‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’ arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

Very neat open source city map poster generator (found via HN) github.com/originalanku... — here's St. Louis, MO

A crisp afternoon stroll around Peterborough today

I’ve spent this morning morbidly watching the MTV channels close down and the final songs played were: MTV Music - Video Killed the Radio Star (Buggles) Club MTV - Don’t Stop the Music (Rihanna) MTV 90s - Goodbye (Spice Girls) MTV 80s - Together in Electric Dreams (Oakey and Moroder)

Excellent timing talk on PTP with a great live demo at #39c3 by Oliver Ettlin: media.ccc.de/v/39c3-excus... (h/t to toot.io/@hisold/1158...)

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Top tier joke

Due to a windstorm-related utility power outage at the NIST, time may soon be destroyed

January bargain: Heath Robinson Museum drops £8 ticket for pay-what-you-can Fridays www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/jan... #London

Benchmarks, benchmarks, and more benchmarks! Getting ready for the FastDoom 1.2.0 release 😁

Building a Commodore 64 Laptop

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

I propose a solution to our ongoing RAM shortage:

Unreal Tournament can now be played IN A BROWSER dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut Along with other late 90s PC FPS classics but yeah. UT99 in a browser window... just fantastic. Thanks to the r/LGR subreddit for letting me know about it!

AI should be spelt Ai, especially when your name is Al

Happy Longest Day Of The Year

I enjoyed my flying visit to Glasgow this week. It was looking splendid in the autumn sunshine, though I didn't take nearly enough photos this time

Pay VERY close attention to the sender's address when you get what appears to be a legitimate password management request. In this instance the sender is not "Microsoft", but R N icrosoft, the R & N close together look like a lowercase 'm' at first glance.

End of an era. Phone call voting is to end on BBC shows such as Strictly and Eurovision. All voting to be online. www.bbc.com/mediacentre/...

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

There's a realistic chance we get to a position where Wikipedia is blocked while official government accounts are posting on a site that created MechaHitler AI

Bye forever, WeTransfer.

That’s not the rule and you know it.

Labour hasn’t confronted Reform’s worldview—it’s validated it. You can’t spend nine months echoing your opponent’s values and then act surprised when the public decides to go straight to the source.

From @respectisvital.bsky.social over on Twiter... He hasn't posted this here, but it's important so... For those who use iCloud, just beware, it's no longer going to be a safe space. I'd switch off personal/important stuff going there if I were you.... He's brill BTW, give him a follow.

estonia's power grid frequency right now!

Tonight on Newsnight... cc @scottygb.bsky.social

Good post by @simonwillison.net - worth a read (and I agree) simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/t...

Lossless Cut is a piece of software I would recommend everyone download because it’s just a frontend for FFMpeg that lets you trim clips without having to encode them again. Just snips off the offending parts.

any React Native performance experts willing to lend a hand? i’ve been debugging feed scrolling perf on low-end Android for the past week but couldn’t make meaningful improvements. it’s very choppy on Galaxy A12, especially when scrolling past videos (but not exclusively). any help is appreciated!

Just deactivated my Twitter account, and remembered I had a second unused one from some software dev I did years ago, so thought I'd deactivate that as well. Logged in, and oh wow! Without any blocked accounts it's wild! Wall to wall porn, racism, transphobia and conspiracy theories!

💡 Tip: You can set your website as your username on Bluesky! This is one form of self-verification, and we especially encourage official organizations and brands to do this! Examples include @npr.org @react.dev @duolingobrasil.com.br. Here's our guide for how to do this:

@jenmsft.bsky.social, is there a way to search for a symbol in the Windows 11 Emoji keyboard, in the same way you can search for Emojis? I was looking for the Pi symbol, but couldn't see it scrolling through the list. I'm not convinced it's there, but I might have missed it. Thanks!