Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  web.py was originally published while Aaron Swartz worked at reddit.com, where the site used it as it grew to become one of the top 1000 sites according to Alexa and served millions of daily page views. Reddit was rewritten using other tools after being acquired by Condé Nast in 2006. * Markdown is used widely by websites including Reddit, GitHub and Discord using it, as well as LLMs such as Claude using it to format the files that store accumulated memories. * Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months.  * Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. - Hedgie * Mo...

In HTML, an image can use a backup source with the onerror event. The browser first tries to load the main image from src. If that image is missing, blocked, or fails to load, onerror runs and replaces it with a fallback image.  <img   src="actual-image.jpg"   alt="Product image"   onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='backup-image.jpg';" > The JavaScript code  this.onerror=null   prevents an infinite loop if the backup image also fails. That prevents an endless loop if the backup image also fails. Without it, the browser could keep triggering onerror again and again. This technique is useful for product images, profile photos, brand logos, or any place where a missing image should show a placeholder instead of a broken image icon. For instance, this Dynamic Dummy Image Generator can be used to generate placeholder images of desired dimensions. For multiple responsive image options, use <picture>, but that is for format/viewport fallb...

This Week I Learned -  * GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a free donation-supported hosted service or self-hosted app. It is a privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo. *  MotherDuck  is a collaborative serverless analytics platform that lets you query and analyze data in cloud databases and from cloud storage, using your browser or any of the DuckDB APIs.  * Cloudflare has built its own version of WordPress that solves some security issues with the older CMS—it’s called EmDash. * Apple reported an 84% first-quarter rise in new apps on its App Store, putting it on a pace to surpass 2025’s 600K apps.  * Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! - Andrew Ng * The Batch - As OpenAI prepares to discontinue the Sora app and API, ByteDance added Seedance 2.0, its multimodal video generator, to its popular video-editing app CapCut - the s...