Does anybody actually see (or read) pinned tweets?

Someone built a Linux desktop where windows are paper on a walnut desk and the dock is a drawer... A developer who goes by fyzugx on GitHub released DEsk, a Wayland desktop for Linux where the desktop is an actual desk. Every window sits on a sheet of paper, the dock is a drawer, and your apps are filed in ring binders on a bookshelf behind it. The project's README calls it "realistic skeuomorphism," the look iOS 6 had, and it's the most fun I've seen a Linux desktop have in years. The window controls are silly in the best way. According to the README, you hold the pointer on a window's dog-eared corner and it lifts to show what's printed on the back: Fold minimizes it like a letter, Unfold maximizes it, and Discard closes it by crumpling it into a ball and tossing it. Notifications arrive as letters in a post box, the system controls are a valve-era machine with real meters and a volume knob built into the back of the desk, and the lock screen is a front door you open with a brass key. If you let it look up your city's weather, rain darkens the brick around that door and snow settles on whatever faces up. One desk lamp lights the whole ray-traced room, and the first login draws it once (about ten minutes on two cores without a GPU) before it's cached. The author also says much of the code and the documentation was written by Claude, Anthropic's AI model, under the author's direction, and the project drew 681 points on Hacker News. It's a beta under the MIT license, with installers for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and Fedora. I'd try it on a spare Linux box or an old laptop first, since the author says to expect rough edges. Then you log out and pick DEsk on the login screen. I'd keep my real work on a plain desktop for now, but DEsk is the first Linux desktop in years I'd install just to watch a window get crumpled up and tossed.

🤢🤮

Good luck, y'all.

Again, just like I called it on the first day, it's incongruent and half baked.

And this, my friends, is what they call compromise.

Apple ran a graphite pipe through the iPhone Duo's hinge to cool it... Apple's first foldable has the heat problem every foldable has: it's thin when it's open, and its thickness doubles when you close it. Apple's engineers told PCMag that their fix was to route a flexible graphite pipe through the hinge itself, so heat can move between the two halves of the phone. I love that the hinge, the part everybody worries about on a folding phone, got a second job. Banafsheh Barabadi, Apple's senior manager of thermal product design, called it "one of the most technically challenging aspects of our design." Moving heat across both halves gives the phone more surface area to get rid of it, PCMag reported. She said the thermal and mechanical teams had to engineer the part together, because it has to survive "many hinge cycles" while still carrying heat and holding together for the life of the phone. The Duo gets its own cooling layout inside, too. PCMag reported its vapor chamber is thinner than the one in the iPhone 18 Pro and floats in the middle of the phone instead of serving as part of its frame. 9to5Mac, writing up the same interview, noted that the Duo's version of the A20 Pro chip has a second display engine so the inner and outer screens can run at the same time. The performance numbers are Apple's. Barabadi said the latest iPhones achieve "35% higher sustained GPU performance than iPhone 17 Pro," and PCMag said it hasn't tested the A20 Pro in the Duo yet but expects to in the coming weeks. If you've ordered one, I'd wait for those reviews before counting on it for long gaming sessions or long video recordings, the sustained workloads where Barabadi said the gains show up. And since the pipe lives in the hinge, I'd want any review that folds the phone a few thousand times to check heat as well as wear. It's a clever trick. Now the hinge has two jobs to survive.

Today is Count Your Buttons Day - 1 Facts! • Count Your Buttons Day lands on October 21 every year, and even National Today says it is unclear what its unknown creators intended, so count what tech left you: shirt cuffs, the remote, and the one surviving headphone button. (Source: National Today)

On this day in 2015, Marty McFly arrived in the future, and the whole world celebrated Back to the Future Day. We are now eleven years deeper into the future than the future was. Still no hoverboards.

On this day in 2010, I posted my iMovie '11 screencast. The audio editing additions were enough for me to call it worth the upgrade, and iMovie was still simple to use. youtube.com/watch?v=AtHdCZxs…

Did I wake up in the wrong month?

I'd think, out of all of them, that Meta has the upper hand (not just because of compute). They've got the social connections / fabric in-place, are far more user friendly. I could get my parents using Muse *insanely* faster than I could Claude, Dots.

Every Monday, my AI team turns the week's videos into articles. On October 12 that run just didn't happen. No error, no warning, nothing for three days, until I asked where the articles were. The check we had read every report the run left behind. When the run never ran, there was no report to read, so the check had nothing to say. Quiet looked exactly like fine. If anything in your setup runs on a schedule, try this: 1. List what runs on its own: the weekly summary, the backup, the newsletter draft. 2. For each one, write down when it should be done. "By Monday noon." 3. Have your AI check at that time that the result exists, not just whether it's good. 4. No result by the deadline? It tells you, in the place you already look every day. We caught it, wrote the articles, and the check now asks that one question every Monday. Silence isn't a status.

Vibe Coding & AI News to Use: October 21, 2026… DuckDB 2.0 LTS adds compact query results for coding agents and background reading of data files. Older versions cannot open database files newly created by 2.0. Existing files remain readable by older versions even after 2.0 reads or writes them. duckdb.org/2026/10/21/announ… Taskman puts each Claude Code or Codex session beside its issue and pull request in one terminal window, so you can see which job needs attention. github.com/sanagnos/taskman Koi's Mac app combines dictation and call transcription with an assistant you can ask about what's on your screen. koiscribe.com/ Claude Code 2.1.306 fixes cloud sessions falsely reporting 'Not logged in' and an API error being mislabeled 'prompt is too long'. github.com/anthropics/claude… Mouse-1 is a decision model API that scores an AI agent's predefined choices, such as classifying a document as a tax return or an invoice. The agent's main model handles planning and code. mouse.dev/api Triage takes bug reports from a user's AI assistant through MCP for command-line, terminal-interface and Linux apps. It replays the problem on a clean machine running the same app version and sends developers a watchable link if the bug happens again. triage.chodeberg.com/ Cisco's DefenseClaw works with NVIDIA OpenShell to restrict which files, network destinations and tools a coding agent can use, and records policy decisions for review. blogs.cisco.com/ai/protect-e… Tend says its AI assistant handles email, scheduling and customer follow-ups through apps including Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack and QuickBooks. heytend.me/ Blacksmith's Sequoia-led Series C values the company at $1 billion and brings total funding to $125 million. Its cloud runs software builds and tests. The company plans to expand its current compute footprint of just under 10 megawatts fivefold in 2027. blacksmith.sh/blog/series-c PHP 8.2.35 fixes two critical flaws that can let attackers run code without logging in. The PHP team urges users to update immediately because there are no complete mitigations. PHP 8.2 security support ends December 31, 2026. github.com/php/php-src/relea… Try this image style: Take the attached photo and redraw it as Sashiko running-stitch decision-path sampler: eyes are short stitched dots; nose is a small angular running-stitch bend; mouth is a short curved stitch; hair is a spiky silhouette made from closely spaced parallel stitches; glasses are thin rectangular stitched loops. Body, face, gate, tracks and robot figures are constructed entirely from the same visible cotton running stitches on woven cloth, with broad empty cloth between contours and no modeled skin. Palette: natural cotton, deep indigo, charcoal. Chris stands upright at a simple Y-shaped routing junction, framed from head to hips with generous cloth beside both elbows. Both complete arms stay clearly separated from his torso: shoulders, upper arms, elbows, forearms, wrists and hands form continuous visible stitched contours. With elbows comfortably bent beside his waist, both palms are fully visible in a relaxed explanatory gesture toward the two choices; fingers are naturally separated. The junction lies below his hands and never crosses his body. One small toy robot approaches the fork; one branch ends in a plain open passage, the other in a single simple barrier. Broad empty cloth separates every silhouette. Face, arms, hands, robot and paths use the same sparse running-stitch construction and thread gauge. No bare feet. Keep the person recognizable. Square, no text. Builder Day is co-working; Builder Night is networking and showing what you made. Greater Seattle, all skill levels welcome. luma.com/ctrlaltcreatelive ctrlaltcreate.live/

My AI team made a change today, and five automated tests went red. The easy move is to have the AI start fixing all five. That's how a small change turns into an afternoon of fixing things it never broke. So first we ran the same five tests on a copy of the project from before the change. Three failed there too. Something earlier had already broken them. The other two were old problems we'd already written down. Our change broke nothing. Copy this the next time something fails right after a change: 1. Stop your AI before it starts patching. 2. Tell it: "Run the same tests on a copy from before this change." 3. Anything that fails there too isn't from this change. Write it down as its own problem. 4. Fix only what fails now and passed before. It keeps the fix the size of the change. Blame the change second.

Vibe Coding & AI News to Use: October 20, 2026… Claude Code v2.1.305 fixes tool-search failures and resumes workflows without rerunning completed agents. github.com/anthropics/claude… GitHub Copilot CLI v1.0.101 adds structured subagent output on supported models and skips MCP connections requiring unavailable interactive OAuth. github.com/github/copilot-cl… @louis_raille v0.5.2 adds optional update checks and verified signed, notarized updates to its Mac notch companion for coding agents. github.com/Louis-CFM/coucou/… @mistralai introduces Voxtral 3 speech models and a voice-agent SDK that connects listening, tool calls and speech. mistral.ai/news/voxtral-3/ @Cloudflare details tsrs, an experimental Rust port of the TypeScript compiler with compatibility differences still to resolve. blog.cloudflare.com/typescri… @composio Instant offers tools paid per use through one wallet, with usage logs and balance checks that aren't strict spending caps. composio.dev/instant Harness² explores improving coding-agent harnesses through repeated trials without changing model weights. github.com/google-research/h… Hoistbay puts S3 uploads, bucket header rules and CloudFront invalidations in a desktop app for Mac and Windows. hoistbay.app/ @exaailabs 3.0 reaches today's Product Hunt launches with Exa Lite and generally available Dynamic Highlights. exa.ai/blog/exa-3 @mintlify Autopilot's beta drafts documentation updates from code changes and opens pull requests for human review. mintlify.com/blog/autopilot @runinfrai offers session-aware inference routing for coding agents, with repeat work sent toward warm replicas when available. runinfra.ai/ Try this image style: Take the attached photo and redraw it as Flooded royal-icing transcription relief: eyes are small piped icing ovals behind narrow rectangular icing glasses; nose is a raised icing wedge, mouth a short curved piped seam, hair a compact jagged piped silhouette. Body and hands are broad flooded icing shapes with rounded piped boundaries. Face, figure, microphone and printer and transcript paper share the same shallow sugar relief, clean large shapes and small raised joins. Palette: warm ivory, burnt orange, deep cocoa. An upper-body figure speaks into the nearby microphone at the left. At the right, a recognizable compact desktop printer rests on the same tabletop and ejects one rectangular paper sheet from its front output slot. The sheet remains visibly joined to that slot, resting on its output tray. Short straight parallel icing ridges on the sheet suggest transcript rows without writing. The microphone stand, printer housing, paper and figure are all built from the same shallow piped and flooded sugar relief. Keep the figure and microphone recognizable as in the first image; replace the floating curled ribbon with this supported printer and rectangular transcript. Broad silhouettes remain legible at preview size. Keep the person recognizable. Square, no text. Join us around greater Seattle for Builder Day co-working and Builder Night networking and showcasing. All skill levels welcome. luma.com/ctrlaltcreatelive ctrlaltcreate.live/

Now, with the iPhone Duo, it's powered by Side Touch ID. If you can live without Face ID, fine.

Tiny Little Office puts the document inside its own link... Paul Ford's company Aboard just put out Tiny Little Office, ten free office apps where the web address is the file. Copy the link, paste it into a chat, and Ford says everybody in that chat now has a copy they can edit, with no account for anyone. Tiny Little Office's own guide shows how it works with a dinner bill. Open the calculator, type what food and drinks cost, add an 18% tip, divide by six, and send the link to the table. Ford wrote in the Aboard newsletter on October 14 that the data rides in the link, after the "#," which stays local by default, so nothing gets saved to a server and all your internet provider sees is that you visited the site. Besides the calculator, the site lists a word processor, outliner, presentation builder, spreadsheet, drawing tool, diagram maker, animator, calendar and trip planner, and you can drop one document inside another. Ford calls that "the dream of the entire 1990s in office software," and he's right. Ford's co-founder Rich Ziade had the idea six years ago with TinySheet, a ten-line spreadsheet that kept its data in its link, which Ford says people mostly used to share simple math in Slack. TinySheet and a later TinyCalendar "fell off the web, and the old links all broke." This version is open source under the MIT license. Ford is upfront that it's built for "a couple pages, a few slides." You can't upload images or video, and it isn't collaborative the way Google Docs is. A long document can go through the site's link shortener, which encrypts it in your browser before sending it to a server, though Ford says those links expire within a month. I'd use it for the small stuff you'd otherwise screenshot from a notes app, like a packing list, a recipe or the split on a dinner bill, and if you'll still want it next year, export it as a PDF or keep the full link somewhere safe. The link is the file.

this is heavy

gee, who could've seen this coming