Nelson's Linkblog

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Turning Point voting fraud

Yet another MAGA group leader committing voting fraud

2024-04-19 fraud • votingfraud • politics • uspol • maga • arizona

Bicycles of World War II

Remarkable set of photos

2024-04-18 bicycle • history • ww2 • war • photos

Chatbots being trained on idiosyncratic English. Specific example: ChatGPT likes the word "delve" a whole lot more than American or British English speakers do.

2024-04-18 ai • chatgpt • africa • training • llm • chatbot

Butterick’s Practical Typography

Typography guidance for the modern computer era

2024-04-15 typography • fonts • formatting • text • publishing

A 17th century misprint results in infamy

2024-04-15 history • bible • funny • printing • starchamber

Normalization of Jan 6

Upsetting details on how Trump and the Republican establishment now act like the coup attempt on Jan 6 was noble and good

2024-04-13 uspol • politics • trump • fascism • coup • insurrection • jan6

Followgraph for Mastodon

Tool for finding people based on friends of friends

2024-04-13 mastodon • fediverse • socialmedia • via:waxy

South Yuba Canal

A surprising amount of Nevada County's water depends on a precarious, 150+ year old canal and its various wooden aqueducts, tunnels, etc. It's broken right now.

2024-04-13 nevadacounty • water • nid • california • irrigation

Waffle House order marking

The odd system of putting things on empty plates in the kitchen to indicate the details of an order

2024-04-12 food • fastfood • wafflehouse • semiotics • training

Boy Meets Boy Meets Boys’ Love

A reflection on gay romance stories

2024-04-10 lgbt • via:metafilter • gay • romance • writing • books

A Linux shell environment for Android

2024-04-10 linux • android • cli • terminal • hacking

The geniuses at Musk's version of Twitter are replacing all URLs ending in x.com with twitter.com, causing all sorts of hilarious breakage for words like "netflix".

2024-04-09 twitter • musk • engineering • stupidity

Nigeria’s Scrabble King

A specific form of expertise in English language in Nigeria

2024-04-09 via:mekka • nigeria • scrabble • games • english • language

Internet eclipse traffic

Cloudflare shows big drop in Internet usage during the eclipse

2024-04-09 eclipse • via:hackernews • data • internet • cloudflare

Electric rickshaws

A less formal form of transportation is being electrified by entrepreneurs in India

2024-04-09 via:hackernews • evs • tuktuk • rickshaw • india • electrify

Eclipse power dashboard

Detailed data on the effect of the eclipse on power generation

2024-04-08 power • electricity • solar • generation • eclipse • caiso

Windows terminal latency

It's 2024 and we're still waiting 66ms for keystrokes to show up on a tty

2024-04-08 latency • fps • terminal • tty • performance • windows

Grass Valley pasties

Short article on the traditional Cornish handpie that's still beloved in my little Gold Rush town

2024-04-08 food • pasties • cornish • history • culture • grassvalley

Django's left hand

Famous jazz guitarist had an injured left hand, couldn't use two of his fingers

2024-04-08 guitar • disability • django • music

Willie Nelson's guitar

Trigger, a famous and beat up old classical acoustic guitar he's been playing for 40+ years

2024-04-08 willienelson • music • trigger • guitar • instrument

LÖVE game engine

2D game engine for writing games in Lua. Balatro uses it.

2024-04-08 games • balatro • lua • engine • opensource

Redesigning Vikram

Duolingo redesigns a cartoon character to avoid harmful stereotypes

2024-04-06 stereotypes • sikh • design • cartoon

Balaji Srinivasan, clown

Ridiculous tech dude has a crazy, fascist fantasy for San Francisco

2024-04-04 politics • sanfrancisco • a16z • balajis • tech

Full-Source Bootstrap

Create a working Unix system in a reproducible way, starting from a 357 byte machine language program and building everything from source

2024-04-04 bootstrap • reproducibility • nix • guix • hex0 • security • programming

Cowboy Carter contextualized

A NYT op/ed juxtaposing political analysis and musical interpretation of Beyoncé's new album

2024-04-04 music • beyonce • country • politics

Best printer 2024

Hilarious 2024 update to The Verge's snarky metacommentary on SEO and Google spam

2024-04-03 funny • google • spam • seo • dannysullivan • theverge • printer

Cloud brightening

Details of an experiment spraying salt in the air to help avert the effects of global warming

2024-04-03 geoengineering • climatechange • globalwarming • solar • experiment

Heartrending plea to allow World Central Kitchen to help avert the famine in Gaza

2024-04-03 politics • gaza • israel • joseandres • wck • charity • famine • starvation

Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’

Detailed analysis of the genres present in Beyoncé's 2022 album

2024-04-03 music • beyonce • genre • criticism • renaissance

Pride flag escalation

Reactions to a London flag that's added yet another chevron and five more stripes

2024-04-02 funny • lgbt • bisexual • visibility • pride

Israel kills World Central Kitchen workers

Famous global food aid charity, one of the very few able to bring food in to Gaza, was attacked by an Israeli airstrike. Seven are dead and WCK is pulling out of Gaza.

2024-04-02 gaza • politics • israel • wck • worldcentralkitchen • joseandres • famine • starvation

Detailed notes on the Indian cooking technique

2024-04-01 cooking • food • indian • tadka

Read Usenet with a 40+ year time delay, to catch it in its heydey

2024-04-01 usenet • socialmedia • timedelay • experiment • history • nntp

Optimizing LLaMa

Second tech half is gold, the process of optimizing matrix multiplication on CPUs in a specific context

2024-04-01 ai • llm • llama • opensource • optimization • math • matrix

Heartbreaking story of the bravery of a transgender doctor in the early 1900s in the US

2024-03-31 trans • transgender • lgbt • history • tdov

The 9/11 Court Case

Dispassionate description of the mockery of justice happening in Guantánamo Bay. Everyone involved is so tainted, whole careers wasted. Not to mention the torture.

2024-03-31 politics • guantanamo • 911 • justice • military • terrorism

AT&T breach statement

Company still clueless as to how 73 million customers of theirs had their data leaked. Also no explanation why it took them five years to disclose it and why they still no so little.

2024-03-30 att • security • badtech • hacking • privacy

Tailscale outage

Details on how a very capable networking company failed to renew their SSL certificates.

2024-03-30 ipv6 • tailscale • ssl • certificate • expiration • calendar

Tekken 8 Color Blind mode

Really unusual graphical presentation for a game, all monochrome with high contrast textures

2024-03-30 games • tekken • colorblind • adaptation • monochrome

Details with references on what looks like an APT planting a backdoor deep in Debian Linux and other systems

2024-03-30 malware • apt • hacking • supplychain • linux

Wikipedia:Task Center

A front end to finding work that needs doing on Wikipedia

2024-03-29 wikipedia • editing • community • culture • work

Beyoncé’s Blackbird

The rich African American history of the Beatles song and how Beyoncé's recording brings it home

2024-03-29 music • beyonce • beatles • blackbird • civilrights

░L░I░N░K░I░N░B░I░O░

A popular form of spam on Musk Twitter. Provocative Neighbors pays spammers $3 or more per victim.

2024-03-28 spam • twitter • elonmusk • porn • via:waxy

Sagittarius A* image

First polarized image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy and why that's so interesting

2024-03-27 space • astronomy • blackhole • milkyway • radioastronomy

Biting critique of a certain kind of awful white guy

2024-03-27 sexism • activism • misogyny • protests • anarchist • applebaum

The Atlantic's full issue looking at plans for a second Trump presidency

2024-03-26 politics • uspol • trump • fascism • project2025

Practical Sous Vide

A technical book on the cooking method

2024-03-26 cooking • food • foodsafety • sousvide

Dali ship position

Click "track" for detailed path of the container ship that hit a bridge in Baltimore

2024-03-26 accident • shipping • ais • baltimore • dali • disaster • maps

PG&E water failures

Nevada County is facing a water shortage because our incompetent electric company is mismanaging their water systems. New evidence of neglected maintenance

2024-03-26 pge • nevadacounty • water • power • california

Fifth Circuit judge corruption

Judge in anti-abortion case ruled as his wife was collecting payments from the folks who brought the case to the court

2024-03-25 corruption • abortion • civilrights • politics

About Placemark.io

Forthright discussion of the difficulty in being sole owner of a small tech startup. Business, emotion, the whole muddle.

2024-03-25 startups • entrepreneur • tmcw • maps • gis • placemark

Hitler's niece, a young woman he controlled and possibly had a sexual relationship with. She met an early end by either suicide or murder.

2024-03-24 hitler • history • nazis • depravity • incest

Hitler's Enablers

Detailed writing of Hitler's rise to power and how it was enabled by scheming political men who were all outmaneuvered

2024-03-24 hitler • germany • history • trump • politics • nazis

Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco

1600 Aztec texts come to public display, having been preserved for centuries by a family

2024-03-24 aztec • history • archaeology • codex • via:hackernews

1870s gay bushrangers

Two Australian men who were a couple in a very rough time and place

2024-03-24 australia • history • lgbt • gay • bushranger • couple

Embedded web maps as an HTML component

2024-03-24 maps • html • webdev • leaflet • htmlcomponents

Strachey love letters

Interesting 1950s proto-AI, also an early example of queer computing

2024-03-23 gay • lgbt • queer • computing • ai • turing • strachey • via:simonw

ChatGPT for extended coding

Remarkable lengthy session getting an LLM to write C code, compile it as a sqlite extension, then test and use it from Python

2024-03-23 programming • llm • ai • simonw

Conway's Game of Life set up to emulate the Game of Life. Infinitely recursive. Click "Life Universe" link in the article to see it in action.

2024-03-23 via:hackernews • life • ca • cellularautomata • recursion

Awesome Selfhosted

A very long list of self-hosted apps and servers

2024-03-22 indie • selfhosting • internet • server • apps

2014 deck building game that was genre-defining for deckbuilders and metaprogression

2024-03-22 games • deckbuilder • roguelike • roguelite

Roguelike vs. Roguelite

Cogent 2024 explanation for a couple of related game genres

2024-03-22 games • roguelike • roguelite • rogue • procgen

PG&E cuts our water

It's not just electricity; the incompetent company also has screwed up the water supply for Nevada County

2024-03-22 pge • nid • water • california • nevadacounty

USB / DC barrel cables

Cables to power things from USB that ordinarily require their own transformer

2024-03-21 usb • barrel • dc • electronics • power

Reddit content moderation

Overview of the positive social changes in the site in the last ten years

2024-03-21 reddit • moderation • content • socialmedia

Thermal Springs in the U.S.

Nice detailed map of locations of hot springs

2024-03-20 via:kottke • maps • hotsprings • hiking • america

GPS jamming map

Clever public map of where GPS is being interfered with

2024-03-20 gps • navigation • aviation • via:hackernews • war

Shrinking Salton Sea

Detailed plot of changing shoreline

2024-03-19 saltonsea • california • desert • environment • water

Balatro interview

Discussion with LocalThunk, the sole indie developer of the new breakout hit game. 1M copies sold so far, $15M revenue.

2024-03-19 games • balatro • roguelike • poker • indie

Reddit deceptive ads

Company very proud to make ads that look just like actual organic content

2024-03-17 ads • reddit • ftc • deception

Consent-o-Matic

An open source extension for autofilling privacy / cookie consent forms on many popular publishing platforms

2024-03-17 consent • cookie • gdpr • privacy • web • plugin • chrome

Atkinson Hyperlegible

A sans-serif font designed for legibility for people with limited vision

2024-03-17 adaptive • blind • font • typography • readability

Dating app enshittification

Details of how Tinder / Bumble / Hinge / Grindr etc are getting worse, in part as a monetization strategy

2024-03-16 dating • grindr • romance • sex • hookup • culture • enshittification

On Colorblindness

Long, carefully researched and argued essay about racial justice in America

2024-03-15 affirmativeaction • racialjustice • justice • america • black • slavery • reparations • politics

A legible ASCII font in a 3x3 bitmap matrix

2024-03-15 fonts • tiny • pixelart

Political email blocklist

EveryAction has a global blacklist that will help you avoid a lot of political email

2024-03-14 politics • spam • email • campaign

Global scale monitoring of power grids. Click the map links, etc for interesting views

2024-03-14 infrastructure • power • electricity • grid • ac • alternatingcurrent

Facebook and Mercurial

Details on why Facebook doesn't use git. Partly performance, partly the culture of git development.

2024-03-13 mercurial • facebook • git • versioncontrol • programming • via:lobsters

A collection of Mesoamerican pottery, maybe specifically Moche pots? Those are famous for their sexually explicit ones.

2024-03-13 archaeology • mesoamerican • moche • pots • sexpots

Framework for using LLMs with voice applications

2024-03-13 voice • ai • llm • daily • generative • chatbot • python

Billionaires are a policy failure

Thoughtful essay explicating just how weird it is to have an enormous amount of money and how it is bad for American society.

2024-03-13 finance • money • politics • taxes • america • inequality • wealth

Attacking Biden effigy

Fascism on display in Kansas City

2024-03-11 politics • fascism • biden

Chinese thoughts on EV brands

Interesting Reddit post from a Chinese person talking about how people see the various Chinese electric car brands

2024-03-11 cars • evs • electric • china

Musk's charity fraud

Collected billions in tax breaks, doesn't distribute the foundation money to worthy causes unless they benefit him and his businesses directly.

2024-03-10 fraud • charity • taxevasion • elonmusk • spacex

Venus figurines

Roundup of speculation on prehistoric feminine sculptures that span millenia

2024-03-10 via:hackernews • sculpture • history • archaeology • venus

1963 NYT on Overt Homosexuality

Ugly newspaper article but somewhat well researched and balanced for its time.

2024-03-09 gay • lgbt • history • nytimes • homosexuality • mattachine

Starlink Latency improvements

Brief technical notes on a significant service improvement I've noticed

2024-03-08 starlink • latency • isp • performance • bufferbloat • lag • ping

British Library postmortem

Details of the ransomware attack on the institution and the recovery. Really nice to see this level of detail in public.

2024-03-08 security • ransomware • malware • badtech • library • it • recovery

Training LLM at home

Clever work to make AI training possible on cheaper lower RAM video cards instead of specialized AI processors

2024-03-08 ai • training • lora • quantization • llm

Apple cuts off Epic

Highlighting the danger of a monopoly platform

2024-03-06 apple • epic • games • competition • antitrust

St. Piran's Day

Grass Valley celebrates its Cornish history by tossing pasties

2024-03-06 cornwall • cornish • california • grassvalley • stpiran • community

Details of Microsoft's process for their new default fonts

2024-03-06 via:lobsters • typography • fonts • microsoft • aptos • bierstadt

Autobiography of an Androgyne

1918 narrative of a transgender woman's life

2024-03-05 lgbt • history • trans • america • transgender

Twitter leaking IP address

Geniuses launch a new feature which lets any Twitter user see your IP address, a major privacy violation

2024-03-05 twitter • privacy • elonmusk

"can a composition be organized in space rather than time?"

2024-03-04 generative • art • music • electronica • via:reddit

Voter suppression

Trump allies misapplying regulations to disenfranchise voters

2024-03-03 politics • trump • votingrights

Feeds All Around

Shows RSS feeds related to Mastodon users

2024-03-03 rss • feeds • socialmedia • mastodon • via:adactio

Leap Day is actually February 24, according to historical calendars

2024-03-03 calendar • via:jwz • leapyear • leapday

Observable Framework ideas

Simon Willison breaks down the innovations in Mike Bostock's new data science publishing system

2024-03-03 datascience • observable • visualization • infovis • javascript

REST reconsidered

A lament on how the distributed systems term REST has gotten watered down

2024-03-03 soap • rest • xmlrpc • rpc • http • webservices • api • programming