Articles by bobbiechen
2

Interview with Amit Patel (Red Blob Games) on Making Things (digitalseams.com)

2

Keyboardion (ianthehenry.com)

21

Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding (redblobgames.com)

7

Most Googlebots Are Fake (digitalseams.com)

4

Zero-defects code: the prescient Microsoft memo from 1989 (digitalseams.com)

2

LLMs and Shaders (amitp.blogspot.com)

4

Zero-defects code: the prescient Microsoft memo from 1989 (digitalseams.com)

1

When anything is possible, how do you decide what to create? (digitalseams.com)

2

Legibility of Effort (eieio.games)

1

Seth Larson on Making Things (digitalseams.com)

2

Morry Kolman on making things: "Keep it stupid" (digitalseams.com)

1

Uniba Embodied Virtuality (uniba.jp)

1

Nolen Royalty (One Million Chessboards) on Making Things (digitalseams.com)

1

SF MUNI Worm: the worm becomes the map (probablyalex.com)

1

Amit Patel (Red Blob Games) on Making Things (digitalseams.com)

1

Making things: interview series on creativity (digitalseams.com)

1

N-Tier Services and Systems Complexity (yegge.ai)

1

Good Careers at Bad Companies (sharedphysics.com)

1

CrankGPT is an offline and off-the-grid AI box (squeezlabs.github.io)

354

Stop the Apple Music app from launching (lowtechguys.com)

1

Interfaces for Representing Uncertainty (2025) (digitalseams.com)

1

Staybl, the browser that adjusts for tremors in real time (2022) (marketingbrew.com)

1

"This was a user-friendly computer." (aresluna.org)

80

Laws of UX (lawsofux.com)

2

The Gypsy document editor: celebrating 50 years (digitalseams.com)

3

Lighter, Not Faster (digitalseams.com)

2

There is no escape from Ashby's law (2020) (surfingcomplexity.blog)

2

Clashes of Tech and the US Government (digitalseams.com)

1

Tools and Toolmaking (aresluna.org)

2

PostalForm lets agents place a real print-and-mail order for their owner (postalform.com)

1

Okmain: Pick an OK main colour of an image (dgroshev.com)

3

Electrical upgrades for our Winnebago Solis camper van (jamesxli.com)

1

Assorted links: clashes of tech and the US government (digitalseams.com)

15

"Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything" (aresluna.org)

2

Testing 80 LLMs on spatial reasoning on grids (mihai.page)

42

Show HN: A custom font that displays Cistercian numerals using ligatures (bobbiec.github.io)

1

Dealing with Bots: A COAR Resource for Repository Managers (coar-repositories.org)

40

The behavioral cost of personalized pricing (digitalseams.com)

70

Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google (alanwsmith.com)

21

Computers that used to be human (digitalseams.com)

1

New year's resolutions are arbitrary, and that's okay (bobbiechen.com)

44

Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy (2016) (techcrunch.com)

3

Arnaud Benard's website is automatically generated by AI every day (arnaud.ai)

3

Most Americans didn't read many books in 2025 (yougovamerica.substack.com)

2

San Francisco identities from government meetings (walzr.com)

3

What conspiracy theorists get right (2023) (tomstafford.substack.com)

3

Do These AI-Generated Food Images Look Appetizing to You? (eater.com)

1

ServiceNow Acquires Veza's Leading AI-Native Identity Security Platform (servicenow.com)

1

Finding the random seeds used to generate RotMG maps (redblobgames.com)

3

Fewer people should run marathons (macwright.com)

2

Some "Silicon Valley" moments I experienced in my 31 year career as a programmer (reddit.com)

1

Any decent error message is a kind of oracle (digitalseams.com)

1

Guide to Authentication for the OpenAI Apps SDK (stytch.com)

1

The future of AI-driven development is eXtreme Go Horse (spavel.medium.com)

3

Any decent error message is a kind of oracle (digitalseams.com)

2

A recent phishing attack on GitHub (digitalseams.com)

84

Y'all are over-complicating these AI-risk arguments (dynomight.net)

1

Image Transcription Humbled Me (digitalseams.com)

2

One Star Review Tour – The Browser Extension (xn--p3hcaaa.yugo.at)

2

Meta Ad Library: all active ads that are shown across Meta technologies (facebook.com)

48

Bluesky Alt Text Stream (bobbiec.github.io)

1

iReal Pro custom chord chart protocol (irealpro.com)

1

How to sign Web Bot Auth for your AI agent, bot, or crawler (and why you should) (stytch.com)

1

Stytch now supports Web Bot Auth for bots and AI agents to identify themselves (stytch.com)

3

In 2014, a random Slack user (me) picked Cmd-K shortcut for quick switcher (ux.stackexchange.com)

1

Image transcription humbled me, plus thoughts on the bitter lesson (digitalseams.com)

1

The Collapse of Coliving Operators, and Why the Solution Is Upstream (fightingxentropy.substack.com)

5

Tell HN: Phishing campaign claiming to be GitHub Developer Fund

2

DX Is Joining Atlassian (getdx.com)

4

How to use AI without becoming stupid (commoncog.com)

4

Rolling Stone, Billboard Owner Penske Sues Google over AI Overviews (reuters.com)

1

Image descriptions (alt text) on Bluesky (digitalseams.com)

2

Show HN: A livestream of all image descriptions (alt text) on Bluesky (bobbiec.github.io)

2

A CSS-only time progress bar to use in Markdown / GitHub Pages (christianheilmann.com)

1

if you meet the singaporean on the road (substack.com)

1

Contractor Kabuki (bobbiechen.com)

3

The Gypsy document editor from Xerox PARC: celebrating 50 years (digitalseams.com)

1

Designing AI tools that support critical thinking (vaughntan.org)

1

Interfaces for Representing Uncertainty (digitalseams.com)

5

Death to Bullshit (deathtobullshit.com)

3

The Cruel Side of Optimism (haleynahman.substack.com)

1

Kagan Says She Was Impressed by AI Bot Claude's Legal Analysis (bloomberglaw.com)

3

Realizing we needed two sorts of alerts for our temperature monitoring (utcc.utoronto.ca)

1

IsAgent: understand and support AI agents using your site (stytch.com)

5

Show HN: IsAgent – Detect agents like ChatGPT Agent on your website (isagent.dev)

1

Interfaces for representing uncertainty (digitalseams.com)

12

Security is a Renewals Problem: How to negotiate in vendor renewals (securityis.substack.com)

2

What birdsong and back ends can teach us about magic (digitalseams.com)

1

What birdsong and back ends can teach us about magic (digitalseams.com)

4

India bars Jane Street from securities market, citing stock index manipulation (reuters.com)

3

Bademails.org: simple tool to check for "throwaway" emails (bademails.org)

2

Why do Sublime Text and VS Code use Ctrl-Shift-P for the command bar? (digitalseams.com)

2

GPT4Free: "educational project" for free LLM inference from various services (github.com/xtekky)

111

The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end (digitalseams.com)

4

Portable EPUBs (2024) (willcrichton.net)

3

The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end (digitalseams.com)

1

Tying Yourself to the Mast (usefulfictions.substack.com)

2

Bears, mice, and moles aren't enough: a better approach for preventing fraud (stytch.com)

1

Skip the A/B Test (digitalseams.com)

3

The dial-up modem lives on, in office meeting rooms (digitalseams.com)