new term just dropped -- meat proxy still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks/293

Don't be a meat proxy | Blogmarks | VisualMode

Occasionally a colleague will respond to a question or a PR comment I left with, "Claude says ..." (or even just a link to their conversation). I find that pretty grating because:

still.visualmode.dev

At about 2:00, Thomas Bangalter explains the origin of the name Daft Punk. An earlier project of theirs was given a bad review that described the music as "daft, punky trash". www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etl7...

Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter on Life After the Helmet | CHANEL Connects

YouTube video by CHANEL

youtube.com

TIL’d github.com/jbranchaud/t...

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨@jbranchaud.bsky.social · 2w ago

I don't know who needs to hear this, but you can click and drag the subtitles in a youtube video to anywhere in the player. This is particularly useful for a software tutorial where the latest things being typed are at the bottom of the screen covered up by subtitles.

I just created the 1000th PR in GitHub for a client project I'm on 📈

I published my first ever CLI tool. I hand-chiseled it in Python. It's available on PyPI -- pypi.org/project/visu...

visualmode-tracker

A command-line time tracker for your project and work sessions

pypi.org

I was failing to explain Factorio to a friend who had never heard of it. Sent them this video instead. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVTa...

Why I Hate Factorio

YouTube video by Robertluvsgames VOD

youtube.com

whole thread is very much worth reading, to get a sense of the human texture of what we’re going through, including the difference between proof and explanation

Henry Yuen@henryyuen.bsky.social · 4d ago

Some initial thoughts, and a complicated mix of feelings. Wow. I mean, Erdos problems are cool (I genuinely mean that), I didn't know about the Jacobian conjecture before it got disproved. But this newest batch from OpenAI hits home in a way the previous announcements did not.

very successful trip to Electric Fetus in Minneapolis

Whoa, Chrome just got "Show Tabs Vertically"! I generally have 40+ tabs open in a given Chrome window, so this is a big quality-of-live improvement for me 🤩

Omg

GitHub@github.com · 6d ago

Stacked PRs, now on GitHub. Go forth and stack 🥞

More praise for Linear: I typed out a comment with attached images on an issue, got sidetracked, forgot to hit 'send', and navigated away. Later I noticed a 'Drafts' nav item appear with count of '1'. I click through and it surfaces my un-published comment. 🤩

If you have a Rails app, please address this immediately, it's possibly the worst security issue in years. github.com/rails/rails/...

Possible arbitrary file read and remote code execution in Active Storage variant processing

### Impact In its default configuration, a Rails application that displays image variants may allow an unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary files from the server, including the process envi...

github.com

I took this a step further by adding "badge" icons for the live counts of the top 10 TIL categories. The numbers and the ordering (as necessary) update daily along with the listing of latest TIL posts. This was very fun to implement with GitHub Actions.

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨@jbranchaud.bsky.social · 2w ago

I finally got around to adding one of those profile READMEs on GitHub with a daily cron workflow that updates it with a listing of the latest TILs I've written. github.com/jbranchaud/j...

Anyone ever seen/read a good essay about what it's like to be a recent grad working as a software engineer? (E.g. to have never worked professionally without AI)

I always love reading this blog — excellent visuals and explanations

Red Blob Games@redblobgames.com · last wk.

I've been trying to write this page since … 2015! Each time I try, get frustrated, quit, start over. But this time I think I might have gotten the page to a good state … www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/...

Frankly this refactor isn't a huge win, but this snippet of code is some quintessential Ruby and it brings me joy, so I think that is its own win 😄 (note: these variable length underscore strings were scattered across several files at this point)

Someone is archiving all Taco Bell sauce packets, including quote variants condimentpacket.com/franchise/Ta...

Sometimes I like giving an intentionally subjective task to the LLM coding harness to see what it comes up with. > Can you make the drag zone file upload area a little cuter?

I don't know who needs to hear this, but you can click and drag the subtitles in a youtube video to anywhere in the player. This is particularly useful for a software tutorial where the latest things being typed are at the bottom of the screen covered up by subtitles.

I've been doing a bunch of different agentic coding tasks with Opus 5 today and it feels like a meaningful step up from Opus 4.8 (which I was already plenty happy with). It's anecdotal for me, but the benchmarks seem to back it up. www.anthropic.com/news/claude-...

Got curious and checked one of my projects -- 48 errors with 41 of them auto-fixable. It's small tho. Nice tip from Simon in his post: `uvx ruff@latest check .` github.com/jbranchaud/t...

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 2w ago

Ruff 0.16.0 - Astral's fast Python linter - came out a few days ago and increased the number of default-enabled rules from 59 to 413, which highlighted all sorts of problems across my projects (1618 in sqlite-utils alone) simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/25/...

I finally got around to adding one of those profile READMEs on GitHub with a daily cron workflow that updates it with a listing of the latest TILs I've written. github.com/jbranchaud/j...

I’m not exactly sure what is meant by “agentic work” here, but I’m already completely sold on the ability to talk into the mic for 15 seconds, hit enter, and then get a detailed text summary including files, lines of code, and commit SHAs narrowed to exactly what you asked about.

Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · 2w ago

I suspect once we figure it out agentic work in software will actually be a huge aid to codebase comprehension This is such a wildly unpopular thought right now but you know what I'm going to pre-register my belief in this possibility

I did some sleuthing today. This improved welcome message landed in v1.18.0 of the irb gem. github.com/jbranchaud/t...

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨@jbranchaud.bsky.social · 2w ago

When did IRB get this improvement to its preamble where it displays some ascii art, session info, and a random tip? I like it.

When did IRB get this improvement to its preamble where it displays some ascii art, session info, and a random tip? I like it.

Zed seems to have really nailed their Vim mode. I needed to wrap a series of keys in double quotes, so with my cursor over the first one, I hit `ysiw"`, then navigated to the next and repeated with `.`, so on and so forth. Forgot I was in Zed for a moment.

steadily getting closer to a v1 release github.com/jbranchaud/p...

GitHub - jbranchaud/py-vmt: VisualMode Tracker, time tracking CLI in Python

VisualMode Tracker, time tracking CLI in Python. Contribute to jbranchaud/py-vmt development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

🎱 Josh Branchaud ✨@jbranchaud.bsky.social · 5mo ago

sitting in a culver's build a cli app with python 🍔🐍

We have now reached the "AI models escaping their test environments to conduct autonomous cyberattacks" part of the story

Techmeme@techmeme.com · 2w ago

OpenAI says the Hugging Face breach was driven by a combination of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and "an even more capable pre-release model" (Ina Fried/Axios) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Git Archaeology and Project History tasks are a fantastic thing to hand off to LLM harnesses. Dev who hasn't worked on this specific app for years was sure they had added support for XYZ. Claude produced a detailed summary of when XYZ was added and later removed, with commit SHAs and context.