2025-11-30 08:00:00
Hey there! Winter has arrived here in Italy. We’ve had our first snow, not enough to paint the city white yet but the mountains are already very picturesque.
As I try to get used to this kind of temperature at this part of the year (I was in Brazil until September, where it’s summer right now), I took some time to do some website expansions!
First, I gave Cool Links a new home and wrote about it here. Basically there’s now a feed of links that show up as I save them during the month. And you can filter them too!
Second, I launched a new page for photos I take. I’ve been posting a few of the ones I’m the most proud of. No professional work here - just me with a smartphone and landscapes that do all the work.
Third, I redesigned the navigation on the site itself (at least on desktop). I moved the header navbar to the left, since the top bar was getting too crowded. I like side navs and am pretty happy with the result.
Fourth, I posted my Default Apps update for 2025! Had way more changes this year compared to the last.
Oh, and for the cool links of the month… a lot of CSS-related ones, but not only that. Enjoy!
The perils of doors in gamedev, by Tom Forsyth
This Mastodon thread is an amazing tale about game development, physics and time-traveling bugs.
Introducing SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection, by Kagi Search
This is a really cool initiative! Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year and I’m really happy with how they’re aiming to stop AI slop from taking over their (still great) search results.
In my experience, their results are miles ahead of Google’s, Bing’s or whatever other search engine out there, partly because of their algorithm prioritizes good sites, partly because they allow you to prioritize/deprioritize/block the sites you want.
But a good algorithm only goes so far and with the amount of AI slop hitting the web every day, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid them. Now Kagi users can report certain articles as AI-generated so other users can know that beforehand and not click on them, or even block their domains.
LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful , by Vladimir Prelovac
… wow. This is an amazing article that goes a bit into how LLMs work (is an easy-to-understand way), how flawed they are, and how useful they can be. Or dangerous.
Plus, the nurse and surgeon examples are hilarious.
The birth & death of search engine optimization, by Xe Iaso
This article walks through how the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was born, how it inevitably became broken and how easy it is to “win” it, as long as your content is made up and not actual real information.
Conditional Border Radius In CSS, by Ahmad Shadeed
This is a really cool trick. Turns out that it’s possible, with pure CSS, to have border-radius be applied conditionally.
The given example is a perfect one: sometimes we have cards with rounded corners that look good on their own, but if you’re on mobile and have less space and want the cards to take up the full page width, the rounded corners look awful. You can technically write breakpoints for that, but with clamp you can make the border-radius disappear if the card is too close to the viewport edges!
Brand New Layouts with CSS Subgrid, by Josh Comeau
This is the first article that made me actually understand the use cases for CSS subgrid. I’m still not fully convinced I’m gonna use them often, but it’s nice to understand what problems they solve.
Solved By Modern CSS: Section Layout, by Ahmad Shadeed
In this awesome post, Ahmad walks through all the possibilities modern CSS offers when building a section layout.
I knew about and have used some of those in the past, but that tip about display: contents was amazing! Never thought of using it like that.
You Don’t Need Animations, by Emil Kowalski
Great and to-the-point article with practical examples of when to use (or not use) animations properly in UIs.
I love me some whooshy animations, but they can be a pain in the ass when overused or when used in the wrong moment.
Just use a button, by Chris Ferdinandi
The “div vs button” debate was never really a debate because one of the sides is objectively wrong, but this is still a good post to remind you of why it was never a debate in the first place.
Is software getting worse? - Stack Overflow, by Isaac Lyman
This article has been sitting in my “Read Later” queue for almost 2 years 😳
It is an interesting article for sure, speaking about why speed and optimization has become such a rare thing in software development.
The second part of it, though, has kinda aged like milk, sadly. Developers no longer have a lot of leverage on their jobs, and we now live in a world where the thought of having no human developers involved at all in the code I’m running is real and frankly terrifying.
I’m hopeful companies will eventually figure out that AI-generated crap is still crap when the bubble bursts, but until then, there’s a lot of damage to be done.
Thanks for reading once again, and see you next month!
2025-11-28 08:00:00
Brand New Layouts with CSS Subgrid, by Josh Comeau
This is the first article that made me actually understand the use cases for CSS subgrid. I’m still not fully convinced I’m gonna use them often, but it’s nice to understand what problems they solve.
2025-11-27 20:00:00
Lies of P
2023, Neowiz
My rating: I like it
Amazing game, probably the best souslike that’s not made by From Software.
Lies of P is a dark retelling of Pinocchio, and the Belle Epoque with Puppets setting really grows on you. At some point it goes bonkers with that and it’s awesome. The Bloodborne inspiration is obvious and very welcome.
The final third of the game suffers from a steep difficulty wall, but doesn’t ruin it. There’s a difficulty setting that can help if a boss gets too difficult.
2025-11-27 00:45:25
Following the end-of-year tradition, here is an updated list of the apps I choose to use for the vast majority of my daily activities on my Mac and iPhone.
Apps that are new compared to last year are marked with the ✨ emoji.
2025-11-24 22:50:57
First snow of the season
Photo taken on Fri, 21 Nov 2025
The snow made the Resegone Mountain even more picturesque than usual.
2025-11-24 20:57:48
LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful , by Vladimir Prelovac
… wow. This is an amazing article that goes a bit into how LLMs work (is an easy-to-understand way), how flawed they are, and how useful they can be. Or dangerous.
Plus, the nurse and surgeon examples are hilarious.
