hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #698 (2025-08-22): Friday Morning Grab Bag

    The Friday Drop presents a novelist’s tiny model improving creative writing through Fibonacci word intervals, MDN’s redesign enhancing usability for web developers, and Lucide, an open-source icon library featuring customizable, scalable icons for various projects.

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  • Drop #693 (2025-08-11): Long-form Monday

    Today’s Drop features Jimmy Hartzell’s critique of LLMs as unreliable assistants needing human oversight, Ian Ireland’s explanation of SpiderMonkey’s innovative four-tier execution model enhancing JavaScript performance, and concerns about Flock’s AI surveillance system flagging individuals based on travel patterns, raising issues of transparency, bias, and surveillance.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #691 (2025-08-07): Short & Sweet

    The post expresses strong discontent regarding Perplexity.ai’s partnership with Truth Social, viewing it as empowering misinformation and contributing to societal division. The author shares frustrations about the difficulty in terminating the service and reflects on past utility, while ultimately concluding with a resolute rejection of the platform.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #690 (2025-08-06): It’s All A Game To You, Isn’t It

    Today’s Drop discusses three online games aimed at enhancing visual perception and design skills. “Hued” challenges players to match daily color hues; “It’s Centred That” tests visual precision with dot alignment; and “Can’t Unsee” sharpens attention to UI/UX differences in design choices. Each game emphasizes detail and creativity in design.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #93 (2025-08-03): Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad?

    The weekend Bonus Drop discusses the tension between technological advancement and accessibility, highlighting how specialized knowledge and costs limit benefits. It covers Shift browser’s workspace management features and critiques self-hosting AI models for their impractical costs. Additionally, it describes ADS-B WX’s innovative use of aircraft data to generate detailed wind maps.

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  • Drop #687 (2025-07-31): A Trio Of Timely Topics

    Today’s Drop features three significant resources: Observable Desktop & Notebook Kit 2.0 enhances local notebook functionality for easier deployment, while Jono Alderson’s piece critiques the shifting focus of SEO from URLs to assertions for digital authority. Additionally, a guide on integrating Bitwarden with direnv improves secure credential management in coding.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #679 (2025-07-10): No, Thanks. I’m Just Browsing.

    Today’s Drop discusses 2 new “AI”-driven browsers: Dia & Comet, + introduces Kite. Dia offers an “AI”-laden browsing experience but lacks functionality and has privacy issues. Comet provides better integration and automation but is/will be costly. Kagi’s Kite focuses on delivering concise news summaries while ensuring user privacy.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #89 (2025-06-28): Shop^wInfer Local

    The Weekend Bonus Drop highlights 2 projects using local inference models for generating alt text and enhancing OCR, encouraging experimentation with these tools as a safeguard against the impending instability of mainstream AI services.

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  • Drop #673 (2025-06-30): Long[er] Form Monday

    Today’s Drop discusses the shortcomings of relying on LLMs in development, positing they may highlight poor tooling rather than technological progress. It also reviews Cloudflare’s secure video conferencing platform, Orange, and addresses the unsettling trend of businesses replacing human imagery with AI avatars, reflecting a diminishing emphasis on human value.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #672 (2025-06-27): If It Walks Like A…

    We have another 🦆-billed Drop today, featuring: DuckPlot — an open-source JavaScript library for generating charts from DuckDB with automatic SQL generation; The mcp-visualization-duckdb package, which allows users to create visualizations through natural language queries, bypassing SQL; & DuckDB-QuickJS which integrates a JavaScript engine for flexible data processing within SQL, enhancing DuckDB’s analytical capabilities.

    hrbrmstr