be static with their infrequent content updates. Use a headless CMS for regular news/blogs if that’s cost effective.

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John Gruber posts “App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours” (now retracted) about Terry Godier’s “Browsers have standards, the App Store has judgment” (since edited).

Godier claimed to have built an astronomy app called Dark Hours over four months, and that Apple rejected the app “on the grounds that it was Astrology”. Gruber ran with the story, heavily criticising Apple.

The next day Gruber retracted his post. The app rejected by Apple was called Asterly, not Dark Hours, and did in fact contain astrology, as Godier later admits. Gruber even gave Godier a draft before publishing his original post and Godier “offered not a word of caution”.

The story doesn’t end there!

The developer of an app called DarkHours called out Godier on Bluesky citing similar features and bugs. Godier quickly posts Mea Culpa - Dark Hours blaming AI and Claude for the rip off. Godier redirected his domain to the original app.

The original DarkHours also appears to be heavily vibe-coded. It’s MIT licensed too, so a simple attribution would have been sufficient. Comments on Mastodon suggest “It’s slop all the way down.”

Whatever the truth, these are dark hours for open source, that’s for sure.

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They were shipping 1.1 MiB of JavaScript to the browser to render markdown and syntax highlight code examples — in the browser.

They moved this work to the server (good) using React Server Components (bad).

RSC proved to be unbearable, even by TanStack standards. They then wrote their own markdown parser and syntax highlighter, and despite using SSR for the initial page load, they’re back to rendering markdown in the browser.

At no point in this palaver did anyone stop to ask, why are we re-rendering the same markdown for every request?

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I checked The Pi Hut and Pimoroni both are priced the same for the UK market.

Raspberry Pi 5 for £292.80? Who in their right mind would buy that?

I see they introduced a 1GB model for £43.20. A 1GB Pi 5 has extremely limited use, a Pi 4 or even Pi 3 with more RAM would be a better choice. 1GB is a marketing scam. They can claim “from £43.20” and maybe trick a few unobservant suckers.

I bought my 8GB Pi 5 for £65.75 in 2023 and even that was way too expensive.

I’ve noted similar price hikes for computer parts. The PC and self-hosted hobby is dead right now. Guess who ruined it?

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Today I tried to rebuild my Tauri app and I get a weird error.

I run tauri info to find:

[✘] Environment
    ✘ rustc: not installed!
      Maybe you don't have rust installed! Visit https://rustup.rs/
    ✘ Cargo: not installed!
      Maybe you don't have rust installed! Visit https://rustup.rs/
    ✔ rustup: 1.29.0 (2026-03-05)
    ✔ Rust toolchain: stable-aarch64-apple-darwin (default)

Weird, I thought I had installed Rust via Homebrew.

I run which rustup to find:

/opt/homebrew/bin/rustup

I run rustup and everything updates.

I check ~/.cargo/bin and see all the Rust tools are symlinked to /opt/homebrew/bin/rustup-init — the rustup-init file does not exist.

I delete everything and reinstall:

brew install rustup

Only to be notified:

This formula no longer provides `rustup-init`.

rustup is keg-only, which means it was not symlinked into /opt/homebrew,
because it conflicts with rust.

What does this mean? I’m using Homebrew because a package manager is supposed to be convenient. I’m not here for cryptic beer metaphors. What’s the point if it can’t install usable packages? This happens so often. Homebrew package break, I’m left trawling GitHub issues trying to make heads or tails.

So I give up and go to the original source piping install scripts straight to bash.

I get that Homebrew is an open source volunteer project. I don’t want to sound complainy. I just don’t understand what it’s supposed to do anymore.

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Random talking with no context. I’m supposed to guess who is speaking and what they’re rambling on about? I look forward to the vague deja vu I get when it’s repeated in 40 minutes 🙄

This ain’t TikTok. Nobody is getting hooked on a poorly chosen mid-sentence quote that isn’t half as profound and the editor imagined.

I’m getting real tired of hitting fast-forward an unknown number of times to find the actual start. Much easier to hit unsubscribe.

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I can’t remember when or why I switched to VS Code. I moved to VSCodium for a short period last year and then gave Zed a spin.

These modern apps and their “developer experience” suck.

Sublime Text with five minutes of configuration in a breath of fresh air.

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