Links roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

Cursed computer hardware! RSS/Atom ideas! etc!

Links roundup! A new feature! Maybe regularly recurring! We’ll see! Articles, videos, etc of interest that I find that I felt like sharing. My Newsblur feed technically has sharing abilities, but, this seems more permanent. Well, it’s likely to eventually, potentially rapidly linkrot these days. Ah well.

cursed computer hardware

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5M0TwnkWUM

Gravis goes through the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in computer hardware. What the absolute hell.

activitypub vs rss

https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/2535-ActivityPub-hot-take

This is an older blog post that somehow I hadn’t seen before but feel compelled to share almost everywhere. I can’t believe this isn’t more of a thing. It feels like someone could write an easy thing that people could use to do this on like, Neocities or something. Maybe I will. Who knows. Then again, Neocities apparently uses WebDAV. So maybe not.

tech debt

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20230605

Oooh, a good explainer on the tech debt metaphor. There’s good and bad debt, like with anything else.

llms

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

LLM hysteria is basically a psychic’s con. Great post.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/llms-are-better-than-you-think-at

Bonus from a few weeks ago, but I didn’t share it here at the time. It talks about how the reinforcement feedback responses are really good at masking limitations in LLMs.

peter molyneux

https://press.invincible.ink/no-godus-no-kingus/

Molyneux’s a grifter, has been for ages, etc.

floppy disks

https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/

Amazing description of the last floppy disk business.