hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • 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.

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  • Drop #671 (2025-06-26): On Display

    Today’s Drop covers the recent, er…, “drop” of the W3C’s PNG-3 standard which introduces significant improvements, including official support for Animated PNG (APNG), enhanced color management, and EXIF data integration. It also covers Keith Clark’s RichInput web component enhances form inputs with real-time feedback; and links to a humorous post discussing the inevitable complexity in…

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  • Bonus Drop #87 (2025-06-22): Taking One For The Team

    The weekend Bonus Drop reviews Microsoft’s basic terminal text editor, edit, deemed unremarkable due to its lack of features. It highlights the Raycast Ollama extension, showcasing its capabilities for efficiently managing local and remote LLM models with advanced integrations. Finally, it introduces ttl.sh, an ephemeral Docker image registry for secure, temporary sharing without authentication.

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  • Drop #659 (2025-06-03): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop again discusses the risks posed by modern printer surveillance, which can trace printed materials back to their sources, highlighting the importance of returning to analog methods like letterpress printing for security. It also features two free fonts: Comic Shanns Mono and Empty Marker, suitable for coding and creative uses,…

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  • Drop #658 (2025-06-02): The [Duck] Lake House

    Today’s Drop has a primer on data lakes and features DuckLake, which introduces a novel lakehouse architecture from the DuckDB folks that separates data management into three layers: storage, metadata, and computation. Using a database for metadata enhances performance and consistency, addressing issues present in traditional lakehouses. This design supports ACID transactions, schema evolution, and…

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  • Drop #657 (2025-05-27): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop explores the world of sound-responsive typography which reveals how typography transcends visual design by integrating auditory elements. This innovative approach allows text to dynamically respond to sound, creating immersive experiences. Wavefont exemplifies this trend, enabling data visualization through specialized typography that reacts to audio, enhancing emotional connections and storytelling through visual transformation.

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  • Drop #655 (2025-05-19): Just Another Manic Monday

    Today’s Dop discusses two main topics: rv, a solution for R dependency management, addressing speed, reproducibility, and environment isolation, and Jetrelay, a high-performance relay for Bluesky’s jetstream feed. It emphasizes solution-focused questioning to enhance team productivity, suggesting a shift from problem analysis to actionable solutions for better outcomes.

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  • Bonus Drop #83 (2025-05-11): The Mother[’s Day] Of All Drops

    The Bonus Drop returns! Today, we cover SveltePlot, a visualization framework improving upon Observable Plot with component-based reactivity; Dax, which streamlines JavaScript shell scripting across platforms; SSL libraries, highlighting the decline of OpenSSL 3.0 and alternative solutions; and an engaging web experience called Internet Roadtrip that offers a virtual group travel experience.

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  • Drop #641 (2025-04-18): Fool Around And Find Out Friday

    Today’s fun-filled Drop features “Stevens,” a customizable AI assistant leveraging minimal components for personal use; “Powxy,” a proxy, combats scraping by enforcing proof-of-work challenges; and, “Ferron,” a Rust-based web server, gunning for Caddy.

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  • Drop #635 (2025-04-09): Happy WednesdAI!

    Today’s “AI”-centric edition of the Drop focuses on the “Model Context Protocol” (MCP). This new, standardized integration system for LLM/GPT-ops enhances data connectivity and addresses prior fragmentation. However, it significantly lacks security measures, making it vulnerable to command injection and tool poisoning. Practical examples, including a Star Wars API implementation, highlight MCP’s potential while also…

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