David Humphrey

A great and funny read on what Canada is gearing up for now that Trump’s negotiators made an offer we literally could never accept.

The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born https://lobste.rs/s/grynsa #practices #culture

The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't https://lobste.rs/s/qzvvbv #networking

The magnitude of the FAFO moment coming for the "we don't read any of the AI code we ship to prod!" crowd is going to be a sight to behold. Unfortunately, we are all going to be watching it as affected users of these systems

Why AI Swarms Cannot Build Architecture https://lobste.rs/s/uhtsz9 #scaling #practices #ai

Documentary about Open Source in Ukraine and around the world https://lobste.rs/s/unmf9w #video #culture

This article has been bouncing around in my head for the past couple of months, but I finally sat down and wrote it.

I can't believe how often I hit this ridiculous rate limit just by browsing to things on GitHub's web site--many times this week. The downfall and neglect of GitHub is hard to watch and brings me no joy.

I missed this piece by @dkthomp.bsky.social which makes a much deeper case for a thing I said to @blaine.bsky.social over the summer. Instagram shouldn't be understood as falling to be a social sharing app. It should be seen as a very successful Pocket TV. www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everyt...

I'm grading my open source students' work, and I loved this description of what it's like from one of the students: dev.to/jongwan93/es...

Seeing a lot of what I'm calling "AI Ennui" with my students. Different from the usual end-of-term burnout and apathy, it's become increasingly hard to get students to be students (read, write, engage with learning). Blaming AI is too easy, but it's fundamentally different from anything I've seen.

Wild to see upgrade docs being given as a prompt for your LLM agent to do... www.prisma.io/docs/ai/prom...

Another day, another reason to love OpenRouter.ai. Student API key leaked into a public GitHub repo and we get a security email from their support team, which have already found it and disabled the key. Fantastic

I never cease to be underwhelmed with the average case for AI image generation. Everyone showing images of Nano Banana generating whiteboard images of papers. I try and it fails to do anything 3 times, then creates one about random AI stuff vs. the biology in the paper itself. Cool but useless?

What is this nonsense in Chrome?

I continue to bet on OpenRouter.ai Today I'm writing my LLM programming course notes on using embeddings and they add embedding models: openrouter.ai/models?fmt=c... Then I get an email that they're doing their own TS/Python SDK: github.com/OpenRouterTe... Every week they ship great stuff

Remember IBM’s Watson?

Neat github.com/jdx/fnox

@pomdtr.me what do you think of pocketbase.io? Reading their docs made me think of smallweb

Interesting Claude Sonnet 4.5 hiccup, where it complains about bits of its own system prompt when reviewing a document I share "Token budget directive at top: The <budget:token_budget>1000000</budget:token_budget> appears to be a system prompt artifact that shouldn't be in student-facing materials"

Dead framework theory aifoc.us/dead-framewo...

Upload your scanned ID they said. It will be fine they said.

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy: www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

I have always loved the old Canadian bills, and especially the birds they portrayed. I thought I'd seen them all, but apparently I missed the 1,000 bill with its pair of Pine Grosbeaks on the back.

📊 Fixed a few bugs in Venz this morning ☕ New to Venz? It's the easiest way to create SVG charts from all sorts of data, such as hyperfine or mitata test results or just lists of numbers (and optionally labels). Create shareable URLs. Check out the examples at try.venz.dev/about → try.venz.dev

Tonight I integrated an LLM into every part of the request/response life-cycle of the the browser to see what I could do. aifoc.us/interception/ It was a lot of fun, in the demo linked I can rewrite a web page as before it's rendered by the browser to give me just a summary of the contents.

Our Rowboat tool is about instantly seeing what's in a dataset, so we added a Chrome Extension that lets you open random datasets from all over the internet. Right click, poof! 0.2 seconds later we see what this dataset actually looks like. No workspace to set up, no waiting for the app, no db.

Published an article about mitigating supply chain attacks with pnpm pnpm.io/supply-chain...

Can't believe how bad Gemini is at making valid Mermaid diagrams

The most formally educated cohort in history is also the most chronically unemployed. Meet one of them. https://macleans.ca/society/eight-years-of-school-zero-job-offers/

Some thoughtful stuff about passkeys and the identity system, includes a few angles I hadn’t thought of: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/2/passkeys/ #identity

We just launched the “DuckDB in Science” site, a curated collection of papers, lectures and podcasts about DuckDB in research: duckdb.org/science/ 🎡 If you would like to learn more about DuckDB in Science, consider joining our meetup in London this Thursday: www.meetup.com/duckdb/event...

🎆 Say hello to Transit 6.0! 🎆 It’s our love letter to public transportation — the brightest, boldest, and best version of ourselves yet 🌟

"What if [AI is] just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary?" I agreed with almost all the points right up to here. It seems implausible to me that AI stalls at "good enough." That doesn't mean I think things will be great, or that I think "revolutionary" is near. My reasoning:

Nice anecdote from the Tailwind team about using AI for a refactor: > But even with all this effort, the results were honestly so inconsistent that I'm absolutely certain that reviewing + polishing all of the work done by the robots took more time than if we just did every single block by hand …

Fascinating response from Gemini 2.5 today: "Your goal is to own this weight for クリスプ(crisp) sets of 12 reps with zero swinging. Lead with the elbows" No Japanese anywhere in the prompt. Also, this seems to be some kind of transliteration of an English word so why bother at all? So many questions!

@carnage4life.bsky.social you are consistently one of the most interesting and thoughtful voices in my timeline, and I wanted to say ‘thanks’ for all the time and care you put into it. It’s appreciated by me, and I’m sure many others.

“Source code comments”

On the loss of the woods news.novascotia.ca/en/2025/08/0...

We are doing a Hackathon! 💻 Together with senior editor @nhcooper123.bsky.social , we'll be discussing and testing a protocol to check whether published data/code is actually reproducible... (1/2)

Spent the weekend binge watching old episodes (new to me) of “Portrait Artist of the Year UK” www.youtube.com/@BanijayArt Really wish I could paint

New from me at TVO on yesterday's decision on bike lanes. www.tvo.org/article/anal...

An analysis of every word that’s visible on NYC’s streets (from 18 years of Google Street View Data). “The data is astonishing; it feels like sifting through the city’s source code. For example, here’s all 111,290 matches for ‘pizza’, on a map.” [pudding.cool]

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our team at @vlt.sh based here in Toronto 🇨🇦 at our HQ. If you love JavaScript & open source this may be right up your alley. Please share if you know anyone who would be a great fit. www.linkedin.com/posts/darcyc... #javascript #nodejs #packages

@jerthorp.bsky.social thought you might enjoy this! youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?...