TLDR Dev 2025-12-05
Django 6 👨💻, SVG clickjacking 🖼️, stacking dependencies 🧱
Teaching an LLM a Niche Diagraming Language (9 minute read)
A 7B language model (Qwen2.5-Coder-7B) was successfully trained (with 86% accuracy) to generate and edit diagrams using the less popular Pintora language. The training involved continued pretraining on Pintora diagrams, followed by instruction fine-tuning. Data was generated by an AI agent, cleaned, and used to train the model with limited resources on Google Colab and Runpod.
SVG Filters - Clickjacking 2.0 (32 minute read)
Clickjacking is a classic attack that involves covering up an iframe of some other website in an attempt to trick the user into unintentionally interacting with it. A new technique called SVG clickjacking turns classic clickjacking on its head. It enables the creation of complex interactive clickjacking attacks, as well as multiple forms of data exfiltration. This article takes a look at the technique and its various applications.
Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig (11 minute read)
Go prioritizes minimalism and corporate collaboration. Rust emphasizes safety and performance through complex features and strict compile-time checks. Zig has manual memory management and encourages data-oriented design.
Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer (12 minute read)
A Senior Staff Engineer at Google compares his own career path with the spotlight-driven approach often emphasized in Big Tech, especially in product-focused teams. His own focus is on developer tools and infrastructure, with an emphasis on long-term stewardship and deep technical ownership over chasing executive visibility. Staying with a system long-term provided compounding returns through pattern matching, allowing for impactful projects overall.
Building Deep Research: How we Achieved State of the Art (8 minute read)
Tavily rebuilt its research agent from scratch after overengineering the first version with assumptions that broke when new models arrived. Instead of passing all tool outputs through the agent loop like most systems do, it distilled outputs into compact reflections and only loaded raw sources for final generation. This cut token usage by 66% while hitting SOTA on benchmarks.
Stacking Dependencies (26 minute read)
Inspired by the XKCD comic about software dependency towers, this dev created a tool to visualize dependency graphs as physical towers. He encountered an NP-hard problem that required him to explore graph theory and various algorithms, ultimately combining a barycentric heuristic with PQ-tree pruning for fast layout generation. The resulting tool normalizes the dependency graph and then renders it as stackable towers with information about maintainers.
It's harder to read code than to write it (especially when AI writes it) (6 minute read)
While AI can generate code quickly, the increased volume and complexity make reviewing and understanding that code more difficult and necessary for maintaining quality.
Vanilla CSS is all you need (11 minute read)
37signals uses vanilla CSS without build tools in its applications by using modern CSS features like custom properties, nesting, and the :has() selector, resulting in simpler, more maintainable code.
Hunting a production-only proxy bug in SvelteKit (16 minute read)
A step-by-step analysis that shows how a developer identified an issue and resolved it.
The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All (8 minute read)
Due to the surging demand for RAM in AI data centers, memory prices are skyrocketing, impacting PC builders, single-board computer manufacturers, and eventually all consumer electronics.
RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung (3 minute read)
Due to soaring RAM prices driven by AI demand, Samsung Semiconductor reportedly rejected a supply order from Samsung Electronics for its Galaxy phones, forcing them to renegotiate at higher, shorter-term rates.
Next AI Draw.io (GitHub Repo)
This is a Next.js web application that uses AI to create and modify draw.io diagrams through natural language.
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