Link Log

A directory of evidence-based techniques for regulating your nervous system.

This is the summary to read about how Jeffrey Epstein conspired with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán, and Nigel Farage-- as well as various media and internet figures-- to create a world-wide fascist order. Ryan Broderick presents a well-researched and well-written explanation of how Epstein, 4chan, GamerGate, SV tech bros, cryptocurrency, Breitbart, Russian troll farms, and MAGA and its international cousins are all connected in one big group chat.

If you've had a feeling that basically all of the awful things in the world are connected in one big spider-web of fascist shit-stains, you are absolutely correct and here's your proof.

Anyway, read Garbage Day and subscribe to Garbage Day.

A cool open-source isometric diagramming tool.

I really need to come up with an excuse to use this.

Yyyeesssssss.

Fun.

⑂〔◕‿◕〕⑂

A directory of public domain films in a Netflix-like presentation.

I've never been a New Year's Resolutions person. If an improvement is important enough, it makes sense to start today, not at an arbitrary future point on the calendar. The second reason is that so many "personal" goals are actually about hammering yourself into shape for other people's-- and let's be honest, capitalism's-- benefit.

Leena does a great job of laying out an argument for why we should all take the year off of self-improvement goals this year.

I have friends and family who won't leave Windows. I have some machines in my house that need to run Windows-only software (cough cough Riot Vanguard cough). In these situations, I like to either use a slimmed-down custom install image using tiny11, or run Win11Debloat to deshittify Windows as much as possible.

Yep. This is a pretty good summary of the state we are in with regard to LLMs and (human) learning.

Loadmo.re is a gallery of delightful unconvential websites.

What an interesting framework.

Put simply, the impossible list is an ever-evolving list of experiences that build upon each other, help others as well as yourself, and implore you to take action. - Thomas Frank

Why do I like this framing? It's natural that as you accomplish one goal on your list, you'll add the next one. Under the framing of a "todo list" or a "bucket list", there's an implicit completion that you'll never reach. In fact, it would be bad to reach it, because it meant you stopped trying new things. Secondly, framing it as an impossible list encourages you to put things on there that you want, whether they feel possible or not.

Hmm. I'll have to think about what's on my impossible list.

I think we're going to see a lot of this over the next couple of years. The economics of AI are so utterly unsustainable that the firms will have to find a way to squeeze their customers. Aggresively. I've seen trustworthy analysis indicated that most AI companies would need 20-50x (not %, x as in times) the current revenue-- per transaction!-- to become profitable. In other words, prices for AI-driven services need to go up by 2,000% or these companies need to find some other way to monetize.

A recent example of this shoe starting to drop is Cursor. The much-hyped random code generate ("AI coding assistant") recently started aggressively rate-limiting customers-- throttling them after as few as three queries. One team reported burning through a $7,000 "annual subscription" in a day.

I, like Nikhil, let most writing about AI-- particularly AI-boosterism-- sail by me. It's just not interesting any more, and there is too much of it to care about everything.

But that blog post by Thomtomtom Ptacek was everywhere for a few weeks. And it was incredibly poorly argued.

Nikhil did what I couldn't be arsed to do-- systematically dismantle this drivel.

Maksim lays out his concept of "Eco cycles"-- named after Umberto Eco:

...he loved his fax machine. The ability to send manuscripts to his editor in minutes felt magical. At first.

But the magic didn’t last. Too many people had his number. The machine started spitting out unsolicited ads, junk, spam. Eventually, he just turned it off. What began as a miracle of speed became a firehose of noise.

He gives a name to a socio-technological phenomina we've all lived through many times: first a breakthrough, then an expansion, and eventually a burden.

My favorite writing is writing that helps me put into words something I've been feeling, but don't have the words for. It turns out that the word I've been looking for is "whatever."

This post is incredibly funny and incredibly true. Over the last couple of decades (at least), the tech world has moved on from making things that solved problems-- often problems that the founders cared deeply about!-- to making whatever they can sell. And because with the right marketing and the right capture of journalism, regulatory power, etc you can sell whatever, that's exactly what the tech world is doing. Selling whatever made up thing that no one wants.

My favorite bit:

Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it do not care about currency — it could be bottled dragon farts for all they care, except that putting it on the computer means there’s no need to actually worry about a product. It’s just something to pump the value of; the underlying asset could be, well, Whatever.

Another one of The Pudding's very cool visual essays. There aren't a lot of places doing journalism really using the web as a medium. The Pudding is the best.

In this piece, they explore and visualize something true and important. We all feel like if we reach out to strangers, we'll feel worse after. Maybe they'll hate us. Maybe it'll be awkward. But time and time again, when people do the expierment, they find something different. Almost everyone feels better after having a chat. Even with a stranger.

Paul writes about how his close group of friends have connected their house LANs into a always-on 24/7 LAN party. Delightful!

Giambattista Vico put forward a claim that is intuitive in hindsight, incredibly powerful, and too often disregarded in practice-- that to truly know a thing, you must make it.

A list of islands inside lakes (inside of islands inside of lakes inside of ... etc).

Without getting into too many specifics, I recently was involved in reviewing hundreds of applications for something. Over the course of reviewing, I was struck by the nearly-identical phrasing that threaded through dozens of the applications. It was eerie at first, like seeing a shadow in the distance, then frustrating, and ultimately completely disheartening: It was AI. For whatever their reasons, a bunch of people had used a chatbot to help write their answers to questions that asked them to draw from their own, unique, personal experience. They had fed their resumes or their personal websites or their actual stories and experiences into the machine, and it had filled in the blanks, Mad Libs-style. I felt crushed.

Until.

Until I read an application written entirely by a person. And then another. And another. They glowed with delight and joy and sadness and with the unexpected at every turn.

They were human.

They were written by people that cared.

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

The LLM bubble is a comorbidity of a longer-term arc that capitalism has been on. More and more jobs are bullshit. People are just going through the motions. And no one is allowed to notice, particularly in corporate culture, that it's all a waste of time and energy. In this environment, of course people are using bullshit machines to write their bullshit email and then using the same bullshit machines to summarize other people's bullshit emails. The content doesn't matter. The email is a prop in a meaningless play. So might as well process it with the minimal amount of effort expended.

A list of a lot of "laws" named after people. Lots of gems in here, for example, a new favorite:

Shank’s Law: “There is no idea so batshit insane that you can’t find at least one PhD scientist to support it.”

If you advocate for not doing a thing, there’s no money changing hands and therefore no ads to buy, no voice to gain, no political decisions going your way. Which is a slightly different explanation than greed and greenwashing for the failure of degrowth to take hold: If you sell flights and buy carbon offsets you’ll always be growing unlike the competition that sells less flights to lower emissions.

This is a dynamic worth thinking about for anyone who wants to change the world. As much as it pains me as a former Teenage Anarchist, dropping out and starting a commune ain't gonna do it.

This is a smart exploration of the concept of "Cognitive Debt" (compare "Technical Debt"), and LLMs. Much like software teams can take on technical debt-- trading higher long term costs for a short term gain in velocity-- LLM users incur "cognitive debt." If you skip the process of thinking up your own answers, you lose long-term understand of the problem and it's possible solutions.

This video is kind of the video companion to the Forest and Desert article from Kent and Beth. It's been a great thing to send around to my Software Engineer friends and clients to get some great conversations going. Are we in the Desert? Or the Forest? If we're in the Desert, what's the first step toward the Forest?

A summary site and list of resources about permacomputing, a movement for resilient and regenerative computing.

This video is a pretty good primer on how the "alt-right" infiltrates spaces, takes them over, and indoctrinates their users into far-right beliefs.

It explains why, for example, it's not a good idea to have a fascist moderator on your Mastodon instance, or have a "no politics" rule on said Mastodon instance (cough, Fosstodon, cough).

I never really crystalized the polar difference between some of the software teams I've worked with. Some of them were definitely in the forest while others were in the desert.

The question, to me, is how to get a desert team into the forest.

This is a very good and very funny summary of the monkeyballs economic argument that Trump and Co have been putting forward.

Please read about George Dale and his long fight with the Klan in Muncie, Indiana.

Unfortunately, they were so concerned with never being accountable for a damn thing, they'd rather have a conversation face to face in the middle of a hurricane than actually make a commitment in writing which you could later use to remind them of a promise they'd made.

Yep. I've met the guy Lou describes. Hell, I worked for that guy for years. Don't be that guy.

I Don't Have Spotify is a little tool where you paste a link to a song on Spotify (or YouTube Music, or Apple Music, or Deezer, or SoundCloud) and it tries to give you a link to that song on all the other services.

Feedle is a search engine that builds its index from RSS feeds. It's great for discovering new feeds about any given topic.

Here's another list of European options for hosting, VPNs, CDNs, etc. This list is stricter, as the person who compiled it tried to filter out any companies that subject to US jurisdiction at all-- either because they are owned by US owners, or because they voluntarily subject themselves to US snooping by policy.

A list of European alternatives cloud or software services such as hosting, CDNs, VPNs, productivity tools, etc.

I'm personally going to be trying to move as much of my digital footprint outside of the US and the Five Eyes / Nine Eyes countries. I want to reward economies that respect my privacy.

In my family’s profession (commercial fishing) we deal with rope a lot. It is called ‘line’ in the fishing world, and it’s what holds it all together. Fisherfolk are very good at coiling it, running it through hydraulic booms, lashing boats to docks with it, and using a small metal tool to splice two ends together. In working with rope you’re always seeing how many different threads form strength, and I think that’s very much a concept we need to be chatting about today.

I've been thinking a lot about repair, care, and maintenance. There's a way in which you can view the polycrisis we're in right now as a result of a lack of maintenance on a lot of fronts-- of machines and the built environment, of nature, of people's health, of the social fabric, and of public institutions.

The quality of your notes isn’t determined by their number of or how they link together or how you’ve organized them or what you’re using to store them. The quality of your notes is measured by how you’re using them. And until you use them, those notes are merely trivia that serves little (if any) purpose.

That bit is true, but I don't agree that anything you have not touched in 8 to 10 weeks needs to be purged. I have notes that have incubated for years before becoming very useful. Maybe it is just a question of how long your creative cycle is.

I really enjoy this page from Devine's wiki about how to engage other people in conversation, or even in argument. I aspire to be someone who can be in conflict with other (good) people this way.

what’s your favorite instance of haptic nostalgia—the poignant memory of the physicality of an obsolete thing—like dialing a rotary phone, shifting gears in a manual transmission, opening a soda can with a pull ring?

Good brain feelings in this thread.

But every minute you focus on that horror when you are not actively doing something to evade or improve or ameliorate the situation (receiving chemo, taking Zofran, listening to the doctor, etc.), you are WASTING WHAT'S LEFT OF YOUR WILD PRECIOUS LIFE.

Read the whole thing for a really valuable perspective on gestures broadly.

The Cybertruck (aka The World's First Ecofacist Vehicle) is dead, after at least seven recalls and who knows how many driver, passenger, and bystander casualties.

I will mark this occassion by relating a conversation I overheard while walking through City Park in New Orleans:

Friend 1, squinting at a parked Cybertruck: So...it's like a truck, but it's a Tesla?

Friend 2: Yep, that's pretty much it.

Friend 1: ...well, why does it look like that? It looks like shit.

“Oh, neat!” is your get out of Hell faster phrase.

My version of this is "Good", preferrably said in your gruffest, toughest voice. I picked that one up from Struthless. "Oh, neat!" is pretty good too, because it puts you in the mode of "I'm going to treat this problem like a cool bug that I'm studying with my magnifying glass."

The article outlines ten ways that "Oh, neat!" works for you.

Mundango is your daily bingo card of mundane joys and I love it.

Designer Bruce Mau lays out some of his techniques for "growth." The techniques are valuable, and I'll probably borrow a few. But what I found most enlightening here is that Bruce's implicit definition of growth is a few degrees off of how the dominant culture defines it. Growth here isn't business growth, and it isn't even "personal growth" defined through the lens of productivity. I think when Bruce says "growth," he purely means "making better stuff" and I think that's the most powerful thing.

A presentation from Phillip Rogaway from NIST's Workshop on Block Cipher Modes of Operation. It was maybe not what the audience was expecting, and that is the point.

What is the small thing we've been lied to about? The "Standard Technological Narrative." My problem with the STN: It's a fantasy

Phillip gives his suggestions for building a Radical CS to combat the STN, and walks through some of his implementations in papers and teaching. More of this please!

NESFab is a new programming language for creating NES games. Designed with 8-bit limitations in mind, the language is more ergonomic to use than C, while also producing faster assembly code. It's easy to get started with, and has a useful set of libraries for making your first — or hundredth — NES game.

I love a good single-purpose language. Back in my early computing days, special purpose compilers with their own dialect and a single target were all over the place. Today, the vast majority of development is done in "write once, run everywhere languages." Obviously, if you want to reach the most users and platforms, there are advantages to that.

But if all you want to do is run on one device? There's power in specialty tools.

A TTRPG in the style of Lasers & Feelings, but:

YOU ARE THE EMPLOYEES OF THE STARTUP RAPPTR. Your job is to scale the company, interface with customers both friendly and deadly, and defend fellow employees against workplace dangers. CEO CHAD has just come back from Burning Man and is overcome by a strange psychedelic energy, leaving you to fend for yourselves while he recovers in a napping pod.

Your character has two stats: Hard Code (science, reason), and Soft Skills (rapport, passion).

A good reminder. I've seen a lot of folks decrying how it is possible that "so many people" voted for Trump. The truth is, as of election night, he had a tiny margin in the popular vote. In his other two elections, he lost by a larger margin. This is, of course, after decades of voter suppression by the GOP, so it's hard to say he's genuinely favored by the majority of people in this country.

Tuki is an open source utility for adding a little structure to running one-off commands in production. It's an interesting approach to a problem that I've encountered at a lot of clients. I'm actually working on a slightly different solution (and obviously I like my version more or I wouldn't be building it!).

Some of the people behind Disco Elysium have formed a new co-op to make new games and their manifesto rules. You can tell this was written by BAFTA-winning writers.

Joseph gives a quick overview of Anom, the encrypted phone company beloved by high-end criminals around the world. The wrinkle: Anom was secretly being run by the FBI.

I've added Dark Wire, Joseph's much more in-depth book on Anom to my pile for reading soon!

A variety of delightful videos that line up really well with songs.

I'm prone to "Owl-speak." As usual, it's a good idea to be more like Pooh Bear.

There is no such thing as multi-tasking. Even computers don't run more than one task at a time (at least on a single CPU core / "brain"). What they do is time-slice. But time slicing has a cost if you do it too often, especially if you aren't a computer.

A classic of programming lightning talks.

Well worth the read if you make software on an "agile" team. First, Barry explains why "story points" don't work. Then Barry outlines what to do instead.

It's brilliant to apply queueing theory and Little's Law to estimate delivery of software in a queue. As software engineers we know it works for job and message queues. Why wouldn't it work for development queues?

A great take on the concept of "technical debt."

Two key takeaways:

1. "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."
2. It's only technical debt if it's intentional. Otherwise, it's just bad code.

It's good to be reminded sometimes.

I saw this guide linked from the Elixir Slack and it is the best guide to comprehensions and the for special form in Elixir that I've seen. I write Elixir code every day and I had no idea about some of the options. See also: the official documentation for comprehensions.

This is a great search engine for public domain images.

Apple's implementation of RCS is a perfunctory, letter-of-the-law effort. Their messaging blames the EU instead of acknowledging their half-assed approach toward the technology. And prominent Apple bloggers are providing cover for it, instead of using their influence to hold the company to account.

This is an example of what a software update that actually serves users looks like-- something that is sadly a rarity these days.

Car companies: Dare to do less · I couldn’t possibly walk away from our time in the Ranger without thinking about the absolutely insane amounts of money and resources and carbon loading we could save by building smaller, simpler, cheaper, dumber, automobiles.

Please, yes. In the last 15-20 years, auto makers, particularly US auto makers have completely abandoned the basic sedan market and the actual light truck market. Before that, base sedans and trucks were intentionally sabotaged (e.g. base trim without aircon) so that dealerships could upsell you expensive packages (e.g. aircon plus a bunch of shiny bits you don't care about for $5,000).

I feel like there's an opportunity for someone to change the game with a car like this:

• ✅ A stero system that is basically a dash-mounted $20 bluetooth speaker and one USB port
• ✅ Aircon.
• ✅ An eye toward user-serviceable.
• ✅ Cheap, reliable, and durable.
• ❌ No other computer-y or electronic bits.

I love so much about this presentation. I believe in the power of writing simple, rough software for small communities, or even for communities of one (e.g. yourself). I've done a lot of that. I also have been feeling the pull of local-first software with really simple tech stacks. That might be my disillusionment with the complexity of modern DevOps.

That said, I don't buy that LLMs are going to suddenly allow a lot of people who have never coded before to start coding. Every LLM-based coding tool I've tried has been basically IntelliSense, but with more variance (plus and minus). To say that people without any other assistance can use IntelliSense to develop whole applications would be nonsense, and so far, I think it's the same for LLMs. Now, does richer developer tooling lower the barrier to entry? Certainly.

My system is pretty similar to this, though I'm still living the one-file-per-day life. I've tried just about all the options out there, and for me, the one that has the lowest friction and highest interoperability is text files.

It also reminds me of the adage I've heard repeated many times about David Allen's Getting Things Done system: "if you can't do GTD with a pen and paper, you aren't really doing GTD."

As an old punk, I love this.

Though, I'd much rather be in a terrible mosh pit than an average social media site.

Cool idea— a font to replace distracting lorem ipsum.

I feel like this solution isn't ideal. My preference is for writing-first design i.e. forcing the client to write their message before you start creating high-fidelity design assets. And I think if I were in a situation where placeholders were appropriate, I think I would prefer something that still felt like glyphs. I feel like the first question from a client would be "what's with all of these blocks everywhere?"

If you don't know Struthless (Campbell Walker) yet, he's making some of the best video essays about creativity, life improvement, mindset, and internet culture on YouTube right now. Go check out his stuff.

In this one, he tackles the "radioactive" subject of masculinity. I know what you're thinking. Uh oh. Is he for or against masculinity? Which camp is he in? Watch the video.

Yeah, this pretty much sums it up.

Neil Stephenson wrote The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, a novel featuring an AI storybook which teaches the protagonist. A Redditor asked him "My ultimate goal in life is to make the Primer real. Anything you want to make sure I get right?." Neal simply replied "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them."

I wish the generative AI people would take that wisdom to heart.

Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content.

Slop. I love (/hate) it.

Essentially, Scrum Masters are corporate dog trainers. Command, control, and structure strengthen the pack and the bottom line. Once they're trained, it's time to move on

I wish more people in the software business understood this. Having permanent, full-time Scrum Masters is an anti-pattern. Their prescence, at least in the long term, is a sign that you don't actually have an empowered agile product team.

The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

The fascinating origins of Oneida silverware.

I think the devil is real and he wants you to be more productive. He’s everywhere, spreading wickedness disguised as wisdom.

...

For legal reasons, I’m not saying the people who write this stuff are literally Lucifer in human skin. It’s just that, if I wanted to maximize human misery, I would 100% try to convince people to spend more time doing things they hate.

The bezzle is a term originally coined by John Kenneth Galbraith for a long-term pattern of bad faith in which the mark does not realise at the time that they have been a victim, and may even feel that they have gained in the short term, until being disillusioned later on. The term is a contraction of the word "embezzlement". The bezzle does not necessarily require criminal acts; the creation of illusionary wealth suffices. I think we're living in the bezzle.

In the hours following the release of CVE-2024-1086 for the project The Linux kernel, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a vulnerability that allows an attacker with unprivileged command execution to gain read/write access to page tables. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them," said programmer King Bud Hodkiewicz, echoing statements expressed by hundreds of thousands of programmers who use the only language where 90% of the world's memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years, and whose projects are 20 times more likely to have security vulnerabilities.

The magical claim of machine learning is that if you give the computer data, the computer will work out the relations in the data all by itself. Amazing!

In practice, everything in machine learning is incredibly hand-tweaked. Before AI can find patterns in data, all that data has to be tagged, and output that might embarrass the company needs to be filtered.

...

Commercial AI runs on underpaid workers in English-speaking countries in Africa creating new training data and better responses to queries. It’s a painstaking and laborious process that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.

AI doesn’t remove human effort. It just makes it much more alienated.

It appears that Shel Silverstein predicted ChatGPT all the way back in 1981.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

[Gunpei Yokoi, long-time Nintendo designer and producter,] said "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply." He articulated his philosophy of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" (枯れた技術の水平思考, "Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikō") (also translated as "Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology"), in the book Yokoi Gunpei Game House. "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting-edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview, he suggested that expensive cutting-edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product.

ht Simon Willison.

Everyone has a list of products they've seen fail and disappear or get acquired and disappear. I want a less-ambitious, lower-scale, bootstrapped company with a plan. I love solo founders with low costs and a fair subscription price.

Yep. What deranged times we live in that it is routine not only for businesses to launch with no plan for ever generating a sustainable income, but for those businesses to rake in buckets and buckets of investment.

A harrowing tale of fixing an unsustainable software project. I've been there.

After being there, I agree with one of Luka's takeaways-- you cannot wait for permission to fix maintainability problems in software. You have do it. And if you have to do it quietly and subvert "the process" to make it happen, do it anyway.

I love to hear these kind of stories about adopting Elixir. I went through a similar arc when I moved from Python/Django, to Node, to Ruby/Rails, and finally to Phoenix/Elixir.

There's a swing back to RSS right now, which I think is good. But I also think that Evan's thoughts here are good. RSS can't be the only solution for how we take in the web. It can't be the only solution for how we decentralize the web again.

Hat tip to Greg Morris for his related post that helped me find this one.

A collection of quotes about AI from 1683 to 2024.

A level-headed explanation of what exactly AI, ML, and LLMs are. "LLMs are really complex markov chains; but the really complex part makes them qualitatively different" has been by go-to explanation of LLMs. I disagree, however, with the idea that LLMs "understand" anything. LLMs contain big statistical models of sentence and paragraph structure, and of the relationship between words and phrases. This allows them to generate text that is more of a statistical match for text written by humans. That humans see this as "understanding" is a form of pareidolia. This distinction is narrow, but important.

A series of great principles for a better web! Hear, hear! Side note: thanks to Cory for inspiring me to add a link log feed to this site, inspired by his at coryd.dev.

Leandro argues that the key to writing readable code is taking implicit context and making it explicit. I agree! This is also one reason I love Elixir. Many of the design choices in the language and standard library encourage you to explicitly write what you mean-- even if it is more keystrokes.

A brilliant lens for thinking about our relationship with tech products, design, and terms of use. Opt-out "consent" isn't consent at all. "Maybe Later" isn't consent either.