Links

🕑 Jul 29, 2025

Learning basic electronics by building fireflies

https://a64.in/posts/learning-basic-electronics-by-building-fireflies/

🕑 Jul 28, 2025

"It is the opinion of the Board that Large Language Models (LLMs), herein referred to as Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use as software engineering tools, particularly in the Free and Open Source Software movement."

https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/

🕑 Jul 28, 2025

"Great news, boss! We invented this new tool that allows nontechnical people to write code in English! Now anyone can deploy applications, and we don't have to hire all those expensive developers!"

"Wow, show it to me!"

"OK here it is. We call it COBOL."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299979

🕑 Jul 25, 2025

dwl - dwm for Wayland

A hackable (~3200 line single .c file implementation) compositor for Wayland based on wlroots.

https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl

🕑 Jul 25, 2025

Being optimistic for technology

https://rubenerd.com/being-optimistic-for-technology/

🕑 Jul 24, 2025

AI: Over-Promise + Under-Perform = Disillusionment and Blowback

Fantasies die especially hard when the dream was over-hyped.

https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/07/ai-over-promise-under-perform.html

🕑 Jul 23, 2025

What to expect from Debian/trixie

Debian v13 with codename trixie is scheduled to be published as new stable release on 9th of August 2025.

https://michael-prokop.at/blog/2025/07/20/what-to-expect-from-debian-trixie-newintrixie/

🕑 Jul 23, 2025

Cops say criminals use a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS - I say that’s freedom

Police in Spain have reportedly started profiling people based on their phones; specifically, and surprisingly, those carrying [...]

https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pixel-3575477

🕑 Jul 22, 2025

Tailwind is the worst of all worlds

https://colton.dev/blog/tailwind-is-the-worst-of-all-worlds/

🕑 Jul 21, 2025

A tsunami of burnout and quitting, both quiet and loud, is on the horizon, but it's taboo to recognize it or mention it. That the system is broken because it breaks us is the taboo that is frantically enforced at all levels of narrative control.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/01/i-quit-tsunami-of-burnout-few-see.html

🕑 Jul 20, 2025

Why a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page

https://endtimes.dev/why-your-website-should-be-under-14kb-in-size/

🕑 Jul 19, 2025

It's rude to show AI output to people

https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/

🕑 Jul 19, 2025

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

🕑 Jul 17, 2025

The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

https://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowing

🕑 Jul 16, 2025

We are destroying software

https://antirez.com/news/145

🕑 Jul 16, 2025

Using zip bombs to protect your server

https://idiallo.com/blog/zipbomb-protection

🕑 Jul 15, 2025

LLMs and the framing of inevitability

https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/

🕑 Jul 15, 2025

What if we made advertising illegal?

https://simone.org/advertising/

🕑 Jul 14, 2025

Measurement and Numbers

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/measurement-and-numbers/

🕑 Jul 14, 2025

Ask Ruben: do you use LLMs to write posts?

https://rubenerd.com/ask-rubenerd-do-you-use-llms-to-write-posts/

🕑 Jul 14, 2025

Learn Vim progressively

https://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressively/

🕑 Jul 13, 2025

Computers are a feeling

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/computers-are-a-feeling/

🕑 Jul 13, 2025

How i use my terminal

https://jyn.dev/how-i-use-my-terminal/

🕑 Jul 12, 2025

Harper – an open-source, privacy-friendly alternative to Grammarly

https://writewithharper.com

🕑 Jul 12, 2025

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

🕑 Jul 11, 2025

Plain Vanilla - an explainer for web development using only vanilla techniques. No tools, no frameworks — just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

https://plainvanillaweb.com/index.html

🕑 Jul 10, 2025

Writing Toy Software Is A Joy

Why you should write more toy programs

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

🕑 Jul 10, 2025

Why I don't ride the AI Hype Train

https://mertbulan.com/2025/06/26/why-i-dont-ride-the-ai-hype-train/

🕑 Jul 9, 2025

"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/

🕑 Jul 6, 2025

Writing code was never the bottleneck

https://ordep.dev/posts/writing-code-was-never-the-bottleneck

🕑 May 21, 2025

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/

🕑 May 20, 2025

Product Pseudoscience

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/product-pseudoscience/

🕑 Apr 27, 2025

Cognitive load is what matters

https://minds.md/zakirullin/cognitive

🕑 Apr 25, 2025

Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

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

🕑 Apr 24, 2025

Bet on systems, not sparks

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/bet-on-systems-not-sparks/

🕑 Feb 26, 2025

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

🕑 Feb 25, 2025

Writing a regular expression engine

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

🕑 Feb 20, 2025

Examples of great URL design

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/examples-of-great-urls/

🕑 Feb 17, 2025

Cold-blooded software

https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software/

🕑 Feb 16, 2025

"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."

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

🕑 Feb 14, 2025

You'll regret using natural keys

https://blog.ploeh.dk/2024/06/03/youll-regret-using-natural-keys/

🕑 Feb 11, 2025

Boring tech is mature, not old

https://rubenerd.com/boring-tech-is-mature-not-old/

🕑 Feb 3, 2025

Writing a Wasm interpreter in C

https://irreducible.io/blog/my-wasm-interpreter/

🕑 Feb 2, 2025

Tools for 2025

http://yosemitesam.ch/3-tools-for-2025/

🕑 Feb 1, 2025

Thoughts on the software industry

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

🕑 Jan 31, 2025

"We ran out of columns" - The best, worst codebase

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

🕑 Jan 28, 2025

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

🕑 Jan 27, 2025

Dualities in functional programming

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

🕑 Jan 26, 2025

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/

🕑 Jan 26, 2025

Immutability Changes Everything (Pat Helland, 2016):

web version: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2884038
pdf: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2857274.2884038

🕑 Jan 25, 2025

How to build your own ZX80/ZX81 and how it works:

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

🕑 Jan 25, 2025

File systems: The original hypermedia

https://jon.work/og/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

Snowdrop OS - a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language

http://sebastianmihai.com/snowdrop/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet

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

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

Ignore the grifters - AI isn't going to kill the software industry

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

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

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/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

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

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Taking a look at compression algorithms
(dissecting various compression algorithms)

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

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Out of the Tar Pit (2006)

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

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Most influential papers in computer science history

https://terriblesoftware.org/2025/01/22/the-7-most-influential-papers-in-computer-science-history/

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Creating a highly-integrated open-source laptop from scratch

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

🕑 Jan 22, 2025

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

🕑 Jan 22, 2025

Simple CPU design

http://simplecpudesign.com

🕑 Jan 21, 2025

Death By Specificity (from Rich Hickey's talk Clojure Made Simple)

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

🕑 Jan 21, 2025

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

🕑 Jan 20, 2025

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

🕑 Jan 19, 2025

Booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit

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

🕑 Jan 18, 2025

A filter that blocks AI spam and bad websites from appearing in search results via uBlocklist:

https://github.com/popcar2/BadWebsiteBlocklist

🕑 Jan 18, 2025

Write your own static site generator

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

🕑 Jan 17, 2025

SQL NULLs are weird

https://raymondtukpe.com/sql-nulls-are-weird.html

🕑 Jan 17, 2025

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/