Frequent links with as little commentary as I can muster.
See also Linkblogging.
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2026
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2026 0702
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Diegetic events are those experienced by both the characters within a piece and the audience, while non-diegetic elements of a story make up the “fourth wall” separating the characters from the audience.
I encountered this word via this post on the Unsung blog, where it is repurposed outside of fiction storytelling to indicate a user interface that can manipulate itself; the author says:
inexplicably on macOS the floating thumbnail is diegetic, meaning it itself can be screenshotted.
A few days later, the word resurfaced on the same blog.
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2026 0630
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Very few people have been on a plane performing a barrel roll, but we could fix this.
And we should!
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2026 0629
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As always, the answer to weird emoji-related questions is Japan. Specifically, a face with steam coming from the nose is sometimes used to indicate someone triumphing or bragging in manga.
My spicy take remains that adding emoji to Unicode was a mistake, what people really want is the ability to send arbitrary pictograms, and we should have built generic image rendering into text fields instead.
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2026 0629
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Dynomite notes:
News from the world of real jobs: Apparently, sometime between 10 and 20 years ago, it became standard for people to communicate by sending slide decks around. These slides are never presented. They aren’t intended to be presented. They’re born, they’re sent around, and they die. What?
I am reminded, as I often am, of the excellent opening paragraph to a great post from blogging history, published to the Omni Group blog all the way back in 2009:
One of my pet peeves, aside from possessive apostrophes on plural nouns and the belief that the virus-afflicted in 28 Days/Weeks Later are zombies (helllo-ooo, they aren’t dead), is when someone emails me an Excel document that contains information that has nothing to do with spreadsheet functionality. You use a spreadsheet as a text editor, really? What do you brush your teeth with, a CHAINSAW?
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2026 0326
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A GBA in Metroid Fusion colors.
Looks great.
What a cool project.
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2026 0311
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A proposal to fix Congress by drastically increasing the number of Representatives,
by ratifying an early proposed constitutional amendment.
Seems less unlikely in light of the amazing story about the success of a UT student
in organizing support to ratify the
27th Amendment
(which the article refers to as the “failed eleventh amendment”).
I assume teachers didn’t share this story with me in school in order to protect their limited power;
if I had known that merely amending the US Constitution could get me two full higher letter grades on a paper,
my life might have taken a very different course.
In any case, I am torn on this idea:
the case it makes does sound interesting,
but I also think that more populism in national government is unlikely to produce good outcomes.
Still, one understands the impetus to poke our representative body with a pointy stick.
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2026 0311
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A look at what’s technically possible today and how public morality isn’t sure what to think about it.
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2026 0311
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I haven’t been so tempted to search eBay for retrocomputing hardware in a long time.
I used to collect whatever old enterprise Unix gear I could get for very cheap,
including several Suns, an HP-UX box, and a couple of SGI machines.
I coveted a Sun Ultra 45 / Power Mac G5 combo,
because they were the most powerful non-PC workstations and also because I thought they would look so cool side to side.
I’m also jealous of that SunPCi card.
I did have a couple of little SBC PCs on PCI cards,
but they were all industrial things that were smaller, slower, and with worse hardware support.
I think I need to go spend some time in a datacenter now.
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2026 0311
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This would have been the house of my dreams in high school.
I used to draw out how I’d have a dedicated room with tables against the walls and 8 of those original iMacs each with a
(separately licensed because the idea of having more than one license to a given game felt like wealth to me) copy of StarCraft,
ready to play at all times.
That said, when I read this, my interest was most piqued by the infrastructure description.
Racks, cables, netbooting, automatic updates…
almost makes me want to build something like this myself just to design that part
(I’d never have time to actually play games on it of course).
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2026 0302
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A defense of clickbait from a practitioner.
He frames YouTube, where he posts, as “consensual clickbait” —
viewers want the videos to grab their attention, and they are satisfied with the payoff.
All clickbait isn’t like this (he uses Upworthy as the antagonist, and I can’t say they don’t deserve it),
but, in his view, the best clickbait is.
Related: How To Paywall — Edging your audience until they beg for it, by Aella.
(If you think an article on that subject with a title that good isn’t itself paywalled, lol.)
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2026 0301
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Six lessons about navigating your career during AI upheaval.
I keep “Do not look down” and “Put the summit out of your mind” at the top of my long-term projects plan at work.
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2026 0224
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The tragedy of cryptocurrencies.
Users still need transaction privacy,
and vendors outside the sunny realm of expurgated pop culture still need a cash equivalent that can’t be clawed back.
But if you build that, the people who show up are mostly gamblers.
The good news is that facilitating gambling can make orders of magnitude more money
than a private payment processor that can’t get your money back if someone scams you.
The bad news is that it may not be possible to build the business you wanted to build at all,
because if all the revenue comes from gambling, that’s where you have to spend all your attention too.
The irony of crypto’s 2025 collapse is that the technology worked. The Ethereum network processes transactions reliably. Layer 2 solutions have made fees manageable. Smart contracts execute as written. The decentralized exchange infrastructure handles billions in volume. The pipes do what pipes are supposed to do. What failed was the civilization we were supposed to build on top of them. What failed was…well, us.
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2026 0223
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A review of a really interesting game controller.
It’s completely modular and customizable, designed to let users change the way its held and button layout.
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2026 0212
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Wikipedia articles: offline, infinite scroll, free.
iOS/macOS app.
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2026 0209
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I did not know that the Magic Trackpad was technology from a company that was originally founded to make a keyboard developed for people with RSI.
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2026 0131
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In order to understand how llms.txt can be used with editors and IDEs, let’s look at how ed, the standard text editor, could work (assuming it’s updated to use this proposal).
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2026 0130
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An account by an accomplished surgeon who hired a coach to join him in the operating room to help him improve over time.
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2026 0130
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I can be really locked up in my head sometimes.
Reading things like this feels like a dynamic mixture of peaceful and exciting —
there’s all this possibility where the failure mode is okay.
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2026 0130
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The norm in Poland is for a single voice actor to cover every character in a non-Polish-language movie,
speaking with a totally flat, emotionless affect.
Apparently these voice actors are famous and well loved, and the population prefers foreign language movies this way.
There’s an embedded clip from the masterpiece film Bad Boys 2 with the Polish lektor covering all characters.
Via Unsung.
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2026 0128
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E-paper is getting amazing, and it would be so cool to have a laptop with a display like this.
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2026 0126
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A short story from CtrlCreep. Aside from this substack, also a great follow on Twitter.
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2026 0126
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“Fiction” from Uel. I’m so excited that he’s back. Several more where this comes from already over at https://www.greaterrealityarea.net/.
fortunate, a mini-project of mine for interesting fortune databases, includes Uel’s INVISIBLE STATES OF AMERICA: A TOURISM GUIDE.
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2026 0122
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Vim is now very popular and has spawned numerous successors. But its key feature, modes, is not obviously-beneficial, to the point that if Bill Joy didn’t make vi (vim’s direct predecessor) fifty years ago I don’t think we’d have any modal editors today.
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2026 0122
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Cool feature I didn’t know that Android had —
it can re-share not just cellular Internet connectiosn but other wifi hotspots via wifi,
like a dedicated travel router.
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2026 0118
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Some musings from a practitioner. (Not a screed, despite the title.)
In His Dark Materials, every human has a dæmon, a companion that is an externally visible manifestation of their soul. It lives alongside as an animal, but it talks, thinks and acts independently. I’m starting to relate our relationship with agents that have memory to those little creatures. We become dependent on them, and separation from them is painful and takes away from our new-found identity.
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2026 0118
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A great name for a useful handle in the conceptual space.
We came up with the concept of the Hrair Line, defined by our hivemind as “a somewhat arbitrary line past which all numbers seem equally large”
Coming up with this term also led to one of my favorite puns, the “receding hrair line” which is when you act like a number is unfathomably large when it benefits you, but quite reasonable when it doesn’t.
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2026 0118
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Writeup of a project to assemble RSS feeds into a very personal magazine-like experience.
I love reports from building personal projects like these.
But the reason it’s been working out for me is not just having a single source of truth, or the apps themselves–it’s the way that I approached having multiple hundreds of new items (sometimes thousands) every morning and whittling everything down to a few meaningful things to read every day.
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2026 0117
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Documenting his decision to return to a corporate job after working on his own idea for 6 months.
Clear introspection and decision making.
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2026 0115
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A take on deliberate reflective practice, which brings me peace.
Most of us treat these failures with a superstitious dread. We view our depression, our procrastination, our sudden outbursts of anger as weather events, storms that pass through us. Or we view them as moral failings: evidence of a corrupted soul. Instead: We should view the mind as a legacy codebase…
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2026 0115
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A colleague at my last job recommended this as a replacement for superwhisper.
I love what we can do with local LLMs.
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2026 0114
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A unique syntax for a custom ed(1)-based static site generator.
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2026 0113
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Elegant desk lighting project.
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2026 0113
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The name for a Chinese astronaut.
New to me;
I encountered this word for the first time in the https://jatan.space/ blog.
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2026 0112
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How to use fonts well-suited for e-ink.
Linking mostly for the described use of no-battery-required (powered by NFC) e-ink screens
as reusable scratchpads.
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2026 0111
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Cultural knowledge is fracturing.
If you don’t recognize the name of a YouTuber who has more subscribers than the US has citizens, what makes you think you’d understand the influence of one of the smaller ones?
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2026 0110
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I can’t not include a link with a quote like this:
I’m willing to bet that when (ok, if) we ever become a Kardashev type 3 civilization we’ll still be using Markdown to write our interstellar missives.
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2026 0109
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A 4" e-ink reader with magnetic backing, designed to attach to the back of a phone.
I’m not sure this is a good idea but it is neat.
Who doesn’t love little tiny versions of normal-sized things?
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2026 0107
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When the conscious fails to deliver on promises to the unconscious, the unconscious rebels.
A predictive and actionable framework for thinking about burnout.
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2026 0107
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Advice from experience.
The two most surprising recommendations have to do with information architecture at the beginning
and blindness at the end.
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2026 0106
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A walkthrough for using an iPhone to interact with this Unix server -based community.
Highlights some tips and tricks with Blink.
I love the photo near the bottom of the author sitting on a couch,
typing on a bluetooth keyboard into their phone,
which is on some sort of microphone/camera stand,
and which is using AirPlay to show IRC on the TV.
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2026 0105
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A public service message for people who write their own CSS.
Interactive!
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2026 0104
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Reflections on gratitude, the kindness of strangers, and that
…this state of being embodied, inflated with life, brimming with possibilities, is so over-the-top unlikely, so extravagant, so unconditional, so far out beyond physical entropy…
I was reminded of this piece in the section of Matt Lakeman’s
Notes on Afghanistan
where he talks about the generosity of the people he met there.
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2026 0103
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Part technically-not-medical-advice, part vision of the future.
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2026 0102
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Read any Linux filesystem on a Mac by mounting it in a Linux VM and exporting it to the Mac host over NFS.
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2026 0102
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… and has been for the past six years?
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2026 0101
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A hell of a dumb bug in GitHub Actions containers.
Some research in the comments about where it came from has revealed still more bugs.
The immediate problem has been fixed, but weirdly,
the script still exists
even though it is totally useless.
More research on lobste.rs.