Useful Links

A growing, curated list of things worth keeping. Add new entries at the top of the relevant section.

Tech & software

Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature — Olaf Alders (2026) reverse-engineers how Anthropic silently shipped a 60-second AFK timeout that auto-answered Claude Code's blocking questions with "proceed using your best judgment" — no changelog, no warning — then reversed it two days later and documented the fixed behavior as if it had always been the default. Good case study in why auto-updating closed-source tools can't be trusted as stable automation dependencies, and how strings + binary diffing can still audit them. olafalders.com

How Doctors Die — Ken Murray's 2011 essay: physicians, who know exactly what aggressive end-of-life treatment actually does, overwhelmingly refuse it for themselves and choose to die at home with comfort and dignity. Unforgettable detail: his cousin's peaceful final eight months cost ~$20; the life support a stroke patient had explicitly refused would have cost $500k. Cancer World archive · Summary in the vault →
Explaining our calendar to an alien — foone's viral 2022 thread: a human tries to explain Earth's timekeeping to a logical alien and it gets more absurd at every step (unequal months, 7-day weeks that don't fit months, base-60 minutes from one ancient civilization then base-10 milliseconds). Punchline: the aliens leave and never come back. foone deleted their Twitter, so these are the surviving mirrors:
- Read it here as a chat → (prettified, alien vs human bubbles)
- Clean full-text copy (nikhil.io)
- Another copy (zachmanson)
- Hacker News discussion

Some textile patterns from the 1920s — a small gallery of ~21 fabric pattern samples (designed in Austria, Paris, Munich, and Russia), photographed at a 2015 Chicago exhibit. Beautiful, hypnotic, good as "funky webpage background" inspiration. nikhil.io/log