• The Lethal Trifecta - An excellent article by Simon Willison on the inherent security flaws of generative AI.
• 21 Lessons from 14 years at Google - A great article on successful elements of an engineering mindset.
• How LLMs Learn From The Internet - This is the best article I've found on how LLMs are developed. Fantastic balance of technical depth while making it accessible to newcomers.

• Removing unused apps on your phone (and delete unnecessary accounts associated with them)
• Blocking/unsubscribing from legitimate newsletters that aren't useful. Obviously be careful clicking links!
• Checking around your desk/area for out-of-place items. My personal goal is to return one item back to its home per day. It adds up.

About a week ago, I published a simple little page called https://getstat.dev. It's live now.

It's nothing fancy; just an easy client-centric way to verify connectivity to the public internet without the excessive bloat of visiting an actual web site. I published it because I couldn't really find anything else like it. Testing baseline layer-7 connectivity usually required living in the world of HTTP return codes or visiting a random bloated site. Sometimes when debugging/troubleshooting you just need a simple target site to run a straight-forward check.

This page has a few things going for it:

• It's small (less than 100 bytes of page data going to the requesting client).
• It's fast (static content with transmission times averaging under 250 milliseconds).
• The output is script-friendly (assuming the respective monitoring tools can parse text).

Frankly though, the best part is what's NOT there: No scripts, no dynamic content, no cookies, no popups, no input forms, no images, no css, no APIs, no third-party scripts, and no AI assistants offering to chat.

It's literally just a status string and a frequently updated timestamp. Don't believe me? Check out the complete page source (attached :-))

Anyway, I know it's a bit silly but I thought I'd mention it in case it's useful to someone else too. Have a great weekend, y'all!