Links, March 6th, 2026

§How to grow strawberries

From Mike Montiero, author of Ruined by Design, some advice for someone new in their career and recently laid off from their tech job:

If you decide to persevere in this industry, I’d walk into every interview with your head held high and remember that you are interviewing them, as much as they are interviewing you. You are deciding whether this is a company you want to sell your labor to.

§Vitamin D & Omega-3 may have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

From Nicky Case, whose work I’ve admired for a while now, with a lengthy positive but skeptical review of recent studies on how the two mentioned supplements can impact depressive tendencies and work with antidepressants. As someone who is benefitting greatly from an SSRI antidepressant, and made a very personal work about my experience of depression, this is interesting stuff, and Nicky has a knack for taking complex, somewhat dry material and presenting it in a compelling way:

But, as of right now, I feel I can at least confidently claim the following:

• Vitamin D and Omega-3 are both at least on par with the median antidepressant (effect size ~= +0.3).

• The evidence is much stronger for Vitamin D; it’s very plausibly at least twice as good as antidepressants.

• Both supplements are cheap and safe, so what’s the harm of trying? (positive “expected value” for this bet)

§Hold on to Your Hardware

A long, cynically speculative piece about the logical conclusions of the current memory/storage crisis:

In addition, manufacturers are pivoting towards consumer hardware subscriptions, where you never own the hardware and in the most dystopian trajectory, consumers might not buy any hardware at all, with the exception of low-end thin-clients that are merely interfaces, and will rent compute through cloud platforms, losing digital sovereignty in exchange for convenience. And despite all of this sounding like science fiction, there is already hard evidence proving that access to hardware can in fact be politically and economically revoked.

§Control

Another piece on that note:

Once again, we have a misadventure that is “too big to fail.” The US economy can’t afford the consequences if consumer demand for AI levels off or disappears. And remember: AI has yet to be profitable for anyone. Not just the hyperscalers, mind you—the small companies trying to find value in the product just…aren’t.

How do you guarantee revenue on a product that nobody wants and people regret buying?

By making it mandatory.

§A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines

The attack - which Snyk named “Clinejection”2 - composes five well-understood vulnerabilities into a single exploit that requires nothing more than opening a GitHub issue.

There will be plenty more attacks like this as people trust natural language processing with more capabilities.

§PCB Forge

Turn any PCB layout into a 3D-printable mold. No etching, no chemicals.

A pay-what-you-want (or not) web-based tool (click “run tool” on the page) which takes an SVG export from an EDA tool and outputs an STL you can 3D-print, with grooves to inlay copper tape onto. It might not be the most effective way to make PCBs, but I’ve dug out an old 3D printer that’s been in a box since I moved six and a half years ago to try this out, because it’s much better than the 2 and half week turnaround time on regular PCB fabrication.

§Gram – A code editor for humanoid apes and grumpy toads

Gram is a fork of Zed, which I used for a while and abandoned for a handful of reasons, most notably their complete disregard for security in the original extensions implementation. When I did so, I also deleted my extension for Fennel (a language gets one extension and they had zero plans for governance at the time, to my knowledge they still don’t), which broke Zed’s extension build system.

It’s a decent editor created by people I consider fundamentally unserious.

From Gram’s Mission Statement:

Programming is more than just productivity. We need tools that are fit for purpose, that aren’t beholden to investors or share holders. There are aspects of the Zed code editor that I think are wrong in the moral and ethical sense, and there are aspects that I think are simply bad choices from a technical perspective.

§Defuddle

Get the main content of any page as Markdown.

From the makers of Obsidian (of which I am a heavy user), and presumably extracted from their web clipper, it basically does what the tagline says.

§Radicle

Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow.

“But git is already decentralized!” you say? From the FAQ:

While Git is designed in some way for peer-to-peer interactions, there is no deployment of it that works that way. All deployments use the client-server model because Git lacks functionality to be deployed as-is in a peer-to-peer network.

For one, it has no way of verifying that the repository you downloaded after a git clone is the one you asked for, which means you need to clone from a trusted source (ie. a known server). This isn’t compatible with peer-to-peer in any useful way.

Whereas Forgejo is a single-source-of-truth host in the vein of Github, Radicle is not that. Why is this important? Well, what with looks around the current mess of things, and especially after Codeberg’s recent DDOSing, I’m becoming more convinced of the importance of the ideals behind this project.