Open sandwich with vegetarian coronation chicken

Two weeks of links. A lot of AI related articles again. I liked the paper about using chatbots in leadership, and the one about the YAML of the mind. If you want a podcast, check out the one about night trains.

Quote of the Week
The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman

Leadership

We-ness: The secret cause of Psychological Safety [Podcast] - very interesting deep dive into how feeling like a team can increase psychological safety.

State of the Global Workplace 2026 - it’s not great, people care less about their workplace.

Using customized, conversational AI agents in leadership and management research - this surprised me, it is pretty positive about AI usage for leadership.

Engineering

Sebastian Bergmann: AI agents can now write code, run tests, and open PRs — what keeps them in check? - best practices and how they are still the best when using AI.

Greg Wilson: “Programming by Chat: A Large-Scale Behavioral Analysis of 11,579 Real-World AI-Assisted IDE Sessions” - link to interesting paper about how engineers are using AI.

Hackers breached the European Commission (The Next Web) - more Trivy effects.

Gemma 4 - How to Run Locally

Android Studio supports Gemma 4: our most capable local model for agentic coding

Gemma 4 26B (IQ4_XS) - Optimized for 16GB VRAM

CSS or BS?

Painting with Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching

The role of LLMs in patch review - work in progress for the kernel.

AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar - more AI kernel feedback.

Self hosting as much of my online presence as practical - I didn’t know about the BlueSky part.

What We Learned After Finding 7 Forgotten Jobs Running for 5 Years - I bet everybody has these kind of jobs. I like the idea of a monorepo to surface these.

The YAML of the Mind - interesting idea to use a formal language to describe exactly what we want with AI.

Urbanism

How Paris swapped cars for bikes – and transformed its streets - My prediction is that Paris will lead the most bicycle friendly cities in a few years.

‘Changing a city is complicated’: Anne Hidalgo looks back on 12 years as Paris mayor - how Hidalgo enabled the changes in Paris.

Train journeys between Barcelona and regional capitals now take longer than they did in 2000 - the infrastructure is getting worse.

Europe’s night train renaissance: Still on track? [Podcast] - sadly not, but there is hope.

Environment

Turkey to race ahead of EU on battery storage amid fossil fuel crisis - and Germany is falling back.

Avocado Diaboli: how California’s battery storage is working out - very well, thank you very much.

Random Spreads

Gentleman’s Relish is toast after its maker axes the pungent anchovy spread - what? I never had the chance to eat it, and now it is even more overpriced. I guess I have to make it myself.

Chad: My therapist said I need to find things to keep me busy, so I created the Artemis II dashboard - pretty amazing visualisation.

42 stages, unbeatable scenery, 144,000ft of climbing: Is the Grand Tour of Catalonia Gravel the world’s most epic gravel ride? - I need more time, fitness, and maybe a gravel bike.

Electronic dance music events appear to provide a mental health boost for women over 40 - for everybody!

OBSOLETE SOUNDS - samples from stuff only I remember.

Supreme Court of Finland makes crimes against humanity convictions in landmark ruling - nice to see the law working in some countries.

The end of Orbán? [Podcast] - one can only hope.

Apple at 50: my top five Apple moments - I am definitely not an Apple fan. Great hardware, mediocre software, bad politics.

Ripping CDs and converting audio with fre:ac - I use whipper, in the comments there are some new options.

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Have thoughts on any of this post? Reply on Mastodon or find me at @cdamian@rls.social.