Nelson's Linkblog

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Juneteenth and Black troops

The U.S. Colored Troops were among the first to arrive in Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation—yet their story has long been overlooked.

2026-06-20 black • civilrights • civilwar • history • texas

Source Serif | Adobe Fonts

Explore Source Serif designed by Frank Grießhammer at Adobe Fonts.

Nelson's Linkblog

Interesting web links, a few a day.

‎Google Gemini

Meet Gemini, Google’s AI assistant. Get help with writing, planning, brainstorming, and more. Experience the power of generative AI.

Open source AI agent under the Linux Foundation umbrella. My friend Douwe works on it.

2026-06-19 agent • ai • douwe • llm

Qontour plagiarism

Some sleazy marketing agency has lifted someone's entire book and is republishing it without permission, adding AI embellishments

2026-06-18 ai • copyright • dictionary • ethics • llm • plagiarism

Free, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging, a nice little new community

2026-06-18 blogs • community • hosting • indie • weblogs

RCS for Business

The open iMessage alternative for text messaging has a special business product with fancier messages

2026-06-17 ads • business • imessage • rcs • sms • texting • textmessage

A new leaderboard / list of 5000 independent personal bogs

2026-06-17 blogs • culture • socialmedia

Some 9 outages in a month because of PG&E's badly maintained power infrastructure

2026-06-17 corruption • nevadacounty • pge • power

Relentlessly proactive

A story of a coding agent going through absurdly complex lengths to accomplish something. It's mostly scary and cautionary, but also exciting?

2026-06-17 agent • ai • claude • llm

Noobs Are Coming

A funny little Brotato clone, a casual shooter that's surprisingly fun to play.

2026-06-16 brotato • games • shooter

Bennet Foddy strikes again

2026-06-16 awkward • foddy • games • qwop • walkingsimulator

A tool to save a full web page, as you see in your browser, for later archiving. Can also integrate with linkding.

2026-06-16 archive • bookmarks • linkblog • research

Linkblog on linkding

I switched the backend for my linkblog.

2026-06-16 blogs • linkblog • linkding • me • pinboard • tech

Alberta rat control

Alberta has no rats. It has set up a border at Saskatchewan to keep them out.

2026-06-16 alberta • canada • rats

Billionaire group chat

Gossip from a Signal group of billionaires freaking out about a one time California tax

2026-06-15 california • guillotine • politics • taxes • uspol

Hockney paintings

Guardian with a lovely gallery of some of Hockney's most loved paintings

2026-06-14 hockney • art • obituary • gay • lgbt

Ben Franklin canoodling

A 1767 sketch by Charles Peale showing Ben Franklin with a young lady in his lap

2026-06-14 sex • funny • history • benfranklin • franklin • sketch

Fable jailbreak?

Swift shutdown of Anthropic's new LLM may have been based on Amazon researchers figuring out how to circumvent safeguards

2026-06-14 uspol • politics • anthropic • llm • ai • alignment • jailbreak

Queer Fascism and the End of Gay History

Thoughtful essay on how same-sex love is not synonymous with liberalism or progressivism

2026-06-14 history • weimar • nazi • politics • queer • lgbt

More Arch malware

Popular package repository has another wave of malware. It will keep doing so until the AUR folks change their security model.

2026-06-14 malware • arch • linux • supplygain • aur

176 chili peppers

A beautifully written and illustrated guide to chile

2026-06-13 chile • chili • pepper • heat • capsicum • scoville • food • via:metafilter

David Hockney appreciation

Lovely essay from someone who knew the artist well

2026-06-13 hockey • obituary • art • aids • gay • lgbt • newyorker

Bright Data botnet

"Legitimate" malware bundled with TV streaming apps turns your TV into a content-pilfering web scraper

2026-06-13 ai • llm • malware • botnet • internet • tv

Arch AUR attack ongoing

Major package repository keeps getting infected with new malware

2026-06-12 arch • linux • security • badtech • aur

Arabic typography

Detailed article about the complications of rendering Arabic text correctly, rooted in history

2026-06-11 arabic • via:lobsters • fonts • typography • typesetting • culture

Florida's surgeon general

Top medical government official is spreading crank ideas about "structured water"

2026-06-11 medicine • science • florida • politics • uspol • water • batshitinsane

Arch supply chain attacks

Arch Linux has a popular package repository called AUR. It's a frequent target of attacks to inject malware, so KDE is going to stop including it

2026-06-11 badtech • security • supplychain • arch • linux • aur • kde

A fun queer history podcast

2026-06-11 podcast • history • gay • lgbt • queer

Working with Mythos

A poetic, slightly awed account of using Anthropic's newest LLM to build complex software products

2026-06-10 claude • mythos • ai • llm • programming • via:waxy

Corrupting a ZFS File

Fun exploration of figuring out how to bash the bits on a raw disk to deliberately trigger file corruption for ZFS to detect and correct

2026-06-10 zfs • disk • filesystem • hacking

Claude self-sabotage

New AI is deployed with a guardrail that if you try to use it to improve AIs, you will get silent corruption. Protecting their IP? Preventing the singularity? It's a bit baffling.

2026-06-10 ai • llm • claude • singularity • training • intelligence

Maurice Terminal Note

The 1913 gay novel had an afterword written in 1960

2026-06-08 gay • lgbt • novel • maurice • forster

A collection of free ebooks, I think mostly things out of copyright. They have been proofread and edited

2026-06-08 books • ebooks • free • culture • epub • copyright • canada

Roundup of hardware to remotely access a PC

2026-06-05 kvm • ipkvm • via:hackernews • hardware • homelab

GPS numbers station

Navigation satellites have been broadcasting encrypted data for over a decade. Really neat analysis.

2026-06-05 gps • cryptopgraphy • steganography • military • security • via:lobsters • cool

Fedora Silverblue hacking

Nice notes about working with an immutable OS while also heavily tinkering and customizing

2026-06-05 via:lobsters • linux • desktop • fedora • immutable • atomic • overlay

Unsloth Gemma 4 QAT

Some deep-in-the-weeds details about boiling down an LLM to a small size you can run on a single desktop computer (or phone)

2026-06-05 llm • quant • unsloth • google • ai

A popular Linux desktop environment is dropping the choice of using the old X-Windows system. It's Wayland now, although an X11 compatibility system will continue

2026-06-05 linux • kde • plasma • x11 • wayland • graphics • gui • unix • history

Arch Linux Gay Mirror

Install Linux with LGBT pride!

2026-06-05 gay • arch • linux • lgbt • russia • protest

Remove Paywalls

Yet another service, seems to be working now

2026-06-04 paywall • web • internet • informationwantstobefree

LEGO Sagrada Familia

$800 lego sculpture, some assembly required

2026-06-04 lego • architecture • sagradafamilia • cathedral

Starlink 1200 connections

ISP discloses that their CGNAT is limited to 1200 open connections per customer

2026-06-04 starlink • spacex • cgnat • internet • isp

rsync and outrage

Author of important tool answers people criticizing him for using AI tooling

2026-06-04 ai • tridge • rsync • llm • coding • engineering

A browser-based tool for facilitating file transfers on a LAN

2026-06-03 filesharing • webrtc • wormhole • lan • utility

The Jesus Trip (1971)

The unlikely source of a lengthy sample in the new Boards of Canada album

2026-06-02 music • sampling • jesus • cult • boardsofcanada • religion

NixOS generators

Build Nix images for a variety of deployment targets like Amazon EC2 or DigitalOcean

2026-06-01 nixos • nix • vps • hosting

Fix encrypted downloads of books so they can be read with standard tools

2026-05-31 books • ebooks • epub • kobo • adobe • reading

Guidelines for Respectful Use of AI

Thoughtful comments on not letting prolix AI make work for people

2026-05-31 ai • work • management • culture • llm

Satellite ISP lists addresses for all its terrestrial exchanges

2026-05-30 internet • isp • starlink • pop • datacenter

Experimental UI for Linux: a tiling window manager that also has an infinite scrolling system

2026-05-30 windowmanager • ui • hci • tiling • pad++

Essential and reliable sysadmin tool has had some bugs recently that seem related to using AI to code

2026-05-29 ai • slop • rsync • correctness • claude

Factorio open source?

Interview with game lead saying he likes the idea of an open source release for Factorio some day

2026-05-29 games • factorio • opensource

Some bits about a gay couple of Nevada City who were graphic designers

2026-05-28 gay • lgbt • history • nevadacity • osbornwoods • prints • silkscreens

Can we have the day off?

A human cry for some relief in the face of AI escalation

2026-05-28 work • ai • culture • jobs • vacation

How to Screenshot

Simple instructional site for teaching people how to take screenshots on a variety of computers

2026-05-27 tutorial • screenshot • computers

Heather Cairns on Google

Employee #4 at Google and their first HR person, she is now working on a book.

2026-05-27 google • startup • hr

A typing teacher / test webapp, very nicely designed

2026-05-26 typing • keyboard • wpm • training • ergonomics

Funny list of common AI errors

2026-05-25 funny • ai • llm • via:hackernews • parody • errno • unix

State of Local AI

A buying guide to running local LLMs on Wintel hardware

2026-05-24 llm • ai • selfhosting • gpu

Street art duo, did a fun piece in Houston

2026-05-23 streetart • houston • graffiti • mural

PenDown vector fonts

Someone making a new set of idiosyncratic fonts for plotters, etc

2026-05-23 fonts • text • rendering • plotter • plotterart • hersheyfont • via:lobsters

A remarkably impressive EE hacker building various USB devices

2026-05-23 hardware • hacking • ee • newzealand

A self-hosted cloud file service, sort of like a private Dropbox

2026-05-22 sync • filesharing • network • syncthing • dropbox • nextcloud

Felicity Chandelle

A remarkable person, a pilot and also a committed crossdresser

2026-05-22 trans • lgbt • history • aviation • pilot • crossdresser

Datasette Agent

Database exploration tool now has a thoughtful AI integration with SQL-aware agent tools

2026-05-21 agent • sqlite • datasette • simonw • ai • rag

Scrapers vs Wikis

Person who runs a bunch of custom Wiki websites writes about abuse from scrapers

2026-05-21 via:lobsters • web • scaling • scraping • ai • wiki • robotstxt

Starlink financials

SpaceX S-1 means we finally have hard data on the Starlink ISP business

2026-05-21 starlink • spacex • internet • isp

Astonishing piece of demoscene art, a whole piece in 16 bytes of x86 machine language

2026-05-20 demoscene • scene • demo • art • xor • via:marcin

Stanford student who did some remarkable journalism. He wrote a great NYT op/ed about AI and ethics at Stanford recently

2026-05-20 stanford • journalism • ai • corruption

AWS GovCloud leak

US CyberSecurity department publishes 800+ MB of security credentials to the public on GitHub

2026-05-20 uspol • cisa • security • badtech • leak • github • keys • aws

Oyster feed party in Japan, looks like a lot of fun

2026-05-18 oysters • japan • food • tourism • culture

100,000 kids separated

Republican agenda to sunder non-white families. Most of the children losing their parents are US citizens

2026-05-18 uspol • immigration • trump • republicans • gop • racism • whitesupremacy

College during AI

A sharp and despairing essay about the cynicism of Stanford students using AI tools and chasing success

2026-05-17 ai • chatgpt • success • ethics • stanford • llms • education

Project to rescue manuals destined for the trash and digitize them instead

2026-05-15 internet • textfiles • manuals • scanning • via:hackernews • internetarchive • archive

Passkey transfer

Some promising steps in an important part of the push to end passwords. You can move your passkey credentials between apps.

2026-05-14 passkeys • security • authentication • via:reddit • passwords • 1password

Reddit Russian propaganda

The big conservative subreddit was entirely dominated by a couple of Russian accounts, now banned

2026-05-14 politics • propaganda • russia • reddit • socialmedia

Various options for wiping an SSD. There's a neat crypto option by default that is nearly instant, but only some drives have it

2026-05-12 security • ssd • nvme • cryptography • linux • wipe

A 2FA app that spots cool numbers like 80085 and tells you about them

2026-05-10 funny • via:george • 2fa • authentication • numbers • random • rngdle

USB Cheat Sheet

Handy roundup of USB protocol and charging variants

2026-05-10 via:amitp • usb • connectors • computers

Modernize your Linux environment by moving config files into $HOME/.config where you can

2026-05-08 linux • commandline • shell • customization • config • xdg

Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Podcast

Podcast promoter books random guests with the wrong Kyle, who gamely interviews them anyway. Hilarity ensues.

2026-05-08 podcast • funny • aphyr • masculinity • manosphere • bro

Is GitHub Cooked?

Another third party GitHub uptime monitor. This one is less apocalyptic than the unofficial monitor but may give a better picture of casual usability

2026-05-04 github • uptime • monitor • systems • scalability

Containers vs VMs

Exploration of security concerns of containers and the practicality of using VMs to run untrusted code like AI agents

2026-05-04 container • vm • security • agent • kvm

India health survey (PDF)

Huge 2021 government survey of household health In India of over 600,000 households. Includes a remarkable amount of detail.

2026-05-04 health • census • survey • india

Yet another bootable rescue / tool system

2026-05-03 rescue • usb • linux • windows • boot • recovery

Silly daily game, nicely made

2026-05-01 via:waxy • games • clicker • idle

Grass Valley welcome arch

In 1901 visitors entered through the legs of an odd statue of a gold miner

2026-05-01 grassvalley • history • arch • kitsch • 1901 • goldminer • photo • photography

Details on how oil processing works

2026-04-30 oil • energy • cracking • distillation • refinery • texas

OpenAI's explanation for a weird fixation in its LLM

2026-04-30 ai • training • llm • bias • fixation • chatgpt • openai

Gay cruising app takes on an enormous amount of investment

2026-04-29 sniffies • gay • lgbt • cruising • apps • vc • investment • enshittification

1Password + Flatpak browser

A fix for a thorny integration problem for Linux systems

2026-04-29 flatpak • 1password • integration • security • container • browser • linux

Fedora's atomic package manager. Instead operating systems plus user customization in snapshots you can easily apply or rollback

2026-04-29 linux • sysadmin • immutable • versions • software

Some explanation of the failures at an essential piece of software development infrastructure. They're under 90% uptime for the month according to the unofficial status page.

2026-04-28 github • scaling • development • reliability

NSF board fired

Trump destroys the governing body for our most effective science organization

2026-04-28 uspol • politics • nsf • trump • science

Linux VRAM management

Experimental work to give certain programs priority for GPU memory

2026-04-27 gpu • vram • linux • bazzite • gaming • performance

Republicans' absurd vendetta against the Southern Poverty Law Center means a major form of charitable donation now can't donate to them.

2026-04-26 politics • corruption • splc • daf • fidelity

Gay Kaiser scandal

A series of early 1900s political scandals involving the Kaiser of Germany which resulted in the weakening of the kingdom

2026-04-26 politics • germany • history • kaiserwilhem • gay • lgbt