Cool Links Vol. 20: February, 2026

Hey there! February is over, which means I survived my first winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and my second winter of the year! I moved from Brazil to Italy in September, which means I survived the winter there and came straight to autumn again...

I gotta say, it was way milder than I expected. I know Italy is not really known for harsh winters (even if I am near the Alps), but I was surprised to find out that winters in (southern) Brazil are way tougher.

Anyway, February is gone but it has brought over 7 Cool Links which have been posted here throughout the month. But for convenience, here's a neat monthly digest for you!

Fun

MyRetroTVs, by Joey Cato

Miss the feeling if watching TV as a kid? This site allows you to surf channels on a retro TV, and you can even choose the decade you want!

Unfortunately it seems it only has US TV, so I can't really relate to anything there. Would love a Brazilian version of this!

Sandboxels - Experiment with Pixels, by Neal Agarwhal / R74n

This is amazing! This is a pixelated sandbox that allows you to experiment with all kinds of materials and elements, and see how they interact with each other. Each material interacts with others differently, as they would in real life. For example, oil won't mix with water, but ink will.

A lot of time-consuming potential here, so don't open it if you have something else to do 😅

Dev

More invoker commands, and more reasons not to use JavaScript please, by Paweł Grzybek

HTML is getting more powerful! Now you can add some predefined commands to HTML elements that can do things like open (or close) modals, for example, without a single line of JS. This article explains really succinctly how that works. The custom commands thing is neat as well.

AI

Stop generating, start thinking, by Sophie Koonin

Fantastic piece wielding the power of common sense and highlighting all the struggles that software engineers have with using generative AI on our jobs.

I also use LLMs as a spicy autocomplete (or even a spicy search) and they can be very useful at times. But I can't replace my thinking with machines, because machines don't think.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me, by Scott Shambaugh

This is both funny and incredibly infuriating. A PR was declined on GitHub for an open-source project because it was made by an AI agent and... the AI agent (or the anonymous person behind it) wrote up a defamatory blog post targeted specifically at the project's maintainer.

If being an open-source maintainer was already a thankless job, now there's one more hell to endure.

App

Current, by Terry Godier

This is pretty cool! Terry built a RSS reader that rethinks how to approach a continuous feed — or rather, a current — of articles and links. I particularly love how it aims to solve the noisy feed problem, where a source that posts 20 news items a day might drown a really cool article from someone who doesn't post often, which is a problem I've had on every single RSS reader I've used (and that I "solved" by unsubscribing from noisy feeds).

It's a one-time-purchase and on iOS/iPadOS/macOS only, and I haven't tried it out yet because I just renewed the annual plan for another RSS reader 😅

Deep Read

The Future is an Empty Room (video), by Jacob Geller

Fantastic video essay about loneliness, technology, and the loss of our ability to do.

Beware that there's some (I assume mild?) spoilers of Death Stranding 1 & 2 in there.

Wrapping up

Thanks for reading and clicking on the links! I get really happy whenever I see people finding out about cool stuff because of me. See you next month!