Linkzine

About

Five links a day, in my voice

linkzine is what I wish landed in my inbox each morning: five hand-picked links from the world I actually work in — AI tools, the PHP / Laravel / WordPress ecosystem, DevOps and SRE craft, security advisories, Linux. One sentence per link, in plain language, with the receipts checked. No vendor amplification, no “top 10” listicles, no AI hype that doesn’t survive a benchmark.

Sundays get a longer slot — // THE BRIEF — where I synthesize the week’s threads into one piece. Different tempo, same voice.

The whole thing is free. M–F for the daily, plus the Sunday Brief. Unsubscribe with one click.

Who’s writing this

I’m Thorsten, a hands-on engineering leader who ships production across stacks. Linux backbone; I read broadly because the interesting problems sit at the seams between specialties. The newsletter is the side project; the editorial taste is mine.

I’m pragmatic, direct, and warm where it’s earned — that’s the voice you’ll see in the issues. I name what’s wrong with a vendor pitch and credit the engineers who do real work. If a link doesn’t deserve the slot, it doesn’t get it.

How this gets made (honestly)

Curation is part automated, part hand-picked, and I’d rather be specific about which is which than wave a vague “AI-powered” flag.

Where AI helps:

  • It reads the day’s RSS firehose — ~50 sources I curate, plus what
    bubbles up on Hacker News and Lobsters — and ranks candidates against rules I wrote.
  • It drafts a one-sentence summary per pick from public link content only. No subscriber data ever touches the model.
  • It generates the abstract header image you see at the top of each issue, in the same visual family every day.

Where I take over:

  • I review the five proposed picks every morning. I swap, edit summaries, reject, and reorder until the issue reads the way I want it to.
  • For the Sunday Brief, the AI drafts the synthesis and the receipts; the take — the editorial position at the end — is mine.
  • I sign off on every issue before it ships.

What you can count on:

  • One name on this. If a pick is wrong, blame me.
  • Banned phrases — “game-changer”, “delve into”, “in today’s fast-paced world”, and the LLM-tic vocabulary — get rewritten or rejected. Voice is the editorial moat; I treat it like one.
  • Skepticism is the default tone. Vendor announcements get the receipt-check, not amplification.
  • No surveillance. We don’t run third-party analytics or advertising tags on the website. The full data story is in the privacy policy.

Sponsors

Sometimes there may be a // SPONSOR block. It’s clearly labeled, visually separated, and never lets the sponsor influence what gets picked. Details in the sponsor disclosure.

Get in touch

If you want to subscribe, the box is on the home page. Or just send the link to one person who’d like a sharper morning read.

— Thorsten Ott

Last updated: 2026-06-15