Apurva Shukla/writing

08-30-25: Internet goodies I read last week

  1. Yes, I Texted the Number on the Sign

    • Kate Bingaman-Burt discovers and interviews Landon, a Portland-based roof cleaner who creates vibrant, hand-painted signs advertising his services. Through a text conversation, she learns about his creative process: he paints signs at night while watching sitcoms, carefully selects sign locations, and enjoys adding playful doodles. Landon's signs, mounted with heavy-duty screws on telephone poles around the city, reflect his love for drawing and represent a charming, human approach to local advertising that stands out in a world of generic marketing.

  2. ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman

    • Harvey Lederman explores the potential meaning of human life in a future where AI surpasses human capabilities in virtually every domain. He wrestles with the existential dread of losing work and discovery as core sources of meaning, ultimately arguing that while the transition may be emotionally challenging, a post-instrumental world could offer new forms of purpose. These might include pursuing artificial projects, self-fashioning, maintaining relationships, and finding value in understanding for its own sake, rather than being the first to discover something.

  3. Recent Stories — Cooks Without Borders

  4. How to index on Google faster for Free

    • Pat Tammaro reveals a free method to rapidly index web pages using the Google Cloud Web Indexing API. By following an 11-step process involving creating a Google Cloud project, setting up a service account, and running a Python script, website owners can index up to 200 pages daily without costly tools. The technique helped Tammaro quickly index pages for his websites ThePickleballDinks and JustTheExercise, transforming their search visibility from minimal to comprehensive indexing almost overnight.

  5. Everything I know about good API design

    • API design is a delicate balance between familiarity and flexibility, with the primary goal of not breaking existing user implementations. The success of an API depends more on the underlying product's value than its technical elegance. Designers must prioritize stability, avoiding breaking changes whenever possible, and using versioning only as a last resort. Key principles include supporting simple authentication, implementing idempotency for action-based requests, using cursor-based pagination for large datasets, and providing rate limits. The fundamental mandate is to create an API that is intuitive, reliable, and minimally disruptive to existing integrations.