Pleopods Weekly #16 — June 26, 2026

This Week on Lobste.rs

Trending topics: practices release programming games nix

1. Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux FLOSS Drivers hardware linux

submitted by FedericoSchonborn — 160 points (+141 this week) — 34 comments

The catch is real: competing tablet makers won't open their specs to Linux drivers because the infrastructure is branded "Wacom," so they see it as handing specifications to their largest competitor, even though the specs are trivially extractable anyway.

2. Pledging Another $400,000 to the Zig Software Foundation zig

submitted by vpol — 156 points (+126 this week) — 21 comments

Mitchell Hashimoto is putting another $400k into Zig (on top of $700k already given), backing the project's maintainership model and no-LLM policy despite using AI heavily in his own work—a useful counterpoint to the binary thinking that often surrounds these debates.

3. What are your Favorite Lobste.rs Comments? ask programming

submitted by veqq — 161 points (+116 this week) — 32 comments

A thread mining Lobsters comments for favorites — a surprisingly effective look at what the community actually cares about, from cynical takes on Cloudflare to battle-tested technical advice to direct criticism of industry practices.

4. help i accidentally a wigglegram programming

submitted by winter — 146 points (+113 this week) — 33 comments

The author reverse-engineered Apple's iCloud API to build a tool that hunts for accidental wigglegrams—those rapid-fire burst shots that naturally create 3D depth when flickered—by fingerprinting image similarity. Now you can scan your entire photo library automatically.

5. In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words historical

submitted by abareplace — 119 points (+106 this week) — 10 comments

Tony Krueger made Word's spell checker run in the background instead of blocking your work, then drew red squiggles under mistakes as he found them — a small usability win that became the standard everywhere and earned him a shout-out from Penn Jillette in a theater full of people.

6. Chesterton's middle finger practices

submitted by carlana — 107 points (+103 this week) — 44 comments

A developer argues that abandoning commit messages entirely after 13 years is less laziness than active sabotage of the next person who has to untangle the code.

7. OCaml 5.5.0 released compilers ml release

submitted by shonfeder — 93 points (+92 this week) — 2 comments

Module-dependent functions, relocatable compiler installations, and higher-rank polymorphism without record boilerplate — OCaml 5.5.0 adds real relief for functor-heavy code and polymorphic patterns, plus 60 new stdlib functions and GC tuning knobs.

8. Godot 4.7: Lights, Camera, Action games release

submitted by joshsharp — 87 points (+85 this week) — 5 comments

Godot 4.7 adds HDR output, inline shader preview, rectangular area lights for soft shadows, and a simpler drawable texture API — incremental but genuinely useful polish across rendering and the editor after three years of post-launch work.

9. One year with Codeberg nix

submitted by untrusem — 91 points (+74 this week) — 38 comments

A year into Codeberg, GNU Guix shares concrete numbers on whether moving from email-based patches to pull requests actually broadened their contributor base — and describes the harder problem they didn't anticipate, continuous integration for PRs.

10. Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in and they’re not good vibecoding

submitted by jaypatelani — 92 points (+67 this week) — 62 comments

Polish endoscopists' adenoma detection rates dropped from 28.4% to 22.4% after deploying an AI flagging tool, a cautionary result for any field where automation might erode practiced skill. The question of whether this deskilling sticks or reverses if the tool is removed goes unanswered here.

11. Is anyone still using Emacs? emacs

submitted by jmmv — 78 points (+66 this week) — 66 comments

The real appeal isn't that Emacs survives—it's that modern infrastructure (LSP, tree-sitter, SSH in VSCode) made the old editor competitive again, and Doom Emacs wrapped it all in a usable default config so you don't inherit someone else's 30-year-old init.el.

12. The Joy and Power of Understanding practices

submitted by BinaryIgor — 65 points (+64 this week) — 19 comments

The author argues that skipping deep understanding—easy now with LLMs—trades short-term speed for long-term dependence, and the payoff only works if you're honest about what you actually know versus what you're just using.

13. Bevy 0.19 games release

submitted by videah — 81 points (+63 this week) — 9 comments

Bevy's new scene system replaces boilerplate entity spawning with macro syntax that handles optional fields and inline relationships; the asset loader ships later, but the code-first approach works now.

14. UK Wikipedia Workers seek union recognition practices

submitted by theresnotime — 70 points (+62 this week) — 10 comments

Wikipedia's UK staff are seeking union recognition over what they see as a breakdown in transparency and trust following recent leadership changes at the Wikimedia Foundation—marking the first unionization push in the organization's history.

15. What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000 design osdev

submitted by luke8086 — 76 points (+59 this week) — 44 comments

Windows 2000's 3D bevels, contrasting colors, and permanent scrollbars made it obvious what you could interact with—design choices that flat modern interfaces have largely abandoned, forcing users to hunt for clickable elements.

16. The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows law

submitted by UkiahSmith — 68 points (+56 this week) — 5 comments

An unauthorized fan site republished Koenig's entire Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows with AI art and affiliate links, then SEO-gamed its way to ranking above the official site and appearing as canonical in LLM outputs — a neat case study in how the current web reward structure punishes creators.

17. I can haz smoller NixOS ISOs? nix performance

submitted by natkr — 62 points (+56 this week) — 18 comments

The author shrinks a NixOS ISO from 458MB by tracing the dependency graph and cutting unnecessary packages—disabling Nix itself saves 74MB, but the real gains come from finding and removing what pulled in Boost and other bloat in the first place.

18. The Future of the Con Is Already Here, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed - In Pursuit of Laziness ai security

submitted by Manishearth — 80 points (+51 this week) — 39 comments

LLMs make personalized scams cheap and scalable—the kind of targeted social engineering that used to require a criminal operation now runs on an API call, so the old assumption that you're safe from sophisticated fraud just expired.

19. Apple Internals: Swift in the Kernel osdev swift

submitted by heavyrain266 — 64 points (+51 this week) — 5 comments

Apple's letting you write kernel extensions in Swift now through KernelKit, which assigns Swift its own Mach-O ID and uses a stripped-down embedded runtime (~2.4KB) instead of dragging in full dylib dependencies—they're starting with pthread and libm as proof of concept.

20. Keeping the Web Open and Private in the Bot Era browsers cryptography web

submitted by galadran — 57 points (+49 this week) — 37 comments

Mozilla and Cloudflare are building a system that lets websites verify you're human without collecting your IP or fingerprinting you—solving the catch-22 where privacy tech makes bot detection harder, pushing sites toward more CAPTCHAs instead.

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