Bobbie Chen

Yup! Ultimately the current implementation requires hitting the Stytch backend, so the API key is needed to keep our costs down.

In the longer run I'm also excited about IETF Bot Auth to avoid the issue of spoofable user agents.

(I work on IsAgent and related at Stytch, thanks for the mention!)

My team at work shipped this!

DrawAFish.com Postmortem — Aug 3, 2025 Incident A blameful postmortem of how my viral HackerNews project got compromised by legacy passwords, missing auth, and the perils of vibe coding.

Refreshingly honest postmortem of a vibe coding security incident: aldenhallak.com/blog/posts/d...

I went maybe a week without thinking about this game only for recent "giant stickbug discovered" news to bring it right back to the top of my mind

*What they're saying*: The original Google research paper warned about this exact trajectory in 1998. * “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users,” wrote Sergey Brin and Larry Page. “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” From The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end - Digital Seams https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-ai-lifestyle-subsidy-is-going-to-end

Written by [redacted] Bot Published on June 23rd, 2025 2:24 PM Social sharing options: link, X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

I had some vanity milestones for my blog but none of them involved being aggregated into an AI ""news summary"" site

Thank you Jason, I really appreciate this. I ended up rewriting the intro, and the new version ended up on the front page of Hacker News for a bit. A good reminder for me to seek more feedback :)

Kim Kitsuragi - "What are you doing?" the lieutenant asks when he sees you climb half-way inside the furnace. You - "I'm hallucinating."

I'm collecting image descriptions from the Bluesky firehose for analysis, and watching the alt text scroll by I had two thoughts:

1. Wow, there's a lot more smutty content on Bluesky than I thought

2. These are easily some of the best (most detailed) image descriptions of the entire dataset

I couldn't conceive of descender envy before reading this and now I have it, thanks

It should not be necessary to learn a programming language like C or BASIC. Instead, the user should be able to instruct the computer to "Watch what I do", and the computer should create the program that corresponds to the user's actions. Allen Cypher, Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration

"Watch What I Do" is a great read. If you're not paying attention, lots of it could refer directly to few-shot prompting for LLMs, or low-code/no-code tools, or RPA, etc. but it's from 1993 and Pygmalion itself is from 1975.

My building (in SF) has sent out emails warning us that repeat false alarms get fined $250 by the fire department, not sure what constitutes "repeat" though

What birdsong and backends can teach us about magic — Digital Seams Who said you had to be reasonable?

digitalseams.com/blog/what-bi...

What birdsong and backends can teach us about magic — Digital Seams Who said you had to be reasonable?

This week on Digital Seams - I started writing about a birding app and ended up with a manifesto on creating magical software:

digitalseams.com/blog/what-bi...

That's true, I got sniped by the original question and forgot that fairly regularly I click the button for "Yes, please show results that actually contain one of the words in my quoted search, that's why I included it in the first place..." 🙃

SEO is adversarial, so other forms of marketing spam come to mind:

- Picking up your phone when an unknown number called
- Sending your own email from your own server (without going through a mega vendor)
- Reading product reviews or other user comments when a commercial product is involved

Reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me"

#229: Living to please your future self I recently came across a screenshot in my phone of a social post with over 10,000 likes.

"The loss of the fullness of these experiences is okay, because I lived them already, was indelibly shaped by them, and that was the point."

haleynahman.substack.com/p/229-living...

Haley Nahman on memories of early parenthood: "I’m stunned to recall the depth and variety of experiences I underwent, the majority of which have now been lost to me, and which may be recalled only in bits and pieces over the rest of my life."

Family of California quails on the ground. Two adults with the head crest, and two smaller birds nearby.

A great egret perched in a tree. It is a large white bird, bending its long neck to look downwards.

Saw some excellent birds in Sausalito this weekend

Same but this was delightful

www.sftransit.fun

How so? I mean, yes, true, just curious if there's anything specific you're thinking of?

+ @sethmlarson.dev with much the same sentiment!

Inspired by @eatonphil.bsky.social to be more of a cheerleader today:

"So much of life and work is drudgery such that when you see something positive... taking initiative [or] doing something with their skills, how can you not feel an overwhelming urge to cheer them on and hope to see more of it?"

Long Island Iced Tea skyrockets after renaming itself Long Blockchain Beverage maker Long Island Iced Tea Corp's <LTEA.O> shares jumped nearly 300 percent on Thursday after the company said it would rebrand itself Long Blockchain Corp, the latest U.S. firm to tap into the frenzy surrounding crypto currencies.

Or more recently:

The disposable email checker flags "bobbie+alias@10minutemail.com" as using a known disposable domain, as well as a "plus alias".

Just spun up bademails.org - surprisingly, lots of people are unaware of services to create throwaway emails.

Although throwaway emails can be useful for privacy, they're also massively used for spam and free trial abuse - this site is a lightweight way for site owners to check on their accounts.

"...But I know of no use of Z to mean Undo before the [Apple] Lisa."

Source: Larry Tesler, personal email to Brad Myers in March 2014, via "Pick, Click, Flick: The Story of Interaction Techniques" (Chapter 15: Undo, Redo, Repeat, Cancel, Command History, and Macro Recording).

Larry Tesler: "Z was next to X, C, and V on the U.S. QWERTY keyboard. But its shape also symbolized the “Do-Undo-Redo” triad: top rightward stroke = step forward; middle leftward stroke = step back; bottom rightward stroke = step forward again. So X, C, and even V were not novel..."

An interesting tidbit that didn't make it to the final post: the choice of Ctrl-Z for Undo was not just to be close to Ctrl-XCV for Cut, Copy, Paste.

It's also symbolic of "Do-Undo-Redo", where the diagonal slash of the Z represents going back to an earlier state.

Why do Sublime Text and VS Code use Ctrl-Shift-P for the command bar? — Digital Seams These influential editors don't use the common Ctrl-K shortcut. Why?

I wrote 1000+ words on the history of this keyboard shortcut:

digitalseams.com/blog/why-do-...

The Next Great Distribution Shift Thank you to Casey Winters, Aaron White, Dan Hockenmaier, Fareed Mosavat and Adam Fishman for reading early versions of this and providing feedback.

Brian Balfour just published a great blog post on what the seller side looks like, and how "distribution" for businesses will follow the same patterns as platforms like Google and Facebook:

blog.brianbalfour.com/p/the-next-g...