Can we start admitting that customer support chatbots, no matter how "smart", are a failed experiment that should be filed under "Kill it with Fire"? It's so annoying to have to "insist" on a human to solve a problem that a chatbot claims there's no way to fix.

Huh, TIL that you can associate form controls like <button> to a form that does not enclose the control itself, through the form attribute (developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...).

hooooo boy www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

It does not matter how fast you can code. What matters is how well your code serves you and the people you wrote it for. The amount of revenue it makes. The amount of maintenance that it costs. Old code is profitable code. That’s what you want.

THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION

Deleted my Atlassian account today and moved my Confluence and Trello stuff to Nuclino, and so far it’s been a delight to use! Built in Germany, bootstrapped, profitable. nuclino.com (not affiliated)

*shocked face emoji*

I don’t get excited about new tech/software anymore. AI has killed that for me, and I don’t fully understand why. People talk about feeling “empowered” by AI. I feel almost the opposite, it’s draining my energy, to the point where I won’t start something new because it might not matter anyway.

It's really sad to see the @developer.chrome.com account pumping out AI-style replies that don't really make sense. These accounts used to be run by DevRel. Now they're run by marketing. bsky.app/profile/deve... bsky.app/profile/deve... bsky.app/profile/deve...

I've had three months time to prepare this presentation, of course I only start working on it for real 2 days before the date... why does it always have to be like this. 😫

Got an Earthquake warning on iOS last night, but the warning was suppressed by Do Not Disturb mode. I think that might be taking it a bit too far 🙂. The shaking woke me up (magnitude 5.4, all good).

Do I know someone who works for LINE (the popular payment++ app in Asia)? Met with a customer today who said my library works better than LINE’s built-in QR reader, which is… surprising!

Huh, first time this popped up, don’t remember agreeing to Siri reading my mal. 😠

My latest:

Playing some Fortnite with my daughter and then the job creeps in. <img id=“VBucksIcon” for the win!

Doing fixed-point math with just integers is so elegant (and fast, depending on the context). Example: check for v < 0.8*r Reformulate using fractions: v < (4/5)*r Rearrange: 5 * v < 4 * r Voilà, no divisions, no floating-point, just integer multiplications. Blows my mind sometimes. 🙂

It's 2026 and I can't even empty Trash reliably anymore.

One of the reasons I love working on my product (strich.io) is that it's rooted in the physical world. To test it, you need to go out in the field. The store manager of the supermarket that I just went to for testing asked me "what the hell are you doing?" 😂

Maybe it's time to call it a day.

Enough is enough. Price increases for AI features I don't use, and now "special offers in your inbox"??? Moving to Proton this year.

10yr old iPhone 7 which I use as a low-end iOS test device just received an OS update. Appreciated, but usually means there's some catastrophic exploit in the wild. 👹

Interesting phishing attempt – it's not being detected as such by Google's spam/phishing filter. And just visually, it fooled me upon first glance.

🍪 Got a cookie banner, selected "Reject All" (thanks for that!), then I get another popup with a spinner saying that the "request is being processed" and it may take a few minutes. The popup is still there, spinning at 92%. Oh dear god how did we end up with 💩 like this?

I'm getting tired of this trend of update popups that contain zero information about the actual contents of the new release. Yes, I know I can click on the link, but chances are I'll be greeted with a cookie popup first, and will need to scroll where the info is. Lazy.

“Technical error” when clicking on the unsubscribe link of an email for which I never signed up for… what’s not to love? 😡

Helicopters spotted over Zurich. The clown is coming to WEF.

*shocked face* “Oh no!”

Oh, so after companies like OpenAI hoovered up all sorts of media as if they had a right to it, now their best idea is to own IP of works derived from “their” dataset. Curious 🧐

I struggle to believe there is a single soul who wants “AI to plan their next getaway”.

Been reading through "How AI Destroys Institutions" and this passage resonated with me. Full article (40 pages, but ~20 effectively, a lot is citations): papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Tailwind fires 75% of their dev team because of AI. Your first thought might be that AI is now doing the work, but that’s not it. LLMs caused a 40% drop in visits to their docs meaning less ways to advertise their commercial offering. github.com/tailwindlabs...

That’s right, we’re now in the era of “learn nothing - work forever anyway”…

Say what you want about Apple, the hardware holds its value well. Sold my Intel MBPro from 2018 (an 8 year old machine!) on the secondhand market for 500 USD today. I don’t think that would work with a Windows laptop.

I wanted to spend less time on HN this year to improve my mental health and get less AI-fueled anxiety. Yet here I am commenting on the “Grok generating CSAM” thread. Anyone still active on X is supportive of this shit, no more excuses. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4650...

Off to a good start in 2026 with a bowl of steaming-hot Chashu Miso Ramen and ignoring everything else.

Enjoyed reading this. I migrated my personal “one post per year blog” from Medium to a super-basic Astro-powered static site (alexsuzuki.com), couldn’t be happier.

Xmas dinner featured an in-law raving about using ChatGPT as a relationship counselor and therapist. “It’s so supportive of me”. I’m just nodding along. <this is fine.gif>

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

I now consider myself a l33t TypeScript coder

🎄 All I want for xmas is Last Samurai Standing, Season 2. It's so good. 😩

🕸️ Got a bit excited when I found this 13 year old LG Nexus 5 Android at the bottom of my "Test Devices" drawer. It boots and everything is surprisingly snappy. Unfortunately no recent browser versions can be installed on it – would have made for a great "worst case" test device.

Been going down the rabbit hole looking at a Sentry issue that's being for one of my customers. Something that should be a `number` is actually a `string`. Turns out they're overriding `Date.now()` to return an ISO8601 string instead of the milliseconds timestamp. Why......

Holy shit, again? #cloudflare #down

New STRICH (strich.io) release undergoing QA. Important to test with real, physical devices, especially low-end ones. @infrequently.org has great guidelines for device selection here: infrequently.org/2025/11/perf...

✨ Built a free tool because I got tired of using barcode generators that are riddled with ads, slow and don't generate vector output. barcode.new is free, fast (WASM, on-device, no server roundtrip) and isn't spammy.

Finally adding Micro QR Code support to STRICH (strich.io), my library for barcode scanning in the browser. Error correction is buggy, that's why it's scanning gibberish. Seems like I'll have to deep-dive into Reed-Solomon error correction – pretty fascinating stuff.

💾 Strong swag game by CashCtrl (cashctrl.com/en), Makes me want to switch my accounting software. (not affiliated)

I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-w...

I'm unreasonably excited about my new RPN calculator, a SwissMicros R47. In high school (1995) I got an HP 48G (still works) and was initially confused... RPN is a stack machine, to calculate 1 plus 1, you enter 1 <ENTER> 1 <ENTER> <PLUS>. To the left is my dad's HP 32S II, which unfortunately died.

OpenAI: „Trust, security and privacy guide every product and decision we make.“ OK. 😂