Two states, no committee
Hey 👋 — today's mix leans thoughtful: a sharp bit of UX reasoning about a widget you've clicked a thousand times without thinking, a VR trip through interference patterns, a browser hack that talks straight to your local LLM, and a dose of healthy skepticism about the whole AI-coding hype cycle. Something for the tinkerer and the skeptic in all of us.
The tri-state toggle for "dark mode"
Lea Verou makes a deceptively simple case: most dark-mode toggles cram in a third "system" option that nobody asked for. Someone hunting for a toggle in your header wants to change something right now, not file a policy preference for how their OS should behave later. It's the kind of argument that seems obvious in hindsight but explains why so many toggles feel fussier than they should — sometimes the fix for bad UX isn't more options, it's fewer (via the post).
Show HN: Quasicrystals animation playground with WebXR
A browser-based generator for those hypnotic quasicrystal interference patterns, now viewable in VR if your headset — and inner ear — are up for it. Open source, photosensitivity warning included, and a nice reminder that generative art playgrounds keep finding new dimensions to spill into (via HN discussion).
CORS Chat
Simon Willison's latest weekend build is a pure browser chat client that speaks directly to any CORS-enabled, OpenAI-Responses-compatible endpoint — including a model running locally on your own machine via LM Studio. Conversations stay in local storage, and it'll even render SVGs live as the model streams them out. It's a small project, but it's a good demonstration of how much infrastructure you no longer need to just talk to a model.
Speaking of what these tools are actually good for, one developer is pushing back on the idea that any of this has measurably improved software quality. Four years into the LLM-coding boom, he argues the productivity case is still thin and industry output hasn't visibly shifted — a useful counterweight to the daily parade of "AI changed how I code" posts.
Why I remain a skeptic
Worth reading precisely because it isn't a hot take — it's someone still waiting for the receipts.
Quick hits
- A spectre is haunting Unicode — the strange afterlife of characters nobody meant to create.
- Working with AI feels more like leadership than coding — delegation, but the intern never sleeps.
- The Dutch community where people live on strips of land in a lake — waterfront property, taken literally.
- T3X/0, a minimal procedural language — for when C feels bloated.
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