UK creatives reflect on a turbulent year marked by economic uncertainty, sharing lessons from navigating inconsistent workloads, self-doubt, and shifting expectations. Across designers, illustrators, and strategists, common themes emerged: be proactive rather than overthink, embrace slow periods for intentional growth, protect your own pace, lead with authenticity, keep your work documented, and stay connected to community. Ultimately, persistence, clarity, and self-trust prove to be the most valuable takeaways heading into 2026.
A decade after shifting from illustration to running her own graphic design practice, Lotta Nieminen and her studio have created a refined yet playful identity for Erly, a clean skincare brand focused on personalisation. Centered on a logo inspired by the circular motion of blending skincare products, the system uses soft, merging letterforms, confident scaling, sophisticated muted tones paired with neons, and an adaptable typographic toolkit to balance elegance with approachability across packaging and digital touchpoints.
Skinmetal's brand identity was co-created with teenage boys, who acted as decision-making collaborators rather than traditional focus group participants, shaping a product and messaging that genuinely resonates with its audience. The packaging, colour palette, and typography balance industrial functionality with emotional authenticity, while campaigns focus on empowerment and everyday relevance rather than fear-based health messaging, reflecting a design process rooted in collaboration, respect, and real-world insight.
2025.12.05·the-brandidentity.com·5 min read·TLDR Design Despite widespread AI anxiety in the illustration industry, many established illustrators report record-breaking workloads by emphasizing their human-made, handcrafted approach and unique storytelling abilities that AI cannot replicate.
Taiki Sakurai, a former Netflix producer, claims animators favor AI because drawing 100,000 pictures by hand feels "inhumane," contradicting widespread creative opposition to the technology.
Utah has unveiled a bold, contemporary logo for the 2034 Winter Olympics, featuring an abstract, angular wordmark inspired by the state's geography and petroglyphs.
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Want the step-by-step blueprint? Read the SaaS Payments for Dummies Guide [6].
Clickjacking is a classic attack that involves covering up an iframe of some other website in an attempt to trick the user into unintentionally interacting with it. A new technique called SVG clickjacking turns classic clickjacking on its head. It enables the creation of complex interactive clickjacking attacks, as well as multiple forms of data exfiltration. This article takes a look at the technique and its various applications.
2025.12.05·lyra.horse·32 min read·TLDR Dev A 7B language model (Qwen2.5-Coder-7B) was successfully trained (with 86% accuracy) to generate and edit diagrams using the less popular Pintora language. The training involved continued pretraining on Pintora diagrams, followed by instruction fine-tuning. Data was generated by an AI agent, cleaned, and used to train the model with limited resources on Google Colab and Runpod.
2025.12.05·huy.rocks·9 min read·TLDR Dev A Senior Staff Engineer at Google compares his own career path with the spotlight-driven approach often emphasized in Big Tech, especially in product-focused teams. His own focus is on developer tools and infrastructure, with an emphasis on long-term stewardship and deep technical ownership over chasing executive visibility. Staying with a system long-term provided compounding returns through pattern matching, allowing for impactful projects overall.
2025.12.05·lalitm.com·12 min read·TLDR Dev Go prioritizes minimalism and corporate collaboration. Rust emphasizes safety and performance through complex features and strict compile-time checks. Zig has manual memory management and encourages data-oriented design.
2025.12.05·sinclairtarget.com·11 min read·TLDR Dev Sponsored
Here's what over 500 software developers, IT professionals, and IT decision makers have to say about incident management [11]: While 74% of respondents said security risks are their top barrier to expanding AI use, 79% are already exploring AI for incident trending. See why in
2025.12.05·atlassian.com·Sponsor·TLDR Dev Django 6.0 features Content Security Policy support, template partials, background tasks, and more. Email handling in Django now uses Python's modern email API. There are some backward-incompatible changes. This post looks at all of the changes in detail.
2025.12.05·docs.djangoproject.com·20 min read·TLDR Dev Tunnl.gg provides instant public URLs for local web servers, making it easy to expose localhost to the internet. It requires no installation as it relies solely on a simple SSH command.
Walrus is a high-performance, Rust-based distributed message streaming engine. It uses segment-based sharding with Raft consensus to guarantee fault tolerance and automatic load balancing. Walrus has a simple TCP client protocol for managing topics and interacting with message production and consumption.
2025.12.05·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR Dev Inspired by the XKCD comic about software dependency towers, this dev created a tool to visualize dependency graphs as physical towers. He encountered an NP-hard problem that required him to explore graph theory and various algorithms, ultimately combining a barycentric heuristic with PQ-tree pruning for fast layout generation. The resulting tool normalizes the dependency graph and then renders it as stackable towers with information about maintainers.
2025.12.05·stacktower.io·26 min read·TLDR Dev Tavily rebuilt its research agent from scratch after overengineering the first version with assumptions that broke when new models arrived. Instead of passing all tool outputs through the agent loop like most systems do, it distilled outputs into compact reflections and only loaded raw sources for final generation. This cut token usage by 66% while hitting SOTA on benchmarks.
2025.12.05·huggingface.co·8 min read·TLDR Dev Due to soaring RAM prices driven by AI demand, Samsung Semiconductor reportedly rejected a supply order from Samsung Electronics for its Galaxy phones, forcing them to renegotiate at higher, shorter-term rates.
2025.12.05·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Dev Due to the surging demand for RAM in AI data centers, memory prices are skyrocketing, impacting PC builders, single-board computer manufacturers, and eventually all consumer electronics.
2025.12.05·jeffgeerling.com·8 min read·TLDR Dev While AI can generate code quickly, the increased volume and complexity make reviewing and understanding that code more difficult and necessary for maintaining quality.
2025.12.05·coderabbit.ai·6 min read·TLDR Dev 37signals uses vanilla CSS without build tools in its applications by using modern CSS features like custom properties, nesting, and the :has() selector, resulting in simpler, more maintainable code.
2025.12.05·zolkos.com·11 min read·TLDR Dev A step-by-step analysis that shows how a developer identified an issue and resolved it.
2025.12.05·drew.silcock.dev·16 min read·TLDR Dev This is a Next.js web application that uses AI to create and modify draw.io diagrams through natural language.
2025.12.05·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR Dev Sponsored
Venture looks completely different than it did in 2023. In Q3 2025, startups on Carta [4] raised the highest quarterly sum of new funding in three years.
The past year in AI has seen rapid shifts in capability, adoption, and developer behavior. These changes have reshaped how we build and interact with intelligent systems. This post looks at a new study that examines these changes through more than 100 trillion tokens of real-world model usage from OpenRouter. The goal of the study was to provide a large-scale empirical picture of what people do with AI today and what that tells us about the future of the industry.
Most of the financing for best-in-class growth companies raising successive rounds at higher and higher valuations makes no sense. Growth equity capital is very expensive. Companies at this scale typically deploy a substantial majority of their expensive equity dollars into highly predictable, relatively low-risk GTM initiatives. The capital is being used inappropriately, and these companies should finance their GTM investments differently.
Vercel enabled its salespeople to spend most of their time with customers by transforming its inbound sales team. It used an AI sales representative to respond and analyze leads, which condensed the number of touches it took to convert. AI enabled quicker responses, creating an unexpected advantage. Increasing human contact means salespeople can develop deeper relationships and drive more success for customers.
A servant leader quickly becomes an overworked single point of failure. Once they leave, there is nobody else who knows how to handle the obstacles the leader moved out of the way for everyone. A good leader coaches people, connects people, teaches methodical problem solving, and explains values and principles embraced by the organization. They create direct links between supply and demand and allow their direct reports to grow their careers. Good leaders are continuously training their replacements and generally make themselves redundant.
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A refreshing take on cards, columns, and kanban.
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Pylar is a platform that securely connects AI agents to data sources with granular access controls and observability.
Your job as a listener is to consume decades of someone else's experience in minutes. This is impossible if you are busy mentally scripting your reply. The secret to world-class communication is to treat listening and thinking as mutually exclusive states. Turn off your analysis engine completely while they speak. When they finish, ask for a "thinking pause." That awkward silence is the only way to truly synthesize reality before you act on it.
We are starting to see the long-term cognitive cost of "AI First" workflows: our brains are literally disengaging. An MIT study found that students who used AI at the start of a task showed lower neural activity and memory retention than those who did the work themselves. The fix is not to ban AI, but to change the sequence. Always force yourself to draft the structure or outline before you open the prompt window. By treating AI as a "Devil's Advocate" that critiques your existing thoughts rather than a generator to create them, you keep your cognitive edge while still leveraging the speed of the model.
A new study revealed that general LLMs fail nearly 40% of the time when building real-world API integrations, proving that specialized infrastructure is still required to handle outdated documentation and debugging.
Evangelism is worth more than money, especially early on.
You cannot displace a giant with a spreadsheet, you have to turn their entire existence into a moral problem.
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ThreatLocker's annual Zero Trust World [4] is the most interactive, HANDS-ON CYBERSECURITY LEARNING event. Join hacking labs, get Cyber Hero certified, and attend sessions with cybersecurity, IT, and business experts.
Marquis, a Texas-based fintech that provides marketing and compliance services to over 700 US banks and credit unions, suffered a ransomware attack on August 14 that exploited a zero-day vulnerability in SonicWall. Attackers stole sensitive customer data, including names, contact details, financial account numbers, and Social Security numbers, impacting at least 400,000 people so far. The total is expected to grow as more state notifications are filed.
A critical flaw in React 19, dubbed React2Shell, allows attackers to execute code remotely on applications that use newer server-side features and common frameworks. Many cloud environments are reportedly exposed. Vendors are already shipping detection and protection rules.
Freedom Mobile, Canada's fourth-largest wireless carrier, disclosed a data breach impacting an undisclosed number of customers. The breached data includes first and last names, home addresses, dates of birth, home and/or cell phone numbers, and Freedom Mobile account numbers. The data was breached via the account of a subcontractor. Ransomware was not involved.
Cotool tested an AI agent's ability to solve security operations tasks using the Splunk BOTSv3 dataset and frontier models from Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini. Cotool found that while GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5 achieved the top accuracy at 63%, Opus was 3x more expensive than GPT-5.1 but also completed tasks in half the wall-clock time of any other model. The Gemini models performed notably poorly on the tasks and failed to complete several tasks.
Ransomware operators often use remote access tools such as AnyDesk and UltraViewer to maintain persistence, execute remote tasks, and transfer files while avoiding detection. Their typical attack involves using stolen credentials to compromise an employee, then either hijacking existing tools or installing legitimate remote access software, followed by establishing persistence, escalating privileges, and disabling security tools. Subsequently, they deploy payloads, move laterally within the network, and finally execute their ransomware attack.
Researchers trapped North Korean operatives from Lazarus Group's Famous Chollima division inside an extended ANY.RUN sandbox environments, documenting their full operational workflow for infiltrating Western companies as remote IT workers. The operators recruit developers via GitHub spam. They offer 20-35% salary cuts in exchange for using victims' identities and laptops for job applications, relying on AI interview tools, AstrillVPN, and remote access software rather than malware. Poor operational security allowed researchers to delay, monitor, and ultimately expose the scheme targeting the finance, crypto, and healthcare sectors.
7AI builds an “agentic security” platform where autonomous AI agents investigate alerts, correlate data, and take or recommend actions to reduce alert fatigue.