I have little artistic talent of my own, but I was inspired by decodingvibes.com. This image was decompiled into the prompt you see below. Das is an amazing human writer and prompt builder. Im just studying the techniques.

Get Started

Creating images that fit your blog is easy once you understand how to communicate with an AI. It starts with writing detailed, descriptive text—or "prompts"—that specify exactly what you want to see.

To help you get started, I’ve broken down the image you shared into its key components. Each of these components represents a specific instruction you can give an image model. Read through these steps to understand how they work, and at the end, I’ll show you the full prompt that created this scene.

Step 1: Define the Scene and Mood

First, establish the setting and the general atmosphere. The image you shared isn't just about a wall painting; it's about the act of discovering something hidden. You want to convey a sense of adventure, history, and light.

Key concepts to use:

• Setting: A "deep, ancient limestone cavern" with stalactites and stalagmites.
• Atmosphere: "Mysterious," "adventurous," and "undiscovered."

Step 2: Choose your Primary Action

The model needs a reason for the light source. It's not just a cave; it's a cave being revealed. You can achieve this by making a character the focus.

Key concepts to use:

• Subject: A lone "adventurer" or "archaeologist" with a "canvas backpack."
• Action: The character is "holding a bright, classic oil lantern" and "shining it onto a previously dark rock face."

Step 3: Describe the Subject Matter

This is where you specify exactly what you want the image to be about. In this case, the main subjects are the specific animals on the cave wall. Be precise about the type, style, and arrangement.

Key concepts to use:

• Subject: Specific "petroglyphs" or "cave art."
• Style: A "distinctive, graphic line-art style."
• Details: Describe the specific animals and their positions. For example: "A majestic, winged dragon at the top; an isometric, blocky grizzly bear to the right; a stylized running wolf to the left; and a small, pixelated-style hedgehog at the bottom."

Step 4: Define the Style and Lighting

This is the final step that brings your scene to life and gives it a distinct look. You can use art styles and lighting instructions to create a strong mood.

Key concepts to use:

• Artistic Style: "Dramatic comic-book style illustration" with "rough, heavy cross-hatching and ink-wash textures."
• Color Palette: "Muted earth tones" like "sepia, charcoal grey, and warm ochre."
• Lighting: This is the most crucial part for this image. Use terms like "high-contrast lighting," "chiaroscuro," and "a strong, golden directional light (the lantern) casting long, deep shadows."

Your Final Prompt

By combining all those elements, you get a highly effective and descriptive prompt. Here is the exact prompt used to generate the image you provided:

A dramatic comic-book style illustration showing an adventurer with a backpack in a deep, ancient limestone cavern, holding a classic oil lantern. The high-contrast lighting is a classic chiaroscuro, with a strong, golden light from the lantern casting a circle of warmth on a central rock face, leaving the surrounding stalactites and stalagmites in deep, heavy cross-hatched shadows. The light reveals several distinct petroglyphs (cave drawings) in a graphic, stylized line-art form: At the top, a slender, winged dragon with horns; to the right, a large, stylized, almost blocky grizzly bear; to the left, a stylized wolf-like creature in a running pose; and at the bottom, a tiny, simple, pixel-art style hedgehog. The colors are muted earth tones, sepia, ochre, and deep charcoals, with the dragon outlined in a slightly warmer tone. The overall feel is one of mysterious discovery.

This prompt works because it doesn't just say what to draw, but how to draw it, where to put the elements, and what kind of lighting to use.

Learning to write prompts like this is just a matter of practice. Try describing different parts of a scene you imagine—the colors, the light, the objects, and the mood. You can then use those descriptions to create your own unique images.

Practice with Google Flow

[NOTE]
AI was used to generate the text and the media for this article.

Choosing the right font is a critical element of user interface design. The typeface must complement the overall aesthetic and brand identity of the product. Consider the intended platform, as different screens require different font scales and weights. Legibility and readability must be prioritized above all stylistic considerations. Selecting a suitable font enhances the user experience while maintaining visual consistency.

Read the full article at yeptype.com

Preview & Generate Open Graph Images
Scan any URL to see exactly how it looks on social media. Create a new OG image for free from one of our high-converting templates.

Read the full article at opengraph.xyz

GitHub had a nearly 8 hour outage on August 17, 2026 due to increased usage .

GitHub Outage

I may have contributed to the problem. GitHub Copilot in VS Code has been so much fun!

NASA The Grand Tour Posters

ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire
Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Revision 88 / Serial number 840726

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

Read the full article and play the game at eblong.com

You're at a coffee shop. A song comes on. It's right on the tip of your tongue. You pull out your phone, tap a button, and it tells you what it is in a few seconds.

How does a phone listen to a few seconds of music through a noisy room and instantly match it against millions of songs?

Your first instinct might be that the phone is listening to the melody or recognizing the lyrics. It's neither of those. What it's actually doing is far more clever.

Reverse Engineering Sound

TL;DR
Your phone captures sound as a waveform using a very thin membrane. This waveform is not useful for song identification, so a process called the Fast Fourier Transform is used to convert it into a three-dimensional representation of sound called a spectrogram.
Your phone's microphone uses an extremely thin membrane called a diaphragm to measure the vibrations in the air caused by sound. Those vibrations are converted into an electrical signal, which is digitized into a waveform: a sequence of numbers representing air pressure at each instant in time.

This is similar to how your eardrum catches those same pressure waves, but while your brain turns them into sound, your phone turns them into a sequence of numbers.

Read the full article at perthirtysix.com

A complete walkthrough of how large language models like ChatGPT are built — from raw internet text to a conversational assistant. Based on Andrej Karpathy's technical deep dive.

Read the full article at ynarwal.github.io

The more I read the #LOTR the more I love it. Found this great post about Tom Bombadil.

Tom Bombadil is one of the greatest characters in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. He is the oldest being in Middle-earth, completely immune to the Ring’s power, and — unfortunately — overlooked by a huge swathe of readers.

“Readers” is indeed the right word to use here, since Tom Bombadil is so confounding that Peter Jackson cut him out of the films entirely: if you’ve never read the books, you’ve likely never heard of him. But despite the enigma that he is, Bombadil plays an incredibly important role in deciphering the world of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Today, we explore what the mysterious character of Tom Bombadil reveals not only about the world Tolkien created, but about the author’s own worldview as well. For in the words of Tolkien himself, Bombadil “represents something that I feel [is] important” — which is an understatement if there ever were one.

So what does Bombadil represent about the underlying ethics of Middle-earth and the key to overcoming evil? Keep reading to find out…

Read the full article at The Culturist

Favicons are small, customized icons that represent a website in browser tabs and bookmarks. They serve as a crucial visual identifier, enhancing a site's brand recognition immediately. Implementing a favicon improves the user experience by providing clear visual anchors. Developers can easily generate or source these small images using various online tools. Having a consistent and appealing favicon helps solidify a brand's digital presence.

Read the full article at favicons.rknight.me

Diddit is a simple application designed for logging daily activities. It functions as a digital logbook, making it easy to record memories. The app is optimized for a shareable and user-friendly experience. Being built for iPhone, it leverages mobile compatibility. It provides a straightforward way for users to document their lives.

Read the full article at didditapp.com

XCancel is an instance of Nitter. Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at github.com/zedeus/nitter [...] Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS

Read the full article at daringfireball.net

I look at all of this, and the only thing I can think is: why take that risk? I know that my ideas and my words are my own; I find plagiarism fundamentally repulsive as a practice, and the only reason I show up to work is that I enjoy my craft. But if I ever let GenAI near my writing, I’m exposing myself to risk from plagiarism accusations—whether or not the GenAI tool smuggles in something that does, actually, constitute plagiarism. If somebody comes to me in 20 years and says “Are these your original ideas and words?” about even a single sentence of my writing, I need to be able to answer yes—no reservations, no loopholes, no room for error.
Here’s the biggest problem.

Academic writing is a collaborative venture, and in my experience, very few researchers have a comprehensive conversation about GenAI use before they collaborate. Everyone tends to think that their practices are normal, well-reasoned, and probably pretty similar to where other people they respect have landed on AI—whether that’s abstaining from it altogether, just using it to code, or wholly embracing it across your workflow.

That means that all of us have the ability to end each other’s career. This has always been true—on the 100+ papers I’ve written in my career, I’ve trusted every single coauthor (and they’ve trusted me) not to introduce a single sentence that will detonate our lives somewhere between journal submission and retirement. We don’t usually think about this as a problem, because we trust the other people we work with. But GenAI adds back the possibility that other people will introduce writing into your paper that can be credibly accused of plagiarism.

Read the full article at carlsonlab.bio

This article discusses the transition in how Apple handles the storage of recovery keys. It highlights Apple's stated commitment to user privacy throughout this change. The focus is on emphasizing the new security measures and protocols. These changes aim to make recovery key storage more obscure and secure for users. Overall, the transition reflects Apple's dedication to protecting user data.

Read the full article at sixcolors.com

Like a vacation, but much longer. Like a Sabbatical, but smaller. You can do it after finishing school, after switching to a new position or job, or to squeeze in 1-3 months where you do nothing or something for yourself.

I also like Austin Kleon’s way in Steal like an artist Trilogy (Austin Kleon) where he says:

Do Sabbaticals. If you can’t do a long one, do daily, weekly, and monthly. Disconnect, go away from your work, and come back.

Smaller sabbaticals is Walk Everyday, go into Nature. It can be a form of turning off, taking a mini-break.

Ideas come from Rest

My best decisions and inspirations all came from so-called mini-retirements. Slowing Down, taking mini retirements, and following the Pathless Path, or just going with the flow. This is the way to go, to find yourself, to listen to your body, your Subconscious. Understanding your body and your inner feelings.

When you do that, you usually get great insights and outcomes from it. But you only learn later, as Steve Jobs said that Connecting The Dots can only be done backward:

Connecting The Dots
Steve Jobs said that a while ago at his commencement speech:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Isn’t it just a vacation? (Question from HN, thanks!)
To me, vacations are too short to turn off completely. Here, where I live, we have 5 weeks a year, if you are lucky, you can take three in a row in summer. But having two months or more, it’s completely different. Your mind will take time to turn off, to shut down from everyday life, and that’s when the benefit of new ideas comes, usually out of the blue, not forced just because your mind and body are resting from work and everything else.

Read the full article at ssp.sh

Wi-Fi speeds vs. broadband speeds: Wi-Fi speeds have lagged behind ever increasing Internet speeds. As a result, there has been a very rapid switch in Wi-Fi from Wi-Fi 4 [§9] 2.4 GHz 802.11n to Wi-Fi 5 [§10] 5 GHz 802.11ac, to Wi-Fi 6 [§11] 5 GHz 802.11ax, and now to Wi-Fi 6E [§12] 802.11ax extended into 6 GHz in an attempt to keep up. And now even the next generation Wi-Fi 7 [§13] is out.

Router Manufacturers' Marketing Hype: Don't be fooled by the marketing hype [§6] of router manufacturers advertising outrageously high aggregate (all Wi-Fi bands maximum speeds added together) Gbps wireless speeds like "11 Gbps", and for client devices that the industry does not yet make 4×4 MIMO client devices. What really matters is the realistic speed that YOUR Wi-Fi client devices [§3] can actually achieve today often that means a 2×2 MIMO limit, for a single Wi-Fi band.
The dirty little secret in the router industry is that virtually ALL routers of the same Wi-Fi generation have the SAME maximum PHY speed to YOUR 2×2 MIMO client device. And likely very similar throughput speeds when standing right next to the router. So the real differentiator is how the router performs 'at distance' for your devices DFS, MIMO, etc, at your location contention, interference, etc.

This paper was written to help everyone understand current Wi-Fi technology better, so that YOU can make educated Wi-Fi upgrade decisions -- because there is WAY too much hype [§6] out there especially about Wi-Fi speeds -- and router manufacturers are directly to blame.

So, let's dig in and learn more about Wi-Fi...

Read the full article at wiisfi.com

Cloudflare has announced Agent Memory in private beta as part of its Agents Week, a managed service that gives AI agents persistent memory across sessions, context compactions, and restarts. Rather than stuffing everything into the context window, the service extracts structured memories from conversations and retrieves only what's relevant on demand. Tyson Trautmann and Rob Sutter from the Cloudflare engineering team write:
We built Agent Memory because the workloads we see on our platform exposed gaps that existing approaches don't fully address. Agents running for weeks or months against real codebases and production systems need memory that stays useful as it grows, not just memory that performs well on a clean benchmark dataset.
The service addresses what the industry calls context rot. Even as context windows grow past one million tokens, research shows output quality degrades as context fills up. Developers face a tension between keeping everything and watching quality drop, or pruning aggressively and losing information the agent needs later. Research also suggests models can produce better results with less but more relevant context, making memory useful as a quality enhancement, not just a storage management tool.

Read the full article at infoq.com

Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines AI-driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed.

The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday by security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock. CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations.

40 minutes is all it takes

The credentials were extracted during a 40-minute window in March while the victims used compromised versions of LiteLLM downloaded from the package’s official location in the Python Package Index repository. Hudson Rock said it made the discovery after analyzing a 195TB file that it obtained. Neither firm identified the source of the information.

Read the full article at arstechnica.com

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.