Pincone Picks for February '26

Hi folks! It's good to talk to you again. The past 12 months have been a quiet period for Pincone. Honestly, too quiet. We didn't ship as much as we wanted to in 2025, and we definitely didn't talk enough about what we were building. That changes now.

2026 is going to be a big year for Pincone. The vision for Pincone has always been bigger than just "bookmarks". We want it to be the place where you save and discover everything worth keeping. Links, articles, images, files, notes. RSS feeds and newsletter inboxes today, Mastodon and the Fediverse tomorrow. A true personal content hub.

We've spent the past couple of weeks laying the groundwork – infrastructure upgrades, polishing rough edges, getting the foundation right for everything that's coming. There's a lot ahead, and we'll share it as we ship it.

But shipping features isn't enough. We also want to be better at showing up. Sharing what we're excited about, what we're reading, what's worth your time. So we're starting something new.

This is the first edition of Pincone Picks – a monthly roundup of the best things we found on the internet. Essays, tools, videos, newsletters, rabbit holes. Some brand new, some we dug up from years ago. If it made us stop and save it, it's here. We'll also spotlight one newsletter we love each month. We'll publish this on the last day of every month, on our blog and in your inbox.

Enough talk. Here's what caught our attention in February.

The Links

Phantom Obligation — Terry Godier
As someone who is (obviously) in love with RSS feeds, I loved this essay from Terry. He traces the anxiety of unread counts back to a design decision Brent Simmons made in 2002 when he built NetNewsWire. Phantom obligation explains the guilt you feel for something no one asked you to do. If you use an RSS reader (or Pincone), this one will hit close to home.

Take off — Benn Stancil
A short ride in a fast machine. The opening paragraph from Benn made my heart race like crazy. A breathless stream of consciousness covering $380 billion funding rounds, sentient chatbot claims, stock market crashes, and new model releases every 27 minutes. Just the fact that it's all accompanied by links corroborating all the claims captures the absurdity of this moment better than anything else out there.

I guess I kinda get why people hate AI — Anthony
Change is scary, and technology changes a lot of stuff. Are there words that better describe the moment we're currently in? Anthony here is wondering if the job he's starting in nine days will be his last – not because of startup risk, but because of AI. I don't agree with a lot of the sentiment here, but the post has resonated with me.

Launch it 3 times — Anil Dash
Your first launch probably won't land. Neither might your second. Anil argues that most ideas need three attempts — sometimes with a new name, sometimes fewer features, sometimes literally the same thing again because the timing was off. It's great advice from Anil, and one that I am constantly grappling with. When to pivot, when to take a different approach, when to just give up.

A website to destroy all websites — Henry Desroches
A passionate, beautifully designed essay about what the internet used to feel like and what we lost to platforms. Henry is right, the internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. I wish this essay was longer!

Sanding UI — Jim Nielsen
Jim compares building interfaces to woodworking: you sand it, run your hand over it, get a splinter, sand again. The specific example of an invisible dead zone between a radio button and its label is tiny, but the principle is everything. I always like to use "death by a thousand cuts" as the metaphor in these scenarios. One thing might not be a dealbreaker, but thousands of little UX and UI transgressions add up to one bad product.

Juice — Brad Woods
An interactive deep dive into "juice" — the non-essential visual, audio, and haptic effects that make software feel alive. The page itself is the argument: it's packed with playable demos, including a delete button you can progressively juice from zero feedback to full sensory overload. If you design or build interfaces, you'll be here for a while. I keep coming back and back to this.

QUOD: An FPS in 64 kilobytes — daivuk, via Marcin Wichary's Unsung
A 28-minute video about building a complete first-person shooter that fits in 64KB. I'll say that again. 64KB. As I was watching this, I kept thinking that there is no way he'll be able to add textures here. And then he added textures. Music? No way. Yep, he added music. The creative problem-solving here is inspiring. P.S. Grab Unsung's RSS feed — Marcin Wichary's blog on software craft is consistently excellent.

Who belongs here? — Johnny Rodgers
There was blood on the new-fallen snow. A short fiction story about an old farmer and a bear in British Columbia. I won't spoil anything further than that. A quiet, beautifully written piece.

50 years off-grid: architect-maker paradise amid NorCal redwoods — Kirsten Dirksen
In 1968, Charles Bello moved onto 240 acres of redwood forest and spent the next 50 years building a life from scratch. A video that makes you want to slow down and build something with your hands.

Newsletter spotlight: What Happened Last Week

What Happened Last Week is written by Sham Jaff, a freelance journalist based in Berlin. Every Monday, she curates the biggest stories from Asia, Africa, and the Americas that Western media tends to skip. I've been an avid reader for the past year.

Three recent editions to give you a hint of the flavor:

• #377: Migrant testimonies from Libya, giant tortoises returning to Ecuador for the first time since 1835, and Russia fining Google a comically large number.
• #376: Bangladesh's Gen Z electorate just voted in a historic election, cyclone Gezani destroyed Madagascar's second-largest city — and 80% of the world's vanilla supply chain with it.
• #375: Costa Rica elected a woman president who wants to double prison sentences for abortion, a record number of African athletes competed at the Winter Olympics, and Malawi's small traders forced the government to pause new tax rules.

Subscribe to What Happened Last Week →

That's it for February. If something here made you stop and save it — well, that's kind of what Pincone is for.

Talk to you folks at the end of March. 🌲