One of the things I get frustrated by in our world is dealing with people who are both not terribly good at what they do but also disinterested in getting better. This makes it all the more enjoyable when I find a piece of art (visual, textual, or otherwise) created by someone who has become excellent at their craft. Brent Weeks is one of those folks, in my opinion, and I recently finished revisiting the awesome Night Angel trilogy. So, dear reader, this recommendation is for you if you also enjoy fantasy that involve elements like assassins (or “wetboys”, as it were), magic and mages, kingdoms falling and rising, but most importantly: how to rise above the most challenging situations in life while remaining true to yourself.

Cloudflare (the company who hosts this site at time of writing via its Pages product) just announced “AI Labyrinth”. If you don’t know, Cloudflare is a passthrough for a large portion of the internet. That means it can block or stop certain types of traffic it thinks is malicious. To that end, it created an opt-in feature for sites behind Cloudflare to trap AI bot scrapers targeting sites by giving the bots a ton of fake content… using generative AI. This way, the AI scraper receives a bunch of generic and real information, but the real site isn’t actually scraped. Pretty clever trick, I’d say.

Earlier this week, Google released the source code for PebbleOS - the operating system for old Pebble devices - at the request of the original founder, Eric Migicovsky. Migicovsky is now planning to build new Pebble hardware after all of these years. As a developer who dreams of revisiting old projects that no one else cares about, I can relate. You can sign up for notifications at repebble.com.

I saw the MCon controller when it was first posted online a little while ago, but it’s now officially on Kickstarter and has surpassed $1.2M USD in backing! This controller design absolutely blows me away as it’s one of those designs that seems so obvious in hindsight. This young man’s ingenuity is pretty inspiring and I look forward to seeing this thing in real life.

YouTube channel and hardware review site Gamers Nexus is raising the bar again by pursuing a proposed class action lawsuit against Paypal over the alleged actions taken by its Honey browser extension. If you’re not aware of it, Steve of Gamers Nexus walks through the reporting and situation in the first parts of the video. GN has been absolutely killing it the last couple years with some amazing investigative reporting and this is yet another way they’ve stepped up to ensure their viewers and fellow YouTubers are supported and protected. If you want to support them directly, they have some amazing merch on their store and a Patreon.