Fool Me Twice: When an API Isn’t the Business I’m old enough to remember days when lots of businesses were built on open APIs of the likes of Twitter just to be destroyed in a day when…

Me: builds on Spotify’s API. Ready to launch. Spotify: lol no. blog.ailon.org/full-me-twic...

Introducing TG Translator: Because Common Translator Apps Are So 2008 If you only know one language, you probably don’t notice it. But if you know two or more and interact with a couple more, you would agree…

Introducing TG Translator: Because Common Translator Apps Are So 2008 blog.ailon.org/introducing-...

Top 21 of 2025

Another year in music. To my own surprise not a single rap track and only minimal amount of rapping in one or two.

Also, not a single BMTH song, but 7(!) that have some BMTH affiliated writer/producer.

Enjoy!

open.spotify.com/playlist/3Di...

Vibecoding Out of Maintenance Many many moons ago my developer-turn-writer friend and I came up with a concept of ZMP (Zero Maintenance Project). The idea is kind of…

Finally, I had an opportunity to do "real vibe coding" on a real project that I most likely just wouldn't touch if it wasn't for AI. Worked out quite well!
blog.ailon.org/vibecoding-o...

An American band quits Spotify because the CEO invested in a defense company, proceeds to pay taxes in the US... Logical. Absolutely logical.

My PC consolidation dilemma (3 to 1-2) was getting on my nerves, so I wrote all of my thoughts down and gave them to several "deep research" AIs.

Perplexity's answer looked the best from both reasoning and a clear final recommendation but... the PC it recommeded doesn't exist 😂

BAD OMENS - Impose (Official Music Video) YouTube video by SUMERIAN

Say what you want about modern music but 30 years ago a popular heavy band couldn't release a track like this www.youtube.com/watch?v=pebU...

Weird thing about working in an English-first company with virtually no native speakers is that your fluency improves with time but your grammar is getting worse. Why bother if you can take shortcuts and there's no one to correct or shame you?

git suddenly stopped working in VS Code on the Mac. And in the terminal as well. Turns out Xcode got updated and I didn't launch it and as a consequence didn't accept the updated license text. And that broke git throughout the system. WTF?

Hit the speed limit.

Check my birthday present to you here distrokid.com/hyperfollow/...

BopOps Lyrics is live on ProductHunt today! Help me spread the word? www.producthunt.com/products/bop...

BopOps Lyrics: The ultimate tool for writing lyrics to a backing track. | Product Hunt A tool for writing lyrics on top of a backing track. Select your track, define sections, loops sections or arbitrary fragments, adjust line timings, get help from an AI co-writer when stuck.

And we are live on PH! Help me spread the word 😘 www.producthunt.com/products/bop...

A brand-new tool from me - BopOps Lyrics. Write lyrics to a backing track, loop sections, align timings, and get help from a "passive" AI co-writer when you get stuck
lyrics.bopops.com

Sometimes it's depressing how you seem to work and work for months and move almost nowhere. Other times it's amazing what you can build from scratch in just a week.

Thousands of hotels in Europe to sue Booking.com over ‘abusive’ practices Class action lawsuit argues the online travel platform distorted market with ‘best price’ clauses

I wondered how come Booking's prices became worse than direct 9 times out of 10 (including all the Genius Level 3 stuff) over the last year or so. Now I have the answer www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Q: can I use @markerjs.com in my React Native app?
A (yesterday): nope
A (today): yep!

Introducing marker.js for React Native Over the years one of the most frequently asked questions about marker.js was, “Does it work with React Native?”

Introducing marker.js for React Native!
blog.ailon.org/introducing-...

Needed to look something up in my old Foursquare/Swarm checkins and discovered that quite a few of my "friends" there still check in regularly.

I wonder if it's just force of habit or sunk cost fallacy or it really still is the best place to "mark" POIs in time? After all that's why I went there.

DON BROCO - CELLOPHANE (Official Music Video) YouTube video by Don Broco

So good! www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8CE...

I suspect some BS like "cultural differences" would be their excuse, but AirBnB not policing hosts marking studio apartments as "1 bedroom" is a total fail in UX.

It's been like that forever and doesn't get better no matter how fancy their design language got over that period.

Thank you, Google, for popping a confusing Gemini dialog when my dad tried to check his email. You gave me an opportunity to visit my parents when I wasn't planning. #connectingpeople

Heads of State is a fun mindless movie. It's funny though, how a russian director made sure that all episodic characters speak perfect russian but couldn't care less that Belarus is not on the way from London to Warsaw and that there are literally zero mountains there.

Lo-files Bring Me The Horizon · Album · 2025 · 23 songs

The "regular" BMTH works fine as the background work music for me. But if you need something more mellow, they have you covered now open.spotify.com/album/34pF0w...

nope - that's exactly the point. People whine about Windows and a mix of hardware all the time, but if it's a Mac you are automatically "using it wrong" if something didn't come from Apple.

Random thought on Macs/macOS: every time it craps out and you want to complain, you realize that some part of your setup is not from Apple, and you don't have a right to whine, bitch! /s

Alan's list of random firsts:
...
134. Drive a Chinese car ✅

I understand that italians have dibs on "coffee fashion" but maybe at least for the hotel staff it wouldn't hurt to learn (or rather admit?) that when a stupid foreigner asks for latte they mean coffee and not just milk?

Hotel manager showing us the premises of a posh Italian hotel: please keep in mind that there's a dress code for the restaurant - no shorts, flip-flops, etc.
Me: even for breakfast?
She: yes, please wear pants
Me: OK
Breakfast: 80% of men wearing shorts, including swim trunks 🤔

A weird thing for a Windows person on macOS is that apps don't close when you close their windows. OK, fine. A different paradigm. But... why the F does the built-in Weather app close when you close its window!?

These shoes are quite likely the most comfortable walking shoes I ever owned. Also the hardest to put on. Strained my wrist putting my shoes on yesterday 😅