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Set Explicit Help Timeouts

from swyx's site RSS Feed [alt+shift+b] in programming

A simple way to normalize asking for help.
5th Apr 2021

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What America has meant to me

Every time I have given up on America, it has been a mistake. And yet, America has never, ever given up on me.

5th Jul 2026 • 1 votes
What you can do in a decade

I turned 40 today. For my 35th I did principles, but for my 40th, I wanted to offer perhaps more useful reflections.

22nd Apr 2026 • 1 votes
How to Thought Lead (2026)

I first started compiling "How To Thought Lead" in my notes 5 years ago, at first as an ironic parody and then slowly becoming sincere, and never published it, 1) because I don't know if I ever really nailed it / have a complete picture, 2) I was somewhat worried if I published it then others might diminish the techniques through overuse.

14th Mar 2026 • 1 votes
Take a hard game, and make it shorter

You are of course aware that attention spans are shrinking. YouTube -> Shorts, Instagram Reels, Tiktoks, etc have taken over the world.

16th Feb 2026 • 1 votes
How To Podcast

Through my 4 (!) podcasts I obviously have built up a lot of opinions on podcasting over the years. Here's some of them. The two outlier podcasts of our time are Dwarkesh and TBPN, and I will explain my mental model of them in a separate post - basically the McClusky Curve applied. the following advice is what I strongly believe for the "average" podcast that wants to do well but not necessarily being full time top tier influencer level. Also, this is primarily for professional/technical interview guest-led podcasts, but I also do have opinions on non-guest-led podcasts as well.

7th Dec 2025 • 1 votes

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We solved SQLite's single-writer limitation

Multiple concurrent writers. Multiple processes. Same SQLite. No modifications.

6 hours ago • 1 votes
SumatraPDF new features: April 5, 2026

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds: Extract Text From Document New Extract Text From Document command (CmdDocumentExtractText) in the Ctrl + k command palette saves the text of a document’s pages to a .txt file. Better comic book archive support (libarchive) Comic book archives (.cbz, .cbr, .cb7, .cbt) are now read with libarchive, which adds support for more archive variants, including bzip2 compression. RAR archives are opened with libarchive first, falling back to unrar.dll. DDE Open can reuse the current tab The [Open] DDE command now honors its inCurrentTab flag: setting it to 1 opens the file in the current tab instead of a new one (#4079). EPUB file list in Properties Document Properties (Ctrl + D) for EPUB files now shows the list of files inside the book. Own Explorer icons for CHM and DjVu The installer registers distinct File Explorer icons for .chm and .djvu files, so they no longer look like PDFs. More: changes from April 5, 2026 and the full changelog.

17 hours ago • 1 votes
If your team is happy, are you doing a good job?

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23 hours ago • 1 votes
WTF is context engineering? (with real examples)

Say you're deploying an AI assistant that processes online order returns. For it to work, it would need access to your store's purchase policy, item…

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Hosting without hyperscalers
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