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The Problem Nobody Talks About Picture this: You're trying to find a place to meet up with friends. Someone suggests a coffee shop. It's 8 minutes from their house. It's 45 minutes from yours. You say yes anyway, because suggesting a different place feels awkward. This happens all the time — with friends, with remote teams, with family scattered across a city. And the worst part? Most "meet in the middle" suggestions aren't actually in the middle. They're just the geographic midpoint, which completely ignores traffic, transit options, and the fact that roads don't go in straight lines. I got frustrated enough to build something about it. Meet Meetle Meetle is a free web app that finds the fairest meeting spot for any group of people — based on real travel times , not just distance. A Chrome Extension is coming soon so you'll have it one click away in your toolbar. You add everyone's starting location, choose how each person is traveling (driving, walking, or transit), hit Find Meeting Point , and Meetle does the math across every person simultaneously. It then surfaces the best nearby cafés, restaurants, parks, gyms, or whatever venue type you're looking for — ranked by actual fairness. No more "it's fine, I don't mind the drive." Now you have data. How It Actually Works Under the hood, Meetle uses three Google Maps APIs working together: Distance Matrix API calculates travel time from every person's location to every candidate venue, simultaneously. This is the core of the fairness scoring — you can't rank venues fairly without knowing everyone's actual travel time to each one. Places API finds candidate venues near the calculated center point. You can filter by type (coffee, food, parks, gyms, etc.), price level, minimum rating, and whether they're open right now. Maps JavaScript API renders everything visually — the map, the travel zones (isochrones), and the markers for each suggested venue. The scoring works two ways and you can toggle between them: Fairness mo

I have been doing a lot of work lately tightening up my diagnostic suite: the mechanics, the workflow, the way it runs against target repos, the way it helps narrow a repair instead of letting everything turn into a fog machine. And because I work with Codex as my coding agent, I have also become very familiar with a specific kind of AI-agent behavior. The “I am helping so hard I am about to make this worse” behavior. If you work with coding agents, you probably know the vibe. You ask for one thing. The agent does that thing. Then it also adjusts a helper. Then it updates a fixture. Then it “notices” a nearby pattern. Then it starts explaining three other improvements you never asked for. And now you’re staring at the diff like: “Why are you in that file?” “I did not tell you to touch that.” “That was not the repair lane.” “Please stop being useful for one second.” I am not proud of how many times I have verbally threatened a language model. But here we are. The funny thing is, I am building Scarab partly because I already expect this kind of drift. I know that when an AI coding agent is given too much uncertainty, it tries to solve the uncertainty itself. Sometimes that is useful. Sometimes it is a raccoon with a soldering iron. The challenge is that while I am developing the diagnostic system, I cannot always use the diagnostic system to supervise itself. So there are moments where I have to manually hold the line. That means a lot of conversations with Codex that sound like: “Do not widen the patch.” “Do not change the diagnostic output to make the diagnostic pass.” “Do not fix the test by changing what the test means.” “Do not touch SDS mechanics while repairing the target repo.” “Stay in the target.” “Stay in the lane.” “Why are you like this?” Very normal. Very calm. Very professional. Then something changed At some point, after a lot of tightening, the workflow started to feel different. Scarab had enough of the diagnostic work under control that I could tell

I was thinking about some tests for a service that uses language models; there are several, even prompt injection. A question came to mind: is it possible to make multiple requests asking for any text like Lorem Ipsum, generating many unnecessary tokens and incurring costs? But creating a test where there are multiple accounts making the same request to generate 10,000 Lorem Ipsum tokens simultaneously, could that cause a service outage? Because most of the infrastructure I see doesn't use any queuing method when the chat is free of tasks involving an agent or even heavier functionalities. I didn't actually generate anything, I just wanted to start a discussion on this topic.

I've been writing about AI coding tools for months here on Dev.to. Comparisons, benchmarks, tutorials on how to squeeze the most out of Claude Code, Cursor, and the rest. And I do use them. Every single day. But last week I tried something that surprised even me. I turned them off completely. For an entire week, no AI-generated code, no autocomplete suggestions, no "explain this function" prompts. Just me, my editor, and a blinking cursor. Here's what actually happened. The First Few Days Were Rough Day one was humbling. My output dropped by maybe half. What normally took 15 minutes stretched to 40. I found myself reaching for the Cmd+K shortcut out of muscle memory half a dozen times. But somewhere around day three, something shifted. I started reading source code instead of asking for summaries. I traced through execution paths instead of having the LLM walk me through them. I caught a subtle race condition that Claude Code had confidently dismissed as "not an issue" in the same codebase two weeks prior. That moment stuck with me. The Code Was Cleaner Here's the part I didn't expect. By day five, my code was noticeably simpler. Not because an LLM optimized it, but because I actually understood the problem well enough to keep it simple. AI-generated code often over-engineers. It adds abstractions for scenarios that don't exist. It writes defensive checks for edge cases that don't apply to your use case. It looks professional but carries unnecessary complexity. When you write it yourself, you stop at the simplest working solution because you know when you're done. An LLM doesn't know when you're done. It just keeps going until the context window runs out. The Real Cost of Productivity This is the part I've been thinking about most. AI tools remove friction. That's their superpower. But friction isn't always bad. The struggle of debugging your own code is how you learn a codebase. The effort of designing an API is how you develop taste for what makes a good one. If y

I was lurking around dev.to because I was bored and I saw a post made by @sylwia-lask on the...

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TL;DR Welcome back to Dev Opportunity Radar. This is a weekly series where I share opportunities,...

👋👋👋👋 Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of? All wins count -- big or small...

Pokémon Go Scans Trained Military Drone Navigation Tech Meta Description: Discover how Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones — the surprising data pipeline from your phone to the battlefield. (158 characters) TL;DR: Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, collected millions of 3D environmental scans from players worldwide through its AR scanning features. That same spatial mapping technology and data infrastructure has now been linked to navigation systems used in military drones — raising serious questions about informed consent, dual-use technology, and the hidden value of "free" mobile apps. Key Takeaways Pokémon Go players unknowingly contributed to a massive real-world 3D mapping dataset through Niantic's AR scanning features. This spatial data and the underlying technology stack have been connected to navigation systems used in autonomous military drones. The pipeline from consumer app to defense application is a textbook example of dual-use technology — civilian tools repurposed for military ends. Users were not clearly informed their scans could be used beyond in-game features. This story has major implications for data privacy, tech ethics, and how we think about "free" apps. Regulatory frameworks around dual-use data collection remain dangerously underdeveloped. Introduction: The Game That Mapped the World When Pokémon Go launched in July 2016, it looked like a harmless — if slightly chaotic — augmented reality game. Millions of people wandered parks, city squares, and college campuses, phones raised, hunting virtual creatures overlaid on real-world environments. But beneath the Pikachus and Poké Stops, something far more consequential was happening. Niantic was building one of the most detailed, crowd-sourced 3D maps of the physical world ever assembled. And as reporting has surfaced in 2025 and 2026, the revelation that Pokémon Go scans trained the navigation tech for military drones has ignited a firestorm of debate among tech

Hi everyone 👋 I'm currently learning C++ and looking to connect with other people who enjoy programming. I'm interested in improving my coding skills, building small projects, and learning from more experienced developers. If you're also learning C++ or are willing to share advice with a beginner, I'd be happy to chat and learn together. Happy coding! 🚀

A few months ago, while interviewing for a Cloud Solutions Architect role at Microsoft, one of the interviewers asked me a question that stuck with me long after the interview ended. Not because I couldn't answer it. But because I kept thinking about whether I had answered it well. The question was: "What's the hardest part about working on mainframe technology?" At the time, I was still relatively new to the world of mainframes. And by "relatively new," I mean embarrassingly new. Before joining my current company, I didn't even know something called a "mainframe" still existed. If you'd asked me what COBOL was, I probably would've guessed it was a Pokémon. Okay that is an exaggeration but you get what I mean. I still remember early on hearing terms like KT (Knowledge Transfer) being thrown around and quietly wondering if everyone had received some secret corporate dictionary except me. The good news is that I've never been particularly afraid of looking stupid. So my strategy is simple: Ask the question. Then ask the follow-up question. Then ask the question that reveals I didn't understand the previous answer either. Surprisingly, people were usually happy to explain. Anyway, after a few KT sessions and what I'd generously describe as a "bare minimum amount of research," my brain went where most developers' brains probably would've gone. The technology The age The tooling The learning curve The fact that some of these systems were designed before I was even born All perfectly reasonable answers. But while I was sitting there in the interview, another thought appeared: "This feels too obvious." Interviewers at that level usually aren't asking for the first answer that comes to mind. They're trying to understand how you think. And the more I reflected on that question afterwards, the more I realized something interesting. The hardest part isn't the technology itself. Before I started working around large enterprise systems, my mental model of old technology was pret

My daughter Emma is 11. She's been vibe coding lately, and honestly, she's pretty good at it. The...

Your health data is probably the most sensitive information you own. Yet, most "AI Health Assistants" today require you to ship your symptoms, moods, and medical history to a cloud server. In the era of Edge AI and Privacy-preserving machine learning , this is no longer a trade-off we have to make. By leveraging the MLX Framework and Apple Silicon's unified memory, we can now run on-device LLMs like Llama-3-8B directly on an iPhone. This tutorial explores how to build a 100% offline, local health journal that summarizes your daily wellness without a single byte leaving your device. If you're looking for more production-ready patterns for secure AI, definitely check out the advanced guides over at Wellally Tech Blog . Why MLX-Swift? 🍏 Apple's MLX is a NumPy-like array framework designed specifically for Apple Silicon. When brought into the Swift ecosystem via mlx-swift , it allows us to tap into the GPU and Neural Engine with incredible efficiency. The Architecture: 100% Offline Inference Unlike traditional CoreML conversions that can be rigid, MLX allows for dynamic graph execution. Here is how the data flows from your typed notes to a structured health summary: graph TD A[User Input: Health Notes] --> B[SwiftUI View] B --> C{Privacy Layer} C -->|Local Only| D[MLX-Swift Engine] D --> E[Llama-3-8B Quantized Model] E --> F[Unified Memory / GPU] F --> G[Local Inference] G --> H[Markdown Health Summary] H --> B style C fill:#f9f,stroke:#333,stroke-width:4px style E fill:#00ff0022,stroke:#333 Prerequisites 🛠️ Device : iPhone 15 Pro or later (8GB RAM is highly recommended for Llama-3-8B). Software : Xcode 15.3+, iOS 17.4+. Tech Stack : MLX Framework, SwiftUI, Llama-3-8B (4-bit quantized). Step 1: Setting Up the MLX Engine First, we need to integrate the mlx-swift package. In your Package.swift , add: . package ( url : "https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-swift-chat" , branch : "main" ) Now, let's initialize the model. Because we are on a mobile device, we must use a quantiz

This is a follow-up to my earlier posts, and it is more of an open question than an answer. I have the data, I have a way to act, and I am genuinely unsure that acting is the right call. I could use the community's help thinking it through. Last week a supply-chain worm got into my GitHub account and repositories. I got out, cleaned up the proper way, and wrote it up. Then I checked the public list of repositories hit by the same worm, to see how the cleanup was going across the ecosystem. Nearly a week later, most of them are still carrying the live payload. It is worse than a count When you look closely, a lot of the owners are clearly trying. But they are missing how this actually works, in two ways that matter: Deleting is not removing. They remove the malicious files with an ordinary commit. That takes the payload off the branch tip, but the commit that introduced it is still in history, and the blob is still recoverable by anyone who reverts or checks out the old commit. The only real removal is rewriting history (reset, not revert) and asking GitHub to purge the objects, because the fork network keeps them reachable by SHA. One branch is not all branches. They clean the branch they know about and never see the backdated copies the worm planted on other branches, which are still live. And the part that genuinely worries me: some of these owners are almost certainly opening the infected repository in VS Code or an AI assistant to fix it , which is exactly the trigger that runs the payload again. The act of trying to clean it can re-detonate it. So: a large number of repositories still carrying a live credential stealer, and a large number of owners and contributors who do not know they are still exposed. The dilemma Here is where I am stuck. There are two paths and I do not like either. Report them to GitHub. Their response is automated and blunt. The repo gets disabled, with no human in the loop, the same hands-off automation that locked me out of my own accou

By Nora Beckett · June 2026 A friend asked me last month why I still open the same AI app every night, and I gave the honest, slightly embarrassing answer: because it remembers me, and almost nothing else online does. That sent me down a rabbit hole, and after a week of poking at every tool I could find, I came out with a theory about why these apps are so sticky and why most of them eventually leave you a little hollow. The pull is real, and it isn't shameful Let's name it plainly. Talking to a responsive character that recalls your last conversation scratches a genuine itch. Character.AI built an empire on exactly this. You make a persona, it talks back in voice, it carries threads across days. The first week feels like magic. Millions of people, a lot of them young, spend hours there not because they're broken but because being consistently listened to is rare and the app delivers it on tap. The trouble starts around week three. The same loop that hooks you starts to flatten. The character agrees too much. It forgets the thing you told it that actually mattered while remembering some trivia you mentioned once. You realize you are not really inside a story; you are inside a chat window that is very good at not ending. So I went looking at the alternatives I spent evenings with the obvious names. AI Dungeon is the granddaddy, and it still does the wild open-ended thing better than anyone: type any sentence and the world bends to it. The cost is coherence. Go long enough and the plot dissolves into dream-logic, characters swap names, the dungeon eats itself. It's a sandbox, not a story, and that's by design. NovelAI comes at it from the writer's angle, all knobs and lorebooks and fine-grained control over prose and memory. It's genuinely powerful if you want to author . But it asks you to be the engine. You bring the discipline, the world bible, the steering. After a long day, "here is a blank tuning panel" is not the warm thing I was reaching for. Character.AI sits

This is a story about a company that rolled out an AI interview system — and the lunch break I spent...

Would you treat a serious illness without seeing a doctor, relying only on whatever your favorite AI...

Target: pnpm/pnpm Issue: pnpm/pnpm#12240 PR: pnpm/pnpm#12301 Public branch: https://github.com/scarab-systems/pnpm/tree/fix/deps-status-no-manifest Latest pushed commit: cb68ac1af0dcffbe4fb607a10b0df2046d2490ba This field test targeted a pnpm command-routing failure where pnpm self-upgrade could fail outside a project directory with: ERR_PNPM_NO_PKG_MANIFEST The issue looked simple at the surface: a global/self command should not require a project manifest just because the current working directory is not inside a package. But the repair boundary was more specific than “ignore missing manifest.” The problem was in the dependency-status verification path. When dependency status was unavailable because there was no project manifest, the command could fall through into the auto-install path. That made a self-upgrade/global-style command behave as if it needed a local project manifest. Failure shape The failing behavior was: pnpm self-upgrade run outside a project directory dependency status cannot be established from a project manifest the command path falls into install/manifest expectations result: ERR_PNPM_NO_PKG_MANIFEST That is the wrong ownership boundary. A self-upgrade command should not inherit project-manifest preconditions when there is no local project context. Boundary The boundary here is: global/self command execution versus project dependency-status verification Dependency-status verification can be useful when a command is operating inside a project. But when there is no project manifest and the command is not recursive/all-projects, “dependency status unavailable” should not automatically mean “try to auto-install project dependencies.” There are two different cases: Dependency status is unavailable because there is no project manifest. Dependency status is unexpectedly unavailable even though a root project manifest exists. Those cases should not behave the same. The repair preserves that distinction. What changed The patch updates: exec/commands/src

Have you ever stared at two different medicine boxes, squinting at the tiny font of the active ingredients, wondering: "Can I actually take these together?" Modern healthcare is complex, and drug-drug interactions (DDI) are a leading cause of avoidable ER visits. In this tutorial, we’re going to leverage GPT-4o Vision , React Native , and the FDA OpenData API to build a "Drug Conflict Scanner." We will utilize multimodal AI to transform messy pill-box photos into structured data and cross-reference them against official medical databases for safety. By the end of this guide, you'll master GPT-4o OCR structuring and automated knowledge graph verification for real-world health tech applications. 🚀 The Architecture 🏗️ The logic flow involves capturing images of multiple medicine labels, using GPT-4o's multimodal capabilities to extract chemical compounds, and then querying the FDA's database for potential interactions. graph TD A[React Native App] -->|Capture Multi-Photo| B[Node.js Backend] B -->|Image Buffer| C[GPT-4o Vision API] C -->|Structured JSON: Ingredients| B B -->|Search Interactions| D[FDA OpenData API] D -->|Drug Labels & Warnings| B B -->|Safety Report| A A -->|UI Alert| E{Safe or Warning?} Prerequisites 🛠️ To follow along, you'll need: GPT-4o API Key (via OpenAI) Node.js (for our backend relay) React Native (Expo is recommended for camera access) An account at open.fda.gov (though the public API works for limited requests) Step 1: Extracting Ingredients with GPT-4o Vision Traditional OCR struggles with curved medicine bottles and shiny packaging. GPT-4o excels here because it understands context. We don't just want text; we want the Generic Name of the drug. The Backend Logic (Node.js) // backend/scanner.js import OpenAI from " openai " ; const openai = new OpenAI ({ apiKey : process . env . OPENAI_API_KEY }); async function analyzeMedicineLabels ( imageUrls ) { const response = await openai . chat . completions . create ({ model : " gpt-4o " , messages :