Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content
Meta has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion access providers, queer groups and reproductive health organisations in the past weeks in what campaigners call one of the “biggest waves of censorship” on its platforms in years. The takedowns and restrictions began in October and targeted the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts of […]
If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?
Fault Lines If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books? Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences. By Jay Caspian Kang December 9, 2025 Illustration by Mark Harris Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story
A “Frozen” Dictionary for Python
Dictionaries are ubiquitous in Python code; they are the data structure of choice for a wide variety of tasks. But dictionaries are mutable, which makes them problematic for sharing data in concurrent code. Python has added various concurrency features to the language over the last decade or so—async, free threading without the global interpreter lock […]
The Cost of a Closure in C
I had a vague idea that closures could have a variety of performance implications; I did not believe that so many of the chosen and potential designs for C and C++ extensions ones, however, were so…
Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS
That should be corrected if anyone invents a time machine. 😛 white-space: nowrap should be white-space: no-wrap animation-iteration-count should just have been animation-count (like column-count!) vertical-align should not apply to table cells. Instead the CSS3 alignment properties should exist in Level 1. vertical-align: middle should be text-middle or x-middle because it’s not really in the […]
Vibe coding is mad depressing
11 Dec, 2025 I’ve been in the mobile development industry for almost 15 years, and this AI/LLM era might be the worst. My work are mostly freelance, gigs, hourly, milestones, and I could say 90% of my experience are greenfield projects. I don’t have any apps on my own, I make a living coding apps […]
Patterns.dev
We offer a modern perspective on patterns A common critique of design patterns is that they needlessly add complexity. Our perspective is that patterns are valuable for solving specific problems, often helping to communicate comminalities in code problems for humans. If a project doesn’t have those problems, there isn’t a need to apply them. Patterns […]
Rubio orders return to Times New Roman font over ‘wasteful’ Calibri
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font instead of Calibri, reversing a change made under the Biden administration. Rubio’s predecessor Antony Blinken had adopted Calibri in 2023, saying it was more accessible for people with visual disabilities. But Rubio said this was a “wasteful” diversity […]
When Would You Ever Want Bubblesort?
There are very few universal rules in software engineering, but there are are a lot of near-universal principles. Things like “prefer composition to inheritance” is near-universal. I love finding the rare situations where these principles don’t hold, like where you do want inheritance over composition. A similar near-universal principle is “don’t use bubblesort“. Some would […]
Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
Last week, I started working on a new side-project. It’s a standard React app partly made up of run-of-the-mill CRUD views—a perfect fit for LLM-assisted programming. I reasoned that if I could get an LLM to quickly write the boring code for me, I’d have more time to focus on the interesting problems I wanted […]