Cool Links Vol. 11: May, 2025

Hey there!

Winter has started to settle in where I live, and my hands are already freezing all the time. The cold and humid weather means more time inside, which means more links!

Fun

I Don't Have Spotify

Sharing links to albums or songs in streaming apps sucks because not everyone uses the same one. This neat website takes in a link (although named after Spotify, it works with others as well) and spits out the link for the same music on whatever other platform you want.

Great for when you share a link with others too!

Pong Wars, by Koen van Gilst

This is a hypnotizing endless battle between two squares, pong-style. All built with JS, HTML and CSS! The source code surprisingly simple and a fun read too, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Tech

Test Ad Block - Toolz

If you use any adblockers (you should!), this website is a neat way to test how effective your setup is. The higher, the better, but if you get a green result you should already feel safe browsing online. I got 98% with my NextDNS + UBlock Origin combo!

Kagi Search Stats

Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year now, and I just found out about their public stats page. Pretty cool they have this info open out there!

The most interesting part is the Domain Insights, that ranks the domains that get most blocked/prioritized on Kagi (Kagi allows you to prioritize results from specific domains, or simply block some altogether). It seems people really hate getting Pinterest results 😅

The Internet Archive opt out itch, by Stefan Judis

In this article, Stefan ponders the ethics of the Internet Archive's opt-out behavior. The work they do is really good for the web in general — but, on an individual level, it kinda sucks that someone is archiving your website without asking?

He also raises the point that while you can ask for your website to be excluded from being archived, doing so might make you (or your company) look shady and untrustworthy. Like, what are you trying to hide so much?

Don't Guess My Language, by Robert Vitonsky

As a bilingual person that's soon moving to another country I really struggle with websites and apps that keep trying to serve you content in a specific language instead of the one you choose. Google is one of the worst in this regard.

Even worse is when the content is translated automatically. It sucks! Google again sucks at this. It keeps reverting things to Portuguese and even re-enabling automatic dubbing (gross, I know) on videos, even though I explicitly have my device, browser, and Google account set to English.

Moving from Notion to Obsidian, by Dave Rupert

I love Obsidian, and have been using it for over a year for taking notes about everything. The thing about his kind of app though is that you’re always looking for ways to tweak and improve your system. This article is great at explaining how Dave uses Obsidian for himself and as usual has a list of neat plugins.

One day, maybe, I’ll write my own post about how I use it. I’m just not confident enough on my system yet, probably…

Dev

Programming is a feeling, and AI is changing it, by Sean Voisen

Programming is an activity, but it’s also a feeling. For those of us who actually enjoy programming, there is a deep satisfaction that comes from solving problems through well-written code, a kind of ineffable joy found in the elegant expression of a system through our favorite syntax. It is akin to the same satisfaction a craftsperson might find at the end of the day after toiling away on well-made piece of furniture, the culmination of small dopamine hits that come from sweating the details on something and getting them just right. Maybe nobody will notice those details, but it doesn’t matter. We care, we notice, we get joy from the aesthetics of the craft.

AI / LLMs / Slightly Depressing

The Who Cares Era, by Dan Sinker

If you don't care, it's miraculous.

I’ve had this talk with my wife a few times already. Around us, it just feels that nobody cares about anything. Everything is hastily produced so it can be ignored by other people. It’s just disheartening to be the only ones noticing AI slop everywhere and see people not only believing it’s real, but also not really caring if it’s real or not.

This article also reminded of this one that I posted back in December: Care Doesn’t Scale.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

The promise that wasn’t kept, by Salma Alam-Naylor

Fantastic piece that highlights how much of a distraction AI has become to creating value, simply because everyone is too focused on the tools and not on the work.

But we can’t rely on tools as a shortcut to gain valuable experience. Experience takes time to develop, and your tools are only as good as your fundamental knowledge and skills. If you skip the knowledge and skills part, and if you fail to learn about what you’re doing and the implications of how you’re doing it and the human value you have the potential to deliver, then you have little hope of building human value into your software.

The Everything App is a symptom of Nothing Management (part 1)

This is a spot on overview of how pretty much every tech company now has no clear direction besides making more money. No vision, no goals, no passion, except for making the number go up.

Yea, every company needs to make money because workers need money to survive, but when a system only ever rewards those that seek money above everything else, that system has failed and will continue to fail unless a big shift happens.

The passionate, skilled, full-of-ideas people that could solve real problems and/or improve the lives of others have been crushed by the weight of big companies looking for one more way to exploit you.

Wrapping up

Thanks for tuning in, and see you next month!