energy_amplifier_by_vlda.wsz via the Winamp Skin Museum

You may be tempted to roll your eyes and say that this was obvious, but there is a substantive difference between pointing out there is a slippery slope and having solid evidence that Ring's CEO is planning to expand Search Party beyond lost pets. Kudos to 404 Media.

Flagrant Llama Abuse - Penny Arcade Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

New Penny Arcade for your Wednesday!
www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/0...

Made by the great @luigihann.bsky.social

There’s a lawsuit against WhatsApp making the rounds today, claiming that Meta has access to plaintext. I see nothing in there that’s compelling; the whole thing sounds like a fishing expedition.

GraphQLConf 2026: Call for Papers GraphQLConf 2026, the official GraphQL conference brought to you by the GraphQL Foundation, brings the entire GraphQL community together to learn, eng...

🎤 The GraphQLConf CFP is open!

Got a GraphQL idea or story to share?

Join us May 6 - 7 at Meta HQ in Menlo Park.

Submit your talk 👇
sessionize.com/graphqlconf...

This blog has secrets / Jordan Eldredge Shh… this blog has secret features

New blog post:

jordaneldredge.com/secrets/

New blog post:

jordaneldredge.com/aliasing-ali...

Markdown is a great for encodeing test snapshots / Jordan Eldredge Making the case for encoding test snapshots as markdown

New blog post:

jordaneldredge.com/markdown-sna...

I know you’re right, and yet it feels crazy to think about the person/people working on it and how many times they refreshed and saw all those flashes without getting annoyed enough to fix it 😅

Setting Chrome to mimic a 3G network it's even worse! 8 distinct layouts.

When I saw it in real time I thought it was some kind of crazy attempt to animate the player in

What the heck is going on with Spotify's embedded player that it flashes through no fewer than six different layouts as it loads?

From the confession community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the confession community

I reached out to the author of this viral Reddit post thinking there might be a story in it. He sent me an employee badge that Gemini flagged as being AI-generated and supporting documents that I suspect were also generated by AI. Be careful out there folks!

www.reddit.com/r/confession...

- ✅ Transcendent melodic perfection - ✅ Ultimate expressive culmination - ✅ Masterful use of appoggiaturas and grace notes - ✅ Perfect voice leading throughout - ✅ Publication-quality sophistication

And its grades for the final version:

* Voice Leading Evolution: Bach-level sophistication
* Harmonic Sophistication: Transcendent melodic expression
* Hierarchy of Priorities: Transcendent artistryd

A simple Bach chorale

Bach choral with many ordainments and flourishes

Remembering the time a few months ago where I asked Claude to write a Bach chorale using LilyPond and then do 10 iterations of critical feedback and improvements. It ended up with this hilarious monstrosity.

The reviews it gave the final draft were quite impressive...

Happy New Year 🎉

New year, new resolutions: fewer null checks, clearer error handling, and getting nullability right in GraphQL.

Let's see how far we get this year.

In particular, the stuff in this file that calls platform APIs: github.com/captbaritone...

Running the codebase locally might be a pain in the butt. But if you can get a working example of calling the tumbler api with exactly the stuff we’ll need, and instructions to get the right keys, I can probably do the rest.

Bluesky bot · captbaritone/webamp@e5ed88c

Sounds great. Could probably use this as a guide: github.com/captbaritone...

Want to stop by our Discord?

Yay personal websites!

screenshot

deployed big update to rsc-playground.pages.dev

lots of bugfixes and a few new examples.

this basically works now! i'll open source a bit later

Spike Jones Presents a Xmas Spectacular / Jordan Eldredge My favorite Christmas album

Tis the season for me to remind you that the Spike Jones Xmas Spectacular is the best Christmas album: jordaneldredge.com/spike-jones-...

I updated grats.capt.dev internal snapshot tests to serialize using markdown and the result is so nice! Snapshot output now has syntax highlighting and nice readable headings showing what each bit of the output means.

x.com/panchito built a _really_ slick looking Github file viewer clone that fully uses RSCs and new React features, as well as making smart use of modern CSS. Great writeup on the implementation:

wtbb.vercel.app

I tried browsing the React repo example and it's _fast_! Really impressive!

Server Components is not really related to SSR. I like to think of Server Components as componentized BFF ("backend for frontend") layer. Each piece of UI has some associated "API" with it (whether REST endpoints, GraphQL, RPC, or what have you). Server Components let you express the dependency between the "backend piece" and the "frontend piece" as an import, instead of as a `fetch` (client calling server) or a <script> (server calling client). You can still have an API layer of course, but this gives you a syntactical way to express that there's a piece of backend that prepares data for this piece of frontend. This resolves tensions between evolving both sides: the each piece of backend always prepares the exact data the corresponding piece of frontend needs because they're literally bound by a function call (or rather JSX). This also lets you load data as granularly as you want without blocking (very nice when you have a low-latency data layer). Of course you can still have a traditional REST API if you want. But you can also have UI-specific server computation in the middle. There's inherent tension between the data needed to display the UI (a view model) and the way the data is stored (database model); RSC gives you a place to put UI-specific logic that should execute on the backend but keeps composability benefits of components.

maybe not the best moment for it but i finally condensed my “why react server components” into a short blurb that does well on HN

Critical Security Vulnerability in React Server Components – React The library for web and native user interfaces

react.dev/blog/2025/12...

useStore by captbaritone · Pull Request #1 · captbaritone/react useStore Implementation Notes This is a prototype implementation of a createStore function and useStore hook for React, which allows components to subscribe to external data stores. It is based on ...

More recently I've started exploring how we might implement such an API in React to move that conversation forward a bit. You can see that progress here: github.com/captbaritone...

I've been working on a userland implementation to see how far we can get there (pretty far, but not to something perfect). I've been using that to try to get some early feedback on the viability of the API shape with some community members. github.com/thejustinwal...