Tootfinder

Prime Security, which develops AI agents that help with security design during software development, raised a $20M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-software-deals/2025/12/09…

Exclusive: Agentic AI startup Prime Security raises $20M
Scale Venture Partners led the Series A round.

If I had a penny for every time I heard something like
"We're going to track increases in productivity that we gain by adopting GenAI"
1. So you're assuming it's an increase
2. Against what control group
3. With no acknowledgement of confounding variables or experiment design
4. Around the...famously open problem of measuring software engineering productivity?

Cursor launches Visual Editor, a vibe-coding product for designers that integrates professional design controls with natural language editing (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/cursor-launches-pro-design-tools-figma/

Cursor Launches an AI Coding Tool For Designers
The 300-person startup hopes bringing designers aboard will give it an edge in an increasingly competitive AI software market.

Who herein is using ON1 Photo RAW 2026?
Your thoughts/Reviews on why I should purchase this cool looking app?
#affinity

“But software design is just vibes!”
No, it’s absolutely not. It’s an extremely well researched topic with an abundance of studies, literature and scientific articles over the last 75 years.
Here’s some books to get you started. They’re over 30 years old.

Open-Source Thermostatic Radiator Valve (OpenTRV) - OpenTRV retrofit open-source reference mechanical/hardware/software design for zoned heating to save carbon and money. #OpenTRV #TRV #heating

Open-Source Thermostatic Radiator Valve (OpenTRV)
OpenTRV retrofit open-source reference mechanical/hardware/software design for zoned heating to save carbon and money. #OpenTRV #TRV #heating #cutCarbon

Singapore-based ChemLex raised a $45M funding round led by Granite Asia to build an AI-powered, automated chemistry lab to accelerate drug discovery (Rachyl Jones/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/12/2025/singapore-startup-b…

Singapore startup builds AI-powered, self-running chemistry lab
The self-driving lab consists of AI software and robots that design experiments, run them, and gather data, with limited human intervention.

@… made me think about my preference for minimalist apps
https://www-gem.codeberg.page/sys_design/

If Affinity really cares about the creatives, they (& all other design companies, hopefully Adobe too?) should have form a group to create a file format standard. As long as the design format is proprietary, there's not much "freedom" here, even if the software is free, paid-once or subscription-based.
Sketch is actually almost there, at least for UI/vector designs (

Hackers exploit 3D design software to target game developers, animators https://therecord.media/hackers-blender-software-malware

from my link log —
Software architecture is overrated, clear and simple design is underrated.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-architecture-is-overrated/
saved 2019-09-19

Software Architecture is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design is Underrated
I had my fair share in designing and building large systems. I've taken part in rewriting Uber's distributed payment systems [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/distributed-architecture-concepts-i-have-learned-while-building-payments-systems/] , designing and shipping Skype on Xbox One and open-sourcing RIBs [https://github.com/uber/RIBs], Uber's mobile architecture framework. All of these systems had thorough

If I didn't need iOS 26 for testing, I’d have waited a few point releases. Fixing years of tech debt is good, but has to frustrate those who updated but might have wanted to wait.
“Apple to focus on ‘quality and underlying performance’ with iOS 27 next year: report”
https://

Apple to focus on 'quality and underlying performance' with iOS 27 next year: report - 9to5Mac
This past year, Apple overhauled its design language across all of its major software platforms with the introduction of Liquid...

Happy Scale now uses the new Liquid Glass design!
One of my daily apps :-)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/happy-scale/id532430574

Happy Scale App - App Store
Download Happy Scale by Front Pocket Software LLC on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games like Happy Scale.

"The last hit song of Belgian singer Stromae, called “Santé”, is a tribute to all those workers behind the scenes in our modern world; the ones growing or catching the food we eat; the ones transporting us; the ones building and cleaning our facilities; those who more often than not, we simply do not see.
How long until Stromae releases an update to this song including software workers among those groups? Not very long."

Divide Et Impera
Divide and Conquer is a common technique for algorithm design: quicksort, discrete Fourier transforms, and even MapReduce are common examples of such a technique. It consists in breaking down a problem into smaller parts, so as to solve the whole of the problem. It is also a common technique in politics, known and applied since before the times of the Roman Empire. It consists in breaking down society into smaller parts, so as to rule the whole of society.

Still can't believe that Apple, a true pioneer of online Music Stores and Jukebox software and user interface design shipped this.
This is an actual screenshot of Apple Music on the Mac.
It's an empty box. The volume controls need an extra click. It doesn't show me elapsed and remaining time.
This is stuff that my CD player in the 80s did better.

my definition of "an UI bug" is basically "any design or implementation choice that makes users miserable". i do not think many in open source hardware|software share this definition and i won't be satisfied until it's a new norm

Apple replacing Alan Dye with Stephen Lemay may fix Jony Ive's mistake by restoring the Jobsian "design is how it works" ethos in Apple's UI design (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

Bad Dye Job
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.

'graphviz' is a suite of programs for drawing graphs (In the nodes/edges senses, rather than upwards and to the right sense) - and it uses a file format called 'dot'. Lots of things generate dot output (such as systemd-analyze I mentioned) and it's really easy to generate from scripts and things. 'dotty' is probably the most common program in the suite.
There are some newer formats and programs - but this one is probably the most universal.

Actual UI that Apple has shipped in a production operating system.
Apple calls this a "beautiful new software design that makes apps and system experiences more expressive and delightful"

Open-Source Thermostatic Radiator Valve (OpenTRV) - OpenTRV retrofit open-source reference mechanical/hardware/software design for zoned heating to save carbon and money. #OpenTRV #TRV #heating

The EmpathiSEr: Development and Validation of Software Engineering Oriented Empathy Scales
Hashini Gunatilake, John Grundy, Rashina Hoda, Ingo Mueller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12546

The EmpathiSEr: Development and Validation of Software Engineering Oriented Empathy Scales
Empathy plays a critical role in software engineering (SE), influencing collaboration, communication, and user-centred design. Although SE research has increasingly recognised empathy as a key human aspect, there remains no validated instrument specifically designed to measure it within the unique socio-technical contexts of SE. Existing generic empathy scales, while well-established in psychology and healthcare, often rely on language, scenarios, and assumptions that are not meaningful or inte…

Vinci, which uses AI simulations to accelerate chip and other hardware design, raised a $36M Series A led by Xora Innovation, taking its total funding to $46M (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/software-

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115604873348659045
Maybe you think all of this is irrelevant now, who gives a fuck about a media format more than 50 years old?
Well, fun fact, the design of SD cards is referencing the design of floppy disks, and were specifically made thin enough to be used in floppy adapters (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath).
Yes, they made an adapter to stick your SD card in and read and write it in a standard floppy disk drive; though you would need to install special software to use it (ironically that software probably came on a CD).
Why would they do such a thing? Because there was no (widespread) USB.

A technical deep dive into Amazon's Trainium3 accelerator, including its server SKUs' specifications, silicon design, power budget, and bill of materials (SemiAnalysis)
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/aws-trainium3-deep-dive-a-potential

AWS Trainium3 Deep Dive | A Potential Challenger Approaching
NL72x2/NL32x2 Scale Up Rack Architecture, Step-Function Software & System Improvements, Optimized Perf per TCO, “Amazon Basics” GB200 NVL36x2, Astera Labs, Trainium4

What's the official way to report bugs in the #Mastodon web software? I just muted an account, and my feed jumped back 9 hours. That can't be by design.
#BugReporting

Lowering Barriers to CAD Adoption: A Comparative Study of Augmented Reality-Based CAD (AR-CAD) and a Traditional CAD tool
Muhammad Talha, Abdullah Mohiuddin, Sehrish Javed, Ahmed Jawad Qureshi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12146

Lowering Barriers to CAD Adoption: A Comparative Study of Augmented Reality-Based CAD (AR-CAD) and a Traditional CAD tool
The paper presents a comparative user study between an Augmented Reality-based Computer-Aided Design (AR-CAD) system and a traditional computer-based CAD modeling software, SolidWorks. Twenty participants of varying skill levels performed 3D modeling tasks using both systems. The results showed that while the average task completion time is comparable for both groups, novice designers had a higher completion rate in AR-CAD than in the traditional CAD interface, and experienced designers had a s…

Neural Concept, whose 3D product design software uses deep learning to help cut development times, raised a $100M Series C, bringing its total funding to $130M (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-software-deals/20…

Exclusive: Neural Concept collects $100M for U.S. growth
The engineering intelligence startup's Series C was led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives.

My profession (software design, programming) makes me so sad currently.
A speedrun to rock bottom chasing non-existing sand sentience with ever more abstruse magical thinking while whole swaths of my peers are masturbating to fascism in hopes of striking it rich.
I hope after the bubble pops and the boomers are gone there will be a reckoning and a reset to making software that actually strives to make human lives better.