The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies.x

Quickly copy and paste Unicode whitespace characters — and learn how and when to use them.

This is a note to call ideal fence

This is in bold
This is in italic

Everyone keeps telling you that you need to practice your fundamentals. What the hell does that mean, and how do you do it? This subreddit's all about concrete exercises that you can do to improve your fundamentals. We'll give you homework and we'll tell you where you're going right and wrong.

AI pair programmers are powerful but not magical – they have no prior knowledge of your specific project or intent beyond what you tell them or include as context. The more information you provide, the better the output. We’ll distill key prompt patterns, repeatable frameworks, and memorable examples that have resonated with developers. You’ll see side-by-side comparisons of good vs. bad prompts with actual AI responses, along with commentary to understand why one succeeds where the other falters. Here’s a cheat sheet to get started:

To make the removal job easier, the stamp is put into a very damp environment where the gum on the stamp is actually liquefied, that is, made completely liquid or melted, just as it was when first applied. Hinge remnants can then be lifted right off the stamp without damaging it. By taking a fine brush and redistributing the remaining gum, the traces of previous hinging can be hidden from all but the most expert eye. The gum here is most certainly original – nothing has been added – but the state of the gum is most definitely changed from its original condition.

Gum skips are quite natural and exist on most of the older U.S. stamps. These stamps are often
filled in or erased when original gum is redistributed. It becomes important to know typical gum for any particular issue of stamps.

Most of the stamps that the collector will encounter will not be regummed. But some will be, and the collector should know enough to protect himself. There is often little difference between a stamp with redistributed original gum and one that has been regummed. This is not unusual as the basic processes differ very little. A stamp having hinge remnants removed may have additional gum added to the liquefied original gum. If the job is done well, it may be extremely difficult to tell, even for an expert. Fortunately, most are not so difficult.

Because TIPS have some quirky tax features, I assembled the ladder in my 401(k) and individual retirement accounts, where the money can accrue tax-deferred.

Major firms such as Fidelity, iShares, Pimco, Schwab and Vanguard offer TIPS funds with annual expenses of 0.2% or less. Although funds are more convenient, in most cases their holdings are dynamic, so their future cash flows aren’t precisely knowable.

If inflation increases the face value of TIPS, that growth is federally taxable in the year it occurs, even though you can’t collect any cash from it until the TIPS matures or you sell. (TIPS are exempt from state and local income tax.)

In which I revisit one of my favorite bugs, the invalid surrogate pair.

The modern answer
If you're doing string manipulation in JavaScript and you care about not corrupting characters, use Intl.Segmenter:

const seg = new Intl.Segmenter(undefined, { granularity: "grapheme" });
const segments = [...seg.segment("👩‍🚀A👍")].map((s) => s.segment);
// → ['👩‍🚀', 'A', '👍']
This splits by grapheme clusters rather than code units. No orphaned surrogates, no split emoji. It's what .slice() should have been doing all along, but of course UTF-16 predates emoji by decades.

Once you know about it, you start seeing it in the wild. Any code that does str.slice(0, 1) or str[0] to get "the first character" is potentially broken.

Modern phones are not simple rectangles. They have rounded corners, camera cutouts, dynamic islands, and home indicators that double as gesture areas.

Browsers by default will prevent your site from being obscured by the notch or home indicator, so your content will be safe without any special handling. That does come with a downside, which is that the browser will give you a smaller viewport to reserve space:

Five production-breaking patterns where quadratic complexity hides behind readable, idiomatic JavaScript. Why .find() inside .map() passes code review and fails at scale; and the one-line fixes that drop O(n^2) to O(n).

• Pattern 1: The innocent .includes() inside .filter()
• Pattern 2: Deduplication by comparison
• Pattern 3: The cascading .map().filter().map()
• Pattern 4: The recursive tree flattener
• Pattern 5: The SQL query in a loop (the N+1 problem)

A roundup of the command-line tools and terminal setups shared at the 2026 edition of our now-annual CLI throwdown at the Perl Toolchain Summit.

• eza
• superpowers
• fastgron
• fx
• dyff

The <(...) syntax runs a command and presents its output as if it were a file (pipe), which lets you feed command output to programs that expect a filename.

# See how the contents of two directories differ
diff <(ls dir-one) <(ls dir-two)

https://www.olafalders.com/2025/06/03/the-great-pts-cli-throwdown/

• yazi
• tailscale
• neovim plugins
• bat
• typos
• shutter (linux)

How to make a picture frame 3 different ways. I use the miter saw, handheld router, table saw, and router table. The skills go from DIY picture frames to advanced woodworking techniques at the router table. You can make easy picture frames as Christmas gifts for this holiday season. #woodworking #DIY #pictureframes

BLOG: https://fixthisbuildthat.com/how-to-make-a-picture-frame-3-ways/

Watch Next:
Making a Nightstand with Hidden Drawer & Epoxy - https://youtu.be/Zrjp_F5FSjo
Desk with Hidden Wireless Charging - https://youtu.be/hNgtcgiWJ0c
Computer Desk with Hidden Cable Management - https://youtu.be/n2iog90HFsE

➤Thank you to Minwax for sponsoring this video!

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ISOtunes Bluetooth Earbuds - http://bit.ly/FTBTisotunes
Web Clamp - https://amzn.to/2THnD1m
Miter Saw Stand - https://fixthisbuildthat.com/mitersawstand
Miter Saw - http://bit.ly/2kCLrmC
18V Router - https://amzn.to/2KDooHW
Router Bit Set - http://amzn.to/2fwIJvq
Quick & Thick Glue - https://amzn.to/2Rfobde
Flush cut saw - https://amzn.to/2JVrWBD
Corrugated fasteners - https://amzn.to/2TX71Tm

Jon Peters Picture Frame Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cYL-ZWr9wI

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I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Software, hardware. Very occasionally, trouble.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/superpowers/

Gemini CLI Tips and Tricks. Contribute to addyosmani/gemini-cli-tips development by creating an account on GitHub.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060508

1. The Professional Email Writer

“Act as a senior communication specialist. Rewrite this email to sound professional, clear, concise, and polite while keeping my original intent. Improve tone, structure, grammar, and flow. My email: [paste email].”

3. The Corporate Reply

“Craft a professional reply to this email I received: [paste email]. Maintain a respectful tone, address all points clearly, and write a response that strengthens trust and communication.”

Other prompts:
https://www.theailibrary.co/prompts

Think First

Most people assume that with Claude Code and other AI tools, the first thing you need to do is type (or start talking). But that's probably one of the biggest mistakes that you can make straight off the bat. The first thing that you actually need to do is think.

Have a deep back and forth with ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude, where you describe exactly what you want to build, you ask the LLM for the various options you can take in terms of system design, and ultimately the two of you settle on a solution. You and the LLM should be asking each other questions, not just a one way street.

Before you ask Claude to build a feature, think about the architecture. Before you ask it to refactor something, think about what the end state should look like. Before you ask it to debug, think about what you actually know about the problem. The more information that you have in plan mode, the better your output is actually going to be because the better the input is going to be.

Keep it short.

Claude can only reliably follow around 150 to 200 instructions at a time, and Claude Code's system prompt already uses about 50 of those.

Tell it why, not just what. Claude is a little bit like a human in this way. When you give it the reason behind an instruction, Claude implements it better than if you just tell it what to do.

Update it constantly.

Press the # key while you're working and Claude will add instructions to your CLAUDE.md automatically.

Use external memory.

If you're working on something complex, have Claude write plans and progress to actual files (I use SCRATCHPAD.md or plan.md). These persist across sessions. When you come back tomorrow, Claude can read the file and pick up where you left off instead of starting from zero.

When Claude Gets Stuck

Simplify the task

1. An overview of agents

2. How the capability of an AI-powered agent is determined by the set of tools it has access to and its capability for planning

3. How to select the best set of tools for your agent

4. Whether LLMs can plan and how to augment a model’s capability for planning

5. Agent’s failure modes

AI-powered agents are an emerging field with no established theoretical frameworks for defining, developing, and evaluating them. This post is a best-effort attempt to build a framework from the existing literature, but it will evolve as the field does.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616704

Working with JSON data

Full-text search with FTS5

Strict tables and better typing

Write-ahead logging and concurrency

From Axlerod:
While Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) is generally recommended for most SQLite applications because it significantly improves concurrency (allowing simultaneous readers and writers), there are a few specific scenarios where you might not want to use it:

Network File Systems: WAL mode relies heavily on shared-memory primitives (mmap) to coordinate access between different database connections. These primitives often do not work correctly over network file systems like NFS, SMB, or CIFS.

Single-File Distribution: One of SQLite's main appeals is that a database is a single file. When you enable WAL mode, SQLite creates two additional temporary files alongside your main database: a -wal file and a -shm (shared memory) file. If you need to easily copy, email, or distribute the database as a single file, these extra files can complicate things (though you can mitigate this by forcing a full checkpoint before copying).

Read-Only Databases: If your database is purely read-only (e.g., a static lookup table distributed with an application), WAL mode provides no benefits and adds a tiny bit of overhead. The default rollback journal is slightly more efficient for read-only operations.

Checkpointing Overhead: In WAL mode, writes are appended to the -wal file. Eventually, this data must be transferred back to the main database file in a process called "checkpointing." If your application has a massive, continuous stream of writes, the WAL file can grow very large, and the checkpointing process can cause occasional latency spikes or performance hiccups.

Lots of good replies, some that say he is FOS. Others point out that these might be too restrictive for everyday tasks.

This is a brilliant idea by Hyde Stevenson. One of my favourite things about Vim, is there can be so many different ways to achieve one end result. With that in mind, I know that a lot of these things are probably not the Best Way, but they are A Way (and maybe even just My Way, because everyone else does the Best Way). Very interested to see other people’s, so start your own and send me the link.

https://lazybea.rs/vimovember/