The Fed says this is a cube of $1 mil­lion. They’re off by half a mil­lion.

At the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Money Museum, there’s a big trans­par­ent cube on dis­play. It’s filled with tightly packed stacks of bills, claim­ing to con­tain .

Have you ever won­dered what one mil­lion dol­lars looks like? You don’t have to won­der any­more be­cause you can see it right in front of you!

I first tried count­ing the stacks right there in the room. The cube was tall, so I had to step back to see the whole thing, squint­ing at the stacks, try­ing to fol­low each row. I lost track al­most im­me­di­ately.

Also, peo­ple were start­ing to look at me funny. Apparently, star­ing in­tensely at a pile of cash while mut­ter­ing num­bers is­n’t nor­mal mu­seum be­hav­ior.

Then, I tried with a photo. I zoomed all the way in on my phone, drag­ging my fin­ger across the screen, men­tally tal­ly­ing as I went.

All I wanted was a way to click on things in a photo and have the num­ber go up.

You’d think this would al­ready ex­ist, a browser based tool for count­ing things.

Turns out it… does­n’t. At least, not as a web app I can find on Google.

There are some clunky old Windows pro­grams, niche sci­en­tific tools, and im­age analy­sis soft­ware that as­sumes you’re try­ing to count cells un­der a mi­cro­scope, not peo­ple, pen­guins, or stacks of $1 bills in a Federal Reserve cube.

It’s stu­pidly sim­ple: up­load an im­age, click to drop a dot, and it tells you how many you’ve placed. That’s it. But some­how, noth­ing like it ex­isted.

I orig­i­nally made it to in­ves­ti­gate this very cube, but I fig­ured other peo­ple might need to count stuff in pic­tures.

Now it’s yours too.

Count your en­e­mies. Count your bless­ings. Count your stacks of cash.

Because when some­one tells you it’s a mil­lion dol­lars, you might want to dou­ble check.

*The straps on them are blue which is the stan­dard for a stack of bills. Unless these are some sort of ul­tra-rare bun­dles. In which case, I have fol­low-up ques­tions.

So yeah. They’re off by .

“Hey so… we’re $550,400 over bud­get on the mil­lion-dol­lar cube pro­ject.”

If you knock from each di­men­sion (basically peal­ing away the out­er­most layer of money bun­dles), the math ac­tu­ally gets kinda close

but since dol­lar bills are much wider than they’re tall, it would­n’t look like a cube any­more.

Maybe the Fed is play­ing the long game.

At the Fed’s in­fla­tion tar­get, this cube will be worth mil­lion in to­day’s dol­lars in:

Can’t wait to come back in 2047 and say: “Nice. Nailed it.”

Sure, it does tech­ni­cally con­tain .

And also of bonus money.

Which is kind of like or­der­ing a burger and get­ting three.

I mean, sure, free stuff. But it’s not what you asked for.

You can only see the outer stacks. For all we know, the mid­dle is just air and crum­pled-up old news­pa­per.

A money shell. A dec­o­ra­tive cube. A fis­cal il­lu­sion. The world’s most ex­pen­sive piñata (but don’t hit it, se­cu­rity is watch­ing).

And get this: just the out­er­most layer is al­ready worth:

You’d only need a 3-layer-thick shell to blow past a mil­lion:

How would you make a mil­lion dol­lar cube?

Turns out U. S. dol­lars are ex­tremely non-cube-friendly. Each bill is wide by tall, a nice and even as­pect ra­tio of:

Best I could do

Which gives you a lovely al­most-cube:

Not per­fect. Not ter­ri­ble. At least it’s hon­est, un­like that other cube.

So what’s in the cube?

Maybe it’s an empty box with a money shell.

All I know is I built a tool, did the math, and triple-checked the stacks.

The sign says you don’t have to won­der. But I did any­way.

And now… you don’t have to ei­ther.

This is a story that started back in 2022, but I think its a per­fect time to re­flect on the im­pact that it has had on my friend group still to this day.

A year or so be­fore COVID, our friend group dis­persed across the world - I moved to Vancouver, one friend moved to the UK and an­other one moved to the United States. The rest of them still lived in Melbourne.

Once COVID hit, like many oth­ers, we looked to find a way to keep in con­tact and still hang out. We have al­ways been a big gam­ing group (both board game & video games) so mov­ing on­line seemed like a log­i­cal choice. We had al­ways used Discord so we started to ramp up our time there.

Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drown­ing in no­ti­fi­ca­tions. A mix of gen­eral chit chat, talks on the ever chang­ing news of COVID and the most im­por­tant - when can peo­ple play games and chat. It re­ally an­noyed me when peo­ple would post on “hey any­one wanna play [game] in 15 mins?”, for it to be buried in an­other 5 mes­sages. The mes­sage would have to be con­stantly bumped in Signal be­fore we even­tu­ally jumped in a voice chat in our Discord server. My friends were also an­noyed that they did­n’t know we were play­ing a cer­tain game tonight, for us to go “we talked about it on Signal!”. Something had to change.

I thought, rather than peo­ple typ­ing in Signal that they want to play a game in Discord, it would be bet­ter for Discord to no­tify us when some­one has joined a voice chan­nel in our server. Now you’re prob­a­bly think­ing “Daniel, would­n’t this just be an­other no­ti­fi­ca­tion that peo­ple would miss?” - you would be right to be skep­ti­cal, but I thought that since it was a dis­tinct no­ti­fi­ca­tion from Discord rather than Signal it would be bet­ter.

I went to Discord to find a set­ting to send a no­ti­fi­ca­tion to the server when some­one joined a voice chan­nel, and I came up with crick­ets. There was no such thing. Eventually I found that you can write a Discord bot to lever­age the on_voice_s­tate_up­date from dis­cord.py, a Discord API wrap­per. So I spun up a new git repo and got to work writ­ing a sim­ple Discord bot. Here is main guts of the bot.

Since on_voice_s­tate_up­date trig­gers on when a mem­ber joins or leaves a voice chan­nel and if the mem­ber muted or deaf­ened - we must check that the be­fore chan­nel is null and the af­ter chan­nel is not null to sig­nify that they have joined a voice chan­nel.

We then get the first text chan­nel of the server so that our bot can send the mes­sage to the server. Then we ac­tu­ally send the mes­sage to the text chan­nel. I added the delete_af­ter op­tion so that the text chan­nel is not clogged up with all the mes­sages sent from the bot. All we care about is re­ceiv­ing the no­ti­fi­ca­tion. Finally, I add a record into a post­gres table (hosted on Supabase) of the Discord server (guild), the mem­ber id and mem­ber dis­play name along with a time­stamp of when they joined. All this juicy data will come in handy later.

I orig­i­nally hosted the bot on fly.io. But I’ve been on a mis­sion to learn more about self-host­ing, so I bought a server from Hetzner and it runs on same server as this blog us­ing Coolify.

I added the bot to the server with the ap­pro­pri­ate per­mis­sions and we are live! Here’s what it looks like.

My friends had mixed views when I ini­tially told them. It was a 50/50 split be­tween ‘that sounds use­ful’, to ‘that sounds dumb and I won’t use it’. The hard­est part was con­vinc­ing peo­ple to down­load the Discord app on their phone as most of us did­n’t have it down­loaded.

Only a few months later, I had moved back to Melbourne and was with my friends on a sunny af­ter­noon at a pub. My friend, Jack, who was ini­tially in the ‘I wont use it’ camp, com­pletely changed his tune. He said that it en­cour­ages him to jump into Discord not even to play games but just to have a quick chat with every­one and to so­cial­ize.

I quickly re­al­ized that this has not just re­duced the amount of mes­sages around or­ga­niz­ing to play games, it acted as a Batsignal for our friends to hang out. I es­ti­mated that over 60% of the time when peo­ple join Discord, it’s just to have a chin-wag about our day and not to play a game.

Since I had been keep­ing a record of each time some­one joined Discord, I now had years worth of data to see some trends (as of 27th June 2025).

Even I am stag­gered on how much we use Discord. Our ses­sions varies a lot from 5-30 mins to nights of multi-hour gam­ing ses­sions. All of my friends are in their 30s and with a few of us be­ing first-time Dads. Being one of those Dad’s - it was a life sav­ior when my lit­tle one was a new­born to jump onto Discord for even 5 min­utes to chat with my friends, watch some­one play a game and then log off for an­other di­a­per change. Our group has gone from pri­mar­ily text-based chat to chat­ting on Discord most nights - it’s rem­i­nis­cent of pick­ing up the land­line back in the 90s and call­ing your friends.

Every year we have an an­nual Christmas party for our friends and since last year I’ve been do­ing a ‘Discord Wrapped’ (cross with the Dundies from the Office) - where I an­nounce who has joined Discord the most as well as pro­vid­ing each per­son with stats around their year on Discord. It’s been such a fun way to re­cap the year and see trends of our ac­tiv­ity.

I did­n’t re­al­ize the im­pact this would have on our group, but I’m very grate­ful I had a few hours to spare one Sunday to quickly whip this Discord bot up.

I plan to add achieve­ments based on who you hung out on Discord and some other fun ideas, as well as track­ing when you left Discord to get those juicy hours spent stats.

I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT de­vice that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have del­e­gated joins your Discord voice chan­nel and you could cus­tomize the colour for each friend. If I get some trac­tion I might turn it into a real prod­uct, so email me at my email ad­dress in my about page if that seems some­thing you’d like.

TL;DR Spegel is a proof-of-con­cept ter­mi­nal web browser that feeds HTML through an LLM and ren­ders the re­sult as mark­down di­rectly in your ter­mi­nal.

Two week­ends ago, af­ter my fam­ily had gone to sleep, I found my­self un­su­per­vised with a lap­top and an itch to build some­thing in­ter­est­ing. A cou­ple of hours later, I had a min­i­mal web browser run­ning in my ter­mi­nal (no JavaScript, GET re­quests only) that trans­formed web con­tent based on my cus­tom prompts.

Then, a few days later, Google re­leased Gemini 2.5 Pro Lite, sig­nif­i­cantly faster in­fer­ence speed, sud­denly my lit­tle week­end hack be­came a tad more prac­ti­cal.

Adapting con­tent to suit in­di­vid­ual needs is­n’t a new idea, think about trans­lat­ing books or sum­maris­ing lengthy ar­ti­cles. However, this used to be slow and ex­pen­sive. LLMs have changed this dra­mat­i­cally, mak­ing these trans­for­ma­tions quick and easy.

Spegel (“mirror” in Swedish) lets you ex­plore web con­tent through per­son­al­ized views us­ing your own prompts. A sin­gle page can have mul­ti­ple views, maybe one sim­pli­fy­ing every­thing down to ELI5 or an­other high­light­ing key ac­tions. It’s en­tirely up to you and your prompt­ing skills.

Sometimes you don’t want to read through some­one’s life story just to get to a recipe.

A pre­vi­ous ver­sion of this screen­shot showed an in­cor­rect recipe on the right. That was due to a bug where large web­sites got trun­cated. Thanks to every­one who pointed it out!

That said, this is a great recipe

[[views]]

id = “recipe”

name = “Recipe”

hotkey = “7”

or­der = “7”

en­abled = true

au­to_load = false

de­scrip­tion = “Get to the point in recipes”

icon = “🍳”

prompt = “”″Parse a recipe and ex­tract only the es­sen­tial parts.

Format the out­put like this:

# Ingredients

* 1 tbsp salt

* 400 g beef

# Steps

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C (Gas Mark 6).

2. Wash and chop the car­rots.

**Instructions:**

* Use **metric units** (not im­pe­r­ial).

* inches -> cm

* pounds -> kg

* cups -> dl

* Keep the out­put **clean and min­i­mal** no ex­tra com­men­tary, tips, or nu­tri­tion facts.

* Include the serv­ings.“”″

Spegel fetches HTML con­tent, processes it through an LLM us­ing prompts stored in a con­fig file (~/.spegel.toml), and out­puts mark­down ren­dered via Textual. Prompts and views can be ad­justed live dur­ing a brows­ing ses­sion.

This was my first ex­pe­ri­ence us­ing Textual for a TUI, and it’s been de­light­ful, pos­si­bly too de­light­ful, as I found my­self adding a few un­nec­es­sary in­ter­face el­e­ments just be­cause it was easy.

One gotcha was en­sur­ing only com­pleted lines (ending in new­line char­ac­ters) were streamed; oth­er­wise, the mark­down ren­derer would parse in­com­plete mark­down and fail to re­cover for­mat­ting

buffer: str = “”

async for chunk in llm_­client.stream(ful­l_prompt, “”):

if not chunk:

con­tinue

buffer += chunk

while “\n” in buffer:

line, buffer = buffer.split(“\n”, 1)

yield line + “\n”

if buffer:

yield buffer

There are a lot of great ter­mi­nal browsers out there, Lynx and Links2 are close to my heart. There are also mod­ern at­tempts like Browsh that can even ren­der graphs us­ing half-block Unicode char­ac­ters (▄█).

Spegel is­n’t meant to re­place these, it’s more of an ex­plo­ration or proof-of-con­cept. It cur­rently does­n’t sup­port POST re­quests (though I have some ideas on han­dling el­e­ments by cre­at­ing on-the-fly UIs).

But most mod­ern web­sites aren’t de­signed with ter­mi­nal brows­ing in mind. They rely on CSS and JS, mak­ing them cum­ber­some in small ter­mi­nal win­dows, full of clut­ter and noise. Spegel tries to clear away dis­trac­tions, pro­vid­ing con­tent tai­lored more closely to your needs.

Spegel is still in the early stages, so ex­pect some rough edges, but it’s us­able and kind of fun to play with.

Then just run it with a URL:

Don’t for­get to con­fig­ure your own ~/.spegel.toml, (example)

Want to check out the source or con­tribute? It’s all on GitHub:

OpenFLOW is a pow­er­ful, open-source Progressive Web App (PWA) for cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful iso­met­ric di­a­grams. Built with React and the Isoflow li­brary, it runs en­tirely in your browser with of­fline sup­port.

* 📝 ISOFLOW_TODO.md - Current is­sues and roadmap with code­base map­pings, most gripes are with the isoflow li­brary it­self.

* 🤝 CONTRIBUTORS.md - How to con­tribute to the pro­ject.

* 💾 Auto-Save - Your work is au­to­mat­i­cally saved every 5 sec­onds

* 🔒 Privacy-First - All data stored lo­cally in your browser

# Clone the repos­i­tory

git clone https://​github.com/​stan-smith/​Open­FLOW

cd open­flow-lo­cal

# Install de­pen­den­cies

npm in­stall

# Start de­vel­op­ment server

npm start

Add Items: Drag and drop com­po­nents from the li­brary onto the can­vas

Connect Items: Use con­nec­tors to show re­la­tion­ships be­tween com­po­nents

Navigate: Pan and zoom to work on dif­fer­ent ar­eas

* Auto-Save: Diagrams are au­to­mat­i­cally saved to browser stor­age every 5 sec­onds

* Save As: Use “Save New” to cre­ate a copy with a dif­fer­ent name

* Load: Click “Load” to see all your saved di­a­grams

* Import: Load di­a­grams from JSON files shared by oth­ers

* Export: Download your di­a­grams as JSON files to share or backup

# Create op­ti­mized pro­duc­tion build

npm run build

# Serve the pro­duc­tion build lo­cally

npx serve -s build

The build folder con­tains all files needed for de­ploy­ment.

Deploy the build folder to any sta­tic host­ing ser­vice:

* Clear browser data (last re­sort - will delete all di­a­grams)

Contributions are wel­come! Please feel free to sub­mit a Pull Request.

MIT - Isoflow com­mu­nity edi­tion is re­leased un­der the MIT li­cense. Unlicense - OpenFLOW is re­leased un­der the un­li­cense li­cense, you can mod­ify and dis­trib­ute it how­ever you please, I don’t care.

Figma, Inc. (“Figma”) to­day an­nounced that it has filed a reg­is­tra­tion state­ment on Form S-1 with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) re­lat­ing to a pro­posed ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing of its Class A com­mon stock. Figma has ap­plied to list its Class A com­mon stock on the New York Stock Exchange un­der the sym­bol “FIG.”

The num­ber of shares to be of­fered and the price range for the pro­posed of­fer­ing have not yet been de­ter­mined. The of­fer­ing is sub­ject to mar­ket con­di­tions, and there can be no as­sur­ance as to whether or when the of­fer­ing may be com­pleted, or as to the ac­tual size or terms of the of­fer­ing.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Allen & Company LLC, and J. P. Morgan will act as joint lead book-run­ning man­agers for the pro­posed of­fer­ing. BofA Securities, Wells Fargo Securities, and RBC Capital Markets will act as book-run­ning man­agers for the pro­posed of­fer­ing. William Blair and Wolfe | Nomura Alliance will act as co-man­agers for the pro­posed of­fer­ing.

The pro­posed of­fer­ing will be made avail­able only by means of a prospec­tus. Copies of the pre­lim­i­nary prospec­tus, when avail­able, may be ob­tained from Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York 10014, or by email at prospec­tus@mor­ganstan­ley.com; Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, New York 10282, by tele­phone at (866) 471-2526, or by email at prospec­tus-ny@ny.email.gs.com; Allen & Company LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 711 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10022, by tele­phone at (212) 339-2220, or by email at al­len­prospec­tus@al­lenco.com; or J. P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/​o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717 or by email at prospec­tus-eq_fi@jpm­chase.com and post­sale­man­u­al­re­quests@broad­ridge.com.

A reg­is­tra­tion state­ment on Form S-1 re­lat­ing to these se­cu­ri­ties has been filed with the SEC but has not yet be­come ef­fec­tive. These se­cu­ri­ties may not be sold, nor may of­fers to buy be ac­cepted, prior to the time the reg­is­tra­tion state­ment be­comes ef­fec­tive. This press re­lease shall not con­sti­tute an of­fer to sell or the so­lic­i­ta­tion of an of­fer to buy these se­cu­ri­ties, nor shall there be any sale of these se­cu­ri­ties in any state or ju­ris­dic­tion in which such of­fer, so­lic­i­ta­tion, or sale would be un­law­ful prior to reg­is­tra­tion or qual­i­fi­ca­tion un­der the se­cu­ri­ties laws of any such state or ju­ris­dic­tion.

Figma is where teams come to­gether to turn ideas into the world’s best dig­i­tal prod­ucts and ex­pe­ri­ences. Founded in 2012, Figma has evolved from a de­sign tool to a con­nected, AI-powered plat­form that helps teams go from idea to shipped prod­uct. Whether you’re ideat­ing, de­sign­ing, build­ing, or ship­ping, Figma makes the en­tire de­sign and prod­uct de­vel­op­ment process more col­lab­o­ra­tive, ef­fi­cient, and fun––while keep­ing every­one on the same page.

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OpenFile is a free tax tool forked from IRS Direct File. More in­for­ma­tion at https://​docs.open­file.tax/​en/​lat­est/​di­rect-file.html.

OpenFile uses Docker. To run the en­tirety of OpenFile:

The OpenFile client will start at lo­cal­host:3000/​df/​file.

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You can’t per­form that ac­tion at this time.

I built a small proof-of-con­cept for a sys­tem that en­ables real-time bidi­rec­tional edit­ing be­tween any mod­ern code ed­i­tor and a GUI, en­abled by an LSP server.

I like work­ing on small pro­jects at home that ben­e­fit from CAD. I’m also a pro­gram­mer with a per­sonal de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment that I’ve spent years mak­ing as cozy as pos­si­ble. Naturally I’ve been in­ter­ested in find­ing code-based CAD sys­tem to use for my pro­jects that al­lows me to use that cozy de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment.

I read a re­cent up­date from Kevin Lynagh about his on­go­ing work on

codeCAD, and this part on bidi­rec­tional edit­ing stood out to me (emphasis mine):

For ex­am­ple: One idea I’m ex­plor­ing is “bidirectional edit­ing”, so geom­e­try can

be ma­nip­u­lated us­ing ei­ther:If you graph­i­cally drag a point around, the co­or­di­nates in the source code should au­to­mat­i­cally up­date. If you edit the source code, the graph­i­cal UI should au­to­mat­i­cally up­date. A sim­ple way to test this idea is to throw a in the UI that dis­plays the cor­re­spond­ing source code. But to me, that feels ter­ri­ble be­cause I never want to be cod­ing in some janky, in-browser — I want to be work­ing with source code in Emacs, with all of my fa­mil­iar key bind­ings, color schemes, au­to­com­plete, and decades of cozy prac­tice.But do­ing this prop­erly is an ab­solute boat­load of work:How does the sys­tem rewrite source code? Is it me­di­ated by files on disk with

re­load on save? How do the ed­i­tor and UI stay in sync and avoid clob­ber­ing

each oth­er’s un­saved changes? Maybe we need an LSP server?The lan­guage in­ter­preter needs to pre­serve com­ments and flow them through,

even when the UI makes ed­its to the code.How much of this needs to be built to eval­u­ate whether bidi­rec­tional edit­ing “fits nicely in the hand”?

Maybe we need an LSP server?

I’ve been a happy user of LSP servers since they be­came com­mon­place in Neovim se­tups, but I have al­most no ex­pe­ri­ence with lan­guage server in­ter­nals. I had cer­tainly never con­sid­ered that they could fa­cil­i­tate bidi­rec­tional edit­ing with a GUI.

That line from Kevin’s post was a proper nerd-snipe be­cause a few hours later I had built this proof-of-con­cept:

What you’re see­ing here is a text ed­i­tor next to a GUI, and data live-up­dat­ing both ways be­tween them, made pos­si­ble by a small server that uses LSP to com­mu­ni­cate with the text ed­i­tor and WebSockets to com­mu­ni­cate with a web app.

I’ve shared more tech­ni­cal de­tails and the code for this demo here on

GitHub.

Bidirectional edit­ing is­n’t new. What’s new, as far as I’m aware, is real-time bidi­rec­tional edit­ing that works with your fa­vorite text ed­i­tor.

I’ve tried out a hand­ful of code-based CAD sys­tems, but so far I haven’t found any that achieve more than two out of these three fea­tures:

* Real-time-ish up­dates in the GUI from changes made in the code

* Real-time-ish up­dates in the code from changes made in the GUI

* Works well with my pre­ferred code ed­i­tor

Fusion 360 has de­cent bidi­rec­tional edit­ing for pa­ra­me­ters, but it’s not fully code-based and it cer­tainly does­n’t let me use my own ed­i­tor.

OpenSCAD does­n’t re­quire the use of its own text ed­i­tor, and it’s pos­si­ble to trig­ger re­loads in the GUI via file watch­ing when you save source files in ex­ter­nal ed­i­tors, but it only goes one way.

Zoo has some bidi­rec­tional edit­ing, but only with its built-in ed­i­tor.

Arcol, the tool that I help build at my day job, is in­no­vat­ing in CAD in­ter­face de­sign in some ex­cit­ing ways, but we’re build­ing for ar­chi­tects, not pro­gram­mers.

This is just a toy demo, but it’s enough to ex­cite me about the pos­si­bil­ity of a sys­tem that achieves all three of those points!

I don’t plan to de­velop this demo fur­ther, at least not any­time soon, but I hope it in­spires peo­ple to find more cre­ative uses (abuses?) of LSP servers.

One of the best code-CAD en­vi­ron­ments I’ve worked in is OpenSCAD + Neovim with the OpenSCAD LSP server, only us­ing the OpenSCAD GUI for the viewer, not the built-in text ed­i­tor. OpenSCAD is fun­da­men­tally not built for GUI edit­ing, but since it’s open source and has a nice lan­guage server al­ready, it could be a good place to de­velop a more in­ter­est­ing demo of this con­cept.

Like Kevin’s post said, do­ing this prop­erly will be a boat­load of work. Handling con­flict res­o­lu­tion, in­cre­men­tal ed­its, and the more com­plex gen­eral LSP server in­ter­nals are all se­ri­ous tasks, let alone cre­at­ing a whole new lan­guage for CAD.

I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what Kevin comes up with for codeCAD!

Today marks the end of an era. After nearly a decade of help­ing mil­lions of shop­pers nav­i­gate the murky wa­ters of on­line re­views, Fakespot has of­fi­cially closed its doors. If you tried to check a prod­uct list­ing this morn­ing and found Fakespot not work­ing, you’re not alone. The ser­vice has per­ma­nently shut down.

TL;DR: Fakespot, the pop­u­lar fake re­view de­tec­tion tool ac­quired by Mozilla in 2023, shut down to­day, July 1, 2025. Founded by Saoud Khalifah in 2016, it helped mil­lions iden­tify un­re­li­able Amazon re­views with 90% ac­cu­racy be­fore Mozilla dis­con­tin­ued it due to sus­tain­abil­ity chal­lenges.

Back in 2016, Saoud Khalifah bought a prod­uct on Amazon, trust­ing the glow­ing re­views, only to dis­cover he’d been duped by fake feed­back. Instead of just leav­ing his own an­gry re­view, Khalifah took a more proac­tive ap­proach: he built Fakespot.

What started as one per­son’s frus­tra­tion with de­cep­tive sell­ers be­came a tool that an­a­lyzed mil­lions of re­views across Amazon and other ma­jor re­tail­ers like eBay and Walmart. The premise was sim­ple but pow­er­ful: use AI to spot pat­terns that hu­man shop­pers might miss, like sus­pi­ciously sim­i­lar lan­guage or re­viewer pro­files that did­n’t quite add up.

Fakespot’s tech­nol­ogy re­vealed some eye-open­ing sta­tis­tics. About 43% of the best-sell­ing Amazon prod­ucts had re­views that were un­re­li­able or fab­ri­cated, ac­cord­ing to a study by app com­pany Circuit. The prob­lem was even worse in cer­tain cat­e­gories. Clothing and jew­elry led the pack with a stag­ger­ing 88% of re­views deemed un­re­li­able.

These num­bers painted a sober­ing pic­ture of the on­line shop­ping land­scape. Most of us rely on prod­uct re­views as a ma­jor fac­tor when de­cid­ing what to buy, but nearly half of the feed­back you read might not be gen­uine.

As Fakespot gained trac­tion, in­vestors took no­tice. In November 2020, the com­pany raised $4 mil­lion in Series A fund­ing, bring­ing their to­tal fund­ing to $7 mil­lion and sig­nal­ing strong con­fi­dence in their mis­sion to com­bat fake re­views.

Three years later, Mozilla ac­quired Fakespot, bring­ing the star­tup’s 13-person team into the Firefox fam­ily. Mozilla in­te­grated Fakespot’s tech­nol­ogy di­rectly into Firefox as the “Mozilla Review Checker” fea­ture, mak­ing it eas­ier than ever for users to ver­ify prod­uct re­views with­out in­stalling sep­a­rate ex­ten­sions.

For many users, this felt like a per­fect match. Mozilla’s rep­u­ta­tion for pri­vacy and trans­parency aligned beau­ti­fully with Fakespot’s mis­sion to bring hon­esty to on­line shop­ping.

But as Mozilla an­nounced in May, not all ac­qui­si­tions fit into a sus­tain­able long-term model. The com­pany made the dif­fi­cult de­ci­sion to dis­con­tinue both Pocket and Fakespot as part of a strate­gic re­fo­cus on Firefox’s core fea­tures and AI-powered in­no­va­tions.

The rea­sons were prac­ti­cal, if dev­as­tat­ing for users. A flood of re­views lament­ing the clo­sure have ap­peared on Fakespot’s ex­ten­sion page on the Chrome Web Store:

Fakespot’s mis­sion res­onated strongly with con­sumers, but Mozilla could­n’t find a sus­tain­able model to keep it run­ning. Resources that once sup­ported the ser­vice would now flow to­ward Firefox fea­tures like ver­ti­cal tabs, smart search, and ad­di­tional AI-powered fea­tures.

As we say good­bye to Fakespot, it’s worth re­flect­ing on what it ac­com­plished. For nine years, it served as a de­fender against fraud in an in­creas­ingly de­cep­tive mar­ket­place. It gave shop­pers a fight­ing chance against pro­mo­tional re­view­ers and bot farms that un­der­mine trust in on­line shop­ping.

For those of us who came to rely on Fakespot’s re­view analy­sis be­fore mak­ing pur­chases, its ab­sence leaves us less con­fi­dent in our buy­ing de­ci­sions. The need for trust­wor­thy re­view analy­sis has­n’t gone away. If any­thing, it’s more crit­i­cal than ever.

I know I’m not alone in feel­ing this gap, which is why I’ve be­gun build­ing a tool that aims to be the spir­i­tual suc­ces­sor to Fakespot. TrueStar will use mod­ern AI, stream­lined analy­sis tech­niques, and sus­tain­able eco­nom­ics to keep costs man­age­able while main­tain­ing the ac­cu­racy shop­pers need.

When did Fakespot shut down?

Fakespot of­fi­cially closed on July 1, 2025, with the Mozilla Review Checker fea­ture in Firefox hav­ing ended on June 10, 2025.

Why did Fakespot shut down?

Mozilla could­n’t find a sus­tain­able busi­ness model for Fakespot de­spite its pop­u­lar­ity, choos­ing to redi­rect re­sources to core Firefox fea­tures and AI-powered browser tools.

What hap­pened to Fakespot?

Mozilla ac­quired Fakespot in 2023 but an­nounced in May 2025 that both Fakespot and Pocket would be dis­con­tin­ued as part of a strate­gic re­fo­cus on Firefox de­vel­op­ment.

What are the best Fakespot al­ter­na­tives?

While sev­eral op­tions ex­ist in­clud­ing ReviewMeta, The Review Index, and emerg­ing tools like TrueStar, the mar­ket is still de­vel­op­ing sus­tain­able so­lu­tions that bal­ance ac­cu­racy with af­ford­abil­ity.

As Fakespot’s servers go dark, let’s raise a glass to the tool that made on­line shop­ping so much more trust­wor­thy for nearly a decade. Thanks to Saoud Khalifah and his team for show­ing us what’s pos­si­ble when tech­nol­ogy serves truth over profit.

Rest in peace, Fakespot. You fought the good fight. 🥂

If you found this ar­ti­cle help­ful, con­sider shar­ing it with oth­ers who might be won­der­ing why their fa­vorite re­view checker stopped work­ing to­day. Let’s keep the con­ver­sa­tion about on­line au­then­tic­ity go­ing.

Never say nev­er­Want to learn more about un­lim­ited IOPS w/ Metal, Vitess, hor­i­zon­tal shard­ing, or Enterprise op­tions?

Today we are an­nounc­ing the pri­vate pre­view of PlanetScale for Postgres: the world’s fastest Postgres host­ing plat­form.

You can re­quest ac­cess to PlanetScale for Postgres by vis­it­ing this link.

We are al­ready host­ing cus­tomers’ pro­duc­tion work­loads with in­cred­i­ble re­sults. Convex, the com­plete back­end so­lu­tion for app de­vel­op­ers, is mi­grat­ing their re­ac­tive data­base in­fra­struc­ture to PlanetScale for Postgres. Read more about their mi­gra­tion here.

PlanetScale has been suc­cess­ful host­ing some of the world’s largest re­la­tional data­bases, so why are we build­ing for Postgres? The rea­son is sim­ple: cus­tomer de­mand. In March we an­nounced PlanetScale Metal and some­thing wild hap­pened. We had an im­mense num­ber of com­pa­nies reach­ing out to us ask­ing us to sup­port Postgres. The de­mand was so over­whelm­ing that by the end of launch day we knew we had to do this. We are noth­ing with­out our cus­tomers, we do the dif­fi­cult but bor­ing bit of pro­vid­ing in­dus­try lead­ing up­time so they can build in­cred­i­ble prod­ucts. We want more and more ex­cit­ing com­pa­nies build­ing on PlanetScale.

Our ini­tial goal was to con­vince our­selves we could be ad­di­tive to the ecosys­tem and pro­vide some­thing of value. We spoke to over 50 cus­tomers of the cur­rent Postgres host­ing plat­forms and we heard iden­ti­cal sto­ries of reg­u­lar out­ages, poor per­for­mance, and high cost. PlanetScale is an en­gi­neer­ing com­pany. We are not go­ing to en­ter a mar­ket with any­thing but ex­cep­tional en­gi­neer­ing.

We had to val­i­date we could out-per­form the cur­rent so­lu­tions while be­ing more re­li­able. This led us to build­ing a com­pre­hen­sive bench­mark method­ol­ogy. After ex­ten­sive test­ing we are proud to share that we con­sis­tently out­per­form every Postgres prod­uct on the mar­ket, even when giv­ing the com­pe­ti­tion 2x the re­sources:

PlanetScale for Postgres uses real Postgres run­ning on our pro­pri­etary op­er­a­tor mean­ing we can bring the ma­tu­rity of PlanetScale and the per­for­mance of Metal to an even wider au­di­ence. Today’s re­lease al­ready achieves true high avail­abil­ity with au­to­matic failovers, query buffer­ing, and con­nec­tion pool­ing via our pro­pri­etary proxy layer PSBouncer. We run Postgres v17 and sup­port on­line im­ports from any ver­sion > Postgres v13, as well as au­to­matic Postgres ver­sion up­dates with­out down­time. Additionally, PlanetScale Metal’s lo­cally-at­tached NVMe SSD dri­ves fun­da­men­tally change the per­for­mance/​cost ra­tio for host­ing re­la­tional data­bases in the cloud. We’re ex­cited to bring this per­for­mance to Postgres.

Vitess is one of PlanetScale’s great­est strengths and has be­come syn­ony­mous with data­base scal­ing. Contemporary Vitess is the prod­uct of PlanetScale’s ex­pe­ri­ence run­ning at ex­treme scale. We have made ex­plicit shard­ing ac­ces­si­ble to hun­dreds of thou­sands of users and it is time to bring this power to Postgres. We will not how­ever be us­ing Vitess to do this.

Vitess’ achieve­ments are en­abled by lever­ag­ing MySQL’s strengths and en­gi­neer­ing around its weak­nesses. To achieve Vitess’ power for Postgres we are ar­chi­tect­ing from first prin­ci­ples. We are well un­der way with build­ing this new sys­tem and will be re­leas­ing more in­for­ma­tion and early ac­cess as we progress. As with all PlanetScale prod­ucts we work with cus­tomers at scale to build and val­i­date ma­tu­rity. If your com­pany runs Postgres at a sig­nif­i­cant scale and this is some­thing that in­ter­ests you, reach out.

We are in­cred­i­bly ex­cited to be a part of the vi­brant and thriv­ing Postgres com­mu­nity. Sign up for the pri­vate pre­view of PlanetScale for Postgres wait­list here.