This is a very interesting read that compares the internet’s development to that of the automobile, but I also want to highlight the design of the article itself. So good 🤌
Cool Links
Cool links are a collection of interesting things I find around the web. They can range from fun dumb websites to deep thought-provoking essays, or more commonly something in between. The feed here updates frequently, and I compile everything into a blog post on the last day of each month.

177 links
This is awesome: an entire site dedicated to shoelaces, how to lace, tie or simply learn about them. It even includes the “world’s fastest shoelace knot”, created by the website’s author himself! I gotta try it out.
You might have read before that I love the Catppuccin color theme. It’s the same one I use on this website! I also love using that theme on the apps that allow me to, like Obsidian, VS Code and Vivaldi.
To match all of that, I need some wallpapers that fit the palette too. And I just came across this tool that automatically adapts the color palette of any image you upload to a theme of your choice! I’ve had good results with it so far. Definitely makes my desktop look way nicer :)
I usually love these videos that deal with the scale of things, and getting one from MKBHD was a surprise for sure, but a welcome one.
It’s incredible how far technology has come, and it’s a testament of how humans can achieve incredible things when we want to.
Another great page by Neal Agarwal; this one lets you see life in all its different sizes.
This website is so cool! It’s the kind of thing that you’d imagine was a personal website, but it’s actually a marketing page! A marketing team actually sat down and planned this out! I thought no such thing as fun marketing existed. Glad to be proven wrong.
CSS is my favorite language and 2025 was amazing for it! The Chrome team built this page highlighting all the new exciting stuff that happened to CSS this year. I’ve used some of it but sadly still have to wait for other browsers to catch up before doing it on any serious work 😭
I recommend opening this in a Chromium-based browser so you can try it out firsthand, but there are video recordings of the features in case you’re unable to.
Neat little daily browser puzzle game where you use clues to find out who’s a criminal and who’s innocent.
The greatest in-camera effect of all time (video)
Ok, this video is amazing. Corridor Crew recreates the amazing practical effects from the first Lord of the Rings movie (the forced perspective ones with Gandalf and the hobbits), but not only that, there’s amazing storytelling on how it was made, all the cinema history before it, and why it has never been done again since then.
Great post about how clients hire experts to solve a problem, then completely ignore their expertise and try to copy what the big ones do. But they’re not big.
The “f*** off contact page” concept is amazing, too. It’s 100% real and out there, with more and more companies doing it (either intentionally or by just wanting to copy what others do).
Also, Nic Chan’s website is a treasure. It’s already been featured as a cool link here before but I wanted to point it out again. So cool!
Brand New Layouts with CSS Subgrid
This is the first article that made me actually understand the use cases for CSS subgrid. I’m still not fully convinced I’m gonna use them often, but it’s nice to understand what problems they solve.
LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful
… wow. This is an amazing article that goes a bit into how LLMs work (is an easy-to-understand way), how flawed they are, and how useful they can be. Or dangerous.
Plus, the nurse and surgeon examples are hilarious.
The birth & death of search engine optimization
This article walks through how the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was born, how it inevitably became broken and how easy it is to “win” it, as long as your content is made up and not actual real information.
The perils of doors in gamedev
This Mastodon thread is an amazing tale about game development, physics and time-traveling bugs.
Conditional Border Radius In CSS
This is a really cool trick. Turns out that it’s possible, with pure CSS, to have border-radius be applied conditionally.
The given example is a perfect one: sometimes we have cards with rounded corners that look good on their own, but if you’re on mobile and have less space and want the cards to take up the full page width, the rounded corners look awful. You can technically write breakpoints for that, but with clamp you can make the border-radius disappear if the card is too close to the viewport edges!
Solved By Modern CSS: Section Layout
In this awesome post, Ahmad walks through all the possibilities modern CSS offers when building a section layout.
I knew about and have used some of those in the past, but that tip about display: contents was amazing! Never thought of using it like that.
Is software getting worse? - Stack Overflow
This article has been sitting in my “Read Later” queue for almost 2 years 😳
It is an interesting article for sure, speaking about why speed and optimization has become such a rare thing in software development.
The second part of it, though, has kinda aged like milk, sadly. Developers no longer have a lot of leverage on their jobs, and we now live in a world where the thought of having no human developers involved at all in the code I’m running is real and frankly terrifying.
I’m hopeful companies will eventually figure out that AI-generated crap is still crap when the bubble bursts, but until then, there’s a lot of damage to be done.
Great and to-the-point article with practical examples of when to use (or not use) animations properly in UIs.
I love me some whooshy animations, but they can be a pain in the ass when overused or when used in the wrong moment.
Introducing SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection
This is a really cool initiative! Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year and I’m really happy with how they’re aiming to stop AI slop from taking over their (still great) search results.
In my experience, their results are miles ahead of Google’s, Bing’s or whatever other search engine out there, partly because of their algorithm prioritizes good sites, partly because they allow you to prioritize/deprioritize/block the sites you want.
But a good algorithm only goes so far and with the amount of AI slop hitting the web every day, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid them. Now Kagi users can report certain articles as AI-generated so other users can know that beforehand and not click on them, or even block their domains.
The “div vs button” debate was never really a debate because one of the sides is objectively wrong, but this is still a good post to remind you of why it was never a debate in the first place.