The ATM never killed the bank teller
Automating a task doesn't necessarily kill the profession around it. Tellers, radiologists, Klarna, measured developers: what survives beyond the task, and the honest case where everything goes.
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All stories · page 11
IRZ archive, page 11.
Quitting Tailwind by copying it
Eight years after celebrating a way to write CSS without writing CSS, Julia Evans moved her sites back to hand-structured stylesheets, copying Tailwind's own systems along the way.
A £41 badge knows when you should run for the bus
Marcio Lopes turned a Pimoroni Badger 2350 e-ink badge into a live departures board for his London bus stop: no API key, no account, roughly a week per charge.
19.8 Liters on a Screen in Uzbek
Uzbek teenagers wired a flow sensor to a €20 board and handed alerts to Telegram. Their screen shows the day's liters in Uzbek, in a country where 90% of water goes to irrigation.
Twelve probe readings before the tire goes cold
Brian Smith spent forty years on track and one weekend building a recording tire pyrometer for under $120. The device turns a paddock ritual into a tuning method: twelve readings, three decisions.
Can a man page be its own cheat sheet?
Julia Evans asked people for their favorite man pages, then tried rewriting one. The exercise looks like reverse engineering: each organizational convention says something about the program underneath.
Digi-Comp I had only three bits. That is why you can see its logic
Three mechanical flip-flops, a hand clock and plastic tubes expose state, Boolean logic and counting. The machine teaches precisely because it cannot hide much.
This hiking stick stores tools in eight tubes. You have to take it apart to use them
TerraTactic turns the shaft into storage for a saw, knife, fire starter and other tools. Every module gained also adds an interface and access time.
At Open Source Ecology, the entrance exam is already a wall you have to build
The Future Builders Academy wants learning to produce something real. Applicants already have to build a wall panel, film the process and document quality-control points.
Julia Evans is rediscovering why frameworks exist: remove a hundred small frictions
QuerySets, template filters and migrations show Julia Evans why Django removes repetitive work, until one forgotten cache setting exposes the price of hidden conventions.