Pleopods Weekly #24 — August 21, 2026

This Week on Lobste.rs

Trending topics: vibecoding web browsers assembly hardware

1. HTML Can Do That web

submitted by abhin4v — 202 points (+192 this week) — 53 comments

HTML has gained enough native features that you can now build popovers, dialogs, accordions, and form inputs without reaching for JavaScript—though browser support is still patchy enough that the article's honest caveats about which implementations are production-ready matter more than the feature list itself.

2. Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin browsers

submitted by tusharhero — 206 points (+188 this week) — 56 comments

Chromium's shift to Manifest V3 has effectively locked out uBlock Origin's full feature set everywhere except Firefox, leaving Chrome, Edge, and Safari users stuck with Lite or built-in alternatives that don't match the original's capabilities.

3. I thought I was building a C replacement. I was wrong c programming

submitted by clerno — 116 points (+100 this week) — 106 comments

The author argues C3 isn't a C replacement at all—it's built for the application-development niche that C occupied before OO languages arrived, and calling it a "C alternative" obscures that entirely different purpose.

4. Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good vibecoding

submitted by robinheghan — 111 points (+99 this week) — 91 comments

A maintainer's experience switching to Bun reveals a messier reality: the Rust rewrite now has 5,000+ unreviewed PRs, deadlines slip constantly, and the code is riddled with unsafe blocks—undercutting the memory-safety argument that drove the Zig-to-Rust pivot.

5. python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird python

submitted by seb — 105 points (+85 this week) — 16 comments

Python's six "constants" treat edge cases wildly differently: True/False/None are keywords (can't be accessed as attributes), debug can't be reassigned, and Ellipsis/NotImplemented are shadowing-vulnerable builtins with inconsistent syntax workarounds—a legacy mess that trips up anyone who digs into Python's internals.

6. RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better assembly compilers

submitted by dmitrygr — 85 points (+82 this week) — 96 comments

RISC-V's modularity creates real tradeoffs: interrupt handling takes 44 cycles versus ARM's 27, compressed instructions pack arbitrary restrictions that waste bits, and vendors keep adding custom extensions just to match decade-old ARM chips.

7. How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots ios

submitted by mt — 91 points (+76 this week) — 10 comments

Bluesky is using iOS's secure text entry API—designed to hide passwords during screenshots—to swap their Follow button for a logo, leveraging the fact that the OS blanks those fields when you capture the screen.

8. Every Fucking Website satire vibecoding web

submitted by op — 105 points (+74 this week) — 62 comments

A developer tears down the absurd conventions of SaaS marketing—serif typography, fake social proof, broken buttons—and explains why these bad patterns still work.

9. Plain Text Accounting is Pretty Cool finance

submitted by abnercoimbre — 95 points (+74 this week) — 40 comments

The author abandoned three subscription services for hledger, a plaintext accounting tool, after hitting walls with account connectivity and 401(k) tracking—and discovered that manual entry gets tolerable once you automate reports and handle multi-currency splits without vendor lock-in.

10. What software do you use daily in 2026? ask practices

submitted by r1w1s1 — 82 points (+72 this week) — 157 comments

A developer shares what's in their actual toolkit in 2026 — Emacs gets the mentions, but the thread's real value is in the smaller tools (direnv, jujutsu, fq, chafa) that solve specific problems, plus the Hister dev appearing to act on feedback immediately.

11. Why I remain a skeptic vibecoding

submitted by jbauer — 76 points (+67 this week) — 125 comments

Four years in, the author can't find evidence that LLMs have actually made software better, cheaper, or more secure — studies claiming productivity gains either measure the wrong thing or use tiny sample sizes, and most generated PRs still aren't worth merging.

12. Mastodon 5.0: Laying the foundation design web

submitted by consteval — 71 points (+67 this week) — 20 comments

Mastodon 5.0 restructures its composer UI and visibility controls based on actual user confusion: the sidebar composer moves to the main interface, "private mention" becomes the clearer "message" with its own tool, and "lists" gets promoted to navigation as "custom feeds" since most people didn't know the feature existed.

13. Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner art

submitted by polywolf — 69 points (+67 this week) — 1 comments

Uses a moving train or ferry as a makeshift scanner—capturing thin vertical slices of scenery thousands of times per second, then stitching them into one ultra-wide image. The trick is compensating for speed variations; do that right and you get surprisingly clean results.

14. A faster way to calculate the day-of-the-week assembly c++ math performance

submitted by benjoffe — 77 points (+61 this week) — 8 comments

Beats compiler output on weekday calculation by 3–6x using bit manipulation tricks that work over the full 32-bit range — and shows how to compute ISO format (1–7) with zero speed penalty by tweaking constants.

15. Fixing a bricked AMD 7040 series Framework 13” laptop with $20 tools hardware

submitted by LolPython — 64 points (+60 this week) — 12 comments

Framework's support team left a customer with a bricked laptop after a failed BIOS update, then stonewalled until warranty expired before offering an expensive replacement — suggesting this isn't an isolated incident they're rushing to fix.

16. A Third World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better" a11y culture hardware

submitted by Corbin — 75 points (+59 this week) — 17 comments

Grinberg argues RISC-V is a failed compromise between high and low-end performance, but misses the point: for engineers in regions outside the US and Europe, the ability to build competitive chips at low cost isn't a bonus feature—it's the difference between viability and irrelevance, and RISC-V actually works for both.

17. Rethinking Database Programming databases elm plt

submitted by janiczek — 77 points (+57 this week) — 33 comments

SQL's dominance has locked us into false choices: bare queries versus full ORMs. The author argues there's unexplored middle ground—writing actual composable code that sits between them.

18. I'm done using AI rant vibecoding

submitted by untrusem — 137 points (+56 this week) — 78 comments

A 20-year programmer explains why he ditched LLM coding tools after a year: they eroded his problem-solving instincts, made debugging harder, and left him feeling like he was running errands rather than building things.

19. How Tailscale helped find the SQLite WAL-Reset bug databases

submitted by pushcx — 133 points (+55 this week) — 18 comments

Tailscale debugged a production SQLite corruption bug through six months of detective work: the team had to involve SQLite's maintainers, collect live telemetry across 19 incidents, and methodically eliminate theories about concurrency and memory before pinpointing the root cause in SQLite's WAL-Reset logic.

20. How I browse the Web with uBlock (Hard Mode) browsers privacy

submitted by untrusem — 79 points (+55 this week) — 24 comments

The author runs uBlock Origin in "hard mode," blocking all third-party requests by default and selectively unblocking only what each site needs. They walk through the specific filter lists, rules, and debugging workflow to make it practical.

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