Hack 60 – April 2025

So I decided to try out some AI summaries, and these are the various ones that got spit out from a couple different models…

Stuff people did - according to Gemini (including an imaginary baby for Panda)

• Adam started the hack day by reading through a study of ORM performance bugs. His primary task was to write up the March hackday summary, which he completed and published. He later got sidetracked and couldn’t join the general chat room for the remainder of the day.

• Hugh had a conversation with Panda. He then investigated an issue with Vercel’s bot protection product seemingly blocking traffic and causing him to hit free tier limits, possibly due to AI data scrapers from major tech companies checking for updates on old election candidate lists.

• Panda had a nice chat with Hugh about work focus and security incidents. For their hack, Panda worked on their website, specifically fixing drop shadows and shape-outside around their face on the site, which wasn’t working correctly (possibly on Firefox). They also adjusted text scaling for very large screen sizes. Panda was also busy cooing over their two-week-old baby.

Stuff people did - according to DeepSeek (including throwing shade on people who weren’t there)

• Ryan was busy cooing over his 2-week old baby, taking a well-deserved break from hacking this month.

• Adam started by reading a study about ORM performance bugs, then wrote up the March hackday summary before getting waylaid by family obligations and never quite making it back to hacking.

• Hugh had a nice conversation with Panda about work focus and security incidents, then investigated Vercel’s new bot protection product that might have been blocking traffic to his site (or maybe it was the robots.txt changes). Discovered some overzealous AI data scrapers checking Irish election candidate lists long after the election was over.

• Panda fixed drop shadows and shape-outside styling around their face on their personal website (particularly for Firefox), and improved text scaling for very large screen sizes: https://www.ticklethepanda.dev/

Notable Absences

• The usual suspects were either busy with newborn care or got distracted by other obligations, making this one of the more low-key hackdays.

Stuff people did - according to Claude (who couldn’t copy the styling correctly and also totally didn’t have Ryan in the training data)

• Adam started the day by reading through a study of ORM performance bugs in the wild, then wrote up the March hackday summary and got it published. Unfortunately got waylaid by family lunch duties and couldn’t even make it to the general chat room to properly participate in the hack day itself.
• Hugh had a lovely conversation with Panda about focusing at work and security incidents, among other topics. Later discovered that Vercel’s new bot protection product might be what’s been blocking tons of AI scraper traffic from Facebook, Google, and Amazon that were inexplicably checking his Irish 2024 general election candidate list every minute… in April 2025, six months after those elected officials have been sitting in office.
• Panda enjoyed the nice chat with Hugh, then got properly focused on fixing CSS issues on their personal website. Successfully got drop shadows and shape-outside properties working correctly around their face photo (which apparently wasn’t working properly in Firefox), and also improved text scaling to be more reasonable at really big screen sizes.

Stuff people did - according to chatGPT (who suggested “Baby distractions, AI bots, and CSS tweaks — a classic RemoteHack” as the title), which also probably had the most enjoyable summary…but still didn’t have Ryan in the training data.

• Adam kicked things off by reading a study on ORM performance bugs in the wild and then got the March hackday writeup published. He planned to get more hacky but ended up entirely waylaid and didn’t even make it into the chat room. Classic Adam.

• Hugh had a good catch-up chat with Panda, got pulled away by other obligations, but later investigated a sudden surge in Vercel bot traffic. Suspects include Vercel’s new bot protection product or possibly his own robots.txt update. Apparently Facebook, Google, and Amazon really want to know if the 2024 Irish general election results have changed (they haven’t).

• Panda also enjoyed the chat with Hugh (featuring deep dives into focus at work and security incidents), then put some polish on their website. Drop shadows and shape-outside now work properly around Panda’s face — at least in Firefox — and text scaling on giant screens got a much-needed fix. Check it out: ticklethepanda.dev