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1. A Train from 1993 Was Breaking My Tests! – A Funny Debugging Story
INFO: The author noticed that running tests with yarn test kept failing — and oddly enough, always after a mysterious 27 seconds. Why exactly 27? Even stranger, the tests passed quickly on macOS but failed with a delay on Linux. In the end, the issue was tracked down using the strace tool. But what does all of this have to do with trains? You’ll find out in the article.
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2. How Were the Underwater Effects Made for The Hunt for Red October?
INFO: This 1990 film didn’t rely on advanced CGI, as you might guess. Instead, the creators used physical scale models of submarines. But how did they achieve the look of underwater scenes and simulate underwater conditions? It turns out they shot the models in a smoky, dark studio with carefully choreographed lighting and slow-motion cameras to mimic the distortion and movement of water. A clever bit of old-school movie magic — details in the article.
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3. How to Root a Kindle and What You Can Do After Jailbreaking It (Video, 26m)
INFO: Kindle jailbreak is usually mentioned as a way to remove ads and swap out the default screensavers — not precisely thrilling reasons to root your device. But the author of this video shows that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Modern jailbreak tools unlock far more, from extending system features to running a fully functional Linux environment with a graphical interface. And it’s all demonstrated on real hardware, no theory. Cool stuff!
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4. How to Tell If a Request Comes from a Browser
INFO: The author describes their experiments in detecting whether an HTTP request was triggered by a user typing a URL directly into a browser’s address bar rather than a fetch() call or an image tag in JavaScript. Standard headers like Accept are too easy to spoof via scripts. The trick is using so-called forbidden headers, specifically the sec-fetch-* headers, which the browser automatically sets and doesn’t allow JavaScript to modify—a clever way to tell genuine user navigation apart from automated requests.
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5. What Is "High Agency" — And How Can It Change Your Life?
INFO: A fascinating, thought-provoking article about the idea of high agency — essentially, the mindset of actively shaping your own life instead of passively accepting whatever comes your way. The author argues it’s a skill anyone can develop, but first, it’s worth learning to recognize the signs of low and high agency in yourself and others. It's not a technical read, but a good one for anyone reflecting on how they approach challenges and decisions.
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6. Automatic Restaurant Menu Transcription — OCR and LLM in Action
INFO: The team at DoorDash (a food delivery company) built a system for automatically transcribing photos of restaurant menus. It combines OCR, large language models, and a machine-learning-based validation layer. This is a clever example of AI being used to automate tasks once handled manually by staff, who had to type out each menu manually.
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7. Buy Once Software — a Catalog of One-Time Purchase Apps
INFO: A handy collection of apps that don’t require a subscription. You pay once and use the software like in the old days. The catalog covers tools for design, productivity, programming, marketing, AI, and general utility apps for both Mac and Windows. Each app comes with a short description, a link to the developer’s site, and info about any available deals. It's a helpful resource — especially if you’re tired of monthly software fees.
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8. How to Build a TV Show Quote Search Engine? (23min video)
INFO: Imagine having a huge collection of episodes from your favorite series and wanting to jump straight to the one where your favorite character says a famous line. But which episode, which season, and at what timestamp? The author cleverly combined the Algolia search engine, YouTube-DL, FFmpeg, and the Happy Scribe service. Even if you’re not a huge series fan or don’t need to track iconic scenes, the tools and methods shown here could be handy for searching through other (especially video-based) content.
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9. Visual Reasoning in GPT-4o — Is This the Next Breakthrough?
INFO: The new features in OpenAI’s GPT-4o allow it to generate images consistent with the ongoing conversation and to remember and modify previously created graphics. That’s a big step up from earlier tools, which had no visual memory and relied purely on text prompts. The author sees even more significant potential here, predicting that “visual reasoning” is coming, meaning models might soon be able to infer how different elements in an image would behave after specific actions.
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10. 5 Noteworthy Programming Trends That Have Nothing to Do with AI
INFO: This article highlights five growing directions in software engineering that aren’t tied to language models. It covers the rise of local-first software, WebAssembly running in browsers (for tasks like executing SQLite or ML models), and the increasing use of SQLite in production environments. You’ll also find practical examples of these technologies in tools like Notion and Expo.
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11. Which Websites Do Kagi Users Love and Hate?
INFO: Kagi is an ad-free paid search engine known for its high-quality results. It allows users to customize their experience, for example, by adding domains they don’t want to see in search results to a blacklist. Which sites most frequently end up on these banned lists? And which domains are favored and trusted by users? Interestingly, the same domain may appear in the top blocked and promoted sites lists, showing a nuanced preference among thousands of users.
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12. Llama 4 from Meta is Climbing the Rankings... But Is It Playing Fair? (Video, 4m)
INFO: Meta introduced the Llama 4 family, the latest generation of large multimodal language models, which strongly competes with products from OpenAI and Google. The new model boasts an impressive (5x larger than Gemini) context window, but users seem underwhelmed despite its outstanding test performance. Is someone tampering with the test results?
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13. Gemini 2.5 Pro vs Claude 3.7 Sonnet in Programming Tasks Comparison
INFO: The author compares the two latest AI models, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, in terms of solving programming tasks. The tests involved building applications like a flight simulator, a Rubik's Cube visualization, and a challenging LeetCode problem. Which model performed better, and which one is worth using in your work as a programmer?
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14. How Android Apps Can Check What Software You Have on Your Smartphone - How?
INFO: Although Google has restricted app permissions to check the list of other installed programs, developers of many well-known apps still bypass this limitation. In practice, any app can profile the user and their interests based on the apps installed on their phone. For example, a simple game could check whether you have a Facebook account (if you have the app for it, you probably do) or if you use dating apps. The article explains how such application detection mechanisms are commonly implemented.
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15. How Chrome Determines Image Loading Priorities on a Page
INFO: By default, the Chrome browser assigns a low priority to images, treating them as less essential webpage elements. However, since version 117, something has changed. The first five large images automatically receive a Medium priority, and images visible within the browser window are suddenly given a high priority so that the user doesn't see a broken page. Developers can, however, control the loading of these resources by using the appropriate parameters on the page to ensure important images load earlier, potentially improving metrics like LCP (Largest Contentful Paint).
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16. Sparks - Font for Creating Mini Charts in Text
INFO: Creating simple mini-charts has never been this easy. In a web app, simply input a sequence of numbers representing the values you want to display on a chart, then switch the font to Sparks, and you're done. You can visualize data using bars, dots, and lines with points. While it's not highly precise if you want to show things like percentage progress or trends in data growth/decline, this is sufficient and, most importantly, very easy to implement.
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17. Technical Words You’re Probably Mispronouncing
INFO: The author compiled a list of IT terms they mispronounced for a long time until they heard the correct version from others. The article explains names like Asus, Debian, LaTeX, GNU, regex, and sudo, as well as their phonetic transcription. It's useful, primarily if you work in an international company and communicate in English.
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18. What is Latency in Distributed Systems, and How to Reduce It
INFO: What factors affect latency in distributed systems, and how can it be minimized? The article discusses geographical distance, network queues, processing delays, and data serialization. Then, it demonstrates specific techniques for reducing the time required for each stage, ranging from caching and CDNs to sharding and connection pooling. It's a solid knowledge summary for those looking to understand better how to improve distributed applications' performance.
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19. Monitoring and Optimizing PHP Applications with SPX and Sentry
INFO: A guide showing how to improve the performance of PHP applications using the lightweight tool SPX, which generates flame charts and execution metrics. The article will teach you how to use the mentioned tools and set up a Dockerized testing environment for your application, making it easier to profile its performance.
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20. One CSS Property That Improves Typography on Websites
INFO: The new CSS property, "text-wrap: pretty," allows the browser to evaluate the entire paragraph before determining where to break the lines. This helps avoid common typographic errors. You no longer need to manually remove orphaned letters at the end of lines or awkwardly split paragraphs. From now on, these corrections can happen automatically.
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21. 20 Years of Git: How It All Started
INFO: The author reflects on the beginnings of Git, Linus Torvalds' first commits, and the context behind its creation. Git was initially designed as a better tool for handling patches and tarballs while working on the Linux kernel. A simple file tracker at first, how did this basic tool evolve into a global version control system, and how did GitHub come into being? This article explains it all.
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22. Minimalistic YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp
INFO: This self-hosted tool enables watching and managing YouTube subscriptions in a clean, organized interface free of ads, distractions, and other embellishments. It also allows offline content to be downloaded, sponsored segments to be removed via SponsorBlock, clickbait thumbnails to be eliminated, and video summaries to be generated using local or cloud-based AI models. The application can run locally or within a Docker container.
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23. The Role of a Senior Developer in the Era of AI-Assisted Programming
INFO: Many developers (up to 70%, depending on the source) now use AI-powered solutions (such as Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, etc.) daily. This has enabled even junior developers to write fairly functional code. So, where does the role of a senior developer fit in, and how can they outperform a beginner? Experienced developers can better use these tools by applying practices such as setting precise requirements, implementing quality control mechanisms, and following coding patterns. The author shows how AI-assisted tools can be leveraged at the senior developer level, where you drive the entire code development process rather than handing the wheel over to the machine.
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24. Hiding Elements That Require JavaScript Without Using JavaScript
INFO: Do you want some web page aspects to be visible or hidden based on whether the user supports JavaScript? Typically, this check is done at the JavaScript level, meaning the element is hidden by default, and a JavaScript function triggers its visibility. But what if you could do the opposite and avoid writing scripts altogether? This is possible, and it can be achieved purely with CSS. It's a simple implementation and aligns with the concept of "progressive enhancement."
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25. GitHub Releases Copilot Code Review
INFO: A feature previously available only to a limited group of testers will soon be publicly accessible. We're talking about automatic Code Review. The copilot will analyze the code and its context, providing comments like a colleague would. The review can be tailored to align with guidelines such as coding style and other standards a specific company follows. This solution can be integrated with VS Code or used directly on the GitHub platform. Currently, it supports several programming languages and offers two modes of operation. Users can review a specific snippet of code or an entire pull request.
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26. Cascii - JavaScript ASCII and Unicode Diagram Editor
INFO: This lightweight tool allows you to create ASCII diagrams without needing backend code or external libraries—just open the HTML file in your browser, and you're good to go. Cascii supports layers, drawing, grouping, tables, undo functionality, and saving locally or via a shared app instance, where short links to the diagrams are also generated. The entire tool is written in pure JavaScript.
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27. Creating Your Own MCP Server in TypeScript (video, 8m)
INFO: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a mechanism that allows AI models, such as Claude, to gain additional context and have a tangible impact on the environment, such as modifying data on a server, running applications, etc. This tutorial demonstrates how to build your own MCP server in TypeScript, which provides an AI model with a data structure and enables operations on that data. It's a concise example to help understand the basics of the MCP protocol and how it can extend the capabilities of LLMs.
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