Working on a project where I need to grab screenshots of pages on a schedule — mostly for QA and keeping a visual history of what changed and when.

Right now I'm running Puppeteer in a cron job on a cheap VPS. It works, but honestly it's a pain to maintain. Chromium eats RAM like crazy, sometimes it hangs and the whole thing needs a restart, and the screenshots come out wrong on pages that load content dynamically.

A few things I've been struggling with:

• Pages with lazy-loaded images — half the time the screenshot fires before everything renders
• Cookie consent banners blocking the actual content
• Memory usage goes through the roof when I try to do more than ~50 pages in a batch

I've looked into Playwright as a replacement but from what I can tell the resource usage is about the same. Also tried running headless Chrome in Docker which at least makes cleanup easier, but didn't solve the core problems.

Curious what others are using. Are screenshot APIs worth it for this kind of thing, or is self-hosting still the way to go? Anyone running something similar at scale?

Not under a freely available license or anything, but the game's source code is on GitHub right now, shortcuts and all!

Self-host your compiler, you cowards!

Several times this year, I've read about new systems programming languages, usually created with robotic help. That's great! New languages expand how we think about programming. I've noticed their compilers are almost always written in Rust.

Rust is a fine systems programming language in its own right, but a systems programming language, the kind of language meant for writing things like compilers, ought to be used for its own compiler before it's used for any other serious work.

I'm kidding about the cowards part of course. I'm sure all language designers are brave and kind, even if some look like serial killers.

@programming

@programming@programming.dev

#programming #languagedesign #rust #compilers

After seeing its announcement a few days ago I didn't think much of it, but after looking into it a bit this looks awesome !

• Blog Post
• Github

Box3D was released a few days ago by legendary developer Erin Catto accompanied by a blog post, this is the person behind the popular Box2D engine.

In the blog post he explains that his work stems from his collaboration with Dirk Gregorius, "Principal Software Engineer II and Physics Architect" at Valve, the person behind Half-Life: Alyx's physics engine "Rubikon", which Box3D is based off.

Facepunch has also revealed that they have been using Box3D for about a year now as well in s&box. Showcasing a cool demo

An interesting quote from the blog post:

On the Valve side, Rubikon continues to evolve and Dirk has developed optimizations (similar to those in Box3D) in a new engine called Ragnarok. Look for that in future Valve games.

👀
Did he just reveal Valve's next physics engine ?
+HL3 confirmed

• cool showcase 1
• showcase 2
• showcase 3 in gmod (already??)

I run a few side projects and I've gone through different stages of monitoring them. First it was just checking manually if the site loads. Then I added a simple curl ping in cron. Then I started tracking response times, certificate expiry, even visual changes on pages.

At some point I realized I was spending more time building monitoring than the actual product. Classic trap.

Curious what other devs use for keeping an eye on their stuff. Do you go with a hosted service, self-host something like Uptime Kuma, or just wing it with scripts?

Mid-last year, I had GPT (maybe 5.0 or 5.1) try to find the source of a bug. Naturally, this code didn't have tests and git bisect wouldn't work, and it was a UI interaction bug for which I'm not even really qualified to write a test for, so I asked Codex to bisect between dates X and Y to find the commit that introduced this bug. Codex immediately told me the offending commit was after this date range (which couldn't possibly be correct). On telling Codex this was wrong, it then told me some commit that was obviously also not the offending commit once or twice. On telling it those were wrong, it then told me the offending commit was some plausible looking commit. When I asked it to prove or disprove its theory, it told me that it wrote a test and confirmed that the alleged commit was the breaking commit.

I then asked it to show me by making a video with the full developer end-to-end stack in the normal browser test environment. It claimed that it didn't have permissions to do that (which was a lie), but it could make video of the execution of the repro before and after the commit in playwright with the appropriate test code. The video was convincing and showed the feature working properly before the commit and failing to work after the commit. Something about this didn't feel right, so I tried reproducing the issue by hand before and after the commit and found out that the whole thing was a fabrication. The video made it look like Codex had reproduced the bug, but it was an artificial browser environment that was designed to create a fake repro, not the real environment.

Like I said, because this was non-ironically such a great experience, I immediately thought to myself, "how can I get more of this?"

The catch here is that it's a limited run. You can only get a CD-ROM of your public repository between July 2 and July 6, 2026, and supplies are limited. The first 1,000 eligible submissions will receive one copy, and you can only apply for one per person via GitHub's form. Notably, there's no talk of payment on the form, which could imply GitHub are sending these out for free. It seems like eligible users will have to sign up to find out for themselves.

I've rewrote the post to be "more pleasant" to read. Sorry for the unhinged original post.

I've a devlog on the card game thing I'm working on. This is a side project, a thing that I'm using for learning and practing some of the stuff from the AI perspective.

This is my discovery and other things, all feedback, ideas and concepts are welcome on the perspective of the software and programming.

Thanks in advance

Hey programmers,

I wanted to share a desktop client I’ve been building: DWN.BRIDGE (fully open-source C# WPF).

I love using AI for data analysis (like cleaning CSVs or querying databases), but there was no way I was going to upload my private/corporate files to cloud LLMs.

So I built a Zero-Knowledge local bridge:

When you point the client to a local database (SQL Server, SQLite, Excel, CSV), the client extracts ONLY the table schemas/headers locally. It sends the schema metadata to the LLM (Gemini web UI) via a secure browser-automation bridge. The LLM writes the SQL query, and the client executes it locally on your computer. Your raw rows and records never leave your hard drive. All local file system access and system commands run locally and require explicit pop-up confirmation. You can check out the source code or download the installer below. I’d love to get feedback on the local sandboxing model! watch the demo videos I uploaded on my youtube channel (links on github)

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/MarckDWN/DWN.BRIDGE

I saw an issue today on a fairly popular project (better-auth, see the link to the issue attached). No repro, no context, just a wall of caps and profanity ending in "fuck you". The maintainers ship this for free. People run production businesses on top of it, for free. And the thanks is someone raging into a text box because a minor bump cost them an afternoon.

I maintain and contribute to a few projects myself, so this hits a nerve a bit. Something people don't see from the outside: it's not enough to know how to build the thing. You also have to know how to defuse a thread where someone's insulting you and not fire back, even though most of us aren't paid for any of it, let alone the work of staying civil while being told to get fucked.

I'm not pretending breaking changes don't cause real pain (that's what the issue is about). But I keep coming back to a boundary question: if you're not paying for it, do you actually get to demand anything? (Obviously yes, but we still need some boundaries)

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/52842255

Have been working my way through this author's essays, thought this one was a unique observation.

To the programmers who worked with Erlang and related languages (so targeting the Erlang VM): how was your experience?

I'm interested in the Erlang ecosystem but would like to know if its languages are hard or can be considered powerful modern languages (and possible easy, but not "Python easy", I want to write efficient software with statically typed syntax).
Also, how mature is the ecosystem? Are there good frameworks to write scalable webservices with? Did you have fun using them and the language or was it more a headache-inducing experience?

So all in all what did you experience, in which context did you; and would you recommend learning an Erlang related language?

Maybe some devs here can help me, I was recently promoted to "head of AI" at my work despite being very outwardly ambivalent towards it. So I'm struggling to figure out what would actually create value instead of just being an expensive waste of time but still satisfy the higher ups AI lust.

My first idea that I thought would actually be useful was just setting up the architecture for an actual analytics database for us and then let them explore it with metabase (then letting them use Claude for their wow factor of exploring it with AI or whatever).

But now I'm somewhat at a loss, so any insight you all have would be really helpful!