Cool Links Vol. 25: July, 2026

Hey there! I hope July has treated you well. It's been a busy month on my end, with project launches at work and a bunch of fun outings on the weekends. The heatwaves gave us a break in July, so we were able to go out and enjoy the scenery a bit (though it seems like August is going to be hot). I've taken a few photos of those outings and put them in my photography page.

Here on the blog, I wrote about Styling Prose with CSS, something that had been sitting on my drafts for a while. I also posted some Quick Reviews of stuff I've watched, like The Sopranos and two amazing thrillers about obsession. As a reminder, you can see everything I post on my Archive page (including the Cool Links!), with hopefully enough filters to satisfy your exploration needs ;)

Without further ado, let's see the cool links I've collected this month:

Fun

OverpAId — Fire Your CEO. Hire The Future.

OverpAId is not coming for the people who do the actual work. It is coming, with extreme prejudice, for exactly one category of job: the one that spent the last forty years insisting everyone else's job was replaceable.

This is fantastic.

Tech

I Could've Rickrolled the Entire FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID., by BobDaHacker

Wow! This is a mistake I’d probably have done on my first semester in college. Not when working for FIFA.

Though I do wonder if real humans wrote that code before the fix. My guess is no.

I gotta say this person has a lot of self-control.

Deep Read

Midwinter, by Iris Meredith

Really good article about literal and metaphorical midwinters and (tech) work.

AI

How AI Poisons Creativity, by The Art of Storytelling

There will be at many points in your creative process opportunities to bypass the struggle of working and learning, but availing yourself of those shortcuts will gradually undermine your work in subtle ways that you cannot foresee.

So sure, go ahead and use generative fill to clean up your image. No one's watching. I won't tell anyone and no one will ever know. But you will pay a very small price in relieving yourself from the duty of learning some new Photoshop skills. You might not need those skills in this precise moment, but as you grow into your craft, those skills might come in handy in other ways that you do not presently anticipate.

While focused on people who do creative work, this video easily applies to everyone. It's so easy to fall into the trap of letting the sparkles do something for you, and just as easy to prevent yourself from learning and improving because of that.

Even as someone who tries to limit and police my own usage of AI tools, I could see myself in a lot of these examples. Process isn't only important to creative work; it's important to our own personal development. AI can produce generic output that anyone else could, but only you, with your unique combination of skills and experiences accumulated over the years, can produce something unique.

Dev

Time-based background colour transitions with Temporal and CSS color-mix, by Sophie Koonin

Don't let the title turn you off in case these words mean nothing to you — Sophie's website is a joy to open every time, with multiple fun themes to choose from. And she added a new dynamic element to one of them, making the background reflect the sky of the current time of day.

She noted it was hard to get to this result, but reading it, it feels pretty simple to understand. Which is the mark of a good developer and writer.

Abject Praise, by Alex Russell

There's hardly a working day in which Safari doesn't make my life harder. I'm not the only one who feels like that. Alex Russell goes in great detail on how shitty the situation of Apple's browser is especially because they block any sort of competition in their main platform.

Apple is consistently out-engineered and out-invested by a non-profit with 1/40th the web-derived revenue.

These large, persistent gaps matter to the mobile and web ecosystems because Apple is unique in denying access to more capable, less-buggy engines and actively erecting unlawful barriers to choice when forced by legislation to enable it.

Getting Started with Anchor Positioning, by Josh W. Comeau

Another amazing Josh Comeau post that explains a new concept in a super easy to understand manner and makes me wanna try it out right now? Yes please.

The last time I saw the anchor positioning API, it looked kinda intimidating. Now it sounds so simple! I know there was work on the browser standards side to simplify it, so kudos to them for arriving at what seems to be a really sensible API.

Wrapping up

Next month is gonna be my first birthday ever during the summer! August has always been the worst month, weather-wise, back home, so the thought of it not being freezing and rainy on my birthday is a bit confusing. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed the links and see you next month!