Links

Links and highlights (index):

πŸ•‘ Jul 12, 2025
Mastodon 0
Harper – an open-source, privacy-friendly alternative to Grammarly

https://writewithharper.com


πŸ•‘ Jul 12, 2025
Bluesky 5 (1) Mastodon 2 (1)
If actions by these bad actors accelerate the rate at which people lose trust in these systems and lead to the AI bubble popping faster then they have my full support. The entire space is just bad actors complaining about other bad actors while [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44540297


πŸ•‘ Jul 11, 2025
Mastodon 24
Plain Vanilla - an explainer for web development using only vanilla techniques. No tools, no frameworks β€” just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

https://plainvanillaweb.com/index.html


πŸ•‘ Jul 10, 2025
Bluesky 9 Mastodon 4
Writing Toy Software Is A Joy

Why you should write more toy programs

https://blog.jsbarretto.com/post/software-is-joy


πŸ•‘ Jul 9, 2025
Mastodon 6
"You might be asking: why did you rewrite tmux in Rust? And yeah, I don’t really have a good reason. It’s a hobby project. Like gardening, but with more segfaults."

https://richardscollin.github.io/tmux-rs/


πŸ•‘ May 26, 2025
Mastodon 2
This is really bad. EU is planning a new mass surveillance law that includes mandating data retention, built-in backdoors, sanctioning non-compliant services and is asking you for feedback.

EU citizens, please give them your feedback.

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1kvmguc/eu_is_planning_a_new_mass_surveillance_law_that/


πŸ•‘ May 21, 2025
Mastodon 2
How convenience kills curiosity

"[...] Those friction-filled experiences are nearly extinct now. We’ve optimized them away in the name of convenience, and something important has been lost in the transition."

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-convenience-kills-curiosity/


πŸ•‘ Apr 27, 2025
Bluesky 17 Mastodon 2
Cognitive load is what matters

https://minds.md/zakirullin/cognitive


πŸ•‘ Apr 25, 2025
Bluesky 4 Mastodon 2
Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm


πŸ•‘ Feb 28, 2025
Mastodon 4
3,200% CPU utilization

"I always thought of race conditions as corrupting the data or deadlocking. I never though it could cause performance issues. But it makes sense, you could corrupt the data in a way that creates an infinite loop."

https://josephmate.github.io/2025-02-26-3200p-cpu-util/


πŸ•‘ Feb 26, 2025
Bluesky 18 (1) Mastodon 7
A TypeScript-types-only WebAssembly runtime

"This engine was built to service a project that aimed to demonstrate why Doom can't run in TypeScript types. Well. The funny thing is.. It can."

https://github.com/MichiganTypeScript/typescript-types-only-wasm-runtime


πŸ•‘ Feb 25, 2025
Bluesky 5 Mastodon 4
Writing a regular expression engine

https://twomorecents.org/writing-regex-engine/index.html


πŸ•‘ Feb 20, 2025
Mastodon 3
Google is on the wrong side of history

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/google-wrong-side-history


πŸ•‘ Feb 16, 2025
Bluesky 26 (2) Mastodon 6
"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."

https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app


πŸ•‘ Feb 1, 2025
Bluesky 6 Mastodon 3
Thoughts on the software industry

https://linus.coffee/note/software-industry/


πŸ•‘ Jan 31, 2025
Bluesky 9 Mastodon 8
"We ran out of columns" - The best, worst codebase

https://jimmyhmiller.github.io/ugliest-beautiful-codebase


πŸ•‘ Jan 28, 2025
Bluesky 4 Mastodon 2
My afternoon project turned into four days of AI lies, USB chaos, and hard lessons

https://nemo.foo/blog/day-4-of-an-afternoon-project


πŸ•‘ Jan 27, 2025
Bluesky 3 Mastodon 5
Dualities in functional programming

https://dicioccio.fr/on-dualities.html


πŸ•‘ Jan 26, 2025
Bluesky 5 Mastodon 4
Does current AI represent a dead end?

A good TLDR on the current state of things: https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/does-current-ai-represent-a-dead-end/


πŸ•‘ Jan 25, 2025
Bluesky 5 Mastodon 8
How to build your own ZX80/ZX81 and how it works:

http://searle.x10host.com/zx80/zx80.html


πŸ•‘ Jan 25, 2025
Bluesky 2 Mastodon 3
File systems: The original hypermedia

https://jon.work/og/


πŸ•‘ Jan 24, 2025
Bluesky 6 (1) Mastodon 23 (3)
Snowdrop OS - a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language

http://sebastianmihai.com/snowdrop/


πŸ•‘ Jan 24, 2025
Bluesky 5 Mastodon 5
A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet

https://wasmgroundup.com/blog/wasm-compiler-in-a-tweet/


πŸ•‘ Jan 24, 2025
Bluesky 8 Mastodon 2
Ignore the grifters - AI isn't going to kill the software industry

https://dustinewers.com/ignore-the-grifters/


πŸ•‘ Jan 24, 2025
Bluesky 6 (1) Mastodon 5 (1)
Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code

A good intro to text search: https://bart.degoe.de/building-a-full-text-search-engine-150-lines-of-code/


πŸ•‘ Jan 24, 2025
Bluesky 18 (2) Mastodon 3
This is interesting - two QR codes overlaid in such a way that a reader randomly catches one or the other:

https://mstdn.social/@isziaui/113874436953157913


πŸ•‘ Jan 23, 2025
Bluesky 4 Mastodon 3
Taking a look at compression algorithms
(dissecting various compression algorithms)

https://cefboud.github.io/posts/compression/


πŸ•‘ Jan 23, 2025
Bluesky 4 (1) Mastodon 6
Out of the Tar Pit (2006)

This is one of my favorite computer science papers: https://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf


πŸ•‘ Jan 23, 2025
Bluesky 6 Mastodon 5
Creating a highly-integrated open-source laptop from scratch

https://www.byran.ee/posts/creation/


πŸ•‘ Jan 22, 2025
Mastodon 4
Minimal 64x4 home computer - a DIY home computer with VGA and PS/2 and 4x(!) the processing power of a Commodore C64 or Apple II.

https://github.com/slu4coder/Minimal-64x4-Home-Computer


πŸ•‘ Jan 22, 2025
Mastodon 4 (1)
Simple CPU design

http://simplecpudesign.com


πŸ•‘ Jan 21, 2025
Mastodon 10 (2)
Death By Specificity (from Rich Hickey's talk Clojure Made Simple)

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


πŸ•‘ Jan 21, 2025
Mastodon 2
Investigating an "evil" RJ45 dongle

Reverse-engineering hardware can be difficult -- but sometimes, all you need is a comfy armchair and some Google Translate.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/investigating-an-evil-rj45-dongle


πŸ•‘ Jan 20, 2025
Mastodon 7
It's time to make computing personal again.

How surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3292/the-pc-is-dead-its-time-to-make-computing-personal-again


πŸ•‘ Jan 19, 2025
Mastodon 9 (1)
Booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit

https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004


πŸ•‘ Jan 18, 2025
Mastodon 4
A filter that blocks AI spam and bad websites from appearing in search results via uBlocklist:

https://github.com/popcar2/BadWebsiteBlocklist


πŸ•‘ Jan 18, 2025
Mastodon 3 (1)
Write your own static site generator

https://g9h.io/write-your-own-static-site-generator.html


πŸ•‘ Jan 17, 2025
Mastodon 8
Let's say you've got horsepower and bandwidth to burn, and just want to see these "AI" models burn. Nepenthes has what you need.

Nepenthes is a tarpit to catch AI web crawlers: https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/


πŸ•‘ Jan 15, 2025
Mastodon 2
If you own a computing device outright, you should be able to make any level of software modification you desire. Hardware manufacturers should not be allowed to absolutely restrict distribution of software to their own channels under the guise of safety.

https://medhir.com/blog/right-to-root-access


πŸ•‘ Jan 14, 2025
Mastodon 5
Greppability is an underrated code metric

https://morizbuesing.com/blog/greppability-code-metric/


πŸ•‘ Jan 14, 2025
Mastodon 4
You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/you-are-what-you-read/

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)


πŸ•‘ Jan 12, 2025
Mastodon 4
Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/01/04/cruft/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42599102


πŸ•‘ Jan 11, 2025
Mastodon 2
"You do not need to know how useState works"

I feel like you eventually do. The issue with React is that it's a type of abstraction that seems ill-suited for how the web works under the hood, so it's incredibly leaky. Everything seems to make sense [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687963


πŸ•‘ Jan 10, 2025
Mastodon 3
You can't build interactive web apps except as single page applications... and other myths

https://htmx.org/essays/you-cant/


πŸ•‘ Jan 9, 2025
Mastodon 7
Operating System in 1,000 Lines: Intro
(building a small operating system from scratch, step by step)

https://operating-system-in-1000-lines.vercel.app/en/


πŸ•‘ Jan 5, 2025
Bluesky 13 (2) Mastodon 4 (1)
"If you've ever worked on refactoring or improving performance in a software system, you've probably run into a particular frustration: abstraction-heavy codebases. What looks like neatly organized and modularized code often reveals itself as a labyrinth, with layers [...]"

https://fhur.me/posts/2024/thats-not-an-abstraction