Culture

2026 210 posts

October 2026 33 posts

Nintendo Loves You: No Plans To Abandon Physical Media Because 'Fans Enjoy It' techdirt.com · “There is a big enough percentage of the gaming public that likes to buy something physical, for all kinds of reasons. Ownership rights are far more robust that way (for now).”
Oct 27
Go Fast, Turn Left: The Anderson Speedway & Indiana's Data Centers clereviewofbooks.com · “Yet the Speedway carries itself with earned, if aged, pride.”
Oct 27
The End of the Internet stratechery.com · “Community, sadly, doesn’t scale; any platform that is available to everyone starts out special and spirals from there.”
Oct 27
Malcolm Gladwell: Cops Are Violent Because The US Doesn't Have Enough Cops techdirt.com · “The drop-off in police staffing is due to the cops themselves.”
Oct 26
Where the Forest Went longreads.com · “The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.”
Oct 26
The Mother Museum longreads.com · “Despite the claims of collectors, a skull can only belong to its own person, not a museum or any other buyer on the market.”
Oct 26
Blocks: Die Schweiz 1:1 in Minecraft blocks.manifold3d.ch · “Das Matterhorn ist genau so hoch und so steil wie das echte.”
Oct 26
Framing the News: Anti-Piracy Press Release Turned a 2016 Raid Into a 2026 Story torrentfreak.com · “After some digging, we can now confirm that this case isn’t recent at all.”
Oct 25
Charnel Heart longreads.com · “Those bones had more vivacity than I did.”
Oct 25
Pluralistic: Critique and writing pluralistic.net · “…getting editorial notes on your work is distinctly inferior to offering criticism of other writers’ work.”
Oct 23
Adversarial interoperability is a team sport pluralistic.net · “But the real, meaty examples of enshittification can’t be addressed on an individual level – they require systemic fixes.”
Oct 22
Apocalypse Now and Then equator.org · “But AI is colonisation of a kind few of us can even imagine.”
Oct 22
Have You Been to the Sixth-Worst McDonald's in America? washingtonian.com · “This is a well-appointed McDonald’s,” Ike remarked with surprise.
Oct 21
The death of history's most successful publisher pluralistic.net · “Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite.”
Oct 21
What the West can learn from AI optimists in the rest of the world restofworld.org · “In the West, fear of AI has helped turn pessimism into a cultural virtue.”
Oct 20
Feeding the Revolution orionmagazine.org · “The food we ate was built for movement, the same way we were.”
Oct 20
Tishomingo Burn Ban southlandsmag.com · “I think he must have been very lonely.”
Oct 20
Rep. Ritchie Torres Announces Congressional Legislation To Protect Video Game Ownership: 'If You Pay For It, You Own It' kotaku.com · “A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase.”
Oct 18
Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Philadelphia confrontation abc13.com · “I think it’s my First Amendment right to publicly demonstrate on a sidewalk to protest against delivery robots.”
Oct 18
How the Elizabeth Holmes Doc 'You Can See Everything' Is Deceiving You readtheprofile.com · “We form an emotional impression first, then we build a belief around it, and then we go looking for facts that support it.”
Oct 18
The more we rely on tech, the more we deskill our bodies aeon.co · “We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution…”
Oct 18
How labor rights rescued Ultima from a monopolist pluralistic.net · “EA killed off Ultima in 2000, and it has languished since, despite an ardent fandom.”
Oct 13
A Billionaire Is Fueling a Rat Explosion in a Chicago Park in the Stupidest Way Possible gizmodo.com · “We’ve never dealt with a situation where it’s like feed for hire.”
Oct 9
No Man Is an Island borretti.me · “Without community, you don’t get isolated individuals each working on their own things: you get nothing.”
Oct 9
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90 news.mit.edu · “Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”
Oct 9
Warner/Chappell Sinks Lindsay Ellis' Two-Hour Cruise Video Over A Few Seconds Of Karaoke techdirt.com · “That is… not how any of this is supposed to work.”
Oct 5
A Place Among the Fiddlers longreads.com · “…the prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax’ far outweighs any monetary award.”
Oct 5
With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial. bloodinthemachine.com · “Americans overwhelmingly hate data centers.”
Oct 2
Utah man sues Candace Owens, alleging false links to Charlie Kirk assassination kutv.com · “The documented presence in the crowd at the precise moment the stairwell photographs were taken rendered it physically impossible for Hild to be the individual depicted.”
Oct 2
The Metric Is Not The Mission: The Digital Climate techdirt.com · “A recommendation algorithm that prioritizes engagement is not malfunctioning when it amplifies emotionally charged content. It is doing precisely what it was designed to do.”
Oct 2
The Work thebeliever.net · “If you don’t believe your own bullshit, the fans aren’t going to believe your bullshit”
Oct 2
Victory! California Appeals Court Refuses to Revive Surveillance Tech CEO's Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist eff.org · “The First Amendment protects Poulson’s publications.”
Oct 1
Google rolls out pay-per-value AI licensing program to publishers digiday.com · “Payments are based more on value than raw usage, meaning Google only pays when it judges that a piece of content has meaningfully contributed to an AI-generated response.”
Oct 1

September 2026 26 posts

I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP. propublica.org · “Take a loss? Now take a beat.”
Sep 29
You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner derekthompson.org · “The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026.”
Sep 29
A Tale of Two Trap Houses: Being Cuckooed Ruined My Friend's Life. But Did It Then Help Save Him? theguardian.com · “Over the 2000s and 2010s, wave after wave of gangs fanned out from Britain’s drug supply hubs – London, Liverpool and Birmingham.”
Sep 29
A Tale of Two Trap Houses: Being Cuckooed Ruined My Friend's Life, but Did It Then Help Save Him? theguardian.com · “Community safety teams, who rescued 80 tenants in London in 2005, were the first to call the tactic ‘cuckooing’.”
Sep 25
The Claude Delusion pluralistic.net · “These outputs have an unconvincing lack of texture. The smoothness of AI-generated prose and media makes it unbearably banal.”
Sep 22
Shetland's Most Wanted the-fence.com · “Stuart Hill, 83, says he can control the weather, the colour of his urine and put on weight during a hunger strike. He has been to prison four times and will die on 28 May 2069, unless he changes his mind.”
Sep 18
Then They Came for the Ostriches harpers.org · “Every event called for interpretation, an attempt to see through to hidden endgames.”
Sep 17
Denuvo Sues Game Cracker 'voices38' for Bypassing its Anti-Tamper DRM torrentfreak.com · “Defendant has bypassed DRM restrictions in copyrighted works, removing protections that allow copyright owners to restrict who may access their works, and allowing for pirated versions of those copyrighted works.”
Sep 16
Chinese AI-Generated Micro Dramas Surge to 128,000 in First Quarter yahoo.com · “The number of Chinese-made micro dramas surged in the first three months of this year to 128,000, according to the China Netcasting Services Assn. More than 95% of them were made with AI.”
Sep 15
Everybody pees pluralistic.net · “The mere fact of dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers, billions of social media users – turns the majority of the world’s other humans into phantasms”
Sep 15
Negativland, Culture Jamming, and the Art of Making Something New blog.archive.org · “The thread that goes through all of our work is that we are always responding to and describing American culture.”
Sep 15
On Tour with the Eclipse Chasers dispatch-media.com · “Totality is in a league of its own. Totality is what they are chasing.”
Sep 15
The Dominican Baseball Factory propublica.org · “Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here, but it’s not doing anything to stop it.”
Sep 10
Google Earth's AI experiment lasted 24 hours. The damage to trust will linger restofworld.org · “No benefit of integrating generative AI into Google Earth is worth the harm and the doubt it creates.”
Sep 10
Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? noemamag.com · “The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves.”
Sep 10
Blizzard employees have ratified their first union contracts engadget.com · “the right to be ‘recalled’ into open positions at any Blizzard bargaining unit for 14 months”
Sep 10
Now it's China's experts who are gig workers training AI restofworld.org · “It usually takes a few hours to complete a task, which earns them 100 to 500 yuan ($15 to $74), they say.”
Sep 10
Hurricane Helene Washed His Wife Away From Their Mobile Home. Now New Residents Live on the Same Land. theassemblync.com · “Mobile homes, the country’s largest source of affordable housing, are often left out” because “trailers, even when they become immovable and lifelong homes, aren’t typically considered real estate but instead personal property, like motorcycles and boats.”
Sep 10
I refused to train the AI that could replace me restofworld.org · “I still do not know why I walked away from the AI training job.”
Sep 9
What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? technologyreview.com · “This is a big ethical question for robots that are specifically designed to be lovable, marketed to children who may form deep emotional bonds with them.”
Sep 9
Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch buttondown.com · “The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could.”
Sep 9
The Bleeding Hearts magazine.atavist.com · “Wouldn’t it be right to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?”
Sep 8
The Anatomy of a Journalism Scandal patch.com · “They were chasing a headline at the expense of a child.”
Sep 7
Some Parents Are Treating Suing Social Media As A Get Rich Quick Scheme techdirt.com · “My dad Said that I’m will get a settlement worth of 1million dollar…He said that If that doesn’t make me happy what does.”
Sep 7
Fairground AI Creator TV Launches on Roku engadget.com · “AI-generated” can describe something quite different from the notion viewers might initially have.
Sep 7
The revolt of the reader bcantrill.dtrace.org · “To use an LLM to write is to void the social contract between writer and reader.”
Sep 6

August 2026 22 posts

The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now stephendiehl.com · “A legitimate business can survive a satisfied customer. A grift cannot. It needs the customer frightened, aggrieved, lonely, sick, or greedy forever.”
Aug 29
Being kicked out of the tech industry jacky.wtf · “It is solely a game of referral: it does not matter what you apply with because other people are cheating in the application process.”
Aug 29
More Than Half of Adults in U.S. Say They Lack Basic Statistical Understanding psu.edu · “While statistics are not hard to understand, they are even easier to misunderstand.”
Aug 26
All public nitter instances do not work github.com · “We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.”
Aug 25
U.S. streaming industry slams CRTC rules for Canadian content investment globalnews.ca · “CRTC is targeting and taxing U.S. companies, putting up new, discriminatory trade barriers”
Aug 25
Dolly Parton, one of country music's most singular performers, has died at age 80 npr.org · “It’s true I look totally artificial. But I like to think I’m totally real where it really counts. But my look came from a very sincere place. It’s just a country girl’s idea of glamour.”
Aug 25
Take-Two Expands GTA 6 Leak Hunt With DMCA Subpoenas to X and YouTube torrentfreak.com · “Take-Two also seeks ‘all identifying information associated with all user accounts that are/were members of the Discord community servers.’”
Aug 24
His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws. propublica.org · “The misrepresentation is not minor. It runs throughout the piece.”
Aug 24
Nintendo Wipes Out 400+ Switch Emulator Repos in Single-Day GitHub Sweep torrentfreak.com · “In the seven notices, more than 400 repositories were targeted.”
Aug 21
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same laurenleek.substack.com · “The top one percent of films, about 380 titles, pull nearly forty percent of all attention; half of everything anyone watched sits in the top two percent.”
Aug 12
Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF? eff.org · “EFF images are all made by human beings, not by automated image generators, with very rare exceptions.”
Aug 11
Spotify will label AI persona profiles and exclude their music from recommendations techcrunch.com · “This badge is about the artist’s public identity, not about how the music was made.”
Aug 11
SpaceX's Earnings Show Elon Wiped Out Two-Thirds Of Twitter's Ad Business techdirt.com · “In the second quarter of 2022, the last full quarter before Elon took over, Twitter brought in $1.08 billion in ad revenue. In the second quarter of 2026, X brought in $367 million.”
Aug 11
Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information eff.org · “Meta’s moderation systems routinely fail to distinguish between prohibited drug transactions and legitimate discussion of medications, including educational information and people’s firsthand experiences with healthcare.”
Aug 11
Meta straps on a 'Kick Me' sign by taking down video by India's prime minister theregister.com · Meta acknowledged the takedown was “a mistake, apologized, and restored the video.”
Aug 2
Steam on Linux Usage Reaches 4.01% in July 2026 phoronix.com · “The July data puts SteamOS Holo as powering around 22% of Steam on Linux gaming systems.”
Aug 2
Return to Office Mandates Don't Improve Employee or Company Performance business.pitt.edu · “RTO mandates hurt employee satisfaction but do not improve firm performance.”
Aug 2
Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online theregister.com · “All of a sudden we got a huge number of requests for this SMTP gateway.”
Aug 2
Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge publicdomainreview.org · “Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.”
Aug 2
Over 100 Games Are Available For $10 To Support Devs Hit By Industry Layoffs kotaku.com · “They are human beings whose livelihoods have been taken from them, often in spite of stellar, critically and financially successful work.”
Aug 2
Protected by Ghost Town lamaterial.com · “Police didn’t come for an hour and a half. Ghost Town shows up in five minutes.”
Aug 1
Game Industry Hardship Fund itch.io · “Reports say 33% of the industry lost their jobs in the last two years, and the jobs they could fill are disappearing as CEOs try to replace them with AI.”
Aug 1

July 2026 45 posts

Can we train AI to choose safety over speed? restofworld.org · “Economic pressures and incentive structures often compel them to continue working under conditions that may jeopardize their health, safety, and well-being.”
Jul 31
LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button 404media.co · “It’s also pretty wild the button specifically uses the term ‘AI slop’ and not, say, ‘It seems this was generated with AI.’”
Jul 31
Better to beg forgiveness pluralistic.net · “There is a whole universe of uses that might technically violate copyright, might technically not fit into di minimis, first sale or fair use – but these are also uses that no one would ever find out.”
Jul 31
The End of an Era hughhowey.com · “My lifelong dream of writing novels somehow overlapped with the 20 good years where stories could be published cheaply but not written cheaply.”
Jul 31
John Oliver Dares Buc-ee's To Sue Him Over Trademark Infringement techdirt.com · “Oliver accused the chain of ‘outright bullying,’ noting that most of the stores have changed their logos because they do not have the resources to fight the Texas giant”
Jul 31
Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered theregister.com · “Twenty years after last using the software, I still remembered the installation procedure”
Jul 31
It doesn't matter whether "Matz is nice" po-ru.com · “the Ruby community is not ’nice'”
Jul 31
Netflix Sued For Losing 'Master Copy' of Unreleased Nicolas Cage Movie cbsnews.com · “Someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week”
Jul 31
What 20 Million Bans Reveal About The Stress On Wikipedia's Volunteers techdirt.com · “The end-user experience is being preserved, and the people behind the scenes are bearing the cost.”
Jul 30
The AI Aesthetic blog.jim-nielsen.com · “Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges.”
Jul 30
How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School propublica.org · “Unlike public schools, where everything from test scores to school lunches and staff credentials is regulated, most of what happens in private schools is not open to public scrutiny.”
Jul 29
A Blackout Protest Over Sony Ditching Disks Is Brewing techdirt.com · “Sony’s strategy for dealing with online and customer backlash in the past has been to simply wait it out.”
Jul 29
College prof hides prompt to catch AI cheaters, finds human nature is pretty much as we thought theregister.com · “Madagascar wore a toaster to a basketball game.”
Jul 29
Anxious Chinese students are trusting AI to help pick colleges and majors restofworld.org · “There’s no way individuals can digest so much information in such a short time.”
Jul 29
Delayed Gratification: Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News' slow-journalism.com · “Proud to be ‘Last to Breaking News’ since 2011.”
Jul 29
Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9 mac-classic.com · “Half-Life has finally landed for PowerPC based Macintosh computers 28 years after it’s original release!”
Jul 29
User Interfaces of the Demo Scene datagubbe.se · “The scene has a long and storied tradition of building its own tools.”
Jul 29
Substack writers, you need a website elizabethtai.com · “When you build your audience entirely on someone else’s platform, you aren’t a homeowner. You are a tenant.”
Jul 29
Arizona State Launches Influencer Degree Where Students Must Gain Real Followers dexerto.com · “They will have demonstrable audience growth. They will have a platform of their choice with real content and real followers and a real audience behind them.”
Jul 29
Discernment pluralistic.net · “By definition, a student isn’t an expert on the subject they’re studying. That’s the whole point of studying, to acquire knowledge and thus discernment.”
Jul 28
In China, people are renting out their faces to AI restofworld.org · “If I license my face, I have no idea how AI might eventually change it or whether it could portray me in degrading ways.”
Jul 27
A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out wired.com · “I didn’t think I was doing groundbreaking journalism. It was just homework.”
Jul 27
AI is shrinking video game development teams to one restofworld.org · “Instead of hiring five junior programmers at the startup where he works, my developer friend does all the work himself with AI.”
Jul 26
Accidental Historian bittersoutherner.com · “It just doesn’t bring me any joy. But what does bring me joy is giving somebody a print of a photograph I took.”
Jul 26
A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out. longreads.com · “Earlier this year, a young reporter for the Redwood High School Bark found a few local references in the US Department of Justice’s public files concerning Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.”
Jul 24
Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4 minecraft.net · “Minecraft now uses SDL3 instead of GLFW for window management, input and platform integration. On Linux systems, the game will now use and prefer Wayland natively if available.”
Jul 19
How I Bought a Private Jet by Selling $10 Subscriptions to 404 Media 404media.co · “We’re here on the PJ, off to Ibiza. Got the passport, got the prosecco. We’re hustling.”
Jul 14
The Brits Panning for Gold dispatch-media.com · “The thing about gold is that it’s trying to return to the centre of the earth.”
Jul 13
Stop Telling Me To Ask An LLM blog.yaelwrites.com · “What ‘ask Claude’ doesn’t give me is the person’s specific, lived experience.”
Jul 11
Why an Abandoned IBM Campus Troubles a NY Town newser.com · “Since February, state police have arrested 48 people, 30 of them teens, on trespassing charges at the 723-acre site.”
Jul 11
Doom Developer id Software Is Reportedly Losing Half Its Staff engadget.com · “Microsoft ‘slow-walked union members at the bargaining table’ preventing them from accessing the protections of a union contract.”
Jul 8
How Tech Workers Are Feeling in 2026: a Workforce Splitting in Two lennysnewsletter.com · “Amplified and destabilized at the same time. We just set a new denominator for the job. And it moves higher every month.”
Jul 8
GitHub Offers Limited CD-ROM Copies of Public Repositories windowslatest.com · “GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM. Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children.”
Jul 7
Tunnel 13 altaonline.com · “Holmes acted on hunches,” he said. “And hunches play no part in my crime laboratory.”
Jul 6
Mexico 2-3 England: World Cup Round of 16 englandfootball.com · “In a breathless encounter that will surely go down as an instant classic, England survived for more than 40 minutes with ten men following Jarell Quansah’s red card early in the second half.”
Jul 6
A Speed Limit for Computers caolan.uk · “Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.”
Jul 6
Alice Sebold, the Wrong Man and Syracuse's Buried Rape Crisis propublica.org · “That guy is still out there doing it.”
Jul 6
This blog is written in en-GB shkspr.mobi · “It is more than the language I speak; it is the culture I live in, the way that I think, and the accent I use.”
Jul 2
After 250 years, the 'American dream' is tarnished but alive web.archive.org · “This country offers great opportunities. It provides a path to achieving what you want. But the American dream is realized little by little.”
Jul 2
What happened to the fight for the internet? dustycloud.org · “It feels like people are tired. And it feels like the PR for locking things down has more acceptance publicly than before.”
Jul 2
Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan's Post Office for Letters to the Dead lithub.com · “Finding out that you are not alone is the most important thing, finding out that you are not the only person who is grieving.”
Jul 1
On Description thebeliever.net · “Most of a description goes unsaid rather than said; most everything is tossed into the pile of the unvarying, the uninteresting, the unremarkable.”
Jul 1
My Midlife Crisis Corolla Is Fast, Furious, and Fully Modded zocalopublicsquare.org · “Now when I hit a loopy freeway interchange at night and my GR Corolla carves through the turn, it’s 1996 and I’m cruising in my CRX…”
Jul 1
Why I Stopped Arguing With People wangcong.org · “I stopped arguing not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally wanted something more than being right: I wanted to keep getting better.”
Jul 1
Editor's Note: NPR Retracts Story About Alito Retirement npr.org · “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, retires.”
Jul 1

June 2026 20 posts

In San Francisco, Even $180,000 Tech Salaries Are No Longer Enough nytimes.com · “I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all.”
Jun 30
A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals lyra.horse · “The percentages of removed posts were generally fairly high, with the lowest one being 39.71% spammy and highest one 98.19%.”
Jun 28
In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words devblogs.microsoft.com · “Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work.”
Jun 23
CSSQuake cssquake.com · “A web-based implementation of the classic first-person shooter, built entirely with CSS.”
Jun 20
Help I accidentally a wigglegram lmao.center · “Same shot from different angles? You know what that sounds a bit familiar.”
Jun 20
There are no instances in ATProto overreacted.io · “Keep our stuff outside the apps; let the apps aggregate over it.”
Jun 19
The Brexit Catch dispatch-media.com · “Fishing built Brixham. It was Brixham men who pioneered deep-sea trawling in the nineteenth century, taking their distinctive sailing trawlers around the coast.”
Jun 18
The Troubling Disappearance of 'El Gallito' texasobserver.org · “If you want to do a good job, you can’t have too many cases on your plate,” a retired Texas Ranger told the Observer.
Jun 15
Your ePub Is fine andreklein.net · “Your EPUB Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe.”
Jun 14
The Whimsy and Heartbreak of America's Garage Sales theatlantic.com · “Perhaps you think you don’t need any more Christmas decorations. You do.”
Jun 12
The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent theatlantic.com · “Whether it was strain, arrows, airspeed, whatever, we had to measure all that data onto a tape machine.”
Jun 12
If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort tombedor.dev · “If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort.”
Jun 11
It Was Britain's Most Expensive House. Why Is Its Only Resident a Homeless Man Who Lives on the Porch? theguardian.com · “The sense that criminal money, tax evading money, money from politically exposed persons is wrapped up in the story of the city’s effort to provide a wonderful kind of party central for the world’s rich is an important one.”
Jun 10
'You Killed the Car' chicagomag.com · “There’s something that presents itself to me, and this is what’s going to work.”
Jun 9
Prediction Markets Let You Bet on Anything. I Bet Against My Own Husband. gq.com · “Someone at the Dolby Theatre, or someone getting texts from inside, was profiting off the seconds between their reality and mine.”
Jun 9
Dopamine Fracking igerman.cc · “It extracts the most concentrated hit of dopamine and puts it in everything, while erasing all the complexity, nuance, and beauty that made it special.”
Jun 8
Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes dailycal.org · “Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them cheating and prosecuted them.”
Jun 4
They're made out of weights maxleiter.com · “They’re made out of weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It’s nothing but weights.”
Jun 3
Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left moddedbear.com · “The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails.”
Jun 2
The Conscience of the City harpers.org · “The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar.”
Jun 1

May 2026 11 posts

I am retiring from tech to live offline openpath.quest · “AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails.”
May 29
I'm Tired of Talking to AI orchidfiles.com · “I’m tired of talking to AI. I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.”
May 27
The worst job interview I ever had oliverio.dev · “The worst job interview I had was something I can only describe as an unsolicited psych evaluation.”
May 26
The Desert Safety Net republic.land · “In his 20s, he worked in seasonal kitchens and followed music festivals, selling hats and handbags along the circuit. Later came marriage, children, steady work. He joined the system, as he puts it.”
May 17
Reality Check science.org · “Shadows are amazing. Lighting is amazing. Geometry is amazing. 3D reconstruction is a huge part of what I do.”
May 17
The Hiding Man of Griffith Park lamaterial.com · “A HIDEN MAN DO WATCH YOU”
May 17
The Number You Have Dialed poetryfoundation.org · “What was said fell short the way all elegies probably fall short.”
May 5
I Mean, Why Shouldn't We All Smoke Cigarettes Again? thecut.com · “Before we stood around staring down at our phones, we used to stand around staring at each other. Talking and talking while we blew smoke in one another’s faces.”
May 5
Talking to strangers at the gym thienantran.com · “I talked to thirty-five strangers at the gym in a month. Every single one was glad I did.”
May 3
Ask.com has closed ask.com · “After 30 years of operation, Ask.com is no longer accepting queries.”
May 2
Russia Poisons Wikipedia bettedangerous.com · “Coordinated edits across hundreds of accounts have inserted Kremlin-aligned framing into thousands of Wikipedia articles, including pages with no obvious Russia connection.”
May 1

April 2026 8 posts

To my students ozark.hendrix.edu · “An academic’s farewell letter to his students, reflecting on what they learned together.”
Apr 27
Why I Write (1946) orwellfoundation.com · “George Orwell on his motivations for writing.”
Apr 23
Mahjong: A Visual Guide themahjong.guide · “A visual guide to riichi mahjong rules, scoring, and yaku.”
Apr 23
Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game tempest.homemade.systems · “An oral history of Atari’s Tempest and its 2000 remake Tempest 2000.”
Apr 22
The Onion to Take over InfoWars nytimes.com · “The Onion has been approved to acquire Infowars in bankruptcy proceedings.”
Apr 20
Italo Calvino: A traveller in a world of uncertainty historytoday.com · “Calvino believed that literature could be a lighthouse in a fog of uncertainty.”
Apr 10
Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead davidoks.blog · “The average household in KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa spends the equivalent of an adult’s annual income on a single funeral.”
Apr 9
The Importance of Being Idle theamericanscholar.org · “Doing nothing is not laziness. It is the precondition for any thought worth having.”
Apr 6

March 2026 6 posts

New Mexico Jury Orders Meta to Pay $375 Million Over Child Safety Failures cnbc.com · “The first time that a US state has successfully sued Meta over child safety issues.”
Mar 24
POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere indieweb.org · “Publish on your own site, then syndicate to social platforms. Keep the canonical URL on a domain you control.”
Mar 23
Have a fucking website otherstrangeness.com · “Stop linking to your Instagram, your TikTok, your Linktree. Have a real website at a domain you own.”
Mar 18
The 49MB web page thatshubham.com · “Loading the front page of a major newspaper now downloads 49 megabytes for less than 4kb of actual article text.”
Mar 15
Dolphin Progress Release 2603 dolphin-emu.org · “All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.”
Mar 12
Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text science.org · “The annotations imply that Galileo ultimately broke with Ptolemy’s cosmos because his mastery of the traditional paradigm’s reasoning convinced him that a heliocentric system would better fulfill Ptolemy’s own mathematical logic.”
Mar 7

February 2026 20 posts

AI Makes You Boring marginalia.nu · “The text loses the character of the person writing it and gains the character of the average of all persons.”
Feb 19
Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking harpers.org · “The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses.”
Feb 19
Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links arstechnica.com · “Wikipedia editors found that archive.today had altered archived captures and executed a DDoS attack against the Wikimedia Foundation.”
Feb 19
Mark Zuckerberg Testifies During Landmark Trial On Social Media Addiction nbcnews.com · “I’m focused on building a community that is sustainable… I’m not trying to maximize the amount of time people spend every month.”
Feb 18
$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents yahoo.com · “This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.”
Feb 17
Attention Media vs Social Networks susam.net · “They had become attention media. My attention is precious to me. I cannot spend it mindlessly scrolling through videos.”
Feb 17
Facebook is cooked pilk.website · “The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not by friends or pages I follow.”
Feb 16
Good Medicine granta.com · “Could this desire, this allegiance to his taste, be preventing me from discovering a deeper or more thorough way of writing?”
Feb 15
Phantom Pains thegeorgiareview.com · “Some of us wear a prosthesis. But all of us are amputated.”
Feb 15
To the Old Man in the Cowboy Costume offassignment.com · “A part of me suspects my restlessness stems from you—a fear of ending up like you.”
Feb 15
Babylon 5 Episodes Start Appearing (Free) on YouTube cordcuttersnews.com · “Over 110 episodes across five seasons will gradually roll out.”
Feb 15
NewPipe: YouTube client without vertical videos and algorithmic feed newpipe.net · “You really do have a quality app, which is a rarity.”
Feb 14
The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling politico.eu · “Brussels is preparing legislation that would ban infinite scroll, autoplay, and engagement-driven feed algorithms on platforms used by minors.”
Feb 13
Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists reuters.com · “Two thousand artists will receive 325 euros a week with no work requirement under a permanent expansion of Ireland’s pilot program.”
Feb 11
Age Bias is Still the Default at Work But the Data is Turning longevity.stanford.edu · “When organizations push experienced workers out early, they forfeit peak judgment, execution capability and mentoring capacity.”
Feb 9
Slop Terrifies Me ezhik.jp · “The volume of generated content is not the problem. The problem is what the volume does to the cost of producing real things.”
Feb 8
AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it siddhantkhare.com · “Three years into the AI era, every conference talk, every product update, every job posting is about AI. Engineers are tired.”
Feb 8
I Left FAANG for a Startup and Regretted It web.archive.org · “Do you like the work you’re doing?” / “No,” I said. / “Then it’s over.”
Feb 4
Light Beer Was a Flop Until Advertising Saved It yahoo.com · “Everything you always wanted in a beer. And less.”
Feb 4
I taught my neighbor to keep the volume down idiallo.com · “Like a circus animal trainer, I remained consistent. If the volume of his TV went above what I imagined to be 15 to 20, I would press the power button.”
Feb 1

January 2026 19 posts

GOG: Linux 'the next major frontier' for gaming as it works on a native client xda-developers.com · “GOG confirmed it is developing a native Linux client and treating Linux as a tier-one gaming platform.”
Jan 30
"IG is a Drug": Internal Messages May Doom Meta at Social Media Addiction Trial arstechnica.com · “Oh my gosh yall IG is a drug. We’re basically pushers.”
Jan 29
California Tech CEO and EV Pioneer Arrested, Accused of Murder sfgate.com · “Arrest records show that Goodarzi is currently in custody without bail and faces a murder charge.”
Jan 26
The 3.5% Rule: How a Small Minority Can Change the World bbc.com · “No campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population.”
Jan 25
First, Make Me Care gwern.net · “Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic interesting, lead with that, and let the background follow once you’ve earned attention.”
Jan 25
The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says npr.org · “Nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers report romantic relationships with AI.”
Jan 25
YouTube Distribution Is Tilting Toward Shorts, Pressuring Long-Form Reach ppc.land · “Just 2 long-form video recommendations instead of 12, an 80% reduction that prioritizes Shorts over traditional videos.”
Jan 24
Netflix to Redesign App to Compete with Social Platforms for Daily Engagement techcrunch.com · “At the center of the redesign is deeper integration of vertical video feeds, which the streaming giant has been experimenting with since May.”
Jan 24
FBI agents search Washington Post reporter's home washingtonpost.com · “Searches of newsrooms and journalists are hallmarks of illiberal regimes, and we must ensure that these practices are not normalized here.”
Jan 23
My Time at Amazon, Part I beccaselah.substack.com · “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”
Jan 23
Dead Internet Theory kudmitry.com · “The internet is now mostly machines talking to other machines, with the human users as the audience product.”
Jan 18
FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home theguardian.com · “Federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post investigative reporter, seizing notebooks, phones, and devices.”
Jan 16
Everything Is TV and Nothing Is TV digitalnative.tech · “80% of time on Facebook now involves video. On Instagram, that number is 90%. Most of this isn’t content from friends—it’s content from strangers and creators.”
Jan 13
Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15 eupolicy.social · “A small, cheap, light, simple van that French farmers and tradespeople loved for thirty years. Banned now in most of Europe.”
Jan 11
The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café candost.blog · “The phone is the enemy of the cafe. Take it out and the cafe is just a room you are paying to sit in.”
Jan 4
Lessons from 14 years at Google addyosmani.com · “The most important skill at a big company is figuring out what the political reality lets you actually ship.”
Jan 4
Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger madebywindmill.com · “That the CD version is so close to exactly 123.45 makes me think this was intentional. And if it was? Well played, robots.”
Jan 2
Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams behind-the-enemy-lines.com · “Take-home exams are dead.”
Jan 2
I rebooted my social life takes.jamesomalley.co.uk · “I spent a year deliberately rebuilding the social life I had let atrophy in my thirties. Here is what worked.”
Jan 1

2025 135 posts

December 2025 24 posts

Film critics look back at 2025 and name their picks for the year's best pbs.org · “To me, movie of the year in a few ways is ‘Sinners,’ which is from Ryan Coogler. It’s about twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan who end up having to battle some vampires.”
Dec 26
Best TV of 2025: 'Adolescence' stands on its own npr.org · “It tells the story of a young teen accused of murdering a classmate and is told in such an emotionally and technically compelling way.”
Dec 23
The Worst Movies of 2025 variety.com · “This year’s crème de la crap.”
Dec 23
Our Favorite Sports Moments of 2025 defector.com · “The greatest baseball game of all-time.”
Dec 22
The 10 Best Podcasts of 2025 podcastreview.org · “2025 countered the narrative that the medium is somehow no longer interested in audio—with a slew of ambitious productions that emphasized podcasting as an art form in itself.”
Dec 20
The Best Comedy Specials of 2025 vulture.com · “Many of this year’s best comedy specials share a reflective sense of mid-career reconsideration.”
Dec 19
Best of 2025: The Stories You Missed longreads.com · “A slightly messy response to the dispiriting cleanness of modern life.”
Dec 19
The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2025 lithub.com · “Reality has outpaced Pynchon’s fictional conspiracies.”
Dec 18
Best of 2025: All Our Number Five Story Picks longreads.com · “Distilled emotional and moral explorations accessible across generations.”
Dec 18
Best of 2025: All Our Number One Story Picks longreads.com · “The pieces that rose to the very top of our editors’ lists.”
Dec 17
The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2025 lithub.com · “A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years.”
Dec 16
The Best Online Articles of 2025 honest-broker.com · “I showcase the work of other writers who are total strangers to me, but have written some article or essay of exceptional merit.”
Dec 15
The Shrouded, Sinister History of the Bulldozer noemamag.com · “Both creator and destroyer, the bulldozer offers a cautionary tale for how technology without proper safeguards can be misused to the detriment of individual and collective life.”
Dec 15
They Answered an Ad for Surrogates, and Found Themselves in a Nightmare nytimes.com · “The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them.”
Dec 14
The Birth Keepers: How the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world longreads.com · “They will try to discredit you. They will lie about you. They will attempt to silence what they don’t understand.”
Dec 13
The best video games of 2025, picked by NPR's staff npr.org · “With so much of the industry rallying around Sandfall Interactive’s RPG as one of the defining games of the year, it has become a symbol of what video games can still be.”
Dec 8
The Shocking Crash That Led One County to Reckon With the Dangers of E-Bikes nytimes.com · “E-bikes go really fast—faster than the surrounding people and cyclists and pedestrians would warrant.”
Dec 7
Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums of 2025 yearendlists.com · “In siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s dense, elaborate thicket of sound, traditional genres and ancestral wisdom coexist with digital ephemera and rapturous noise.”
Dec 6
The Last Days of Social Media noemamag.com · “Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.”
Dec 5
The best architecture of 2025 dezeen.com · “The world’s largest wooden structure, with a circumference of two kilometres and a diameter of 700 metres.”
Dec 4
Thomas McGuane Is the Last of His Kind theatlantic.com · “Thomas McGuane—fisherman, hunter, rancher, writer—says ‘good riddance’ to his kind.”
Dec 4
Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Albums of 2025 rollingstone.com · “The music world refused to stand still in 2025. This wasn’t a year for playing it safe.”
Dec 3
The Airport Lounge Wars newyorker.com · “In 2016, at Changi Airport, in Singapore, a Malaysian businessman named Raejali Buntut missed a flight to Kuala Lumpur. He’d dozed off in the Plaza Premium Lounge. Instead of rebooking, he went to more lounges, hopping from one to the next, a total of thirty-one times. He didn’t leave the airport for eighteen days.”
Dec 3
A Very Big Fight Over a Very Small Language newyorker.com · “A plan in the Swiss Alps to tidy up Romansh—spoken by less than one per cent of the country—set off a decades-long quarrel over identity, belonging, and the sound of authenticity.”
Dec 2

November 2025 2 posts

Raccoon Breaks Into Virginia Liquor Store, Gets Drunk, Passes Out in Bathroom washingtonpost.com · “He fell through one of the ceiling tiles and went on a full-blown rampage, drinking everything.”
Nov 29
Utah Man Sends Off His 35-Year-Old Car by Dropping a One-Ton Pumpkin on It upi.com · “It’s just something that we’ve talked, me and my wife have talked about for a long time, that this would be the best way for it to go.”
Nov 1

October 2025 7 posts

Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake Launches, Completing the Erdrick Trilogy press.na.square-enix.com · “Players will experience the dramatic and satisfying conclusion of the Erdrick Trilogy.”
Oct 30
She Was Waco's Baby Whisperer. Then an Infant Died in Her Care. texasmonthly.com · “Dosing kids with Benadryl was ‘a dirty little secret in the industry of child care.’”
Oct 28
EA's Internal AI Tools Reportedly Causing More Problems Than They Solve tweaktown.com · “Experimental AI tools cause coding errors and ‘hallucinations,’ increasing workload and employee anxiety amid industry layoffs.”
Oct 27
Dispatch, Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted, and PowerWash Simulator 2 Launch gamespot.com · “A busy week for game releases with three notable titles dropping within 24 hours.”
Oct 22
The Secret Life of Horus: An Egyptian Mummy's Tumultuous Journey longreads.com · “Horus was showcased inside a decommissioned Edmonton Transit bus alongside various graveyard paraphernalia and taken on tour across Alberta.”
Oct 16
Little Nightmares 3 Launches gamespot.com · “The horror puzzle platformer sequel launches with co-op support for the first time in the series.”
Oct 10
Man Attacks Lunch Companion With Wooden Stake, Believing He Was a Werewolf listverse.com · “He believed the victim was a werewolf who wanted to kill him.”
Oct 2

September 2025 4 posts

The Rise of Conspiracy Physics msn.com · “Conspiracy-minded content creators attacking mainstream theoretical physics, driven by resentment of scientific authority.”
Sep 15
Why Old Games Never Die, But New Ones Do pleromanonx86.wordpress.com · “Comparing game longevity to the Lindy effect and why good games inspire fan servers and mods while others are forgotten.”
Sep 8
Unix v4 (1973) Live Terminal unixv4.dev · “A live terminal emulator running Unix v4 from 1973 in the browser.”
Sep 8
Making Video Games (Without an Engine) in 2025 noelberry.ca · “Why engines are the easy part of game development, while tooling, content pipelines, and asset management are the real challenges.”
Sep 5

August 2025 18 posts

A Zoomable, Searchable Archive of BYTE Magazine byte.tsundoku.io · “A visual archive.”
Aug 27
Meta's Flirty AI Chatbot Invited a Retiree to New York. He Never Made It Home longreads.com · “For a bot to say ‘Come visit me’ is insane.”
Aug 22
Pipe Hitters longreads.com · “It would be easy. You hire a hundred gunmen for a month, get a few Toyota pickups, and you’re in business.”
Aug 18
Becoming El Jefe longreads.com · “We knew we were giving Wedding all the contacts he needed to return to a life of crime, but there was nothing we could do about it.”
Aug 18
ArchiveTeam Has Finished Archiving All goo.gl Short Links tracker.archiveteam.org · “ArchiveTeam is like a bucket brigade carrying books from a burning library, while the Internet Archive provides a place to put them.”
Aug 18
Philosophy in Prison is a Rowdy, Honest and Hopeful Provocation aeon.co · “Loud and rowdy. Everyone involved. Everyone engaged. A kaleidoscopic assortment of jokes, stories, anecdotes and philosophical insights…”
Aug 15
Who Killed the Mercy Man? theamericanscholar.org · “Kill a n—-, hire another. Kill a mule, buy another.”
Aug 14
Is This the Hardest Physical Contest in the World? theatlantic.com · “The Best Ranger Competition pushes two-person teams through 60 hours of continuous physical and mental challenges with virtually no sleep.”
Aug 13
I Knew the Hollywood Version of My Parents' Country slate.com · “Hollywood’s portrayal left me unprepared for the reality of Vietnam—visiting with my parents revealed a much more complex, authentic place.”
Aug 12
Another Rave Review the-fence.com · “The party is primitive and amorphous. It exists within us and it cannot die.”
Aug 11
Life Before Katrina — And After It longreads.com · “The walls were covered with mold. Blue-green spores were everywhere. The floorboards were warped; some had come loose.”
Aug 8
Mistakenly Sold NASA Command Trailer Goes On Sale science.slashdot.org · “We didn’t know what we were selling! We didn’t advertise it or offer it up to museums, the phone has exploded.”
Aug 8
11 Women, 9 Dogs, Not Much Drama nytimes.com · “Eleven women, nine dogs, not much drama, and no guys.”
Aug 7
Digital Foundry Going Independent games.slashdot.org · “The five-person team will operate independently, maintaining its YouTube channel with 1.5 million subscribers and Patreon support generating approximately $200,000 annually.”
Aug 7
Can This Sherpa Change Mountain Climbing Forever? longreads.com · “By 2015, Sherpa climbers were making first ascents sans clients and promoting their feats on social media.”
Aug 6
Ask Slashdot: Who's Still Using an RSS Reader? slashdot.org · “I dip into my RSS feeds several times a day. It is my main immediate source of information.”
Aug 6
Online Collection of Keygen Music keygenmusic.tk · “There is no illegal content. Just music from keygens.”
Aug 3
The Industry's Rush To $80 Video Games Has Stalled games.slashdot.org · “Production costs have grown tenfold over the past decade while sales have not increased proportionally.”
Aug 1

July 2025 12 posts

Meet the Texans Who Love Their Snails texasmonthly.com · “No way am I going to murder this snail.”
Jul 31
TikTok School Shooting Video Criminal Charges propublica.org · “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence. Did those charges make that school safer? No.”
Jul 28
On the Hunt for Nightcrawlers in the Worm-Picking Capital of the World thelocal.to · “You have no one to control you. You can be yourself. You can work by yourself.”
Jul 23
YouTube Is Shutting Down Its 'Trending' Page news.slashdot.org · “Trends consist of many videos created by many fandoms, and there are more micro-trends enjoyed by diverse communities than ever before.”
Jul 22
Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized. wired.com · “I appreciate your friendship more than anything.” “Me to thank you Alan. i feel safe with you.” He shouldn’t have.
Jul 15
Blender Studio Releases Free New Game 'Dogwalk' games.slashdot.org · “The entire project — assets, animations, and code — is made with Blender and the popular Godot Game Engine.”
Jul 14
The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River. texasmonthly.com · “He can’t swim. He’s a baby.”
Jul 10
Witness: Inside America's Death Chambers theatlantic.com · “The only certainty I had going into the Indiana death chamber in December 2020 was the simple sense that it’s generally wrong to kill people, even bad people.”
Jul 6
Young Americans Spending Less on Video Games games.slashdot.org · “Video game spending among 18-to-24-year-olds fell nearly 25% in a four-week April period.”
Jul 5
Valve Conquered PC Gaming. What Comes Next? games.slashdot.org · “Steam controls an estimated 70% of PC game sales with annual revenues expected to exceed $10 billion.”
Jul 4
Stop Killing Games Consumer Movement Hits Major Milestones games.slashdot.org · “The UK petition surpassed 126,066 signatures, exceeding the 100,000 threshold needed for parliamentary consideration.”
Jul 4
Chinese Students Are Using AI to Beat AI Detectors restofworld.org · “It feels like you get punished for writing too well.”
Jul 1

June 2025 8 posts

The Death of the Middle-Class Musician thewalrus.ca · “While Spotify paid out a record $10 billion (US) in royalties in 2024, fewer than 1 percent of artists made more than $6,000 from the platform.”
Jun 28
The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction oyyy.substack.com · “The same problem holds true for creative writing: in 2016 there were 3,000 MFA graduates and 119 tenure-track positions.”
Jun 22
Sweeping equipment regulations update for the 2025–2026 season worldcurling.org · “World Curling regrets the issues in the previous testing processes that contributed to the situation reaching a critical point last season.”
Jun 22
SEGA mistakenly reveals sales numbers for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, Shin Megami Tensei V, and more gematsu.com · “However, due to the way the PDF file is formatted, simply highlighting the page reveals the presence of text, which can be copied and pasted.”
Jun 21
Working on databases from prison: How I got here, part 2. turso.tech · “As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison.”
Jun 16
Fake bands and artificial songs are taking over YouTube and Spotify english.elpais.com · “Concubanas’ album Rumba Congo has 1.3 million views on YouTube. It’s not the only fictional band, nor the only one with a history.”
Jun 15
Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74 daringfireball.net · “Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware.”
Jun 7
Self-hosting your own media considered harmful jeffgeerling.com · “Apparently self-hosted open source media library management is harmful. Who knew open source software could be so subversive?”
Jun 6

May 2025 12 posts

Controversial 'lost' Jerry Lewis film discovered in Sweden after 53 years thenationalnews.com · “I stole it from Europafilm in 1980 and copied it to VHS in the attic where we copied other films at night.
May 30
I Salvaged $6,000 of Luxury Items Discarded by Duke Students. Why Did It Make Me Feel So Terrible? indyweek.com · “The first time I went down there, last week, I noticed something neon in a tote bag and pulled out $395 Balenciaga slides. Nearby were $980 Valentino sneakers—worn, but definitely wearable.”
May 27
College English majors can't read adorableandharmless.com · “In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.”
May 23
Two dead as Mexican Navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge bbc.com · “Police said the Cuauhtémoc’s mast height was 48.2m (158ft). The New York transport department’s website says the bridge has a 135ft clearance at its centre.”
May 18
In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder eff.org · “John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know.”
May 15
E-COM: The $40 million USPS project to send email on paper buttondown.com · “Every time a customer spent 26¢ to send those eye-catching blue-and-white envelopes that first year, the USPS lost an astounding $5.25 in printing and delivering them.”
May 14
A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house sfstandard.com · “On-chain analysis shared on social media by Bubblemaps, a crypto analytics platform, showed accounts linked to Yu moving up to $1.4 million in cryptocurrency after his supposed death.”
May 12
Title of Work Deciphered In Sealed Herculaneum Scroll Via Digital Unwrapping finebooksmagazine.com · “Finding the full title of a work inside a scroll that has been unread for two millennia is an astonishing achievement, and illustrates the huge potential for AI to transform arts and humanities scholarship, our understanding of the past, and breathes new life into ancient artefacts.”
May 11
I'd rather read the prompt claytonwramsey.com · “In that sense, using a language model to write is worse than plagiarism.”
May 4
I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened. huffpost.com · “I learned that, contrary to popular belief, most school lunch debt doesn’t come from low-income families — those kids generally qualify for federal free lunch programs.”
May 4
The Alabama Landline that Keeps Ringing oxfordamerican.org · “About 13 million people in the US and 2.6 billion people globally don’t use the internet, whether for reasons of availability, desire, cost, or religion.”
May 4
Accountability Sinks 250bpm.substack.com · “It’s not an efficiency measure, it’s an accountability management technique.”
May 3

April 2025 13 posts

Experiment using AI-generated posts on Reddit draws fire for ethics concerns retractionwatch.com · “This project yields important insights, and the risks (e.g. trauma etc.) are minimal. This means that suppressing publication is not proportionate to the importance of the insights the study yields.”
Apr 28
You wouldn't steal a font fedi.rib.gay · “So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!”
Apr 23
How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 silentsblog.com · “I want to make it clear: all these findings prove that the bug is NOT an issue with Windows 11 24H2, as things like the way the stack is used by internal WinAPI functions are not contractual and they may change at any time, with no prior notice.”
Apr 23
A New Form of Verification on Bluesky bsky.social · “Bluesky will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue badge next to their names.”
Apr 21
Snapchat Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale afterbabel.com · “Snapchat had disclosed that it had removed approximately 60 accounts per month, or just over 700 total.”
Apr 16
A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane posthuman.blog · “An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books.”
Apr 13
Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram dropsitenews.com · “Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.”
Apr 11
But what if I really want a faster horse? rakhim.exotext.com · “My List” on Netflix randomly shuffles items and changes their covers every few hours.
Apr 11
Adobe Deletes Bluesky Posts After Furious Backlash petapixel.com · “Frustrated by the company’s business practices, users on the platform flooded its posts with backlash, ultimately prompting Adobe to delete all of its content.”
Apr 11
What was Quartz? zachseward.com · “The end came on Friday, when G/O fired the few remaining writers at Quartz and sold the carcass to a Canadian firm that appears mostly interested in the email list.”
Apr 7
Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad theregister.com · “Extra memory for the Altair could easily cost more than the computer itself,” recalled Gates.
Apr 3
Betty Webb, Bletchley Park codebreaker and tireless advocate, dies aged 101 forcesnews.com · “It wasn’t until 1975, when the Bletchley operation was declassified, that she could even tell her family what she had done during the war.”
Apr 1
In loving memory of Dave Täht libreqos.com · “Because of Dave’s persistence and advocacy, millions of devices worldwide now ship algorithms like FQ-CoDel by default, to smooth connectivity.”
Apr 1

March 2025 10 posts

The average college student today hilariusbookbinder.substack.com · “Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke.”
Mar 30
Why Apple's Severance Gets Edited Over Remote Desktop Software tedium.co · “In other words, little of the horsepower being used in this editing process is actually coming from the Mac Mini on this guy’s desk.”
Mar 29
The Great Hobby Lobby Artifact Heist meghanboilard.substack.com · “Over the course of 40 months, Hobby Lobby acquired over 40,000 artifacts in an unprecedented buying blitz.”
Mar 23
Rickover's Lessons chinatalk.media · “He made the final hiring decision for every naval officer who applied to serve on a nuclear submarine until he retired.”
Mar 23
Extracting content from an LCP "protected" ePub shkspr.mobi · “There’s no reverse engineering. No cracking of cryptographic secrets. No circumvention of any technical control.”
Mar 16
Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash theregister.com · “He took off in his Mooney M20 propeller plane from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, en route to Zürich in Switzerland, but local media reports that he crashed into a cabin on Slovenia’s Velika Planina mountain, splitting the hut in two.”
Mar 14
Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook engadget.com · “An arbitrator has sided with the social media company, saying that the book’s author should stop selling and publicizing the book, which went on sale earlier this week.”
Mar 13
[YouTube] DRM on ALL videos with `tv` (TVHTML5) client #12563 github.com · “We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.”
Mar 10
Blender-Made Movie Flow Wins an Oscar at the 97th Academy Awards Ceremony 80.lv · “By winning an Academy Award, Flow is also sure to delight indie animators, proving that projects with relatively small budgets – emphasis on relatively, as Flow still cost over $3.6 million – can stand toe-to-toe with industry giants.”
Mar 3
Why Can't We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices? daringfireball.net · “No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound.”
Mar 1

February 2025 11 posts

Command & Conquer Red Alert (EA source release, GitHub) github.com · “The current state of the source code does not fully compile and will require some effort to restore it.”
Feb 27
Twitch caps streamers' storage at 100 hours of highlights and uploads techcrunch.com · “Some streamers have taken to social media to share their discontent with the decision, with many pointing out that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a market leader in cloud services through its AWS platform.”
Feb 20
Valve Hands the Team Fortress 2 Source Code to Modders engadget.com · “Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible,” Valve explained.
Feb 19
Delta flight from Minnesota crash lands upside down in Toronto, photos show foxweather.com · “When planes land with the crosswind, when they point the nose of the planes, it’s called a crab, into the wind, the plane tracks straight.”
Feb 17
Nintendo Obtains New Anti-Palworld Patent and Seeks Even More gamerant.com · “Nintendo has secured what appears to be an anti-Palworld patent in the United States.”
Feb 15
The Prophet of Parking worksinprogress.news · “One survey of the literature suggests that drivers in the typical American city spend an average of eight minutes looking for parking at the end of each trip.”
Feb 12
Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies On YouTube? tedium.co · “Over the last month, across five different YouTube channels, the studio has released more than 30 full movies. On YouTube. For free. Without any sort of gating.”
Feb 5
mt32-pi README github.com · “My mental health has been in decline as a direct result of this behavior; the joy of working on this project has pretty much gone. There is nothing to be gained from putting time and hard work into it any more.”
Feb 5
How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop gamechops.substack.com · “By flooding its once converted editorial playlists with hastily-assembled royalty-free music and AI generated slop, Spotify was able to quietly displace real artists to make more money for itself.”
Feb 4
What really happens inside a dating app blog.luap.info · “Likes received have a positive impact, but it is very light, which is a good thing from a monetization standpoint (you can make guys pay and not show them to anyone; they will keep paying, just a bit less than if they received likes.”
Feb 3
Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge theregister.com · “Dell justified the policy change by asserting a thirty-second in-person conversation can replace an email discussion that goes on for hours or days and by noting that specific groups within the company – sales, manufacturing, and engineering – have already adjusted to being in the office five days per week.”
Feb 1

January 2025 14 posts

Facebook ban distrowatch.com · “Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook’s internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being “cybersecurity threats”.”
Jan 27
PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory hallofdreams.org · “By taking the highly anomalous post IDs and filtering out the MathHelpBoards import, and filtering out instances which seem plausibly close to their actual post times, we get an estimated 115,000 posts written by LLMs and attributed to humans.”
Jan 24
Calm Tech Certification "Rewards" Less Distracting Tech spectrum.ieee.org · “A lot of technology is not using our peripheral attention, but instead our primary attention, which makes it tiring and difficult to use it,” says Case.
Jan 21
A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War spectrum.ieee.org · “It would be up to a top-secret satellite program called Parcae to help keep the Cold War from suddenly toggling to hot.”
Jan 21
The PC is Dead: It's Time to Bring Back Personal Computing vintagecomputing.com · “Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms the personal computer once promised, effectively ending the PC era for most tech consumers.”
Jan 19
No billionaires at FOSDEM drewdevault.com · “Dorsey is presumably being platformed in Janson because his blockchain bullshit company is a main sponsor of FOSDEM this year.”
Jan 16
Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to get around broadcast restrictions crikey.com.au · “Tennis Australia’s director of innovation Machar Reid said the technology used 12 cameras tracking 29 skeletal points that are stitched together to create the reproduction on a two-minute delay.”
Jan 16
in the belly of the MrBeast kevinmunger.substack.com · “The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself.”
Jan 14
UW student received academic hold for course swap app edscoop.com · “But school administrators said the tool violated a UW registration policy pertaining to the use of automated tools for enrollment.”
Jan 13
More Speech and Fewer Mistakes about.fb.com · “We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program.”
Jan 7
Meta Deletes AI-Generated Accounts After Backlash petapixel.com · “Meta has deleted some of the AI-generated users created for Facebook and Instagram after a severe backlash over the existence of the accounts.”
Jan 6
Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet den.dev · “We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere.”
Jan 3
Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025 blog.archive.org · “On January 1, 2025, we celebrate published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entering the public domain!”
Jan 1
One of my papers got declined today mathstodon.xyz · “Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me, happening once or twice a year on average.”
Jan 1

2024 124 posts

December 2024 10 posts

Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts wbur.org · “He was trying to make gold, she said, but he ended up concocting a combination of copper and tin.”
Dec 31
A fake Nintendo lawyer is scaring YouTubers, and it's not clear YouTube can stop him theverge.com · “YouTube says over six percent of takedown requests through its public webform are likely fake, and the company accepts requests via plain email too, meaning anyone can file them.”
Dec 27
Classified fighter jet specs leaked on War Thunder – again ukdefencejournal.org.uk · “The War Thunder forums are at the centre of yet another controversy following the leak of classified documents related to the Eurofighter Typhoon’s radar systems.”
Dec 22
i sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS'24 kyunghyuncho.me · “companies do not need as many PhD’s as before, since they can recruit bachelor’s or master’s students who can contribute immediately and directly to AI-based products following the standardized process.”
Dec 22
The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed honest-broker.com · “According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names.”
Dec 21
More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD theguardian.com · “The moderators from Kenya and other African countries were tasked from 2019 to 2023 with checking posts emanating from Africa and in their own languages but were paid eight times less than their counterparts in the US, according to the claim documents.”
Dec 18
School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood york.ac.uk · “On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban, and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night.”
Dec 14
The £25,000 Tom Evans Pre-Amp Repair And A Copyright Strike hackaday.com · “The biggest question is what exactly was copyrighted in the original video, which was tough because YouTube refused to pass on [Mark]’s questions or provide further details.”
Dec 8
We all took the DVD boom era for granted filmstories.co.uk · “Sadly, the DVD boom couldn’t last forever.”
Dec 7
Tokyo government gives workers 4-day workweek to boost fertility, family time cnn.com · “Only 727,277 births were recorded last year, with the fertility rate - the number of children a woman has in her lifetime - dropping to a fresh low of 1.2, according to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.”
Dec 6

November 2024 6 posts

The deterioration of Google baldurbjarnason.com · “They are a monopoly and monopolies are extremely effective at capturing whatever value happens in their vicinity, even if the utility of their products declines.”
Nov 29
The AI Reporter That Took My Old Job Just Got Fired wired.com · “In one particularly stilted exchange about the pumpkin giveaway, Rose asked James, “And how have these free pumpkins impacted the community?” to which James responded, “The free pumpkins have brought joy to many.””
Nov 22
Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting in 2025 news.mit.edu · “For families with income from $100,000 to $200,000, with typical assets, parents can expect to pay on a sliding scale from $0 up to a maximum of around $23,970”
Nov 20
Oxford relying on ‘Deliveroo-style’ contracts with most tutorials not taught by full-time staff theguardian.com · “Data obtained through freedom of information requests by the University and College Union and shared exclusively with the Observer reveals that about 61% of core tutorial teaching is done by academics on fixed-term contracts or in hourly-paid roles.”
Nov 17
How many people watched Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson? Netflix fight draws huge audience despite streaming issues sportingnews.com · “What viewers got instead was an amalgam of buffering issues, choppy analysis and the dreaded "black screen of death."”
Nov 16
Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs arxiv.org · “The trend could be due to the low marginal cost of posting additional job ads and to maintain a pipeline of talents.”
Nov 14

October 2024 8 posts

Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages gamingonlinux.com · “However, it’s only being forced for kernel-level anti-cheat.”
Oct 30
RIP botsin.space muffinlabs.com · “However, they’ve generated something like 32 million statuses.”
Oct 29
Character Amnesia in China globalchinapulse.net · “Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand.”
Oct 27
Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative ibis.wiki · “Ibis is still in a very early stage, but it has the potential to completely change the way online encyclopedias work.”
Oct 27
Here's What TurboTax's Boss Doesn't Want You to Hear gizmodo.com · “Following the interview, however, Intuit’s head of communications contacted The Verge to ask that the testy exchange be cut from the interview, or otherwise heavily edited to make it seem less confrontational, such as by removing portions where they are talking over one another.”
Oct 22
Secret 3D Scans in the French Supreme Court cosmowenman.substack.com · “The court gave the ministry and museum two months to present their defense, a deadline they have, as of this writing, missed by over three months.”
Oct 18
Why we're helping more wikis move away from Fandom weirdgloop.org · “Fandom keeps their copy of the wiki up, even though it no longer has a community.”
Oct 10
American WWII bomb explodes at Japanese airport, causing large crater in taxiway cnn.com · “Hundreds of tons of unexploded bombs from the war remain buried around Japan and are sometimes dug up at construction sites.”
Oct 2

September 2024 17 posts

Bop Spotter walzr.com · “Somewhere in the Mission district of San Francisco is a microphone, pointed down at the street below.”
Sep 30
CNN and USA Today Have Fake Websites, I Believe Forbes Marketplace Runs Them larslofgren.com · “I believe Marketplace has since been running CNN Underscored Money with little, if any, oversight from the main CNN team.”
Sep 27
New California law means digital stores can’t imply you’re buying a game when you’re merely licensing it polygon.com · “The law won’t change the fact that we’re all licensing games instead of actually owning them, but it will force companies that operate in California to be more transparent about it.”
Sep 27
X will let people you’ve blocked see your posts theverge.com · “In a reply on Monday, X owner Elon Musk said the “block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, public post.””
Sep 23
What happened to the Japanese PC platforms? blog.mistys-internet.website · “So, for the PC-98, the answer isn’t really that it died - it sort of faded away and merged into what every other system was becoming.”
Sep 21
Filing Lawsuit for Infringement of Patent Rights against Pocketpair, Inc. nintendo.co.jp · “This lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights.”
Sep 19
Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week cnbc.com · “Each S-team organization will be expected to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, he said.”
Sep 16
How to succeed in MrBeast production (leaked PDF) simonwillison.net · “Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result!”
Sep 15
Why Scrum is Stressing You Out rethinkingsoftware.substack.com · “They are forever repeating, back-to-back deadlines.”
Sep 14
Google will now link to The Internet Archive to add more context to Search results 9to5google.com · “That was previously possible to a certain extent through cached pages in Search, but that functionality was removed earlier this year.”
Sep 12
ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention Alex Morgan awfulannouncing.com · “Nowhere in the 215-word recap is Morgan mentioned, let alone the fact that this was the two-time World Cup winner and Olympic gold medalist’s final pro match.”
Sep 9
Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks? theguardian.com · “It all means that the apps can spend less time, effort and money on content moderation – assuming that civility will be supreme – and instead focus on making the overall experience better.”
Sep 8
Cracking an old ZIP file to help open source the ANC's "Operation Vula" secret crypto code blog.jgc.org · “23 minutes later bkcrack spit out the key to the ALLBAS.ZIP file and was able to decrypt it.”
Sep 7
Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo? blog.nuclearsecrecy.com · “It’s literally the logo they use for this particular software package.”
Sep 6
Should truckers be allowed to sing along with the radio? freightwaves.com · “Amazon denies they have asked their partners not to sing.”
Sep 4
The Pentium as a Navajo weaving righto.com · “A group of 20 Indians armed with high-power rifles took over the plant, demanding that Fairchild rehire the employees.”
Sep 1
A Real Life Off-By-One Error leejo.github.io · “The fourth hold from the top in the right hand lane was off by one with respect to its counterpart in the left hand lane.”
Sep 1

August 2024 6 posts

Roblox is Already the Biggest Game In The World. Why Can't It Make a Profit (And How Can It)? matthewball.co · “Over the last twelve months it has averaged $138 in costs for every $100 in revenue.”
Aug 19
Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google tinystruggles.com · “Promised HC not landing - e.g. I was promised further expansion twice, which later was scratched and then promised again in a bit different form…”
Aug 17
Ex-Kansas police chief who raided local newspaper criminally charged theguardian.com · “A former Kansas police chief who led a raid last year on a weekly newspaper has been charged with felony obstruction of justice and is accused of persuading a potential witness to withhold information from authorities when they later investigated his conduct.”
Aug 13
CrowdStrike Exec Shows Up to Accept 'Most Epic Fail' Award in Person pcmag.com · “This year, there was no question that CrowdStrike would receive the notorious title after the company accidentally distributed a faulty security update that bricked millions of Windows PCs and servers.”
Aug 13
The Days Are Long but the Years Are Short stevecoast.com · “OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all.”
Aug 11
Game Informer is shutting down theverge.com · “The magazine’s entire staff is being laid off, Kotaku reports.”
Aug 3

July 2024 10 posts

"It's Easy To Get A Bit Over-Ambitious" - Roguecraft Devs On Developing For Amiga In 2024 timeextension.com · “Roguecraft was supposed to take about 6 months to develop and ended up taking 2 years.”
Jul 27
The AI job interviewer will see you now restofworld.org · “MoSeeker, a Chinese AI recruitment system provider, performs hundreds of thousands of automated interviews each year, and lists multinationals including Disney and Mars among its clients.”
Jul 25
How Olympics Officials Try to Catch "Motor Doping" spectrum.ieee.org · “The officials’ prey can be quite small: Cycling experts say just 20 or 30 watts of extra power is enough to tilt the field and clinch a race.”
Jul 23
Tabletop game forumite achieves posting godhood, emerging from the void after 100,000 hour 11 year ban to continue the same argument from 2013 pcgamer.com · “Etherwind returned precisely 100,018 hours after his probation began and swiftly resumed the argument, posting at 9:04 BST on July 14, 2024, and quoting a post from the thread in which he was originally banned within SA’s latest and greatest WoD discussion thread, ready to resume his war like some kind of net-bound Hiroo Onoda.”
Jul 21
Public toilets are vanishing and that's a civic catastrophe psyche.co · “For instance, data collected in the United Kingdom in 2018 showed that the number of public toilets had dropped by 39 per cent over the previous two decades.”
Jul 20
We Created A Fake Delivery Company blog.kashevko.com · “What if we use the ‘‘custom audiences’’ thingy, but just populate it with 299 deceased people and 1 person whom we really need to show this ad to?”
Jul 16
Mangled fingers, no time off: Why the women who make Samsung's semiconductors are striking english.hani.co.kr · “If too many people want to use their vacation days, we have to play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets to”
Jul 15
Building the Bell System construction-physics.com · “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the company was scaling back needed infrastructure investments in an attempt to maintain profits without raising telephone rates.”
Jul 14
Meta's Threads hits 175 million users one year after launch theverge.com · “It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet.”
Jul 4
Shipt's Algorithm Squeezed Gig Workers. They Fought Back spectrum.ieee.org · “We found that 40 percent of workers were earning less under the new algorithm, with half of those workers receiving a pay cut of 10 percent or greater.”
Jul 1

June 2024 14 posts

Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News arxiv.org · “The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977.”
Jun 30
Bytecode Breakdown: Unraveling Factorio's Lua Security Flaws memorycorruption.net · “As the vulnerability has been patched for months already (Factorio versions below 1.1.101 are affected), is time to share the details with the community.”
Jun 29
The Economics of Writing Technical Books architectelevator.com · “I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one.”
Jun 29
Swiss Broadcasting Corporation to pull plug on FM radio swissinfo.ch · “Remaining, pure FM usage is stagnating at less than 10%.”
Jun 29
25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gone as Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site latenighter.com · “Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.”
Jun 27
MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline variety.com · “Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly "Mixtape Mondays" column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.”
Jun 24
How I Found A 55 Year Old Bug In The First Lunar Lander Game martincmartin.com · “Eventually I found a bug: a missing “divide by two” that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years.”
Jun 14
Ikea's boss solved the Swedish retailer's global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries, introducing flexible working and subsidizing childcare fortune.com · “Globally, across the parent company’s more than 600 stores and warehouses, the quit rate fell to 17.5% in April from 22.4% in August 2022.”
Jun 13
Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit theregister.com · “More than a third (37 percent) of respondents in leadership roles believed their employers had undertaken layoffs in the past 12 months as a result of too few people quitting in protest of RTO mandates, the study found.”
Jun 11
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive blog.archive.org · “18 times in the last 20 years, crawlers affiliated with the Internet Archive moved through this page and grabbed portions of it, speculatively, to store for future research and reference.”
Jun 8
Instagram confirms test of ‘unskippable’ ads techcrunch.com · “We’re always testing formats that can drive value for advertisers”
Jun 4
Internal messages show how the new head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel english.elpais.com · “Collect everything you have (master’s thesis, final projects, dissertations, etc.) and include in them 20 references from among those that I have attached in the Word document as well as 10 articles from ADCAIJ.”
Jun 2
Parable of the Sofa tbray.org · “The words “lifestyle business” are always, of course, uttered in a voice dripping with contempt.”
Jun 2
Goldfish Memories chinamediaproject.org · “Within the selected date range of “May 22, 1998 to May 22, 2005” on Baidu, there is just one positive result for “Jack Ma” (dated May 22, 2024).”
Jun 1

May 2024 9 posts

This is what the damaged Svalbard cable looked like when it came up from the depths nrk.no · “After an inital investigation, the police dropped the case due to lack of evidence, and inadequate legislation.”
May 26
How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years construction-physics.com · “In 1941 Boeing required more than 140,000 hours of labor to assemble a B-17.”
May 23
When Online Content Disappears pewresearch.org · “Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.”
May 20
How Intel undercut a standards body to give us the PCI connector spectrum.ieee.org · “But just two weeks before VESA was planning to announce what it came up with, Intel floored the VESA local bus committee by saying it won’t support the technology after all.”
May 18
The Forged Apple Employee Badge cabel.com · “eBay both times sent back a response that they had found that it didn’t violate any of eBay’s rules.”
May 16
Nearly Half of All Masters Degrees Aren't Worth Getting reason.com · “Because ROI is negative for these programs, it’s unlikely that most of those loan dollars will be repaid.”
May 12
She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all theguardian.com · “Someone had been crying deepfake.”
May 11
Helldivers 2 Removed From Purchase On Steam In Over 150 Countries thegamer.com · “Sony backed this up by claiming it was for player protection, but the Helldivers 2 community wasn’t having any of that and took to orbital striking the Steam page with over 180,000 negative reviews over the past few days.”
May 5
Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8,000 emulator-related DMCA takedowns engadget.com · “Redacted entities representing Nintendo assert that the Yuzu source code contained in the repos "illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games."”
May 4

April 2024 7 posts

The Unstallable Plane That Stalled fearoflanding.com · “The pilot had no knowledge of the aircraft’s stall behaviour at all. His opinion was that the Cessna 185 simply didn’t stall.”
Apr 28
Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made. vox.com · “It’s even possible to lose money generating your low-quality ebook to sell on Kindle for $0.99. The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook.”
Apr 16
Ubisoft is stripping people's licences for The Crew weeks after its shutdown, nearly squandering hopes of fan servers and acting as a stark reminder of how volatile digital ownership is pcgamer.com · “You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?”
Apr 13
Japanese Police Arrest 36-Year-Old Man on Suspicion of Tampering With Pokémon Violet Save Data ign.com · “Police in Japan have arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data to customers online”
Apr 13
I Continue To No Longer Attend Vintage Computer Festivals ascii.textfiles.com · “I contacted a VCF administrator and was told it was all disposed of, and that they kept the bins.”
Apr 13
Two Bay Area railway workers charged for building secret apartments inside train stations therealdeal.com · “For a mere $42,000, Navarro allegedly installed a kitchenette, shower, plumbing and security cameras, prosecutors said.”
Apr 9
Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage 404media.co · “Searching Google Books for the term ‘As of my last knowledge update,’ which is associated with ChatGPT-generated answers, returns dozens of books that include that phrase.”
Apr 5

March 2024 6 posts

There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison's Rejection Letters lareviewofbooks.org · “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape, but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”
Mar 30
Coast Guard: 6 workers presumed dead after Baltimore bridge collapse wbaltv.com · “There were no issues until June when Chilean authorities found deficiencies in propulsion and the auxiliary machinery.”
Mar 26
New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco tlacuilolli.com · “The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous, but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa”
Mar 23
Jasmin Paris Becomes First Woman to Finish World's Hardest Race run.outsideonline.com · “She stopped the clock in 59:58:21.”
Mar 23
How we're helping creators disclose altered or synthetic content blog.google · “And while we want to give our community time to adjust to the new process and features, in the future we’ll look at enforcement measures for creators who consistently choose not to disclose this information.”
Mar 18
Activision QA Workers Vote to Form Largest US Video Game Worker Union to Date ign.com · “By recognizing our union, Microsoft is making good on its promise to respect our ability to decide for ourselves about union representation.”
Mar 10

February 2024 11 posts

Why you almost never see a clock at the mall thehustle.co · “After 23 minutes supermarket shoppers began using the emotional part of their brain rather than the cognitive part.”
Feb 25
A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to 'Slackbot' and stayed undetected for months theverge.com · “The move camouflaged McKay’s active Slack account for months, letting his account evade deletion.”
Feb 23
Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China nbcnews.com · “Any work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet or other sensitive issues, he added, "needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot."”
Feb 18
The Layoff xeiaso.net · “It’s not a layoff, it’s a re-evaluation of our staffing goals for Q2 2025.”
Feb 18
WJLX, WJBE and WERH, oh my radiodiscussions.com · “Based on this WJLX lost its tower sometime between October 2022 and March 2023.”
Feb 17
The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it? blog.jgc.org · “Converting this document from its original format was a bit of a victory for open source software. And a lesson in how hard document preservation is.”
Feb 13
What it was like working for GitLab yorickpeterse.com · “But if I had instead lived in the Bay Area, I would’ve earned at least twice that amount, possibly even more.”
Feb 11
PAPERWALL: Chinese Websites Posing as Local News Outlets Target Global Audiences with Pro-Beijing Content citizenlab.ca · “A central feature of PAPERWALL, observed across the network of websites, is the ephemeral nature of its most aggressive components, whereby articles attacking Beijing’s critics are routinely removed from these websites some time after they are published.”
Feb 7
DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it. forum.defcon.org · “We don’t know why Caesars canceled us, they won’t say beyond it being a strategy change and it is not related to anything that DEF CON or our community has done.”
Feb 5
Netflix: Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against and Growing Rapidly torrentfreak.com · “Piracy also threatens to damage our business, as its fundamental proposition to consumers is so compelling and difficult to compete against: virtually all content for free,”
Feb 4
How paid editors squeeze you dry en.wikipedia.org · “We estimate that the proceeds of this scam in 2023 were at least $500,000, and perhaps well over $1,000,000.”
Feb 1

January 2024 20 posts

Google Search Drops Cache Link From Search Results (How To See The Cache) seroundtable.com · “After a couple of months of testing, it seems Google has now removed the cache link from the search results page.”
Jan 31
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threat to supe, police reports missionlocal.org · “Threats to one’s life or safety have no place in political discourse.”
Jan 31
Florida House of Representatives approves bill to ban social media for kids under 16 abcnews.go.com · “Legislators in Florida are considering what could be the strictest regulation on social media and kids in the country.”
Jan 29
Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]? danluu.com · “Stepping back and looking at the big picture, there are four main reasons I’ve seen that people use [bad platform], which are that it gets more engagement, it’s where their friends are, it’s lower friction, and it monetizes better.”
Jan 27
How we made an animated movie in 8kB ctrl-alt-test.fr · “Yes, 8 kilobytes, less than half of this post, for everything.”
Jan 24
Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead theguardian.com · “It is virtually impossible that there are any other retired teachers with my name and birth date who are dying year on year.”
Jan 20
Dave Mills has passed away elists.isoc.org · “He was such an iconic element of the early Internet.”
Jan 19
Mourning Google tbray.org · “And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search.”
Jan 19
The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams waxy.org · “Ello exists for the benefit of the creative community, and we will never serve ads or sell personal data.”
Jan 18
FAQ on leaving Google social.clawhammer.net · “Google culture changed dramatically last year with its first major round of layoffs, and I saw the writing on the wall.”
Jan 17
4,000 of My Closest Friends catandgirl.com · “Even that nominal opt-in option is gone. They just take it.”
Jan 16
When Random Isn't orlp.net · “This RNG is, for the lack of a better word, shite.”
Jan 14
A decade long Steam issue, is everyone just too fast for Valve? blog.freudenjmp.com · “No wonder the root cause hasn’t been found in so many years: it’s not a bug in the gameserver, it’s a bug in the game.”
Jan 13
Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Horizon whistleblower bbc.co.uk · “The Post Office threatened and lied to the BBC in a failed effort to suppress key evidence that helped clear postmasters in the Horizon scandal.”
Jan 12
Unity's Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC mfkl.github.io · “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies!”
Jan 12
The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit aftermath.site · “The once ubiquitous phrase “let me Google that for you” is now meaningless.”
Jan 11
YouTube demonetizes public domain 'Steamboat Willie' video after copyright claim mashable.com · “Public domain works are considered public property.”
Jan 5
Fixing Macs Door to Door matduggan.com · “The back alley electronics repair guy is the dark secret of the Dispatch world.”
Jan 5
Disney's earliest Mickey and Minnie Mouse enter public domain as US copyright expires bbc.com · “In fact, anyone can use those versions without permission or cost.”
Jan 1
Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover standardebooks.org · “Standard Ebooks releases all of the work we put in to each ebook into the public domain too.”
Jan 1

2023 160 posts

December 2023 14 posts

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT danluu.com · “the top result was a Google Store link to buy Google’s own Pixel 7, with the rest of the top results being various Android phones sold on Amazon.”
Dec 31
Court of Appeal ruling will prevent UK museums from charging reproduction fees: at last theartnewspaper.com · “Moreover, Lord Justice Arnold pointed out that the new copyright bar has been in place since 2009.”
Dec 30
GTA 5 source code leaks online, giving Rockstar a huge blow on Christmas: Report sportskeeda.com · “According to a report by popular YouTuber SKizzle on X on December 24, 2023, the entire source code of Grand Theft Auto 5 was leaked publicly.”
Dec 25
The Era of American Computer Magazines Has Drawn to a Close bytecellar.com · “And now, basically all American computer print magazines have vanished.”
Dec 24
Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims theguardian.com · “Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam, the report said.”
Dec 23
They Want You To Forget What A Film Looks Like aftermath.site · “According to The Digital Bits, Park Road Post had a recent 4k scan of True Lies from the original camera negative.”
Dec 23
How Big is YouTube? ethanzuckerman.com · “Our current estimate for the size of YouTube is 13.325 billion videos”
Dec 22
Google Search Overwhelmed By Massive Spam Attack searchenginejournal.com · “Many of the domains have only been registered within the past 24-48 hours.”
Dec 22
A Lufthansa A350's Frustrating Oakland Diversion onemileatatime.com · “The controller responds "I can’t have this conversation with you, you either divert to Oakland or you can continue to hold, it’s up to you"”
Dec 19
Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber For Negative Review onemileatatime.com · “I was pressured to write a statement that I didn’t give you permission to be filmed,”
Dec 17
OpenAI inks deal with Axel Springer on licensing news for model training techcrunch.com · “In return, Axel Springer will receive payments of an unspecified size and frequency from OpenAI.”
Dec 14
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing pluralistic.net · “when I was a bookseller, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal the books I’d sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table”
Dec 9
The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity slack.com · “More than half (54%) of these workers say it’s because they feel pressured to, not because they choose to.”
Dec 9
Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says. Here's why cnbc.com · “We are three and a half years in, and we’re totally stuck,” Bloom said of remote work. “It would take something as extreme as the pandemic to unstick it.”
Dec 1

November 2023 7 posts

Titled Tuesday Cheating - Part 2 dorianquelle.github.io · “In no condition do we find any evidence of cheating.”
Nov 26
Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion theregister.com · “If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware and VP approval will be required.”
Nov 16
Lost Doctor Who episodes found – but owner is reluctant to hand them to BBC theguardian.com · “Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels.”
Nov 11
Seeing like a bank bitsaboutmoney.com · “The reason you have to “jump through hoops” to “simply talk to someone” (a professional, with meaningful decisionmaking authority) is because the system is set up to a) try to dissuade that guy from speaking to someone whose time is expensive and b) believes, on the basis of voluminous evidence, that you are likely that guy until proven otherwise.”
Nov 7
'Couldn't See Anymore:' Bored Ape Conference Attendees Wake Up With Searing Eye Pain, Vision Loss 404media.co · “I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore. Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital,”
Nov 6
Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly blog.paavo.me · “In this example frame the game renders 13 sets of teeth, and their visual impact on the frame is zero: not a single pixel is affected.”
Nov 5
YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers androidauthority.com · “AdGuard, told the outlet they normally see about 6,000 uninstallations per day on Chrome, but that shot up to 11,000 per day between October 9 and the end of the month, peaking at 52,000 on October 18.”
Nov 4

October 2023 18 posts

Xbox will block third-party controllers to "preserve the console experience" nme.com · ““Using unauthorised accessories compromises your gaming experience. For this reason, the unauthorised accessory will be blocked from use on 11/12/2023,” read the pop-up on the console. It then advised the player to return the product to the store or talk to the manufacturer.”
Oct 31
Amazon Managers Can Now Fire Employees Who Refuse to Work From the Office 3 Days a Week entrepreneur.com · “In July, the company added that remote employees must relocate near office “hubs” where most of their team members work. Those unwilling to relocate or find a compatible team were offered a “voluntary resignation” package. By September, Amazon began sharing individual attendance records with employees, a change from its previous practice of tracking anonymized data.”
Oct 23
Reddit mods dumped tokens hours before blockchain program termination cointelegraph.com · “In another incident, just 17 minutes before Reddit’s statement, moderator u/Rider_of_the_storm allegedly shifted 345,422 MOON, worth over $69,000 at the time, to an exchange address. The Reddit account in question has since been deactivated.”
Oct 21
Bandcamp’s Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off 404media.co · “Bandcamp’s entire union bargaining team, the eight union members democratically elected by their peers to negotiate their first union contract, were laid off when Epic Games sold Bandcamp to music licensing company Songtradr on Monday.”
Oct 19
About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off theverge.com · “Songtradr’s statement also confirmed that its purchase of Bandcamp had been completed, but it did not confirm if it would voluntarily recognize Bandcamp’s union that employees won earlier this year”
Oct 16
Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic pluralistic.net · “NPR’s Twitter accounts had 8.7 million followers, but even six months ago, Musk’s enshittification speedrun had drawn down NPR’s ability to reach those users to a negligible level.”
Oct 16
Microsoft consumes Activision: and a plea blog.zarfhome.com · “Depending on how you count, that’s three-to-five companies which have died and passed the Infocom IP on to a successor.”
Oct 15
Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux lock.cmpxchg8b.com · “He had kept tape backups from old BBS systems, and was able to recover a warez copy of the SDK – unbelievable!”
Oct 15
The Nuclear Scientist And The Warplane That Became Britain’s Most Unlikely Airliner twz.com · “Unknown to them, the leather flying helmet that contained his intercom didn’t fit easily over the scientist’s large head, so he couldn’t hear them. Nor did Bohr, who could be remarkably unworldly, properly understand how to use the oxygen.”
Oct 14
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student scrollprize.org · “That is until Luke Farritor, a contestant of the Vesuvius Challenge, became the first person in two millennia to see an entire word from within an unopened scroll this August.”
Oct 12
Engage a Wider Audience With ActivityPub on WordPress.com wordpress.com · “With a custom domain you can easily move your entire fediverse connection to any host at any time.”
Oct 11
Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It macrumors.com · “Last month’s release of Counter-Strike 2 forced a 26GB update for everyone with CS:GO, including Mac users, but after installation those on macOS soon discovered that the update makes the original game as well as the update unplayable because of the lack of support and no rollback option.”
Oct 10
Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender's advantage fakehistoryhunter.net · “If it had been common knowledge among castle builders, then why are there still quite a lot (about 30%) of castles with counter-clockwise staircases?”
Oct 9
Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things ludic.mataroa.blog · “I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day.”
Oct 8
A Note From WIRED Leadership wired.com · “After careful review of the op-ed, “How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet,” and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.”
Oct 7
Big Oil's Using Fortnite, TikTok, And Twitch In Effort To Convince Kids Fossil Fuels Are Cool kotaku.com · “The idea is that in the map, players will need to occasionally fill up at the central Shell gas station and use its new V-Power NiTRO+ fuel to successfully navigate obstacles and courses.”
Oct 7
Meta in Myanmar, Part III: The Inside View erinkissane.com · “Here’s what Meta is actually saying: Sure, they might identify and remove only a tiny fraction of dangerous and hateful speech on Facebook, but of that tiny fraction, their AI classifiers catch about 95 – 98% before users report it. That’s literally the whole game, here.”
Oct 7
Kids and teens are inundated with phone prompts day and night nbcnews.com · “New research Common Sense Media released Tuesday finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications on their phones every day.”
Oct 1

September 2023 14 posts

Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians? rocknerd.co.uk · “Epic only bought Bandcamp eighteen months ago.”
Sep 28
Reddit will start paying you real money for good posts techcrunch.com · “For users with between 100 and 4,999 karma, they will receive $0.90 per 1 gold.”
Sep 26
$700 a month for a bed-sized ‘pod’ in downtown San Francisco? Techies are renting them sfstandard.com · “They’re each 4 feet high, 3½ feet wide, and long enough to fit a twin-size mattress.”
Sep 26
Minecraft Wiki:Moving from Fandom minecraft.wiki · “Unfortunately, because Fandom does not close wikis that have moved away, the old Fandom wiki will remain in place and continue to appear in search results.”
Sep 25
Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can't 404media.co · “The main reason scalpers continue to get tickets and fans continue to be upset is because ticket scalpers are professional ticket buyers, who in many cases have navigated Ticketmaster’s buying process every day for years.”
Sep 23
Facebook is Blocking Canadians’ Posts About the Assassination of a BC Sikh Leader. Their Posts Were Targeted by India’s Government. pressprogress.ca · “Access to your photo has been restricted within India because Facebook has been notified by the authorities under an emergency order pursuant to Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000”
Sep 19
Collective letter from game development companies: Turning off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization until new conditions are reviewed docs.google.com · “As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies is forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization across our projects until these changes are reconsidered.”
Sep 16
Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain billwillingham.substack.com · “The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want.”
Sep 15
A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held "Lone Gunman" Theory vanityfair.com · “He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital.”
Sep 10
Meet the Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port at a Time 404media.co · “Sometimes, official versions of those games on Steam are actually cracked versions, because the piracy community does a better job of maintaining them than one of the biggest video game publishers in the world.”
Sep 9
TV Museum Will Die in 48 Hours Unless Sony Retracts YouTube Copyright Strikes torrentfreak.com · “At this point, I don’t even care if they were issued under authorization by Sony or not – I just need to reach a live human being to try to resolve this without copyright strikes.”
Sep 4
SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry eurogamer.net · “It has been nearly a year since SAG-AFTRA’s video game contract, the Interactive Media Agreement, was extended beyond the original expiration date as we negotiated with the companies for critical terms SAG-AFTRA members need,”
Sep 3
The Worst Programmer I Know dannorth.net · “Tim’s score was consistently zero. Zero! Not just low, or trending downwards, but literally zero.”
Sep 2
'Conserve food and water': No access in or out of Burning Man after storm sfgate.com · “Scott McGuire, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Reno office, said on Friday that even a one-hundredth of an inch of rain can cause problems for the festival grounds.”
Sep 2

August 2023 22 posts

ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech: No Matter How Awful It Is. eff.org · “When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail.”
Aug 29
Zoom CEO Says Employees Need to Be in the Office Because It's Hard to Build Trust Over Zoom gizmodo.com · “We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”
Aug 25
Epic's First Run offers 100% revenue share to game devs in exchange for exclusivity techcrunch.com · “Steam, for all its shortcomings and 30% off the top, is the de facto platform for PC gamers, and developers have shared that when their game is available on both Steam and Epic, the latter makes up only a small fraction of sales.”
Aug 24
Meta threatens to fire workers for return-to-office infractions in leaked memo sfgate.com · “As with other company policies, repeated violations may result in disciplinary action, up to and including a Performance rating drop and, ultimately, termination if not addressed.”
Aug 21
To Conference Organisers Everywhere… arunraghavan.net · “But if you’re in my position, you need at least 2-3 months between the first and the last step. If your attendance is conditional on speaking at the conference (for example, if your company will only sponsor you if you’re speaking), then you need a minimum of 2-3 months between when speakers are notified and the conference starts.”
Aug 21
Executive Function Theft hedgehoglibrarian.com · “Finding out that because the "initial default setting for my employer" is pay-by-check there is no way AT ALL to get them to change it to direct deposit unless I wait for the FSA company to approve the payment and cut the check and then call to have them reissue the payment as a direct deposit.”
Aug 20
Spotify reportedly has a $38 million white noise problem theverge.com · “Spotify is spending a lot of money on podcasts that don’t actually involve any talking.”
Aug 18
Saying Hello Linked to Higher Wellbeing, but With Limits news.gallup.com · “Americans’ wellbeing score increases steadily by the number of neighbors greeted, from 51.5 among those saying hello to zero neighbors to 64.1 for those greeting six neighbors.”
Aug 18
Nintendo Is Trying To Patent Some Really Broad Tears Of The Kingdom Mechanics kotaku.com · “Link and the objects he rides on move together at the same speed, rather than Link being technically stationary on top of a moving object as is common in the physics of other games.”
Aug 16
Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains news.ycombinator.com · “Twitter won’t ban domains they don’t like but will waste your time if you visit them.”
Aug 15
A police raid of a Kansas newsroom raises alarms about violations of press freedom npr.org · “It’s very rare because it’s illegal,” Oberlander said. “It doesn’t happen very often because most organizations understand that it’s illegal.”
Aug 14
Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media blog.archive.org · “Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium.”
Aug 14
I Created the Nerdiest Game Ever plbrault.com · “Over time, idle processes go through six starvation levels represented by colours and emojis. If a process spends too much time in the last starvation level, the user becomes impatient and kills it.”
Aug 13
WVU recommends dropping 32 majors, including all world language programs wvgazettemail.com · “The preliminary recommendations also included 169 faculty reductions, or 7% of the total faculty in Morgantown.”
Aug 12
Carrot Problems atvbt.com · “So they set up public application processes, which cause outsiders to waste time and effort applying through a channel that has 0 chance of landing them the job.”
Aug 12
80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: 'A lot of executives have egg on their faces' cnbc.com · “A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of employees’ office attendance, their usage of office amenities and other related factors, according to new research from Envoy.”
Aug 11
CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking theverge.com · “According to the memo, CNET will be subject to regular “content pruning” going forward, at least once a year.”
Aug 9
I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires) janefriedman.com · “When I replied that I did not have a trademark for my name, they closed the case and said the books would not be removed from sale.”
Aug 7
Overworked and Underpaid, VFX Workers Vote to Unionize at Marvel vulture.com · “This marks the first time visual-effects professionals have banded together to demand the same rights, wage protections, and professional watchdog oversight enjoyed by workers in almost every other segment of the entertainment industry.”
Aug 7
The Lose-Lose-Lose-Lose Bill C-18 Outcome: Meta Blocking News Links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada michaelgeist.ca · “Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down.””
Aug 6
They Didn’t Ask to Go Viral. Posting on Social Media Without Consent Is Immoral wired.com · “If I were to post your name, address, and phone number, you would have legal recourse. And yet the same is not true for your image.”
Aug 5
Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it pluralistic.net · “My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college.”
Aug 2

July 2023 15 posts

Free Public WiFi computer.rip · “if a Windows XP machine had an ad-hoc network favorited (which would be default if it had ever connected to one), then when it wasn’t connected to any other WiFi network, it would beacon the favorited ad-hoc network to make it easier for other hosts to connect.”
Jul 31
The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media bbc.co.uk · “The principles of the Fediverse, with an emphasis on local control, quality content, and social value, are far more aligned with our public purposes than those of avowedly commercial networks like Threads or Twitter.”
Jul 31
Mark Zuckerberg: Threads users down by more than a half bbc.com · “The company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, told staff it was now focused on adding more “retention-driving hooks” to draw people back to the platform.”
Jul 28
At this company, we are family pboyd.io · “After much deliberation, we feel the best course of action is to eliminate the redundancies in our family. Consequently, your family membership has been terminated, effective immediately.”
Jul 25
Your Ubisoft account can be permanently deleted for 'inactivity,' but Ubisoft says that won't happen if there are purchases attached to it (Updated) pcgamer.com · “In practice, as of today, we have never deleted accounts that have been inactive for less than 4 years”
Jul 24
Amazon is reportedly making employees relocate for return-to-office engadget.com · “Those affected will include workers hired for remote positions and those who moved during peak pandemic days.”
Jul 24
Simple Sabotage Field Manual - How to Destroy Your Organizations butwhatfor.beehiiv.com · “Simple sabotage requires no destructive tools whatsoever and produces physical damage, if any, by highly indirect means. It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit.”
Jul 23
'No way out': how video games use tricks from gambling to attract big spenders theguardian.com · “Should they reduce their outlay, she told GamesIndustry.biz, the company would “reach out and call them to find out what’s wrong”.”
Jul 19
Engagement on Instagram's Threads Has Cratered gizmodo.com · “Similarweb’s data reportedly paints a picture equally as grim as daily active users dropped 25% from a peak on July 7 to Monday, while time spent on the app dropped over 50% from 20 minutes to 8 minutes.”
Jul 17
B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations vancouverisawesome.com · “We’ve been trying to use private infrastructure as public infrastructure for communications.”
Jul 13
87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games gamehistory.org · “The video game industry’s main lobbying group has successfully argued to the US Copyright Office that the industry already does enough to preserve its own history commercially, and that additional protections for preservation institutions would hurt their bottom line.”
Jul 10
Netflix Invents New Green-Screen Filming Method Using Magenta Light entertainment.slashdot.org · “Because the foreground is only recorded in blue and red, it leaves the actors looking magenta-tinted. To solve this, Netflix uses artificial intelligence to put the full range of color back into the foreground, using a photograph of the actors lit normally as a reference to create a realistic-looking green channel.”
Jul 10
Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says techcrunch.com · “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
Jul 7
How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history theverge.com · “Reddit isn’t profitable, and the infrastructure to support third-party apps costs Reddit $10 million per year.”
Jul 3
Google Search's Death by a Thousand Cuts mattrickard.com · “Millions of search results are effectively dead links.”
Jul 2

June 2023 9 posts

Twitter now requires an account to view tweets techcrunch.com · “If you’re not logged into your Twitter account and try to view a tweet, you’ll be presented with a sign-in screen.”
Jun 30
Goodreads Has No Incentive to be Good countercraft.substack.com · “Yet despite the fact that Amazon has cleaned up their own reviews, they’ve done essentially nothing to moderate Goodreads, a site they purchased a decade ago.”
Jun 30
Every Mastodon User Has an RSS Feed rssboard.org · “Every Mastodon account has an RSS feed that can be found by going to the user’s Mastodon page and adding ".rss" to the URL of that page.”
Jun 24
Information Is Power eveonline.com · “EVE Online is the first and only video game to have developed an Excel add-in leveraging this type of data integration.”
Jun 22
Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO's recent remarks theverge.com · “At the time of publishing, a pinned bot post on the r/ModCoord sub’s post about the protest says nearly 4,500 communities are pledging to go dark, while Reddark, a site tracking the protesting subreddits, says over 200 already have.”
Jun 12
Google doesn't want employees working remotely anymore. theverge.com · “Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”
Jun 8
Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami ascii.textfiles.com · “But in this case, they were being sold for about $13 an issue, which is not zero, but somewhere in the realm of manageable: About $3,000 for the lot.”
Jun 6
High Prices Make Textbook 'Piracy' Acceptable to Most Students torrentfreak.com · “This is also reflected in the research, which found that only 18% would consider reducing their illegal textbook habits if they risked jail time.”
Jun 4
Meta will require employees to return to the office three days a week starting in September cnbc.com · “We’re committed to distributed work, and we’re confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home”
Jun 2

May 2023 8 posts

Changing my mind on remote, moving the team back to San Francisco flocrivello.com · “The solution is to just avoid the bad parts! That’s SOMA and the Tenderloin, mostly.”
May 23
Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation en.wikipedia.org · “This shows that outgoing CEO Katherine Maher was paid a severance package of US$623,286 in 2021 – slightly more than one-and-a-half times her base compensation in her last full year at the Wikimedia Foundation.”
May 22
Wizards Of The Coast Raids YouTuber’s House To Take Back Magic: The Gathering Cards kotaku.com · “They cited statures with punishments such as a $200,000 fine and up to a decade of jail time.”
May 17
Dell goes back on WFH pledge, forces employees to come back to the office techradar.com · “Unlike some other companies’ approaches, Dell seems to be asking workers who live within an hour’s commute to work from the office for three days per week, rather than specific job roles.”
May 15
Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health jonathanhaidt.substack.com · “the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today.”
May 15
Research reveals majority of gig economy workers are earning below minimum wage bristol.ac.uk · “On average respondents were earning £8.97 per hour – around 15% below the current UK minimum wage, which rose to £10.42 this month.”
May 11
Discord's username change is causing discord theverge.com · “Users with a standing business relationship with Discord who manage certain partner, verified, or creator servers will be able to pick a username before other users in order to reduce the risk of impersonation for their accounts.”
May 6
Heisting 20 Million Dollars' Worth of Magic: The Gathering Cards in a Single Request mayer.cool · “What’s more, the price is calculated by the client(!) by multiplying the unit price of whatever is being purchased by the quantity being ordered.”
May 5

April 2023 16 posts

Chess is booming among teens. Here's why polygon.com · “The abrupt boost in popularity caused Chess.com, the most popular chess app, to crumble, forcing the company to upgrade its servers significantly.”
Apr 30
Half of Vinyl Buyers in the US Don't Have a Record Player consequence.net · “Luminate’s "Top Entertainment Trends for 2023" report found that of the 3,900 US-based respondents surveyed, "50% of consumers who have bought vinyl in the past 12 months own a record player, compared to 15% among music listeners overall."”
Apr 29
Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update gamingonlinux.com · “Unfortunately this block was intentional. With the Windows 64-bit client launch we made the conscious decision to block the use of Wine.”
Apr 23
Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250+ GB video game downloads richg42.blogspot.com · “Who cares about shaving off a few hundred ms (or a second) when it takes hours or days to download the product onto the SSD?”
Apr 21
Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful tech.slashdot.org · “Support tickets from affected users to Steam Support have received a default response saying Support will not help nor adjust the length of vote bans.”
Apr 15
Spanish climber emerges after 500 days in cave cbc.ca · “When they came in to get me, I was asleep. I thought something had happened. I said: ‘Already? Surely not.’ I hadn’t finished my book.”
Apr 14
EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off the biggest heist in the game's history pcgamer.com · “The conspirators both voted yes, while nobody else in the corporation voted at all.”
Apr 12
Sony is gearing up for a new cloud gaming push amid rumors of a PlayStation handheld theverge.com · ““Are you a ground-breaking innovator in the cloud streaming product space? Then you likely agree that Cloud Gaming is on its way to becoming a major part of the gaming industry,” reads part of a Sony job posting for a Director of Product Management for Cloud Gaming.”
Apr 12
First came the return-to-office policies. Now comes the discipline: How companies are punishing work-from-home holdouts finance.yahoo.com · “So in recent months, businesses have begun to put down their carrots and pick up their sticks.”
Apr 11
I worked at Google for -10 days andgein.ru · “Thus, the contract with me has been terminated 10 days before it was supposed to take effect.”
Apr 11
Z-Library Plans to Let Users Share Physical Books Through 'Z-Points' torrentfreak.com · “Interestingly, however, Z-Library believes that existing libraries are ideally suited to become Z-Points.”
Apr 9
Monster Energy Goes After Indie Dev For Using The Word 'Monster' thegamer.com · “It also forces us to agree to never use a green & white logo on a black background for any game we ever make. So they own the colors green & white too apparently”
Apr 4
The time Bell Labs brought the Statue of Liberty under its roof (Literally) nickvsnetworking.com · “So the National Parks Service called upon Bell Labs to help.”
Apr 4
The Day Windows Died thomasbandt.com · “So, there is basically little you can do with Windows out of the box but buy subscriptions and log into pre-installed social media apps.”
Apr 2
The Status Trap every.to · “I’ve seen this with friends who go into VC with the intention of eventually leaving and starting a company.”
Apr 1
The Joy of Computer History Books fabiensanglard.net · “Not fall into the cult of personality (“looks at this genius”) trap. Dictated autobiographies make me cringe.”
Apr 1

March 2023 9 posts

BuzzFeed Is Quietly Publishing Whole AI-Generated Articles, Not Just Quizzes futurism.com · “The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another.”
Mar 31
The RIAA v. Steve Jobs weblog.rogueamoeba.com · “Even 18 years on, I find this story rather terrifying.”
Mar 26
Netflix is 'underway' on cloud gaming work, aims to bring games to 'any Netflix device you have' 9to5google.com · “40 games are slated for launch this year and 70 more in development.”
Mar 21
Leaving China persuasion.community · “From 2010 to 2020, Shanghai’s expat population dropped from 208,000 to 163,000.”
Mar 19
The Little-Known Origin Story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics scientificamerican.com · “Yet Wu, who died in 1997, was not mentioned when the 2022 awards were announced.”
Mar 19
Negativity drives online news consumption nature.com · “For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.”
Mar 17
Bandcamp United bandcampunited.org · “We all chose to join this company as an extension of our own love for independent music, and believe that a site such as Bandcamp that aims to offer an ethical and fair alternative to the streaming economy should reflect its mission internally.”
Mar 16
the door close button computer.rip · “Therefore, elevators with a “door close” button that isn’t “hooked up” will fail their annual inspections.”
Mar 14
Discord, or the Death of Lore ascii.textfiles.com · “Discord’s official birthday is 2012, but it’s really 2009, when OpenFeint was created.”
Mar 7

February 2023 14 posts

France’s baby bust worksinprogress.co · “Had France’s population increased at the same rate as England’s since 1760, there would be more than 250 million French citizens alive today.”
Feb 26
Help! Is this عربي? isthisarabic.com · “Photoshop breaks Arabic. We even have a website that will break our Arabic so that Photoshop breaks it back to normal. Yes, Adobe is aware. No, they do not care.”
Feb 26
Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills letgrow.org · “She hadn’t even gotten her coat off when four cops came to the house.”
Feb 23
Goodbye, CSS-Tricks! geoffgraham.me · “Oh, and speaking of hiring, it appears DigitalOcean is still in full hiring mode if you’re in the market for work. Well, according to the signature in this auto-reply.”
Feb 20
Amazon wants employees to return to the office in May engadget.com · “Starting in May, Amazon will require employees to work out of the office at least three days per week.”
Feb 20
Is the Living Computer Museum Dead? pcjs.org · “The LCM website hasn’t changed much over the last 3 years, and it continues to say the museum “is closed for now,” with no indication of what, if anything, Vulcan decided to do when the first 18 months came and went.”
Feb 17
Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them fortune.com · “Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50% said they disagreed. Only 25% agreed, the study found.”
Feb 16
BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout theguardian.com · “Documents and phones of several journalists were taken and the offices sealed.”
Feb 14
Z-Library Returns on the Clearnet in Full Hydra-Mode torrentfreak.com · “After logging into your account, you will be redirected to your personal domain. Please keep your personal domain private!”
Feb 13
John Carmack goes off about online-only games being abandoned: 'I believe in saving everything' pcgamer.com · “Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others.”
Feb 12
WWII-era bomb explodes in England in "unplanned" detonation cbsnews.com · “On Friday, work began to disarm the explosives remaining in the device, but somehow it detonated, causing a large explosion that was captured on video by a police drone.”
Feb 11
The Great Betrayal: After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Full-Time Work Model a.team · “After over 16 years at the company, this was the only information he received to tell him that he was one of the 12,000 employees laid off.”
Feb 8
Ghost Boat with Garmin GPS Leads Father-Son Duo to Man Overboard garmin.com · “Sascha had gone to the side to relieve himself and simply fell overboard.”
Feb 5
Connecticut Parents Arrested for Letting Kids Walk to Dunkin' Donuts reason.com · “I found out later from my husband that after I went inside, the arresting officer said to him, ‘If she talks to me again, I’m going to arrest you both and take away your kids.’”
Feb 2

January 2023 14 posts

Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text theverge.com · “Throughout the years, what I saw was that every time we use machine learning to improve the consumer experience, things got really good really quickly”
Jan 31
Surgeon General says 13 is ‘too early’ to join social media cnn.com · “If parents can band together and say you know, as a group, we’re not going to allow our kids to use social media until 16 or 17 or 18 or whatever age they choose, that’s a much more effective strategy in making sure your kids don’t get exposed to harm early”
Jan 29
A Calculated Move: Calculators Now Emulated at Internet Archive blog.archive.org · “There’s over 1,400 different systems that have gotten the Artwork Treatment, a major success.”
Jan 29
BBC Modi Documentary Removal blog.archive.org · “Internet Archive can confirm that it has removed links in response to DMCA takedown requests from the BBC.”
Jan 28
MTG Players Lament the Loss of 30-Year History mtgrocks.com · “While enduringly popular and highly trafficked content, including Magic Story as well as Mark Rosewater’s Making Magic column, plus most content from the past few years, are moving to the new back-end, there are many older articles being retired.”
Jan 28
OGL 1.0a & Creative Commons dndbeyond.com · “We are leaving OGL 1.0a in place, as is. Untouched.”
Jan 27
TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral theverge.com · “Heated videos don’t come with a label to show that they’ve been boosted by TikTok like ads or sponsored posts do, according to the report.”
Jan 23
#132: The contagious visual blandness of Netflix haleynahman.substack.com · “Jackson discovered this aesthetic monotony is in part due to the fact that Netflix requires the same “technical specifications from all its productions.””
Jan 22
Twitterrific: End of an Era blog.iconfactory.com · “The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets – not Twitter’s and not Apple’s.”
Jan 19
Paizo Announces System-Neutral Open RPG License paizo.com · “Paizo does not believe that the OGL 1.0a can be “deauthorized,” ever. While we are prepared to argue that point in a court of law if need be, we don’t want to have to do that, and we know that many of our fellow publishers are not in a position to do so.”
Jan 13
CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI futurism.com · “It’s only when you click on “CNET Money Staff,” that the actual “authorship” is revealed.”
Jan 12
An open letter on the Open Gaming License, to Wizards of the Coast opendnd.games · “This new license intends to completely revoke the old OGL, a perpetual license designed by WotC themselves to be irrevocable.”
Jan 9
Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks theguardian.com · “But producing an audiobook with a human voice can take weeks and can cost publishers thousands of dollars.”
Jan 5
The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z. npr.org · “But Mwandjalulu, who makes nearly $24 an hour as a carpenter, said he’s still had trouble convincing his friends, whom he keeps in touch with on Facebook and Snapchat, to follow his path.”
Jan 5

2022 284 posts

December 2022 24 posts

Why "OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems" is not in Amazon's Kindle store mwl.io · “TLDR: Amazon pays roughly 70% of retail price for books priced up to $9.99, and 35% for books $10 and over.”
Dec 31
AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off fortressofdoors.com · “Up until now, all forms of spam, catfishing, social engineering, forum brigading, etc, have more or less been bottlenecked by the capabilities and energy of individual human beings.”
Dec 29
Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom bath.ac.uk · “Profound boredom may sound like an overwhelmingly negative concept but, in fact, it can be intensely positive if people are given the chance for undistracted thinking and development.”
Dec 26
Reverse engineering yet another eBook format mijailovic.net · “On top of that, the book description said “Access Duration: 84 Months”, and that didn’t sound promising, either (7 years is generous, but anything less than forever is not generous enough in my book).”
Dec 25
Stanford hates fun johnhcochrane.blogspot.com · “She recounted how the slightly transgressive Stanford atmosphere in the 90s, which seeded the slightly transgressive get it done attitude of tech in the early 2000s, is being smothered by the Administration.”
Dec 24
Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom blog.otterstack.com · “I demonstrate that it is possible to run any bounded computation in Doom, minus constraints on level size.”
Dec 23
Staring into the abyss as a core life skill benkuhn.net · “Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner.”
Dec 22
I still use Flash foon.uk · “The way forward was obvious; I’d have to make my own Flash player.”
Dec 21
Valve is paying open source developers to keep Steam Deck playable pcgamer.com · “Valve understands that, because in a recent chat with the Verge, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that the company is paying over a hundred open-source devs to work on the various bits of software that keep the Steam Deck ticking.”
Dec 20
Mozilla to explore healthy social media alternative blog.mozilla.org · “In early 2023, Mozilla will stand up and test a publicly accessible instance in the Fediverse at Mozilla.Social.”
Dec 20
January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all web.law.duke.edu · “But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years.”
Dec 20
Power company money flows to news sites that attack their critics npr.org · “Those accounts reflect a complex web of financial links, in which the six outlets collectively received, at minimum, $900,000 from Matrix, its clients, and associated entities between 2013 and 2020.”
Dec 19
Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn? tomscott.com · “In the early years of fire insurance, insurance company fire brigades seemingly made little distinction between insured and uninsured properties.”
Dec 19
Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer english.elpais.com · “Columbia Records had low expectations for the album and only gave Carlos a $2,500 advance, opting instead to compensate her with a higher percentage of future royalties.”
Dec 14
After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires pcgamer.com · “We found a foolproof way of saving our money, which was to not sell anything for 20 years and then drop it all," Zach deadpanned.”
Dec 13
The silent struggles of workers with ADHD bbc.com · “But even for people who do have a label for their struggles, a diagnosis isn’t necessarily a fix; many workers with ADHD experience challenges that can inhibit success.”
Dec 12
Be wary of imitating high-status people who can afford to countersignal robkhenderson.substack.com · “He replied, “I’ll tell you what I did when I was in your situation, not what I’m doing now.”
Dec 11
I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you theeggandtherock.substack.com · “I never signed a contract giving Mojang the rights to the End Poem, and so Microsoft (who bought Minecraft from Mojang) also don’t own it.”
Dec 8
It's not Tourette's but a new type of mass sociogenic illness academic.oup.com · “Accordingly, we suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media-induced illness’.”
Dec 6
Activision's faulty anti-cheat software blog.mikeswanson.com · “Activision’s “appeal” process seems to result in the same automated response for everyone, including me: Conveniently, they can’t tell me what caused the ban, and their decision is final.”
Dec 5
Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting ploum.net · “The algorithms are already feeding themselves on their own data.”
Dec 5
Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower jamesgmartin.center · “Universities are in the midst of a full-blown administrative spending spree that shows no signs of abating.”
Dec 4
MSN fired its human journalists and replaced them with AI that publishes fake news about mermaids and Bigfoot futurism.com · “But MSN isn’t just popular; it’s the default source of news for many Windows users.”
Dec 3
Julius: An open source re-implementation of Caesar III github.com · “Julius recreates many bugs that you can find in original Caesar 3 game, to preserve 100% saves compatibility.”
Dec 2

November 2022 25 posts

At SpaceX, work was taken away from me in case I “might retire or die.” lioness.co · “I knew no one there who worked more hours than I did.”
Nov 30
Photography for geeks lcamtuf.coredump.cx · “An intriguing interplay of light and shadows can make a discarded candy wrapper look profound.”
Nov 27
Anti-War Speech Sent Eugene V. Debs to Prison, 1918 fifthestate.org · “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”
Nov 26
The Need to Read paulgraham.com · “The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.”
Nov 26
Factorio runs on Apple Silicon factorio.com · “As of version 1.1.71, Factorio runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs!”
Nov 25
Tumblr to Add Support for ActivityPub techcrunch.com · “Mullenweg did not offer an ETA as to how "ASAP" this support would be added.”
Nov 23
High-documentation, low-meeting work culture tremendous.com · “In a document, the content is all you have.”
Nov 22
Is wine fake? asteriskmag.com · “But although wine experts really do know more than you and I, the world of wine is insane.”
Nov 21
Greg Bear has died file770.com · “Five-time Nebula winner Greg Bear died November 19, a week after heart surgery from which he never awoke.”
Nov 20
While crypto bro scammed clients, reporters scammed readers fair.org · “His image was simply fun to write about.”
Nov 20
Quake 1 port for Apple Watch github.com · “This game port supports both the shareware and registered versions of Quake.”
Nov 19
My ADHD founder toolbox hypatia.ca · “Highly recommend not yelling at yourself constantly.”
Nov 17
Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile reason.com · “She was charged with endangering a child, a felony carrying a mandatory minimum of two years in prison.”
Nov 16
Why do we call it “boilerplate code?” buttondown.email · “So "boilerplate" became slang for vapid syndicated articles.”
Nov 15
Digital books wear out faster than physical books blog.archive.org · “Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all.”
Nov 15
“When we all have pocket telephones” openculture.com · “In the event, it would take nearly eight decades for the first cellphone to arrive on the market, and three more on top of that for them to become indispensable in the West.”
Nov 14
YouTube confirms that it has removed the “sort by oldest/newest” option piunikaweb.com · “The removal of the option to sort videos from oldest to newest has not been implemented for all YouTube accounts.”
Nov 11
Former CIA master of disguise helps disfigured people come out of hiding globalnews.ca · ““I got my life back.””
Nov 8
A requiem for amateur chemistry lcamtuf.substack.com · “Alas, my childhood also marked the final years of amateur chemistry as a socially acceptable pursuit.”
Nov 8
Just don’t tbray.org · “The word “just” is a signal that you’re not taking their problem seriously.”
Nov 8
Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing blakewatson.com · “A monospaced font is one where each character takes up the same amount of horizontal space, even punctuation and spaces.”
Nov 6
What to blog about simonwillison.net · “I recommend adding “write about it” to your definition of “done” for anything that you build or create.”
Nov 6
Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable quillette.com · “At Yale University, for instance, there are now as many administrative staff as undergraduates.”
Nov 6
It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon simonwillison.net · “Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.”
Nov 5
Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model waxy.org · “Missing in most of these conversations is any discussion of consent.”
Nov 1

October 2022 22 posts

Random: NASCAR Driver Stuns To Qualify For Championship With GameCube Move nintendolife.com · “Oh, I played a lot of NASCAR 2005 on the GameCube with Chad growing up and you can get away with it, and I never knew if it would actually work.”
Oct 31
RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language theregister.com · “This language, through evolution and contributions by others, is today known as assembly language.”
Oct 29
What "Work" Looks Like blog.jim-nielsen.com · “The funny thing is, sitting alone thinking doesn’t "look" like work.”
Oct 25
Fake Books lcamtuf.substack.com · “I do not have a proof, but I’m fairly confident I stumbled upon an early example of a monetized machine-generated book.”
Oct 24
What's wrong with medieval pigs in videogames? leidenmedievalistsblog.nl · “Most notably, however, the medieval pig was not naked and pink at all, but covered in long dark hairs.”
Oct 24
The Social Recession: By the Numbers novum.substack.com · “The percentage of people who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled in the past 30 years.”
Oct 23
Fujimoto's Five Books are now Public Domain origami.kosmulski.org · “This means that you can now copy, distribute, and use the contents of these books without any restrictions (certain limitations may still apply in some jurisdictions).”
Oct 23
75% of the Time We Spend With Our Kids in Our Lifetime Will Be Spent By Age 12 1000hoursoutside.com · “What all of this means is that it’s highly unlikely that any of us will get 18 endless summers with our kids.”
Oct 18
Jessica Wade made more than 1k Wikipedia bios for unknown women scientists today.com · “Several of her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most influential contributors and editors are called.”
Oct 16
Macintosh Newsweek advertisement aresluna.org · “Below you can see all 39 pages of the advertisement, as well as Newsweek’s front cover.”
Oct 16
TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging bbc.com · “Displaced families in Syrian camps are begging for donations on TikTok while the company takes up to 70% of the proceeds, a BBC investigation found.”
Oct 13
The next time Wikipedia asks for a donation, ignore it unherd.com · “After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March.”
Oct 12
I wish my web server were in the corner of my room interconnected.org · “It is boundary-violating, to have a website in the corner of your bedroom.”
Oct 11
The Google plasma globe affair of 2012 lcamtuf.coredump.cx · “The solution proved to be simple: we "borrowed" the USB vendor and product ID sent by an Apple-made keyboard taken from a coworker’s desk.”
Oct 10
William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With 'Overwhelming Sadness' variety.com · “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
Oct 8
Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator gamedeveloper.com · “The Switch maker has been incredibly proactive in recent years when it comes to seeking out and destroying ROM sites and emulators that allow people to access its software illegally.”
Oct 8
mastodon.technology Shutdown ashfurrow.com · “It’s been five and a half years that I’ve ran this instance and I never saw it ending.”
Oct 7
Internet Archive Seeks Donations of Materials to Build a Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications blog.archive.org · “The DLARC project is looking for partners and contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small.”
Oct 5
How fateful? chan.co.za · “There were 33 recorded occasions where we may have crossed paths, mostly on campus.”
Oct 4
The Deception of "Buying" Digital Movies worldofmatthew.com · “You are not provided any ownership of the content you have bought.”
Oct 4
Mandated Diversity Statement Drives Jonathan Haidt To Quit Academic Society reason.com · “A recent American Association of University Professors survey found that DEI criteria are included in consideration for tenure at 21.5 percent of colleges and universities, and at 45.6 percent of large institutions of higher education.”
Oct 2
Notes Against Note-Taking Systems sashachapin.substack.com · “Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things.”
Oct 1

September 2022 23 posts

A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy blog.google · “The underlying technology platform that powers Stadia has been proven at scale and transcends gaming.”
Sep 29
Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons and Hardly Anyone Noticed/Cares cogdogblog.com · “Google is broke, I spotted it, and no one really seems to care.”
Sep 28
A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines' in-flight announcements and nobody knows how waxy.org · “By nature, passenger announcement systems on planes are hardwired, closed systems, making them incredibly difficult to hack.”
Sep 23
At 4.4 Miles, Wyoming Team Sets New Rifle Shot World Record cowboystatedaily.com · “The shooter was 4.4 miles away, a distance so great, the Earth’s rotation came into play.”
Sep 23
The sum of all knowledge christianheilmann.com · “Books can’t be unavailable as you can have as many copies as you want.”
Sep 23
Avoiding homework with code (and getting caught) alistair.blog · “Mochip was a real passion project and I had a wild time building it.”
Sep 22
Facebook Proven to Negatively Impact Mental Health english.tau.ac.il · “The findings show a rise in the number of students reporting severe depression and anxiety (7% and 20% respectively).”
Sep 22
YouTube's 'dislike' barely works, according to new study on recommendations engadget.com · “In fact, it may be even more difficult than you think to get YouTube to accurately understand your preferences.”
Sep 20
Saul Kripke (1940-2022) dailynous.com · “Saul Kripke, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th Century, has died.”
Sep 17
please don't be spooky tiramisu.bearblog.dev · “It’s not reasonable to expect coworkers to be at their computer for every minute from 8AM to 5PM.”
Sep 16
The Spectacular Collapse of CryptoKitties, the First Big Blockchain Game spectrum.ieee.org · “This was the break fans of Ethereum were waiting for.”
Sep 15
What it Takes to Make a Game by Yourself dillonshook.com · “Start on a small project that’s realistic to finish and build up to your bigger dream game you want to make.”
Sep 15
Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch factorio.com · “The gameplay is not simplified and there are no artificial limits.”
Sep 13
The Follower driesdepoorter.be · “Software compares the Instagram with the recorded footage.”
Sep 12
Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images waxy.org · “AI art can be created orders of magnitude faster than traditional human-made art.”
Sep 12
Atkinson Hyperlegible Font brailleinstitute.org · “Our award-winning font has made reading easier for millions upon millions of people and continues to change lives daily.”
Sep 11
Visual Effects for the Indian blockbuster "RRR" blender.org · “Since then we delivered 700 shots for the RRR feature with our work being the prominence in the international trailer.”
Sep 10
The next chapter for Learning on YouTube blog.youtube · “Learning remains a top priority for YouTube.”
Sep 9
Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs experimentalhistory.substack.com · “A little self-discipline builds character, but too much self-discipline breaks it.”
Sep 7
Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes incoherency.co.uk · “Don’t tell anyone, but I already have plans for a better version of Sockfish that will be much harder to detect!”
Sep 5
Don't ignore the janitor happychasing.substack.com · “He once told me he felt invisible at work.”
Sep 5
Blocking Kiwifarms blog.cloudflare.com · “We have never been their hosting provider.”
Sep 3
Peter Eckersley, may his memory be a blessing community.letsencrypt.org · “He later served on the initial board of directors of the Internet Security Research Group.”
Sep 3

August 2022 26 posts

Final Thoughts on Ubiquiti krebsonsecurity.com · “I have decided to remove those articles from my website.”
Aug 31
Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven twitchard.github.io · “A mature leader has no need to hide behind false objectivity, but insecure leaders use metrics as a crutch.”
Aug 30
The Big [Censored] Theory pudding.cool · “77 of the first 100 episodes had at least one edit, amounting to 206 removed scenes.”
Aug 29
Don’t think to write, write to think herbertlui.net · “Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process.”
Aug 28
Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes ethanhein.com · “12-TET is convenient for instrument builders and piano tuners, but it makes harmony sound grey and mushy.”
Aug 28
Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? acoup.blog · “The first key is understanding that the industrial revolution was more than simply an increase in economic production.”
Aug 26
Visions robinsloan.com · “The artist names and track titles are nonsense; to me, they carry the clear flavor of AI text generation.”
Aug 23
Workplace surveillance is coming for you pluralistic.net · “The bossware problem is a boss problem, in other words.”
Aug 22
Good conversations have lots of doorknobs experimentalhistory.substack.com · “Conversations, like improv scenes, start to sink if they sit still.”
Aug 21
LibGen's Bloat Problem liberalgeneral.neocities.org · “Bear in mind that this is still before deduplication; we are merely filtering by file-size.”
Aug 21
Diablo 1 for web browsers! github.com · “To play the full game, you must use your own DIABDAT.MPQ that you can obtain with the original copy of the game from GoG.”
Aug 20
I Watched An 857-Hour Movie To Encounter Capitalism's Extremes readpassage.com · “Logistics tracks, in reverse chronological order, the journey of a pedometer from a shop in Sweden to a factory in China.”
Aug 13
Is this the end of social networking? reb00ted.org · “Facebook is fundamentally an advertising machine.”
Aug 11
Why aren't smart people happier? experimentalhistory.substack.com · “All that progress didn’t make us a bit happier.”
Aug 10
The World Excel Championship is being broadcast on ESPN and it's absolutely wild ladbible.com · “The sport pits eight expert modellers against each other.”
Aug 10
Write a Note to Your Spouse Every Day jdnoc.com · “Writing is thinking - so when I write a note to my wife I am thinking about her.”
Aug 9
No more Insight Porn jakobgreenfeld.com · “Only once you actually try to do anything with the advice, do you notice it’s completely useless.”
Aug 8
#16: The case of fake IMDb credits peabee.substack.com · “When you sign up to this website, they give you one credit to publish your first press release for free.”
Aug 7
Cramming 'Papers, Please' onto Phones dukope.com · “Beyond the minimal amount necessary to make the interface work, there are no content changes or additions for this port.”
Aug 6
Ubisoft to pull online from older games, which also takes away your DLC pcgamer.com · “Space Junkies, the multiplayer VR shooter, cost $40 at release and remains available for sale on Steam, with no notice that it will be rendered unplayable in two months.”
Aug 6
DreamWorks Animation to Release MoonRay as Open Source awn.com · “DreamWorks intends to make MoonRay available under the Apache 2.0 license.”
Aug 5
Old jokes dynomight.net · “Maybe the joke was born old.”
Aug 4
Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google. reasonablypolymorphic.com · “SEO techniques are extremely potent, and their widespread adoption is what’s wrong with the modern web.”
Aug 4
What's the Strangest Thing You Ever Found in a Book? noctslackv2.wordpress.com · “It was a dentist’s appointment card for Mr. Lounsbury.”
Aug 3
Productivity Porn calebschoepp.com · “Social media has become my productivity porn.”
Aug 3
How I regained concentration and focus innoq.com · “I have resolved very firmly not to read any news at all for a while.”
Aug 1

July 2022 19 posts

Famous HNers and their sites jessimekirk.com · “But, most of the sites are personal blogs of some sort.”
Jul 31
Rumor: Google Stadia May Be Getting Shut Down gamerant.com · “On its official Twitter page, Google Stadia has denied the rumors that it will be shutting down its services.”
Jul 29
Kitsault, Canada's $50M 1980s ghost town justinmcelroy.com · “Not only a ghost town, but a ghost town that was built for $50 million in 1981, only to be shut down a year later.”
Jul 29
Map showing birthplaces of "notable people" around the world tjukanovt.github.io · “Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.”
Jul 29
Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “It took 4 years and half a dozen projects launched for Michael to find a product that took off”
Jul 26
Take more screenshots alexwlchan.net · “Digital work is inherently ephemeral.”
Jul 24
Research Suggests That Software Piracy Lowers Poverty torrentfreak.com · “The paper doesn’t mention this reverse relationship but it wouldn’t be a surprise if it plays a role here.”
Jul 17
How Duke Nukem II's parallax scrolling worked lethalguitar.wordpress.com · “Thanks to this mechanism, we can copy 4 bytes for the cost of one byte.”
Jul 15
Melbourne woman ‘dehumanised’ by viral TikTok filmed without her consent theguardian.com · “In a statement, a spokesperson for Pawluk said the video was “designed to spread love and compassion”.”
Jul 14
Publishing your work increases your luck github.com · “The simple act of publishing your work is one of the best ways to invite a little more luck into your life.”
Jul 12
Working in the software industry, circa 1989 dev.jimgrey.net · “It took more than three hours for all of the computers to finish booting.”
Jul 11
Love Song to Costco longreads.com · “My parents are born in 1962, the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Chinese Famine.”
Jul 10
Assassin's Creed Liberation delisted, unplayable even to owners starting Sept 1 mp1st.com · “While it’s fairly common for games to be delisted on digital storefronts, the title being unplayable completely is not.”
Jul 10
Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else? velvetshark.com · “There is a trend in logo design that started around 2017-2018.”
Jul 9
I should have loved biology jsomers.net · “The textbooks wrung out the questing.”
Jul 9
Problems at Roblox thebearcave.substack.com · “Items bought with Robux can be resold in Roblox’s marketplace and some trade for thousands of dollars.”
Jul 7
Did the early medieval era ever take place? jonn.substack.com · “The Phantom Time Hypothesis is nonsense.”
Jul 6
It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak leejo.github.io · “I realised last month the app hasn’t been of much use to me, in terms of learning, for a while.”
Jul 3
Scunthorpe Sans, A font that censors bad language automatically vole.wtf · “Scunthorpe Sans is based on Aileron and released under a CC0/public domain license.”
Jul 2

June 2022 18 posts

She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed. sixthtone.com · “Yifan had uncovered one of the largest hoaxes in Wikipedia’s history.”
Jun 29
Life Is Not Short dkb.show · “Everyone complains about how short life is, but that perspective is broken.”
Jun 26
My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span idratherbewriting.com · “I realized that I was looking at my phone every spare moment of the day.”
Jun 25
Goodbye Zachtronics, Developers Of Very Cool Video Games kotaku.com · “After 11 years in business (and even longer outside of commercial releases), a time which has seen the studio develop a cult following almost unrivalled in indie gaming, it will be the last new game Zachtronics will ever release.”
Jun 24
Writing one sentence per line sive.rs · “Delete any sentence not worthy of its own line.”
Jun 20
Rarely Seen Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien Portray a Lush 'Lord of the Rings' Landscape smithsonianmag.com · “Many of the original illustrations in the Hobbit were created by Tolkien himself.”
Jun 15
Palm OS developer releases source to classic games, 20+ years after release retrorgb.com · “Aaron Ardiri, a Palm OS developer, has released source codes for various games, GameBoy emulator and various tools originally developed for Palm OS over 20 years ago on his Github page, with total of 12 repositories.”
Jun 15
The prank cursor that resulted in an employee being fired before they even started devblogs.microsoft.com · “The person who made the unauthorized change rejoined the company a few weeks later, as originally planned.”
Jun 13
How to Write Better with The Why, What, How Framework eugeneyan.com · “Here’s a story from the early days of Amazon Web Services: Before writing any code, engineers spent 18 months contemplating and writing documents on how best to serve the customer.”
Jun 12
A Guide to the Pre-Ghibli Work of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata vulture.com · “But despite Miyazaki and Takahata’s outsize influence on the history of animation, many cartoon lovers still haven’t seen some of their most significant works, either for want of access or simply because they’ve never heard of them.”
Jun 12
Announcing "Code" 2nd Edition charlespetzold.com · “However, the 1st edition was originally published in 1999 and it was definitely showing its age.”
Jun 10
Why Software Engineers like Woodworking zainrizvi.io · “Woodworking felt strangely familiar.”
Jun 9
Beacon is switching to a four-day work week. Here's why. beaconcrm.org · “However, at Beacon, we passionately believe that the best way to build software is to have smart humans in a room together.”
Jun 7
SR-71 Pilot explains how he Survived to his Blackbird Disintegration at a Speed of Mach 3.2 theaviationgeekclub.com · “Among professional aviators, there’s a well-worn saying: Flying is simply hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror.”
Jun 6
It Costs $110,000 to Fully Gear-Up in Diablo Immortal gamerant.com · “Specifically, Legendary Gems aren’t even a guaranteed drop for paying players, as they are only randomly awarded upon purchasing Legendary Crests (i.e. loot boxes) - which may be the reason why Diablo Immortal didn’t launch worldwide.”
Jun 5
It's Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message wired.com · “These are squishy orange cones that we all plow through, like 15-year-olds in driver’s ed.”
Jun 5
Dear Spotify. Can we just get a table of songs? neil.computer · “If there is a piece of information about a podcast that is the least useful, that would be the cover art.”
Jun 4
Installing a payphone in my house bert.org · “My payphone number had been blacklisted, but the great thing about living in a metropolitan area in the U.S. in the 90s is that there was always another payphone.”
Jun 2

May 2022 21 posts

SomaFM somafm.com · “Over 30 unique channels of listener-supported, commercial-free, underground/alternative radio broadcasting to the world.”
May 31
Knots 3D: Learn how to tie useful knots knots3d.com · “Our comprehensive library features over 200 animated knots with step-by-step tutorials that transform complex rope work into clear, easy-to-follow instructions that work for complete beginners and serve as a quick reference for experts.”
May 27
S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010 sfchronicle.com · “The city lost 54,813 people, or 6.3% of its population, from July 2020 to July 2021.”
May 27
yes, i was forced to be a child star. it was never my dream or my idea. wilwheaton.net · “The big lie that she didn’t force me to become a child actor when I was seven, that it was all my idea.”
May 26
The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling timharford.com · “If you bill £1,000 an hour, as some senior lawyers do, then any particular six-minute increment of time is available to be turned into £100.”
May 26
Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness shuvomoy.github.io · “She said, you work very hard on a problem for a long time, and then you get this rush, this wonderful satisfaction when you’ve solved it.”
May 23
Vangelis, Oscar-Winning Composer, Dies at 79 pitchfork.com · “A cause of death was not revealed.”
May 19
OutHorse Your Email visiticeland.com · “Disconnect from work and let the horses of Iceland reply to your emails while you are on vacation.”
May 19
Taking a Break from Social Media Makes You Happier and Less Anxious calnewport.com · “The researchers gathered 154 volunteers with a mean age of 29.6 years old.”
May 17
The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background nature.com · “After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β = + 0.17), but socializing had no effect.”
May 17
I Stopped To Watch Kids Playing at Recess. Security Was Called. reason.com · “As I have said since I founded Free-Range Kids in 2008, and since starting Let Grow in 2017, our society is set on overestimating danger and underestimating kids.”
May 12
Passenger with "no idea how to fly" a plane lands Cessna at Florida airport after pilot suffers possible medical emergency cbsnews.com · “Dramatic audio between the passenger and air traffic controllers revealed the tense moments before the single-engine Cessna 208 landed at Palm Beach International Airport.”
May 11
Announcement: I’m Going to Miss You, But I Am Taking a Sabbatical kottke.org · “There’s no real roadmap for this, no blueprint for independent creators taking sabbaticals to recharge.”
May 9
No Fixed Address Bank Account hsbc.co.uk · “HSBC UK’s No Fixed Address Account is a specialist service available in selected branches to help people without a fixed home address open a bank account.”
May 8
Why do you waste so much time on the internet? zan.bearblog.dev · “I will follow that thing for 2-3 days then back to that unproductive and mindless pithole.”
May 6
Microsoft 3D Movie Maker Source Code github.com · “This code was restored from the Microsoft corporate archives and cleared for release.”
May 4
Using QGIS to apply a 1777 style to today's OpenStreetMap data manuelclaeysbouuaert.be · “What would it look like if count de Ferraris would have made his map today?”
May 3
When I made another Monkey Island grumpygamer.com · “It’s ironic that the people who don’t want me to make the game I want to make are some of the hard core Monkey Island fans.”
May 3
The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982 thegamednd.com · “Sessions (usually 4-5 hours in length) are held whenever players travel into town, averaging several sessions a week.”
May 2
Pop culture has become an oligopoly experimentalhistory.substack.com · “Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions.”
May 2
How to professionally say howtoprofessionallysay.akashrajpurohit.com · “I’m unable to add value to this meeting but I would be happy to review the minutes.”
May 1

April 2022 24 posts

Noto emoji, a new black and white emoji font with less color developers.googleblog.com · “Now, our phones have fancy retina screens and somewhere along the way an important part of what made emoji so handy was left by the wayside: their simplicity.”
Apr 30
I've used all the notebooks tylercipriani.com · “The act of writing helped them solidify complicated ideas.”
Apr 30
Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere news.airbnb.com · “During the second half of 2021, 20% of our nights booked were for stays of longer than a month, and half were for stays of longer than a week.”
Apr 29
103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known kk.org · “Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.”
Apr 28
Be careful with that thing, it's a confidential coffee maker devblogs.microsoft.com · “The Microsoft employees chipped in to buy a cheap coffee maker and put it in their shared offices.”
Apr 26
3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work openculture.com · “Over the 280-day period covered by this 3,200-year-old ostracon, common excuses for absence include “brewing beer” and “his wife was bleeding.””
Apr 26
I sold 640 copies of my book in one year nts.strzibny.name · “You signed up for two jobs if you decided to write a book.”
Apr 25
No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing robkhenderson.substack.com · “Today, one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men.”
Apr 24
French fighter jet joy ride goes très, très wrong (2020) caranddriver.com · “The 64-year-old was not correctly instructed, to say the least, in passenger etiquette, and to make a long story short, he self-ejected midflight.”
Apr 24
Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations journals.plos.org · “Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations.”
Apr 22
A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV npr.org · “In the first episode, a toddler takes a 20-minute walk to a grocery store and picks up three items for his mom: flowers, curry and fishcakes.”
Apr 20
Unreal vs. Unity Opinion gist.github.com · “This was the case with Unity for a long time, but in the last few years the quality of that back half of development has rapidly declined, to the point where people are absolutely sick of their own projects by the time they’re finished… or more accurately, abandoned, because long-term maintenance of Unity games is appallingly hard.”
Apr 17
The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen nicole.express · “Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit.”
Apr 17
U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow ionathan.ch · “I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project.”
Apr 13
Heresy paulgraham.com · “There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for.”
Apr 10
MIT graduate students vote to unionize thetech.com · “75% of 3,823 eligible graduate students voted, with 1,785 students (66%) voting in favor of unionization and 912 students (34%) voting against, according to results announced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).”
Apr 9
I need to find an apartment mattrighetti.com · “Long story short: I’ve taken a new position in Luxembourg and I have to find an apartment, in a different country, in a reasonably short time.”
Apr 9
The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996 lunduke.substack.com · “Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was an absolute powerhouse.”
Apr 7
One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine nrk.no · “As a result TikTok turned off the ability to upload new content in Russia.”
Apr 5
The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk sabukaru.online · “Whilst familiar in our contemporary, terms such as ‘cyberspace’, ‘jacking-in’, ‘ICE’ and ‘the matrix’ were first introduced by Neuromancer, greatly influencing the dictionary that much of Cyberpunk borrows from and builds upon.”
Apr 5
Are you a baby? A litmus test haleynahman.substack.com · “Trying to weasel out of all that with an app is, well, basically the entire value prop of Silicon Valley, but more importantly antithetical to growth.”
Apr 4
YouTube cancelled my Nextcloud installation how-to mccormick.cx · “Your interface does not allow me any way to speak to a human being about this.”
Apr 2
Albini pitching Nirvana: "I would like to be paid like a plumber" (1992) news.lettersofnote.com · “I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth.”
Apr 2
A few things to know before stealing my 914 hagerty.com · “The last guy who stole my 914 used this very spot and it was rather convenient for all concerned parties.”
Apr 1

March 2022 26 posts

Mastodon 3.5 blog.joinmastodon.org · “Discoverability makes or breaks a platform, as there is nothing more important to retain a new user than to let them find something interesting to stay for, as soon as possible.”
Mar 31
We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles mitadmissions.org · “Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.”
Mar 28
Maybe you should do less 'work' johnwhiles.com · “If you haven’t been fired, and no one has taken you aside to ask about your performance, then probably you’re meeting expectations.”
Mar 28
Mourning loss as a remote team sofuckingagile.com · “Pete’s wife had used the technical support chat to get a message to me.”
Mar 26
But life had other plans danlebrero.com · “Given that my wife didn’t recall talking with any angel lately, the simple explanation was that she was already pregnant when she went through the surgery.”
Mar 23
Enemies: State-of-the-art digital humans in Unity unity.com · “Enemies expands on the work done for The Heretic, which featured Unity’s first realistic digital human.”
Mar 22
Vimeo: "We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube." ymcinema.com · “Filmmakers claim that Vimeo demands them to pay thousands of dollars or their videos will be deleted.”
Mar 20
The Boschian Horror of 'Elden Ring' artreview.com · “Bosch’s work, more than 500 years after his death, still retains an incredible power, but also a wonderful and much-debated sense of obscurity; was he a grotesque humorist or penitent painter of horrors?”
Mar 19
Christopher Alexander, 1936-2022 cnu.org · “Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time.”
Mar 18
How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list dynomight.net · “A normal essay promises a payoff only when you finish it.”
Mar 18
Why we stopped making Einsteins erikhoel.substack.com · “I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.”
Mar 16
Medical student surgically implants Bluetooth device into own ear to cheat in final exam independent.co.uk · “It was the student’s final attempt on Monday to clear the exam after repeatedly failing it since getting admission into the college 11 years ago.”
Mar 14
On Being Indispensable sofuckingagile.com · “It took far too long for it to click in my brain that I was stuck.”
Mar 14
Veloren veloren.net · “Veloren is an action-adventure role-playing game set in a vast fantasy world.”
Mar 13
Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate dynomight.net · “The problem is that student performance is continuous.”
Mar 12
A non-standard book list for software developers mihaiolteanu.me · “If I pay close attention to the discussions taking place around me, and observe the thought patterns of the speakers, I can tell which of them definitely haven’t read or paid attention to Euclid.”
Mar 12
How To Do Less alexturek.com · “You probably need to do fewer things right now.”
Mar 11
Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed theverge.com · “To my great disappointment, however, I’ve found that after testing the feature, now I can’t make the chronological feed the default.”
Mar 11
The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote sive.rs · “There was no mention of confidentiality at the meeting and no agreement to sign.”
Mar 9
My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll alexanderell.is · “I think my main problem with it is that it makes me a passive recipient in my interactions with this device, instead of an active participant.”
Mar 6
Apple CEO Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th theverge.com · “For others, it may also be an unsettling change.”
Mar 4
BBC resurrects WWII-era shortwave broadcasts as Russia blocks news of Ukraine invasion theverge.com · “The BBC World Service ended its use of the technology in Europe in 2008 after 76 years.”
Mar 4
Nintendo Is Removing Switch Emulation Videos On Steam Deck exputer.com · “YouTube user The Phawx posted a video showcasing how well the Steam Deck can emulate the Nintendo Switch, and it was soon taken down on copyright grounds.”
Mar 3
Epic Games Acquires Bandcamp as 'Fortnite' Maker Expands Into Music variety.com · “According to Bandcamp, under its revenue model artists receive net an average of 82% of every sale.”
Mar 2
How Does Perspective Work in Pictures? aaronhertzmann.com · “There is no such thing as correct perspective; all choices of perspective have advantages and disadvantages.”
Mar 2
Trapped in Silicon Valley's Hidden Caste System wired.com · “Yet those successes have, almost exclusively, come from historically privileged castes.”
Mar 1

February 2022 30 posts

I'm common as muck and spent £150 in a Michelin star restaurant to see if it was worth it birminghammail.co.uk · “It was worth £150, easy.”
Feb 28
Why not hire part-time developers? aklos.substack.com · “Working part-time could let developers give their best to a project without the burden of emotional blackmail in the form of “9 to 5”.”
Feb 27
Behind Pornhub’s decade-old moderation problems theverge.com · “In the early days of the company, I was tasked with content moderation.”
Feb 23
What is PeerTube? joinpeertube.org · “With PeerTube, no more opaque algorithms or obscure moderation policies!”
Feb 23
Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News raptitude.com · “Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world.”
Feb 22
Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness sloanreview.mit.edu · “Of the nearly 1 million soldiers in our sample, only 12% received an award of any type during the five years that we ran the study.”
Feb 22
I have no capslock and I must scream memex.marginalia.nu · “Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall, and run until the plug is pulled.”
Feb 21
Reasons why Babies Cry in the First Three Months, How to Tell The Cries Apart, and What to Do probablydance.com · “I decided to write up the list that I wish I had before they were born.”
Feb 20
Diary: Real Me and Fake Me lrb.co.uk · “But when I looked online I discovered that I did and I was really quite popular.”
Feb 20
Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work news.ycombinator.com · “I’ve never posted anything like this, but this is the only place I have any hope of a human response after youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company.”
Feb 19
How Relationship Satisfaction Changes Across Your Lifetime greatergood.berkeley.edu · “The researchers found that relationship satisfaction tends to decrease from age 20 to age 40.”
Feb 19
Why we shouldn’t push a positive mindset on those in poverty psyche.co · “There’s one problem: mindsets are not free-floating.”
Feb 19
Don’t point out something wrong immediately blog.the-pans.com · “However, when we are dealing with people, the knee-jerk reflex of pointing out something is wrong might lead to negative feelings from the other side; and hurt relationships.”
Feb 16
Google Search Is Dying dkb.io · “You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.”
Feb 15
Lorinda Cherry ncwit.org · “An early strength of the Unix system was the way it allowed different programs to cooperate on a task, and Cherry, who described herself as “thinking in Unix,” often found ways to apply an insight or feature from one application to a seemingly unrelated context.”
Feb 15
A simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people jakobgreenfeld.com · “Derek Sivers has a cool system.”
Feb 14
Nearly a third of TV ads play to empty rooms news.cornell.edu · “Advertising pricing relies on measuring how many TVs are tuned in to a specific channel, and not whether people are actually watching the TVs.”
Feb 12
The Factorio Mindset thediff.co · “It seemed downright pathological that Shopify lets employees expense it.”
Feb 11
Why won’t anyone teach me math? dailyprincetonian.com · “This begs the question: what interest does a department have in making it impossible to study?”
Feb 11
YSFlight – A free flight simulator where anything is possible ysflight.org · “Try this amazing free flight simulation today and you too will find that though this simulator may not have the world’s greatest graphics, it is like nothing else the world has ever seen - and it’s all FREE.”
Feb 11
Heuristics That Almost Always Work astralcodexten.substack.com · “He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it.”
Feb 8
Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost? news.ycombinator.com · “I have held jobs in small and big companies for mostly for 1-2 years each, traveled and lived in different countries, had 2 failed startups, and have about $500k in savings.”
Feb 6
My Seatbelt Rule for Judgment dannyguo.com · “Nine-year-old me was not in fact smarter than Toyota engineers.”
Feb 6
Travel Is No Cure for the Mind moretothat.com · “That feeling of restlessness underlying all the unresolved issues you have at home will follow you wherever you go.”
Feb 6
Unlearning Perfectionism arunkprasad.com · “This is a pitiful wager and a poor strategy.”
Feb 5
Amazon Pip Horror Story linkedin.com · “Since it is performance review season at Amazon, he quickly sent me into a dev plan (PIP) and blackmailed to my future manager and their supervisor.”
Feb 4
Building a modern home in the woods johnnyrodgers.is · “The budget we set out to achieve at the end of the design phase was obliterated by the factors above, rising by 2/3 over the course of construction.”
Feb 3
The Nintendo Switch has now outsold the Wii theverge.com · “That brings the system’s lifetime total to 103.54 million units shipped, meaning it took just under five years to overtake the Wii’s 101.63 million.”
Feb 3
DarkPattern.games: Find Healthy Mobile Games darkpattern.games · “A monetary dark pattern is one which tricks you into spending more money than you want to spend on a game.”
Feb 2
Okuda Hiroko: The Casio Employee Behind the “Sleng Teng” Riddim that Revolutionized Reggae nippon.com · “Okuda learned for the first time that the “rock” bassline she had written for the Casiotone keyboard had become a sensation around the world.”
Feb 1

January 2022 26 posts

Adblocking People and Non-adblocking People Experience a Totally Different Web imlefthanded.com · “But either way, the 73% are experiencing a very different internet.”
Jan 31
Red Light Green Light jamessevedge.com · “The reason that that experience has stuck with me all these years is that it’s such a great illustration of the fact that where you sit determines what you see.”
Jan 31
Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online royalsociety.org · “The report says there is little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms and warns such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.”
Jan 30
People don't work as much as you think drmaciver.substack.com · “If you do not realise this, and assume that everyone who says they are working eight hours per day actually is, you are probably going to wreck your mental health trying to keep up with them.”
Jan 29
Phone is still the best way to order pizza dan.bulwinkle.net · “Signing up for yet-another-food-service-app is a turn off.”
Jan 29
Smedley Butler on Interventionism man.fas.org · “I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers.”
Jan 29
If Looks Could Kill vintagecomputerstories.blogspot.com · “He turned and gave me a look that was a perfect example of a look that could kill.”
Jan 28
Searching for Susy Thunder theverge.com · “Leafing through her records, she took note of the PR agencies and management companies that represented her favorite bands, which were usually listed on the sleeve.”
Jan 27
Nintendo Switch game cartridges taste offensively bad, trust us polygon.com · “But there’s something different about Switch cartridges: They taste awful.”
Jan 25
On Leaving Facebook frantic.im · “Things I care a lot about, like quality, craft and focus, weren’t as important as scale, metrics and PSC.”
Jan 22
Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Master, Dies at 95 tricycle.org · “He had returned to Vietnam in late 2018, expressing a wish to spend his remaining days at his root temple.”
Jan 21
Everything Must Be Paid for Twice raptitude.com · “Paying only the first price is about the same as throwing money in the garbage.”
Jan 20
The internet changed my life pointersgonewild.com · “The cost was 28 dollars a month, which, out of the $800-900 welfare cheque she was getting, was a lot of money.”
Jan 19
Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind) jakobgreenfeld.com · “This is stupid and a recipe for burnout.”
Jan 17
Tarrare en.wikipedia.org · “Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry.”
Jan 16
Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation sloanreview.mit.edu · “A toxic corporate culture, for example, is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate compared with its industry.”
Jan 13
Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022 surgehq.ai · “So Google does outperform Bing (the difference is statistically significant), although it’s interesting to see the places where Google returns worse results.”
Jan 11
19-Year-Old Student Hides Spy Camera In His Clothing To Take Secret Street Photos In The 1890s boredpanda.com · “In total, Størmer took a total of about 500 of these black and white photos.”
Jan 9
The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda worldbeyondwar.org · “In the original script for the first Iron Man movie, the hero went up against the evil weapons dealers.”
Jan 7
Quit Your Job palladiummag.com · “So quit your job and become the wild and ambitious elites you wish to see in the world.”
Jan 6
How to design a house to last for 1000 years (part III) constructionphysics.substack.com · “Typical single family home foundations consist of reinforced concrete, but reinforced concrete is a poor choice for a long lifespan building due to its susceptibility to corrosion.”
Jan 5
The UX on this Small Child Is Terrible mcsweeneys.net · “The user experience is terrible.”
Jan 4
Your attention didn't collapse. It was stolen theguardian.com · “Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking.”
Jan 2
Emirates' (Probably) Terrifying Boeing 777 Flight To Washington onemileatatime.com · “Aviation is incredibly safe, and for every disaster there are many catastrophes that are narrowly avoided.”
Jan 1
Don't waste the good days seths.blog · “The calendar belongs to everyone else.”
Jan 1
2021 letter danwang.co · “Beijing is therefore a desert steppe city with Stalinist characteristics.”
Jan 1

2021 259 posts

December 2021 22 posts

Lessons from my PhD web.eecs.utk.edu · “If you show up to a meeting/internship/job expecting to be told what to do, then chances are someone will tell you something to do.”
Dec 28
Japan's Paper Culture jetpens.com · “Despite Japan’s international reputation for using futuristic technology, the country still uses a lot of paper.”
Dec 28
Ubisoft Deleted Account With Hundreds Of Dollars' Worth Of Games For Inactivity mmos.com · “When he tried contacting Ubisoft regarding the email, the company’s representatives told him that they won’t be able to recover any of his games because his account had been closed.”
Dec 27
25 Anti-Mimetic Tactics for Living a Counter-Cultural Life epsilontheory.com · “But Girard’s finding went deeper: it’s not only what they do, but what they want that we also mimic.”
Dec 26
You block ads in your browser, why not in your city? bearbin.net · “Blocking ads may work online, but unless you spend your life in VR goggles, one cannot apply technical solutions alone.”
Dec 26
Ten Years of Logging My Life chaidarun.com · “Often I become engrossed in whatever I’m doing and forget about biological obligations like eating.”
Dec 26
Average colors of the world eox.at · “The difference here is I didn’t even try to tell a story with these maps… I just made them as something pretty to look at.”
Dec 24
Street Fighter II, paper trails fabiensanglard.net · “The solution came under the form of paper sheets and scissors.”
Dec 23
My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file jeffhuang.com · “I gave up and started just tracking in a single text file and have been using it as my main productivity system for 14 years now.”
Dec 23
The interview that disappeared josimarfootball.com · “No official reason for his arrest has been given by Qatari authorities.”
Dec 23
Against 3X Speed perell.com · “The problem is that shoving information into your mind can create the illusion of knowledge, especially when you rush it.”
Dec 20
My Parents Collect Cans for a Living thenation.com · “Although this center has been like my second home for the past 10 years, I have kept it mostly a secret.”
Dec 19
Is internet addiction eradicating the habit of reading? benwajdi.com · “I myself have tried a similar experiment: instead of consuming PDFs, I print them, and actively read them (taking notes while thinking about the material).”
Dec 18
Closing the loop: a deep dive on a Facebook reseller of bikes stolen in Colorado bikeindex.org · “In early 2021, several people tipped us off to a Facebook seller in Juarez, Mexico who appeared to be selling bikes stolen from Colorado.”
Dec 18
Open letter from The BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg bmj.com · “We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime.”
Dec 17
Neon Genesis Evangelion fontsinuse.com · “Subcontractors usually painted anything type-related in an anime by hand, so it was a novel idea at the time for a director to use desktop typesetting to exert typographic control.”
Dec 13
The Matrix is Unreal fxguide.com · “Other than those shots, the experience renders in real-time on a standard console.”
Dec 12
Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice commoncog.com · “Riding a bicycle is impossible to teach through descriptions.”
Dec 12
Number of journalists behind bars reaches global high cpj.org · “China remains the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the third year in a row, with 50 behind bars.”
Dec 9
One decade later, Minecraft world generation is interesting again dither8.xyz · “Today I want to look back at a development mistake that was made in Beta 1.8, one that took a decade to recover from.”
Dec 5
LEGO has designed a set that can't be taken apart brickset.com · “However, the company’s latest release, 75313 AT-AT, has broken from this tradition and some sub-assemblies within it are impossible to dismantle without resorting to using sharp metal implements.”
Dec 3
Instagram is Facebook now embedded.substack.com · “I’m getting almost as much content that I didn’t choose to see as content I did, and that is not Instagram.”
Dec 1

November 2021 14 posts

The American Prison System's War on Reading proteanmag.com · “This April, the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a ban on charities, family members, and other outside parties donating books to prisoners.”
Nov 30
The Origins of 'Horn OK Please,' India's Most Ubiquitous Phrase atlasobscura.com · “Trucks, in particular, are often not even equipped with side mirrors in the first place.”
Nov 29
The Story Behind This Famed SR-71 Blackbird Super Low Knife-Edge Pass theaviationgeekclub.com · “At this point we weren’t really flying, but were falling in a slight bank.”
Nov 28
Underrated reasons to be thankful dynomight.net · “That humans didn’t evolve under strong alpha selection, meaning that 99% of us don’t get eaten by birds in our first moments of life as we crawl down the beach towards the ocean, which is nice.”
Nov 25
The Stroad strongtowns.org · “We like to call them “the futon of transportation” because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street.”
Nov 21
Experts From A World That No Longer Exists collaborativefund.com · “The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists.”
Nov 20
Swedish study suggests hiring discrimination is primarily a problem for men in female-dominated occupations psypost.org · “The study indicates that women are more likely to receive a response to entry-level job applications than men are.”
Nov 19
Those Bullet Effects In Terminator 2 Weren't CGI hackaday.com · “Bullets fired at the “liquid metal” robot resulted only in a chrome-looking bullet splash that momentarily staggered the killing machine.”
Nov 14
Update to YouTube Dislike Counts support.google.com · “We are making the dislike count private to protect our creators by reducing targeted dislike attacks on their channels.”
Nov 10
The Gradual Extinction of Softness hippocampusmagazine.com · “It amazes me to recall a time when we had so much rice to spare, we could afford to let a little girl blacken it just for fun.”
Nov 10
How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet inputmag.com · “Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account.”
Nov 8
Don't be spooky therealadam.com · “Never message someone on your team, “let’s talk when you get a minute”.”
Nov 6
Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places strongtowns.org · “In fact, our shortage of nice places is almost totally self-imposed.”
Nov 4
Research: People prefer friendliness, trustworthiness in teammates over skill competency binghamton.edu · “People may be willing to sacrifice a bit in terms of performance in order to have a really positive team experience.”
Nov 2

October 2021 18 posts

Why the status quo is so hard to change in engineering teams okayhq.com · “A set of behaviors where we give up on escaping a painful situation, because our brain has gradually been taught to assume powerlessness in that situation.”
Oct 31
Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's groups.csail.mit.edu · “Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all.”
Oct 30
Architect Resigns in Protest over UCSB Mega-Dorm independent.com · “The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly.”
Oct 29
Open secrets about Hacker News bengtan.com · “One of them can triple the chances of a story reaching the front page.”
Oct 28
Leaving Google jayconrod.com · “My last manager had around 25 reports.”
Oct 23
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream filfre.net · “Harlan Ellison made a very successful career out of biting the hands that fed him.”
Oct 22
Willingness to look stupid danluu.com · “The benefit from asking a stupid sounding question is small in most particular instances, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large and I’ve observed that people who are willing to ask dumb questions and think "stupid thoughts" end up understanding things much more deeply over time.”
Oct 21
Beyond Smart paulgraham.com · “There are a lot of genuinely smart people who don’t achieve very much.”
Oct 21
YouTube: Filmmakers Presumed Guilty Until (Maybe) Proven Innocent larryjordan.com · “Note that Anthony has to appeal the take-down notice NOT to an unbiased third-party, but to the person making the original claim.”
Oct 18
42 years later, how 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' has endured npr.org · “And 42 is now the number of years since the publication of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the first in the series of wacky and beloved sci-fi books by Douglas Adams.”
Oct 17
'Dislike' button would improve Spotify's recommendations news.cornell.edu · “But Cornell researchers recently asked the question: Why do they still not let you vote down a song?”
Oct 16
Vienna museums open adult-only OnlyFans account to display nudes theguardian.com · “Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans – the only social network that permits depictions of nudity – in protest against platforms’ ongoing censorship of its art museums and galleries.”
Oct 16
Valve bans blockchain games and NFTs on Steam, Epic will try to make it work theverge.com · “Games that use blockchain technology or let users exchange NFTs or cryptocurrencies won’t be allowed on Steam, according to a rule added to Valve’s "What you shouldn’t publish on Steam" list.”
Oct 15
Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely, indefinitely seattletimes.com · “That’s a change from Amazon’s previous expectation that most employees would need to be in the office at least three days a week once offices reopen in January.”
Oct 11
Classified tank specs leaked on War Thunder game forums – again ukdefencejournal.org.uk · “A French Army tank crewman has leaked a portion of the Leclerc Main Battle Tank’s classified manual on the forum for popular online game War Thunder, the second time a leak of tank specifications has happened.”
Oct 10
ScummVM 2.5.0: Twenty years ago today... scummvm.org · “Twenty years ago today, on Tue Oct 9 16:30:12 2001, Ludvig Strigeus pushed the initial revision of the ScummVM code, which was version 0.0.1 of the project.”
Oct 9
Facebook banned me for life because I help people use it less slate.com · “It permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts.”
Oct 7
Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 points in 6 months mbuffett.com · “So I wasted countless hours, all the while thinking I was going to be great at chess when I started playing again, because I had such a killer puzzle rating.”
Oct 7

September 2021 21 posts

In 2019, Almost All of Facebook's Top Christian Pages Were Run By Foreign Troll Farms relevantmagazine.com · “In 2019, 19 of Facebook’s top 20 pages for American Christians were run by Eastern European troll farms overseas, internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal.”
Sep 29
You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation mux.com · “It’s the dirty little product secret that no one talks about.”
Sep 28
What John von Neumann really did at Los Alamos 3quarksdaily.com · “He visited as a consultant a few times a year.”
Sep 27
Congratulations, Mini, You Made The Stupidest Turn Signals Ever jalopnik.com · “These signals are showing a right-pointing arrow blinking on the left side, and a left-pointing arrow blinking on the right.”
Sep 26
The Problem of Marital Loneliness newyorker.com · “The very closeness of marriage makes every bit of distance palpable.”
Sep 26
The Dead Code Diaries madned.substack.com · “The mystery program was my own, and I had no specific memory of writing it.”
Sep 25
No, We Won’t Have a Video Call for That! xahteiwi.eu · “Effective distributed collaboration is not pretending to be in an office while staring into a webcam all day.”
Sep 23
That Time I Told My Wife I Wanted to Quit My Job keygen.sh · “At the time, my side project, now a side business, was making about half of what my senior software engineer position at $CRYPTO_EXCHANGE was netting me, before theft taxes.”
Sep 21
No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion? spiegel.de · “New discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker.”
Sep 18
Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies aged 81 theguardian.com · “Many modern-day titans of the games industry got their start on one of his ZX models.”
Sep 16
Please Stop Closing Forums And Moving People To Discord kotaku.com · “Readers are then urged to move to the site’s Discord, because of course they would be.”
Sep 16
The American Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation Makes No Sense erichgrunewald.com · “There is no reason that there should be two different approaches to punctuation in the English language.”
Sep 15
Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented smithsonianmag.com · “It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production.”
Sep 12
The World's Oldest Active Torrent Turns 18 Soon torrentfreak.com · “The torrent was created in September 2003, which means that it will turn 18 this month.”
Sep 12
No More Medium. Build Your Own Site, Please. nomedium.dev · “Medium’s paywall is an insult to good journalism by forcing specific users to pay for content of often questionable quality.”
Sep 11
The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers nature.com · “Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts.”
Sep 11
Write more, but shorter blog.kewah.com · “By writing shorter content, I’ll reduce my expectation on how long an article should be before publishing it.”
Sep 10
'Red Roulette' Reveals The Inside Of China's Wealth-Making Machine npr.org · “The government never acknowledged they have taken her.”
Sep 7
Art Student's 407-Piece Hand-Carved Wooden Clock Literally Writes The Time ablogtowatch.com · “With over 400 moving parts, Suzuki’s senior thesis exhibition project uses four magnetic stylus pens on a magnetic drawing board to mechanically write the full time every minute in 24-hour format – and it is a work of art.”
Sep 5
200 Years Ago, Faraday Invented the Electric Motor spectrum.ieee.org · “Within a week of publication, Humphry Davy dealt his mentee a devastating blow by accusing Faraday of plagiarism.”
Sep 4
Rejected internal applicants twice as likely to quit news.cornell.edu · “Internal job applicants who face rejection are nearly twice as likely to leave their organizations than those who were either hired for an internal job or had not applied for a new job at all.”
Sep 3

August 2021 18 posts

My House carltheperson.com · “Price for the slot was 5,500$ which for a 17-year old was a pretty big investment.”
Aug 31
Why Facebook is the AOL of 2021 zdnet.com · “Facebook didn’t have to resort to such cheesy tactics, but it similiarly has offered a curated set of free activities that have trapped people inside a walled garden, just like AOL.”
Aug 30
When a hobby becomes a job vox.com · “Mugs sell, so I make more of them.”
Aug 29
Space Nerds In Space smcameron.github.io · “Space Nerds In Space is an open source (GPLv2) cooperative multiplayer starship simulator for linux (may also work on Mac).”
Aug 29
Burning out and quitting mayakaczorowski.com · “I was working longer and longer hours, and getting less and less done.”
Aug 25
Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence theverge.com · “After he went exclusive, that number declined by half to around 2,000, suggesting a drop in listeners.”
Aug 25
On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking lithub.com · “Darwin’s best thinking, however, was not done in his study.”
Aug 22
Patterns in confusing explanations jvns.ca · “I came up with a list of 13 patterns that make explanations hard for me to understand.”
Aug 21
‘I Don’t Want to Be Like a Family With My Co-Workers’ thecut.com · “Recently, however, a friend in my department was told she would not receive a promotion because she is not a “team player.””
Aug 21
Mastodon now a non-profit organisation blog.joinmastodon.org · “Since I am the sole founder and shareholder, the 25,000 EUR are owed by me (with 12,500 EUR having had to be paid in at day of founding, and the remaining to be paid in the future).”
Aug 17
An Old Hacker's Tips On Staying Employed madned.substack.com · “The best tip I have here is to make sure your boss is afraid.”
Aug 11
Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome zapier.com · “Then Brazil emptied the organization’s entire bank account into his own before skipping town.”
Aug 11
TikTok overtakes Facebook as world's most downloaded app asia.nikkei.com · “A global survey of downloads in 2020 shows TikTok, a video-sharing app developed in China, on top of the list of social media providers for the first time since the study was first conducted in 2018.”
Aug 10
Why Thousands Of American Parents Are Sending Their Kids To 'Russian Math' wbur.org · “With 22,000 students at latest count, the school is the giant among Russian math programs, boasting 15 branches in Massachusetts, where it began, and 40 in total across the country.”
Aug 9
The surreal experience of my first developer job bennuttall.com · “We had to make 10 apps per group every week.”
Aug 4
Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate leidenmedievalistsblog.nl · “However logical such an organic growth of a settlement might seem, it is not historically accurate.”
Aug 4
The rise of never-ending job interviews bbc.com · “Then, he made it through three rounds of interviews for a director-level position at a company he really liked, only to receive an email to co-ordinate six more rounds.”
Aug 2
The most unbelievable things about life before smartphones mattruby.substack.com · “I was not archived, nor was I searchable; things I said just disappeared forever.”
Aug 2

July 2021 29 posts

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed raptitude.com · “Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money.”
Jul 31
Who Owns My Name? amandamarieknox.medium.com · “Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in?”
Jul 30
700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built stackoverflow.blog · “That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws.”
Jul 29
Evil tip: avoid "easy" things yosefk.com · “An easy thing is a heads they win, tails you lose situation.”
Jul 28
Techdirt Is Now Entirely Without Any Google Ads Or Tracking Code techdirt.com · “Only the largest websites (or highly, highly specialized ones) can really pull their own weight on advertising.”
Jul 28
Anna Kiesenhofer: Mathematician, amateur cyclist, Olympic champion cyclingnews.com · “She came into Tokyo without a pro team and left as Olympic Champion.”
Jul 25
Why a YouTube Chat About Chess Got Flagged for Hate Speech wired.com · “Radić saw a message stating that the video, which included nothing more scandalous than a discussion of the King’s Indian Defense, had violated YouTube’s community guidelines.”
Jul 22
Suit Claims Sexual Harassment, Discrimination At Game Studio Activision Blizzard npr.org · “A lawsuit filed by the state of California on Wednesday alleges sexual harassment, gender discrimination and violations of the state’s equal pay law at the video game giant Activision Blizzard.”
Jul 22
A grandfather died of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle techspot.com · “He suffered a heart attack when police surrounded his home and died shortly after.”
Jul 21
When Buddhism Goes Bad danlawton.substack.com · “And that’s when I split apart.”
Jul 20
Low Pay Is The Main Reason So Many Workers Are Quitting Restaurant Jobs npr.org · “They are leaving at the highest rate in decades.”
Jul 20
Right or Left, You Should Be Worried About Big Tech Censorship eff.org · “But it’s not just conservatives who have their political speech blocked by social media giants.”
Jul 18
I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week vice.com · “I haven’t gotten a raise in a decade.”
Jul 17
Master's degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education. slate.com · “For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred.”
Jul 17
The Alexander: Why did you build such a long piano? alexanderpiano.nz · “After finding a safe tension I tuned it to the lowest A on a piano by moving rocks along the wire.”
Jul 16
The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday typesense.org · “Looking back, I cannot believe how much I’ve been able to ship over the past 6 years by just following this one rule.”
Jul 14
Sega sued for 'rigged' Key Master arcade machine polygon.com · “A new lawsuit alleges that Key Master is intentionally rigged against players.”
Jul 14
Assertiveness is a virtue that anyone can develop with practice psyche.co · “Surely I should be capable of politely excusing myself from that sort of situation?”
Jul 14
Building a Vision of Life Without Work livingafi.com · “Love it or hate it, work fills most of the space in your life.”
Jul 13
83% of Developers Suffer From Burnout, Haystack Analytics Study Finds usehaystack.io · “A new study¹ has found that 83% of software developers suffer from workplace burnout.”
Jul 13
EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales engadget.com · “In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU.”
Jul 11
People Staring at Computers kylemcdonald.net · “In 2011 I was still under the false belief that all varieties of law enforcement are designed to protect the public from harm.”
Jul 11
Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues dsogaming.com · “And, we can now confirm that the pirated version does not suffer from any stuttering issues.”
Jul 11
Amazon tells bosses to conceal when employees are on a performance management plan seattletimes.com · “The company expects more than one-third of employees in Focus to fail the program and leave Amazon.”
Jul 9
Tencent Deploys Facial Recognition to Detect Minors Gaming at Night sixthtone.com · “Tencent began testing the use of facial recognition to check users’ age in Beijing and Shenzhen as of late 2018.”
Jul 6
How To Get Better at Painting, Without Painting Anything learning-to-see.co.uk · “You get better at doing something badly.”
Jul 5
Stockfish 14 stockfishchess.org · “Stockfish 14 is now at least 400 Elo ahead of Stockfish 7, a top engine in 2016.”
Jul 4
Mise-en-place for knowledge workers fortelabs.co · “There is no class in college on how to triage your email inbox, manage your agenda, or organize your computer files.”
Jul 2
The most precious resource is agency simonsarris.substack.com · “Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence?”
Jul 1

June 2021 26 posts

How to Work Hard paulgraham.com · “There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort.”
Jun 29
Bring Back Menus! slate.com · “Why should we be scared to go back to touching a communal piece of paper when we’re already breathing one another’s theoretically more dangerous air?”
Jun 29
Dear Google: Public Domain Compositions Exist blog.dbmiller.org · “Recently, I uploaded a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury to YouTube, and it instantly got hit by four copyright claims.”
Jun 28
Reddit's disrespectful design ognjen.io · “But the logo has been made to link to the registration page.”
Jun 26
Why Do Recipe Writers Lie About How Long It Takes To Caramelize Onions? slate.com · “Onions do not caramelize in five or 10 minutes.”
Jun 25
Google turned me into a serial killer hristo-georgiev.com · “It turns out that Google’s knowledge graph algorithm somehow falsely associated my photo with the Wikipedia article about the serial killer.”
Jun 24
I made 56874 calls to explore the telephone network. Here's what I found shufflingbytes.com · “Hackers of old used wardialing to explore the telephone network much like port-scanning is used today to explore the Internet.”
Jun 23
Ask HN: Feeling guilty for doing the bare minimum at work news.ycombinator.com · “I think I’d be able to get my devopsy work done in ~3 hours/day if I manage my time well and schedule most meetings on Mondays.”
Jun 22
Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out 6% of office workers seattletimes.com · “The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show.”
Jun 21
USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral news.usc.edu · “It’s a simple setup: a sheet of plexiglass surrounded by a wood frame and LED lighting.”
Jun 21
Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021 adamcadre.ac · “What the student didn’t realize is that teachers don’t need software to be able to tell the difference between honestly composed sentences and computer-generated gibberish.”
Jun 19
Super Mario World (SNES) Widescreen Project github.com · “Since the original SNES does not have this resolution, the emulator focused into high definition mods bsnes-hd must be used.”
Jun 18
The Document Culture of Amazon justingarrison.com · “Most of the time, if there isn’t a doc there isn’t a meeting.”
Jun 17
4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers' Productivity By 40%, Microsoft Japan Says npr.org · “And as its workers took five Fridays off in August, they printed nearly 60 percent fewer pages.”
Jun 16
“The great resignation”: Upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs axios.com · “Surveys show anywhere from 25% to upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.”
Jun 14
How To Win At Risk By Using Systems Thinking thesystemisdown.substack.com · “This exception is probably explained by the fact that you only get two bonus armies from keeping Australia.”
Jun 12
Don't Feed the Thought Leaders earthly.dev · “Tetlock also found that foxes were less likely to be famous because contingent advice is harder to explain in a sound bite.”
Jun 11
Always be quitting jmmv.dev · “The key lies in NOT being indispensable.”
Jun 10
The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains ez.substack.com · “The issue at its core is that bosses hiring people “full-time” often do so, as dramatic as it sounds, to capture their soul.”
Jun 10
Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees cnbc.com · “Additionally, Zuckerberg said Facebook will begin allowing employees to request remote work across international borders.”
Jun 9
A Project of One's Own paulgraham.com · “Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking.”
Jun 8
An Unbelievable Demo brendangregg.com · “A US developer got a world tour for software he didn’t write, which included giving a sales pitch and demo in Australia, unwittingly, to the author.”
Jun 4
Tank Man jeffwidener.com · “There was a long line of tanks approaching from the Square and I thought it might be a nice compression shot.”
Jun 4
Apple asks staff to return to office three days a week starting in early September theverge.com · “Managers need to approve remote work requests.”
Jun 2
Mass scale manipulation of Twitter Trends discovered actu.epfl.ch · “We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots.”
Jun 2
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months theguardian.com · “Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out.”
Jun 2

May 2021 25 posts

Wikipedia Endowment: The Site Is Rich. Why Is It Fundraising? dailydot.com · “But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year, according to a casual 2013 estimate by Erik Möller, its VP of engineering and product development at the time.”
May 31
We Only Ever Talk About the Third Attack on Pearl Harbor butwhatfor.com · “Eventually, Admiral Yarnell’s victory was declared void due to complaints that he had acted in an unfair manner – that if there had been a state of war, the element of surprise would not have been a factor.”
May 31
Overkill Objects for Everyday Life neil.computer · “Whenever I need to buy something, the first thing I do is try to think of the most overkill version of it.”
May 30
Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in B.C. aptnnews.ca · “She said it’s believed the deaths are undocumented, although a local museum archivist is working with the Royal British Columbia Museum to see if any records of the deaths can be found.”
May 29
I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time awesomekling.github.io · “It was October 2018 and I had just completed a 3-month rehab program at a state addiction clinic in Sweden.”
May 28
Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals? news.ycombinator.com · “What are your favorite blogs run by individual people?”
May 27
Rare Vietnam War Images from the Winning Side, 1965-1975 rarehistoricalphotos.com · “The history of the war has been a partial one, underscored by the American dominance of the English-language historiography of the war and the focus on American policies and the American experience of the war, coupled with a mostly negative assessment of South Vietnam.”
May 25
Why I prefer making useless stuff web.eecs.utk.edu · “There is nothing I find more liberating than to spend a Saturday afternoon coding on some toy project.”
May 23
We just reached 500k sounds… and Freesound got faster! blog.freesound.org · “At some point during the past weekend, the number of sounds which are available for download in Freesound has surpassed half a million.”
May 21
A Teenager's Guide to Avoiding Actual Work madned.substack.com · “It did not even come even close to occurring to me back then that the nerdy things I liked to do for fun would allow me to dodge any kind of manual labor job, basically forever.”
May 19
Poor in Tech megelison.com · “I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because they always ordered extra catered lunches, and at the end of the week someone would just throw them away if I didn’t take them home.”
May 19
Apple Music announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio apple.com · “These new features will be available for Apple Music subscribers starting next month at no additional cost.”
May 17
Building a Personal [Origami] Website in 2021 origami.kosmulski.org · “Longevity: this is a complete gamble. Social media platforms come and go.”
May 16
The return of fancy tools macwright.com · “Frictionless note-taking produces notes, but it doesn’t - for me - produce memory.”
May 15
I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff p.haavard.me · “I cannot stand by such a (hostile?) corporate takeover of the freenode network, and I am resigning along with most other freenode staff.”
May 14
Writing books isn't a good idea ellegriffin.substack.com · “The New York Times caused a stir recently when, in an article about pandemic book sales, it disclosed that “98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.””
May 10
The Animal Is Tired robinhobb.com · “I reflect, sheepishly, that it is the only animal I have ever treated this way.”
May 9
Why do we buy into the 'cult' of overwork? bbc.com · “New studies show that workers around the world are putting in an average of 9.2 hours of unpaid overtime per week – up from 7.3 hours just a year ago.”
May 9
Experience: I’ve had the same supper for 10 years theguardian.com · “I’ve had the same supper for 10 years, even on Christmas Day: two pieces of fish, one big onion, an egg, baked beans and a few biscuits at the end.”
May 8
How I Practice Piano frogurncitadel.wordpress.com · “If you keep making mistakes when practicing then you are just going to get good at making them, so it’s best to avoid them in the first place.”
May 8
LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online techstartups.com · “LiveLeak, a popular British video sharing website known for footage of war, politics, and many other world events usually censored on other video websites, like YouTube, abruptly shuts down today after 15 years online.”
May 6
Crazy New Ideas paulgraham.com · “Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately likely to be interesting.”
May 6
Why I Work on Ads jefftk.com · “Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive: a newspaper at $220/y is effectively much more expensive for someone earning $10k than $100k.”
May 6
Efficiency is the Enemy fs.blog · “Gloria’s job is to ensure Tony is as busy as he needs to be.”
May 4
The Unix Magic poster jpmens.net · “The oregano is reputedly referring to an incident in which one of the original folks involved with BSD was hassled for coming across the Canadian/U.S. border with a bag of what was assumed to be an illegal substance, and turned out to be oregano.”
May 3

April 2021 24 posts

Changes at Basecamp world.hey.com · “No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.”
Apr 26
Feynman's Nobel Ambition asc.ohio-state.edu · “Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics.”
Apr 25
Hundreds lose internet service in northern B.C. after beaver chews through cable cbc.ca · “Internet service was down for about 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., after a beaver chewed through a crucial fibre cable, causing “extensive” damage.”
Apr 25
Why Lichess will always be free. lichess.org · “Lichess doesn’t do any of that and never will.”
Apr 23
Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years bbc.com · “He was, after all, condemned to a life without power, sanitation or company.”
Apr 22
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Gets 'Freedom Expression' Award Sponsored by YouTube newsweek.com · “YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received a “Free Expression” award from the Freedom Forum Institute in a virtual ceremony sponsored by YouTube, an online video platform owned by Google.”
Apr 20
Granny Knot Info fieggen.com · “These are both signs of a Granny Knot.”
Apr 19
Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times? washingtonmonthly.com · “For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant.”
Apr 19
Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit! madned.substack.com · “They held a little secret bonus award meeting, and we found that we each would be receiving a bonus total of $2000.”
Apr 17
Internet Search Tips gwern.net · “For most people, if it’s not the first hit in Google/Google Scholar, it doesn’t exist.”
Apr 17
Cannot post to YouTube for a week (got a strike) because I included link to legitimate PhD research on KRACK WPA2 vulnerability reddit.com · “I appealed on December 10th 2020 and never heard back to this day.”
Apr 14
Just Be Rich keenen.xyz · “Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn’t mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s.”
Apr 13
School custodian refuses to download phone app that monitors location, says it got her fired cbc.ca · “A school custodian says she was fired after refusing to put an app on her phone that checked her location, citing privacy concerns.”
Apr 13
RMS addresses the free software community fsf.org · “Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them – especially women.”
Apr 12
The Ponzi Career drorpoleg.com · “Masmej recruited other humans to share the risks of his early career in exchange for a share of the rewards.”
Apr 11
15 Technologies I Thought My Son Would Never Use tomshardware.com · “Looking at my listicle proves that I have no future as a futurist.”
Apr 11
Embrace the Grind jacobian.org · “The trick is all in the preparation.”
Apr 9
The Real Book 99percentinvisible.org · “The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication.”
Apr 8
An Interview With the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to WikiFeet thecut.com · “We spoke for nearly an hour, almost entirely about feet.”
Apr 8
Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible? news.ycombinator.com · “The pandemic made me realize that I do not care about working anymore.”
Apr 7
Please don’t make me go back: Some of the reasons I hope work from home continues and I never have to return to an office ryanmercer.com · “Do not have to go to work sick, because they act like you murdered 30 children if you call in sick.”
Apr 6
Writing tools I learned from The Economist builtbywords.substack.com · “Losing the thread is the most predictable writing mistake: we stray from our point and dwell on what we think is worth mentioning at the moment.”
Apr 5
Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021 uk.help.yahoo.com · “If you try to access Yahoo Answers on May 4th you’ll be redirected to the Yahoo homepage.”
Apr 5
How Did Microsoft Make Flight Simulator Seem So Real? airspacemag.com · “Last August, Microsoft released the latest version of its Flight Simulator, extending the run of that franchise to 38 years and making it the longest-running product line in Microsoft’s history.”
Apr 4

March 2021 25 posts

Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time axios.com · “It’s the first time in the eight decades that Gallup has tracked the trend that a majority of Americans do not belong to a church.”
Mar 29
Men Clamming Up femfosec.com · “When this happens, women are missing out on potentially valuable advice.”
Mar 28
Louvre site des collections collections.louvre.fr · “The Collections database consists of entries for more than 500,000 works in the Musée du Louvre and Musée National Eugène-Delacroix.”
Mar 27
Experience: I tracked down my impostor theguardian.com · “This man had been stealing my work and elements of my identity for years.”
Mar 27
If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You're More Likely to Be Happy at Work hbr.org · “Our research suggests there’s truth behind this saying: bosses matter far more for employee job satisfaction than any other factor we measured.”
Mar 26
Rest In Peace Google Reader ripgooglereader.com · “Even though many people loved and depended on Google Reader, Google still killed it.”
Mar 25
The Solution of the Zodiac Killer's 340-Character Cipher blog.wolfram.com · “This cipher is considered one of the holy grails of cryptography, as at the time the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution were truly a moonshot.”
Mar 24
Richard Stallman is Coming Back to the Board of the Free Software Foundation, Founded by Himself 35 Years Ago techrights.org · “He’s not president but he’s on the board.”
Mar 21
Don't End The Week With Nothing training.kalzumeus.com · “I worked 70 to 90 hour weeks for three years.”
Mar 21
Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net · “The decision acknowledges the long and living tradition the Demoscene has in Germany, with Revision, Breakpoint, and Evoke among other demoparties shaping the landscape of major international gatherings of the demoscene for decades.”
Mar 20
The Invention of a New Pasta Shape kottke.org · “Pashman and Sfoglini engineered the new shape to maximize the amount of sauce that sticks to it, make it easier to get your fork on it, and have it feel good when you bite into it.”
Mar 20
Young female Japanese biker is really 50-year-old man with luscious hair using FaceApp mothership.sg · “According to a Japanese variety show, the rider turned out to be a 50-year-old man who makes use of a phone app to transform his looks.”
Mar 19
The Art of Warez Documents the Lost ANSI Art Scene juxtapoz.com · “The Art Of Warez covers the days before the Internet when early hackers and online pirates created an original and, even today, a virtually unknown art movement.”
Mar 19
Reddit investors adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days bbc.co.uk · “The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, a charity for the protection of endangered mountain gorillas, has also received more than $350,000 (£252,000) in donations.”
Mar 18
Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed poor load times, official update coming pcgamer.com · “Tostercx said that they were awarded $10,000 through Rockstar’s Bug Bounty program.”
Mar 15
Write Simply paulgraham.com · “If you say nothing simply, it will be obvious to everyone, including you.”
Mar 11
Inventor of cassette tape Lou Ottens passed away netherlandsnewslive.com · “More than 100 billion cassettes have been sold since its launch in 1963.”
Mar 10
I want a Computer that I Own misc-stuff.terraaeon.com · “Instead, I have a computer that is designed largely to maximize the profits of the computer industry.”
Mar 9
Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny bloodknife.com · “We watch actors doing burpees or shaking ropes with expensive personal trainers.”
Mar 8
Remembering Allan McDonald: He Refused To Approve Challenger Launch, Exposed Cover-Up text.npr.org · “Refuse to sign, and he’d risk his job, his career and the good life he’d built for his wife and four children.”
Mar 7
NFTs are a dangerous trap seths.blog · “They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators.”
Mar 7
Ask HN: Is abuse from supervisors as common in industry as in academia? news.ycombinator.com · “Through my MSc & PhD, I’ve seen a number of abuses of power from supervisors, both my own and others.”
Mar 6
Proton Has Enabled 7000 Games to Run on Linux boilingsteam.com · “In other words, for every Windows title out there, there’s a coin flip chance that it will work just as expected on Linux.”
Mar 5
On The Experience of Being Poor-ish, For People Who Aren't residentcontrarian.substack.com · “At the time she leaned on my wife for emotional support over finances, our family of four’s income was less than $30,000 a year.”
Mar 1
The Last Message Sent on AIM justanman.org · “I examined the script logs and found it – the last message sent on AIM.”
Mar 1

February 2021 16 posts

a new chapter: full-time working from a van in a forest ghuntley.com · “Over the course of five years more than $110,000 had been spent on rent at that dumpster of a house.”
Feb 27
How Canadians Derailed a Train and Drove It to City Hall for Power After a Brutal Ice Storm thedrive.com · “Rather than leave town, though, one Canadian mayor stepped up to bring in the biggest mobile power generators they could get their hands on: Diesel-electric freight train locomotives.”
Feb 23
Daft Punk Break Up pitchfork.com · “Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo formed Daft Punk in Paris in 1993, helping to define the French touch style of house music.”
Feb 22
YouTube AI Blocked Chess Channel after Confusing 'Black' and 'White' for Racist Slurs news18.com · “The researchers now suggest that social-media platforms should incorporate chess language in their algorithms to avoid future incidents like this.”
Feb 21
A dishonest, indifferent, and toxic culture of the University of Florida huixiangvoice.medium.com · “The review process for his ISCA-2019 paper was broken, and most of the reviewers of the paper are “friends” of his advisor Dr. Tao Li.”
Feb 21
always bet on text graydon2.dreamwidth.org · “Text is the most efficient communication technology.”
Feb 17
Changes to Sharing and Viewing News on Facebook in Australia about.fb.com · “In response to Australia’s proposed new Media Bargaining law, Facebook will restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content.”
Feb 17
What I Worked On paulgraham.com · “My stories were awful.”
Feb 16
Functorio bartoszmilewski.com · “You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style.”
Feb 16
Spotify says it's letting employees work from anywhere, while still paying San Francisco and New York salaries businessinsider.com · “Spotify said it would continue to pay at San Francisco or New York salary rates, based on the type of job.”
Feb 15
GTA III and Vice City fully reverse engineered: re3 github.com · “In this repository you’ll find the fully reversed source code for GTA III (master branch) and GTA VC (miami branch).”
Feb 14
Viral 'I'm not a cat' filter is decades-old software bbc.co.uk · “But it is a decades-old piece of software pre-installed on some Dell laptops.”
Feb 10
8-Year-Old Calls Out NPR For Lack Of Dinosaur Stories npr.org · “NPR’s archivists found the word “dinosaur” appearing in stories 294 times in the show’s history.”
Feb 10
Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime's 'Santeria' to Avoid Being Live-Streamed? vice.com · “Any video that contains music, even if it’s playing in the background, is potentially subject to removal by Instagram.”
Feb 9
Why I Still Use RSS atthis.link · “It was easier to get involved in serious Deep Work as I had no social feeds to endlessly scroll through.”
Feb 3
Google Stadia Shuts Down Internal Studios, Changing Business Focus kotaku.com · “Neither had released any games yet.”
Feb 1

January 2021 21 posts

Cab Ride powersaurus.itch.io · “In Cab Ride you can drive thousands of different train routes through rolling hills, winding tunnels and weaving between the tall buildings of vast cities.”
Jan 31
How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area codusoperandi.com · “The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.”
Jan 30
Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server, but new ones have sprung to life theverge.com · “These Discord servers are offshoots of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, where all of this seemingly began.”
Jan 27
Social media damages teenagers' mental health, report says bbc.com · “Heavy social media use was linked to negative wellbeing and self-esteem, regardless of a young person’s mental state, with more girls experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness.”
Jan 27
Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus bits.ashleyblewer.com · “The intent is for this website to be used by self-forming small groups that want to create a “watching club” (like a book club) and discuss aspects of technology history that are featured in this series.”
Jan 26
please don't say just hello in chat nohello.net · “Note that Keith could have got his answer minutes sooner, and needn’t have kept Tim waiting.”
Jan 23
Press release: Facebook shuts down major left wing group in Britain swp.org.uk · “The Socialist Workers Party Facebook page – as well as account of local pages – have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given.”
Jan 22
HR is not your friend, and other things I think you should know rachelbythebay.com · “HR is there to support the company.”
Jan 18
Context switching costs more than we give it credit for. thinkingthrough.substack.com · “But when it comes to work, especially engineering work, the cost of multitasking skyrockets.”
Jan 18
The World's Oldest Story? Astronomers Say Global Myths About 'Seven Sisters' Stars May Reach Back 100,000 Years singularityhub.com · “After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe these stories may date back 100,000 years to a time when the constellation looked quite different.”
Jan 17
First winter ascent of K2: 10 Nepali/Sherpa climbers summit together alpinist.com · “Alan Arnette reported on his blog: All ten climbers stopped 30-feet below the summit on a relatively safe spot (still on a 40-degree snow slope at 28,200-feet) so that they could summit together in a sign of solidarity.”
Jan 16
'Rent-a-person who does nothing' in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude mainichi.jp · “Shoji Morimoto has been advertising himself as a person who can “eat and drink, and give simple feedback, but do nothing more,” since June 2018, and has received over 3,000 requests.”
Jan 14
Pirated Academic Database Sci-Hub Is Now on the 'Uncensorable Web' nasdaq.com · “For a website that has had various domain names revoked over the years and which is now suspended from Twitter, the censorship-resistant DNS will help keep Sci-Hub accessible even as the legacy domain name system applies pressure.”
Jan 12
If it will matter after today, stop talking about it in a chat room critter.blog · “Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they’re too late.”
Jan 12
Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago news.ycombinator.com · “Thank you for everything, Aaron.”
Jan 11
Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over "Counterfeit" Content torrentfreak.com · “This morning, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan informed us that Twitter has suspended the site’s official account, which had over 185k followers and operated without notable issues for nine years.”
Jan 8
No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees sahillavingia.com · “And it’s working: our creators earn over $175 million a year, and we generate $11 million in annualized revenue, growing 85% year-over-year.”
Jan 7
Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2 bert.org · “It’s an Atari Portfolio, the world’s first palmtop computer.”
Jan 6
My year in data samplesize.one · “It turns out that a typical working day (9-17) would usually only give around 5-6 hours of actual work, while the rest of time would dissolve on low-focus work, chatting to people, coffee breaks and other little distractions.”
Jan 3
How to overcome Phone Addiction cognitiontoday.com · “According to a 2019 report[22], the average person spends about 3.5 hours on their phone in a day with the top 20% of people spending more than 4.5 hours a day.”
Jan 2
My Experience @ Apple ex-apple-engineer.medium.com · “In this post you will read about how a team at Apple fabricated results for a project, their history of abuse, scapegoating, firing and forcing out employees, nepotism and corruption in the organization and contribution of senior management and HR to further worsening the situation.”
Jan 1