Links on fournm

Music Stuff

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I keep finding a lot of stuff right as it gets posted that matches up with my music tastes! It’s been pretty great, always happy to find more bands to follow while I wait for the new Voxtrot album. Okay, so, I know not all of these are sleepers or anything, but this is just a sample of what all I’ve been running across lately. I’m not including the stuff that I just included on the links post a week or two ago.

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Links! Again for 2026

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One more time with feeling!

sleep

https://www.fastcompany.com/3057465/why-six-hours-of-sleep-is-as-bad-as-none-at-all

I do not like the implications of this even if I probably don’t disagree with them as much as I would like.

silliness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsFM1C78HIg

This is hilarious. A math teacher looking at what courses in Mario Kart DS could be done in a normal car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as8s6QQcjp0

Escalator logistics!

electricity and engineering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

Fantastic Technology Connections video about renewable energy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl3zHuih_CY

A friend of mine digging into a plasma toroid generator she made!

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2025 Links!

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to do this more and I just… haven’t. Oops. So I won’t have too many comments just so that I go ahead and post…

https://egoless.engineering/

Fantastic engineering culture writeup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2G_GaXpLiI

Silent film makeup! With recreation. I knew a lot of this about black-and-white film but I don’t think I had seen detail like this on it before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

Noodle talking about pixel art and how it used to look! This is a really cool breakdown about how some of the techniques worked and the differences to modern pixel art.

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Mid October links!

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Got a few more things!

covid

https://emilysdupree.substack.com/p/the-invention-of-memory

Oof. That’s.. entirely too relatable.

This is, I believe, at the heart of pandemic memory: it is a way we have rewritten the past so that we may continue rewriting the present.

I had surgery near the start of all of this. It meant that I needed to be extra cautious at the start, and then several people I know were some of the first wave of Long COVID cases, and… well, I’ve not stopped. Maybe if I could go a week or two without hearing someone I know is “unable to get out of bed” sick with it. Until then, well, I’m wearing a mask when I go out in public. It’s not like it’s particularly difficult for my life.

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Early October links!

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been holding off on posting this and I don’t have a good reason why! Here’s some links.

generative ai / software development (they’re linked this week)

https://www.wheresyoured.at/saaspocalypse-now/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

Oh look it’s more .. everything about how the tech industry is currently eating itself alive. Sigh.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/10/githubs-copilot-lies-about-its-own-documentation-so-why-would-i-trust-it-with-my-code/

… including why I hate the idea that any of this will be useful for software. I have a few friends who keep sharing “look at the neat thing I did with ChatGPT” posts and the errors are blatant, just like this. I don’t understand it.

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Links roundup for some time around September 14

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The main social media platform I’ve been using is going away, so unfortunately I won’t be linking the neat posts I’ve found on it of late. Instead here’s some other stuff.

generative ai

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/random-finds-ai-image-upscale-collapse

Oops. Upscalers bad, it turns out. Well. They work great initially, until…

https://redeem-tomorrow.com/llms-wont-save-labor-when-you-use-them-like-this

As I’ve said many, many times – code review is the hardest part of writing software. I cannot imagine using an LLM to generate a benchmark, something where you need to be incredibly aware that you are testing the same thing. Perhaps this is why I’m not pulling in VC Startup Money.

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August 2024: Life and links

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well. So, that whole “my friend died” thing… kind of put me into more of a daze than I expected, especially as my cat’s health declined and she passed away recently as well. Oddly enough (if you’ve played through it this will make sense maybe), Dawntrail… kinda helped with digging out of the hole from that. Good expansion, it has some flaws (I played Astrologian), but the encounters are stunning. Love the characters and setting.

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December 2023: Life and links

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Been a minute, hasn’t it? I’m going ahead and putting out the RSS guide, which has been sitting 95% done for ages. I hope it’s helpful to someone. Health’s been a bit wonky, been busy with work, so on, so forth. A friend died, which… I’m going to be honest, everything’s a bit of a blur in the aftermath of that, which is why this is actually going live… quite a while after I wrote it. We started playing Final Fantasy XI as a friend group in addition to XIV, a game I’ve missed dearly. I’ve done a lot of informal writing about why I think it works so well, and I should collect that and post it here, which I’ll probably get around to…

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Links roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

writing

https://theeditorsblog.net/2017/01/23/restraining-accents/

I’ve seen a few things around this in the past, but it’s writing advice around accents.

the web

https://www.patrickweaver.net/blog/a-blog-post-with-every-html-element/

Every HTML element! Neat!

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/the-future-of-the-web-is-vnc/

Less neat! Google really is screwing everything up again.

https://coolguy.website/basic-html-competency-is-the-new-punk-folk-explosion/

What it says on the label – love this.

generative ai

https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/can-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-be-fixed-experts-doubt-altman-openai/

Oh, would you look at that – “hallucinations are foundational to this style of generative model” isn’t exactly surprising.

grifting

https://nebula.tv/videos/tomnicholas-griftonomics-why-scams-are-everywhere-now/

Tom Nicholas breaking down why it seems like scams are even more on the rise.

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Links roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Not a lot that I’ve really seen that caught my eye this week, but here’s a bit.

llms

https://nebula.tv/videos/patrickhwillems-ai-filmmaking-is-not-the-future-its-a-grift

Does anyone other than me always remember that old “What if Wes Anderson made X-Men” video? Well, the guy who did it put down his thoughts on the generative AI trend of “Wes Anderson” videos, which are… bland.

games

https://cohost.org/matthewseiji/post/2183727-thinking-about-game

Interesting thoughts on game difficulty, indirectly via Zachtronics.

https://cohost.org/lizbushouse/post/2269622-yet-another-example

Context is important in localization, and Final Fantasy XIV is doing a great job at it.

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Links roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

gaming

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/game-tutorials-should-be-easily-skipped-why-is-that-so-hard/

This makes me so angry. There’s been a lot of good and bad examples of it in recent memory, some of which I should really talk about in their own blog posts. Monster Hunter Rise? Horrible, I actually can’t maintain the attention to play the game further. Jedi Survivor? Fantastic, well integrated, nice controls reminder.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/17/23798368/neopets-relaunch-website-flash-games

NEOPETS RELAUNCH. Sad to hear that it comes from the remnants of Math Blaster yet again shutting down, but good in terms of the fact that it has confused me for about a decade on how you mismanage something like Neopets so heavily.

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Links roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Here we are again with some more links of interest! If you saw the original description that I forgot to update off the draft, no you didn’t!

handwriting

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-the-ballpoint-pen-killed-cursive

Oh, this made something click for me. I’ve never held a pen “correctly” because it hurt to use like that, and.. well. Thanks, younger me, you weren’t wrong.

llms

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/fruit-of-the-poisonous-llama/

Yeah this is probably going to be a regular aspect of these. Up first, we’ve got a Terence Eden post about lawsuits going on against some of these model makers, which seem to have whitepapers openly admitting that the models are using pirated books as a source.

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Links roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

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Some assorted links

Mon, 02 May 2022 11:19:31 -0700

So it sure has been a neverending pandemic, huh. Sure hope that it’s possible for it to actually end. It has not, to be clear.

Instead of actually bringing myself to write anything (though I will be! I’m going to be writing up a Spring Security 2 to 5 migration post), I have some great posts I read that I wanted to share instead.

https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/01/19/no-dynamic-type-systems-are-not-inherently-more-open/

Type systems and lies people tell themselves. This is fantastic, completely recommend it.

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Torture Testing

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 16:19:31 -0800

I haven’t posted anything about testing (or.. anything, for that matter) in a while, despite trying to make a lot of progress at work in that department.

So instead, today I’m going to link to a great blog post I read about it that inspires me to try this approach, since we have a similar problem at Dayjob in regards to the in-depth tests.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/12/16/how-randomly-skipping-tests-made-them-better/

The idea of only running some of your “worst” tests on each run is fascinating and I can see easily leading to actually having more developers run the test suite involved if it cuts off enough time. We already have what we call the “fastbuild” which skips all integration tests and cuts off 30 minutes of execution time, but this could be an interesting middle ground.

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