Links – Brian Smith

Links I find worth reading, with notes.
If you have something good for this list, @me on Bluesky and I’ll have a look.
OpenAI introducing ads to ChatGPT.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
'I don’t even remember hating any other piece of technology I used.' - Things that make GitHub Actions painful to work with.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
AI has made generating code cheap. Architecture, maintenance, and knowing what to build haven’t gotten easier.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
Apple is bringing Google's Gemini to power Siri rather than building their own model.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
Google warns that writing short LLM-optimized content can hurt search rankings. Their systems still reward depth.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
WAICT is a W3C-backed spec for cryptographically verifying JavaScript integrity and consistency. It targets the supply-chain risk from third-party scripts.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
Schleswig-Holstein moved ~30,000 employees from Microsoft Exchange to Open-Xchange and Thunderbird in October 2025.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
The story of Web Platform Tests (WPT), the ~2-million-test shared suite that transformed browser interoperability over the last decade.
A walkthrough of diff algorithm design decisions: API flexibility, multiple operation modes, and performance tradeoffs, using a Go diff library as the example.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
A curated archive of 385 experimental mobile-first website designs, emphasising unconventional interactions and positive friction.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
MCP server that lets AI agents control and inspect Chrome for debugging, performance analysis, and automation.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
Tim Berners-Lee on releasing the web without patents or royalties.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
An experimental re-implementation of SSH over HTTP/3 and QUIC with modern auth.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
The Typst repo: markup-based typesetting with integrated scripting, incremental compilation, and a web editor.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
An introduction to Typst, a Rust-based typesetting system with simpler syntax, faster compilation, and better error messages than LaTeX.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
An extension to robots.txt letting site owners express preferences for how their content is used: search, AI training, or real-time AI applications.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
A link containing a natural language query that will redirect to a best guess at the most relevant web destination.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
Wasmer Edge now runs Python, including FastAPI, Django, and Streamlit, on WebAssembly infrastructure with near-native performance.
[Discuss on Hacker News]
PayPal soon to allow P2P Bitcoin, Ethereum, PYUSD transfers.
Can you host a website on a vape? I guess you can!
[Discuss on Hacker News]