I’m trying to invent a reason that I ought to print out and use the Neatnik Calendar, a single page calendar for the whole year. If I were teaching our JavaScript course I’d consider sharing the NeatoCal tool that creates one-page calendars (inspired by Neatnik Calendar) with a variety of configuration flags available.
I’ve been hearing from some alums recently about the things they’re finding they’re spending most of their time on – and the fact that it isn’t programming. A lot of what they say is echoed by this engineer’s reflections on their time at Google.
I’m not a manga reader, but this bookshelf adapter is a very nice piece of design.
In AI news, Gas Town got a lot of attention in January (Yegge’s welcome post here – at the very least it’s an interesting exploration of pushing agentic AI forward with a variety of roles, hierarchies, agent memory, orchestration, etc.). This article is a nice effort at identifying some lessons/themes learned from Gas Town over the past month. It closes with some interesting conversation about how much developers should ever look at, or touch, code. For the time being, this sounds right: “Framing this debate as an either/or – either you look at code or don’t, either you edit code by hand or you exclusively direct agents, either you’re the anti-AI-purist or the agentic-maxxer – is unhelpful. Because nothing is a strict binary. The right distance isn’t about what kind of person you are or what you believe about AI capabilities in the current moment. How far away you step from the syntax shifts based on what you’re building, who you’re building with, and what happens when things go wrong.”
Then at the end of the month Moltbook blew up, because now that we’ve killed Stack Overflow, the bots need to make their own. Unsurprisingly, Simon Willison has thoughts. The security community is rightly losing their minds and the bots agree.
Two good books that I read in January:
- The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz: When this came up in my Libby queue I remembered nothing about it beyond assuming it was a novel about literature. I think it increased my enjoyment that I didn’t remember the specific genre or reviews I had read of it. It opens appearing to be a novel about academia, but that quickly passes, and it’s much more about the process of writing. Very plot twisty.
- Culpability by Bruce Holsinger: Family drama plus AI ethics, heavy on the trolley problem. Though ultimately the book is much more about keeping secrets, of different kinds, for different reasons.
It took me a while to realize that this month’s featured add from Byte (still on August 1983) features what’s practically a kiddy-pool sized glass of champagne:
