Didn't have time to do one this year but I'm enjoying this year's April Cools posts!

www.aprilcools.club

Probably I'd start by not polluting public platforms with useless AI spam in hopes of getting engagement.

Shame on you, reported.

Rule #23: Be inefficient on purpose Learn to be time rich instead of time poor

a sad, warped, work ethic that only values capitalistic production. That person in the silly video was having fun. How often do we do that? Isn’t that the goal of all the work we do? To “make time” to, you know, enjoy life?"

rulestolive.substack.com/p/rule-23-be...

Preach @berkun.bsky.social -

"Our culture rewards us with status for never having time for things. We admire busy... When we see a silly video on social media, we often judge the creator by saying, “Well, that’s someone with too much time on their hands.”

This is just Puritanical bullshit;

In case you missed it, I converted my talk into a blog post!

digitalseams.com/blog/phantom...

Movie theater. Serena stands at the speaker podium. The giant screen shows a title slide: what happened to the lock icon? bsides sf 2026 - serena chen

Great talk!

BSides The Musical (San Francisco 2026) The Phantoms of the Fraudpera: An Overview of Anti-Detection Tooling Bobbie Chen / bobbie@digitalseams.com / @bobbiechen.com (Bluesky)

A preview of my talk at #BSidesSF tomorrow! Looking forward to it :)

Pretzels are a good snack of last resort, something that you won't eat normally so it'll be there when all other options are gone

Disco Elysium screenshot RHETORIC [Heroic: Failure| - Alright, here we go. We're devoting all your available brain cells to coming up with a question about communism. Scratch that, to coming up with the question about communism, the alpha and omega of communism questions, and that question is: 1. - (Whisper.) "Are tech employees bourgeois?" 2. - Oh god, that's bad. Surely I can think of something better.

Happy birthday week!

Don't Get Distracted I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

Thinking about this 2017 talk from @calebhearth.com today: Don't Get Distracted.

calebhearth.com/dont-get-dis...

New sparkling water flavor !

Pavlok is a wrist band that gives you electric shocks by remote control: “I have been biting my nails for 25 years…I shocked myself every time I bit my nails… my husband had a good time shocking me when he caught me biting my nails… this helped with … quitting nail.” Those ellipses… doing a lot of work… on… the “how it works” page. Also, husband. You know that friend who won’t eat Taco Bell anymore after she got a terrible case of food poisoning? That’s how it works: "That’s aversive conditioning. We’ll help you use it to your advantage." Well why not. The wrist band also has an alarm clock function.

I once playtested my friend's video game, which used the Pavlok to shock you when you get hit.

I got shocked a lot (they told me I was by far the worst playtester). It was a VR game, and I didn't realize I could look around.

(Image via @genmon.fyi: interconnected.org/home/2026/02...)

Corporations demand perfection from workers, but AI gets unlimited slack. LLM users have bottomless patience for inconsistent tools, and no grace left for their colleagues. What if we could flip it around?

"Today, they are choosing to invest this positive energy into a synthetic slop extruder. But tomorrow, they could invest it into their fellow human beings, if they chose to do so."

productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/corporatio...

Corporations demand perfection from workers, but AI gets unlimited slack. LLM users have bottomless patience for inconsistent tools, and no grace left for their colleagues. What if we could flip it around?

From the excellent @spavel.bsky.social:

"The LLM experiment has taught us one thing: people are willing to tolerate error, explain themselves, collaborate, trust."

You're absolutely right!

Cistercian Numeral Font A font that renders numbers as medieval Cistercian numerals

Demo site: bobbiec.github.io/cistercian-f...

Making a font with 9,999 ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals — Digital Seams As the title implies, I just created a font that displays numbers in a compact format used by Cistercian monks . You can play with it on my demo site here :

You know what's better than a font with 9,998 ligatures?

digitalseams.com/blog/making-...

It's hard to imagine China needing to ban Tesla from the market considering the dominance of BYD and other EV brands there already.

New startup idea

I haven't seen it, but it would be similar to how "honeypot" hidden form fields are used to detect dumb bots.

In general I think people are sensitive to false positives and conversion rate enough that they wouldn't serve a fake captcha unless it was already suspicious ("tarpits")

We only use 33% of the traffic light, wake up sheeple

An app can be a home-cooked meal I made a messaging app for my family and my family only.

I've seen "homecooked apps", via Robin Sloan www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-c...

During his study in 1939, Dantzig solved two unproven statistical theorems due to a misunderstanding. Near the beginning of a class, Professor Spława-Neyman wrote two problems on the blackboard. Dantzig arrived late and assumed that they were a homework assignment. According to Dantzig, they "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for both problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.[4][6] Six weeks later, an excited Spława-Neyman eagerly told him that the "homework" problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.[2][4] He had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal.[7] From a Wikipedia screenshot

George Dantzig core: "seemed to be a little harder than usual"

Alternate-world person-tool etymology:

Protractor used to be someone who made meetings drag on longer by considering new angles (some say this role still exists today)

digitalseams.com/blog/compute...

Stepped reckoner - Wikipedia

in contrast to its modern casual meaning of "I guess".

In dictionaries from the 17th century you'd see Computer defined as "Reckoner", like Leibniz's "Stepped Reckoner" calculator

Wow, that's unexpected

Anti vagueposting: Old French randir "to run fast" -> with great random "at great speed, with impetuousity" -> random "haphazard, lacking purpose"

Just recently in blog research I learned "reckon" used to mean "calculate or compute" with financial or numerical precision,

Everyone is a PM now (derogatory)

How about you?

I really enjoyed seeing the band Couch live for the third time! They are just such great performers.