Weekly Reading List

This page contains a list of articles I've read and found interesting over the past week.

Over the past week, I have been reading about teamwork in research, practical guides for outputs and coding, mindset topics like burnout and confidence, public visibility, cost-conscious AI tools, local coding models, internet shutdowns, and governance issues like gift card accountability.

Monday - 22 December 2025

• User research is a team sport — Myddelton

  ‘ User research is a team sport ’ is the most powerful thing I’ve learned in government. Forget user needs. Forget discovery, alpha, beta, live. Forget agile. Forget the service standard and service assessments. This is the one thing I would save in a fire. I love ‘user research is a team sport’ fo

  Tags: research methodology, product development, team collaboration, user research, Organizational Change

  Author: Will Myddelton

• Best Background Music for Team Building Activities

  Music can make or break your event, the last thing you want is an event you fly everyone in for and it falls flat because the energy is low. Let us help you find the right music for your team building activity.

  Tags: team building, background music, corporate events, event planning, music recommendations

  Author: Billy Kirsch

• Structured Outputs Create False Confidence

  Constrained decoding seems like the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it often forces models to prioritize output conformance over output quality.

  Tags: machine learning, Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models, structured output, data extraction

  Author: Sam Lijin

• You’re Not Burnt Out. You’re Existentially Starving. - Neil Thanedar

  “Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this book heContinue reading “You’re Not Burnt Out. You’re Existentially Starving.”

  Tags: personal development, burnout, Existentialism, Meaning of Life, Philosophy

  Author: Neil Thanedar

• I Wish People Were More Public

  On sharing more of yourself.

  Tags: knowledge sharing, digital identity, personal expression, online writing, public sharing

  Author: Fernando Borretti

• [Revised] You Don’t Need to Spend $100/mo on Claude Code: Your Guide to Local Coding Models

  What you need to know about local model tooling and the steps for setting one up yourself

  Tags: software development, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, Local AI Models, Coding Tools

  Author: Logan Thorneloe

• Deliberate Internet Shutdowns - Schneier on Security

  For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing couldn’t have been worse: communities still reeling from a major earthquake lost emergency communications, flights were grounded, and banking was interrupted. Afghanistan’s blackout is part of a wider pattern. Just since the end of September, there were also major nationwide internet shutdowns in…

  Tags: Internet Shutdowns, Censorship, Digital Rights, Political Unrest, Human Rights

  Author: Bruce Schneier

• The gift card accountability sink

  The gaps scammers exploit in gift cards are the result of deliberate policy tradeoffs.

  Tags: gift cards, fraud, payments, financial services, consumer protection

  Author: Patrick McKenzie (patio11)