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The best things and stuff of 2025
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2025. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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Paperbacks and TikTok
In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 ... Read more
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I know you didn't write this
Exploring the ethics and productivity impacts of undisclosed AI-generated content in professional work, and why verification overhead is now the hidden cost of AI adoption.
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One year of keeping a tada list
Sometimes called a to-done list.
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If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
A client once responded to one of my questions by saying, "Oh Greg, I am too busy living to think about life!” His off-the-cuff comment named a trap al ...
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A year of vibes
A personal recap of 2025 and a year of a new style of engineering.
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Your inbox is a bandit problem
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
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I wish people were more public
On sharing more of yourself.
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You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this…
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Three ways to solve problems
Deciding not to solve a problem, or solving a different one, can also be a viable solution.
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Coarse is better
Make AI weird again.
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Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy
Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solv…
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Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?
I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque…
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Prepare for That Stupid World
Prepare for That Stupid World par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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The port I couldn't ship
Porting a venerable library on vibes. What started as a quick WebPerl success spiraled into weeks of failed attempts, mangled ASCII diagrams, and a hard lesson about respecting the craft embedded in battle-tested code.
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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
Link to: https://tidbits.com/2025/12/17/compromised-apple-gift-card-leads-to-apple-account-lockout/
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Slowness is a virtue
... at least when you're doing research, not development
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I program on the subway
Ever since moving to New York City, I've found my time to be in more demand than ever. Between work, meetups, and social events, I have noticeably less time for side projects than I had before moving here. At the same time, my commute is a massive time suck. It's 30 minutes each way, which doesn't sound that bad, but…
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This is not the future
I thought about this when reading a mastodon post which commented on a news where a project adopted a "use Generative AI but disclose it" policy, because it is "the future" and "people are going to use it anyway".
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Overconsumption is a spiritual problem
Overconsumption is a spiritual problem, not a money problem. Lessons about desire from "Spirited Away".
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I'm just having fun
programming isn't a competition
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The Bob Dylan concert for just one person
An interview with Fredrik Wikingsson, the subject of 'Experiment Ensam'
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The appropriate amount of effort is zero
Most people put too much effort into everything they do. Here’s a good example from Kristijan around tension in his hands when touching and holding things: Something clicked about inhibition and non-doing (in Alexander Technique), and the strongest effect has been a relaxation of my hands. Like I was touching...
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John Varley has died
. John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But...
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Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
Announcing my latest open-source project.
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Bye, Mom
I get a text that my mom’s in the ICU.
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Recovering Anthony Bourdain's Li.st's
Loved reading through GReg TeChnoLogY Anthony Bourdain’s Lost Li.st’s and seeing the list of los...