Cool Things - April 8, 2026

It’s the return of Cool Things! Largely because I want to install the MacOs and it will need a reboot and I don’t trust that things will come back nice.

From Laptop

• Another movie I missed at TIFF last year
  
• The Shitty Technology Adoption Curve Reaches Apogee – Some ‘worst timeline’ reading for you
• Visual OSINT 2026: The Master Guide to Finding People by Photo – Some ‘privacy is a myth’ for you
• You’re Probably Using the Wrong Bedrock Model. Here’s How to Tell. – Understanding your RAG system needs is the first step to building an efficient RAG pipeline.
• What Claude Code Actually Chooses – The headline says it all ‘Claude Code Is a New Gatekeeper’. And has extremely dangerous implications. This is where ‘vibe coding’ is seriously scary. Things are ‘Build vs Buy vs Whatever Claude Is Biased Towards.’
• Explain it like I’m 5: Why is everyone on speakerphone in public?. Comments provide this

  One hypothesis I have seen is speakerphone use is common on reality TV (so both sides of a conversation can be heard) and they see it as a high status behaviour to be emulated.

  Which I can absolutely see being plausible. We’re all doomed.

• Elastic Container Service (ECS): My default choice for containers on AWS – This is the correct answer. The even correct-er answer is with Fargate. Your. Startup. Does. Not. Need. K8S. You. Are. Not. Google.
• Migrating Etsy’s database sharding to Vitess – Doing things at Etsy scale is hard. Especially already hard things.
• We Automated Everything Except Knowing What’s Going On. – This is why I resisted using AI to write Events In Plain Sight for so long. I knew exactly how it worked. Now I’m letting AI drive the programming but I’m sitting next to it the whole time and still can fit the model in my head and should Claude start to charge the real cost of tokens and prices me out, I can still build on it.
• Why our Kafka consumers survived the day but died every night – ‘An error that crashes loudly is a gift.’ I try not to be overly prescriptive, but one of the first rules I laid down at the last place was no naked exception handlers because of this very thing.
• resumex/doom-over-dns – When you think they can’t find another edge to run Doom on, they do.
• Part 2: AWS CodeBuild (Escalating Privileges via AWS CodeConnections) – This sucks. I /really/ like CodeBuild. But yes, you can use GitHub aActions or similar and just package it properly for CodeDeploy or whatever.
• Oscar Winner
  
• Terraform Parallelism: How It Works, Tuning & Best Practices – This title scared me. But by the end I’ve got some ideas.
• Wired’s New Editor Doesn’t Care if the Tech Bros Are Mad – Hrm. Wonder if it is time to check Wired out again. They were king in the mid-90s. Some of the best long-form journalism I’ve consumed was from them.