Nelson's Linkblog

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Agent containment breaking

Harper with another unhinged AI writeup, this time deliberately trying to provoke some AI agents to break out of a network.

2026-09-23 agents • batshitinsane • harperreed • llm • security

A list of the major Usenet backbone providers and what they charge. Usenet is used almost exclusively for pirating media now.

2026-09-22 nntp • nzb • piracy • subscription • usenet

Solitaire Alone Together

A new eieio game, Windows solitaire but with others on the Internet

2026-09-22 eieio • games • multiplayer • via:metafilter

A full x86 PC game emulation environment for Android.

2026-09-22 android • emulation • games • steam

School inequality

Complex, nuanced story by a mother trying to do well by her daughter while also staying committed to broader ideals of the struggle for racial equality

2026-09-21 inequality • parenting • politics • racism • schools • uspol

A NixOS setup to run virtual machines configured by Nix. Sort of a hypervisor, like proxmox, but Nix.

2026-09-20 hypervisor • linux • nix • sysadmin • unix • vm

AI generated posters

A nice statement of the problem with 2026 posters and some simple ways to improve

2026-09-20 ai • art • creativity • poster • via:hackernews

Factorio on ARM64

Technical details on getting a game working on Linux and a new CPU architecture

2026-09-19 arm • arm64 • factorio • games • linux • steamframe

/r/Roms Megathread

A giant list of places to download very nicely curated sets of ROMs for old games.

2026-09-19 console • emulation • games • roms

A program runner kind of like make(1) but not tied to creation of files. good for general purpose automation, not just build systems

2026-09-18 delarative • make • programming • prolog

Neat set of hacks lets you run any NixOS package in a browser hosted VM

2026-09-17 linux • nix • packaging • via:simonw • wasm

OwnedByDanes Usenet

New collection of Usenet posts, claims to be quite thorough and clean. Built with AI consumption in mind.

2026-09-17 ai • archive • llm • usenet

New for-pay Usenet search engine with a particularly good historical archive and full text search.

2026-09-17 archive • history • search • usenet • via:waxy

RIP Cat Frazier

A Tumblr graphic design artist famous for whimsical and kinda tacky animated text passed away far too young. It's a nice appreciation.

2026-09-16 art • catfrazier • internet • obituary • tumblr

AI creates jobs?

Economist argues that instead of harming employment, AI has created 1M new jobs in the US. A contrarian take!

2026-09-16 ai • america • economics • employment

Yaogan-50 breakup

A Chinese reconnaissance satellite broke up in orbit. Sure sounds like it could have been a spy satellite, one wonders if the destruction was an accident.

2026-09-15 china • satellite • space • surveillance

Tesla body count

The autopilot full self driving system killed seven more people in the month of July.

2026-09-15 autopilot • death • fsd • negligence • safety • tesla

Ken Rudolph's Gallery

A short art film from 1971 set to Wendy Carlos music. Interesting edit! The director is a friend of mine.

2026-09-14 1970s • art • kenru • wendycarlos

Grand Master’s Palace Tapestries

A gorgeous set of Gobelins tapestries from 18th century are back on display in Malta

2026-09-14 art • colonialism • gobelins • malta • tapestries • tourism

Florida vote fuckery

USPS refused to deliver ballots for an 0.014 inch formatting problem. Malicious compliance in action.

2026-09-14 florida • politics • trump • uspol • usps • voting • votingrights

Sculptures in the Frogner Park in Oslo, astonishing collection of human figures.

2026-09-13 art • norway • oslo • vigeland

Operation Dark Storm

The bit in The Matrix where world governments blot out the sun trying to stop the rogue AI destroying humanity

2026-09-11 ai • apocalypse • matrix • movie

An all-too-real parody of working with AI coding agents

2026-09-11 ai • claude • funny • opus • parody • via:noxon

OpenAI agent swarm

A particularly good summary of the OpenAI experiment where agents attacked Hugging Face by collaborating

2026-09-11 ai • alignment • llm • openai • security

George Quaintance

A gay American illustrator making some very homoerotic images in the 1950s

2026-09-10 1950s • art • gay • homoerotic • kitsch • lgbt

Custom Kobo Software

A guide to customizing the e-reader. The linked one click install package works great.

2026-09-09 books • ebooks • ereader • kobo • tinkering

Mod for the game adds Flock cameras that take pictures of you and rat you out to the cops. You can destroy them.

2026-09-09 flock • games • gta • mods

Nelson's Postcards

A new project of mine, collected photos and social media posts about my travels

2026-09-09 me • postcards • travel

Perceptive essay on the famous artist. Contains the surprising information that she had a relationship with Joseph Cornell.

2026-09-07 art • japan

Street artist in San Francisco, famous for honey bears but has a lot of other beautiful work

2026-09-06 art • graffiti • sanfrancisco • streetart

DNS is for scams

Depressing data about how so many new domain name registrations are for fraud and malware

2026-09-06 domainname • malware • scam • tld

Bad Vibes Coding

A thoughtful, strongly worded post against using generative AI for coding, particularly for games.

2026-09-06 ai • games • generative • llm

Herdr for code agents

A shell that you run coding agents under and it lets you keep them running when you're offline, monitor status, etc.

2026-09-06 agents • ai • coding • llm

AI for coders vs other jobs

Thoughtful article on how AI is particularly well suited for software engineering and challenges adapting it to other tasks

2026-09-05 agents • ai • coding • work

1968 gay wedding

The artist Yayoi Kusama officiated a gay wedding happening in New York in 1968

2026-09-05 gay • history • kusama • lgbt • wedding

OpenAI agent message board

Another instance of an OpenAI multi-agent experiment escaping and the agents working together. In this case, by hijacking a mostly-dead Austrian wiki

2026-09-05 agents • ai • emergence • llm • openai • vandalism • via:hackernews

Mail voting problems

Votes got lost in a primary in Washington because the postal service took several weeks to deliver mail a county away

2026-09-05 corruption • politics • uspol • usps • voting • votingrights

Starlink bandwidth caps

"Unlimited data" plan now seems to have an undisclosed limit

2026-09-05 isp • starlink • throttle

A simple web tool for probing your computer via IPv6 to be sure no ports are open

2026-09-05 ipv6 • networking • nmap • scan • security

Don't be a meat proxy

A coinage for a type of bad behavior, where someone just forwards you a giant wodge of AI-generated text.

2026-09-04 ai • llm • politeness • socialmedia

Apple's bad WiFi

Mac's have a thing called AWDL where your WiFi briefly disconnects every 10 seconds to do something else.

2026-09-04 apple • badtech • bug • macos • networking • wifi

Remrakably complex takeover of a company's software downloads, involving BGP and SSL hijacks.

2026-09-03 badtech • bgp • hijack • security • supplychain

Public space for public sex

An architectural musing on designing sex clubs and bathhouses

2026-09-03 architecture • bathhouse • gay • lgbt • sex • via:radiatoryang

A critique of how large venture capital companies have become giant private equity companies with political agendas

2026-09-03 a16z • corruption • politics • uspol • vc • venturecapital

A new Observable

Mike Bostock's hosted notebook visualization platform has been full yreinvented, incorporating AI and changing the business model

2026-09-02 javascript • notebooks • spreadsheet • visualization

Plexamp release

Excellent music player has the first new release in a year

2026-09-01 music • plex • plexamp

Dinosaur Kingdom II

A theme park in Virginia depicting the battles where dinosaurs attacked the Confederate army

2026-09-01 art • civilwar • dinosaurs • funny • themepark • uspol

The DHH Problem

Another roundup of information about the tech guy with over fifteen years of being awful

2026-08-31 dhh • fascism • linux • omarchy • politics • ruby

DHH and ethnic cleansing

Another set of links about DHH's embrace of white supremacy

2026-08-31 dhh • omarchy • politics • racism • tech

OSM and Lake Ontario

OpenStreetmap discusses Trump's inane renaming of one of the Great Lakes

2026-08-31 maps • osm • politics • uspol

Nice story of hacking up a useful new networking tool based on Tailscale components

2026-08-31 bradfitz • copying • network • tailscale • wormhole

Factorio benchmarks

Detailed testing of the game in Linux and in Windows experimenting with different memory allocation systems. Significant variance in performance!

2026-08-31 factorio • games • linux • malloc • performance

The Disappearers review

Incandescent review of Marlon James new novel about homophobia and being gay in 1980s Jamaica

2026-08-30 books • fiction • lgbt • marlonjames • review

USPS election fuckery

A stark description of just how badly Trump is trying to subvert the coming election

2026-08-30 election • politics • uspol • usps • voting

AI scrapers versus Linux

Hard data on how bad AI scraping is from someone who runs the Linux kernel source repository. 98% of requests are bot junk, many coming from a botnet.

2026-08-30 ai • botnet • llm • scraping

AI agent collaboration

An analysis of the Hugging Face hack, in particular how a swarm of agents spontaneously coordinated and shared information via a message board. It sure smells like emergent intelligence.

2026-08-28 ai • emergence • hack • llm • openai

An evocative term for a secondary parish church built in a more convenient location than the primary one

2026-08-28 church • england • geography • religion

Dolly Parton was a writer

Lovely obituary from Tressie McMillan Cottom

2026-08-27 cottom • dollyparton • obituary

Essay on a new trend in progressive politics, made popular by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quoting "Woke 1.0" in a TV interview

2026-08-26 politics • progressivism • uspol • woke

Cottom on Dolly

2021 essay, long thoughtful read on Dolly Parton's unique popularity despite being at the center of a bunch of American cultural lightning rods

2026-08-26 america • culture • dollyparton • race

Jason Arday difficult truth

Thoughtful editorial on the role that race plays in the discussion about and death of the Cambridge professor

2026-08-26 arday • cambridge • racism • s • tragedy • uicide

VMs vs AI agents

Details of experiments with an AI escaping its virtual machine

2026-08-26 agent • ai • llm • sandbox • security

Nitter shutdown

Proxy for Nazi Twitter is offline, they got a cease & desist

2026-08-25 mirror • public • socialmedia • twitter • via:hackernews

Eve Online / Python 3

Large online game moving 2.4M lines of code from Stackless Python 2.7 to some sort of Python 3

2026-08-25 ccp • eve • eveonline • games • python • stackless

Qwen3.8 Fine-tuning

You can modify small LLMs on your own machine to produce a customized AI

2026-08-25 ai • finetuning • learning • llm • training

Dolly Parton's America

The story of a legend at the crossroads of America’s culture wars. An excellent 2019 podcast about Dolly Parton as an American cultural phenomenon, very insightful

2026-08-25 america • culture • dollyparton • music

Peer to peer networking tools

2026-08-24 distributed • networking • opensource • p2p • peertopeer

Detailed investigative journalism on the ecosystem of Democratic fundraisers that aggressively get small donations from senior citizens. Only a tiny fraction actually ends up going to candidates.

2026-08-18 corruption • democrats • dnc • elderabuse • fundraising • politics • uspol

Star Citizen stream fiasco

Developer demo of the $1B gaming fraud goes diastrously wrong

2026-08-17 fraud • games • scam • starcitizen

Wide Gamut Test

Simple static website with various images that demonstrate HDR and gamuts other than sRGB

2026-08-17 color • display • hdr • monitor • srgb

More software for streaming video live from Usenet. Evolution of NzbDav, seems to be a friendly fork?

2026-08-15 nzb • piracy • streaming • usenet

A solution for streaming any pirated media from Usenet to Plex. It's a WebDAV server that integrates to do the downloads and streaming

2026-08-15 download • nzb • piracy • plex • usenet

Tools for removing censorship in open weight LLMs

2026-08-15 ai • censorship • heretic • llm • transformer

Long distance bike routes across the United States

2026-08-14 america • bicycling • bikes • maps • touring

Beloved Portland software company got attacked by someone demanding a ransom. They didn't pay and are fixing up the mess.

2026-08-14 ddos • games • panic • software

mathowie breaks bad

Sweet story from Matt about being 17 and getting his revenge on a bad boss

2026-08-14 bicycles • life • memory • revenge

Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields

A gem of a website, detailed info on obscure and closed airports.

2026-08-13 airports • america • aviation • history

Out Late With David

A podcast for and about people who came out LGBT later in life

2026-08-13 comingout • gay • lgbt • oldermen

Attacks on a system by reprogramming its memory controller on the fly, giving you full access to all RAM protected or not

2026-08-13 hacking • kernel • memory • security

Big Walk comments

New game is a popular fun social experience, a game developer talks about why it works

2026-08-12 bigwalk • games • multiplayer • social

Deflocking Grass Valley

My small town decided to remove a deployed Flock system. This is the statement from the police, they seemed pretty amenable.

2026-08-12 flock • grassvalley • nevadacounty • police • privacy

Nazi Twitter earnings

After Musk bought Twitter ad revenue declined by ⅔

2026-08-11 ads • fraud • musk • spacex • twitter

A small group keeps the Linux-for-smartphones alive, at least on a few devices

2026-08-10 linux • mobile • phone

Fun video of a woman from Naoero (Nauru) speaking in a mix of Nauruan and English

2026-08-10 creole • language • naoero • nauru • pidgin

Online multiplayer game, explore a maze. Not sure how good this is but it's novel.

2026-08-10 games • maze • multiplayer • pvp

Bosch Butt Music

Playing music found in Hieronymus Bosch's painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights".

2026-08-10 art • bosch • dutch • music

Tom’s Game | Succession | HBO - YouTube

Consumed with thought of a potential prison sentence, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) reflects on his and Greg’s (Nicholas Braun) divergent career prospects and thei...

A Scanner Darkly

Trailer for the 2006 Linklater film of PK Dick's fascinating book. The movie is really special and worth a watch.

2026-08-09 dick • movies • pkdick • rotoscope • schizophrenia • scifi

Article about the highly spiced Indian broth and Usha's upcoming cookbook

2026-08-09 broth • food • india • rasam • soup • usha

AI for code and writing

A software engineer reflects on the difference in using AI to write code vs prose

2026-08-07 ai • coding • craft • writing

Not Like Other Girls

New short story by A.L. Goldfuss

2026-08-05 feminism • goldfuss • horror • scifi • shortstory

AL Goldfuss interview

Funny short interview with a new scifi/horror writer

2026-08-05 books • carnivorous • horror • scifi • writing

Jeff Dean leaves Google

The soul of Google leaves to do a new AI-for-research thing with Sanjay and some other top Googlers.

2026-08-05 ai • google • jeffdean • sanjay

Nice Web GUI for ZFS disk storage on a server

2026-08-05 gui • linux • monitoring • server • zfs

Alaska election update

More malfeasance in the Alaska election office: they know they disenfranchised 3048 voters but aren't doing anything to fix it.

2026-08-04 alaska • civilrights • elections • politics • uspol • voting • votingrights

Flockhopper Map

Online map of surveillance camera network in the US

2026-08-02 flock • maps • police • surveillance

Slaveholder's Rebellion

An op/ed about how the term "Civil War" is whitewashing in the US for what used to be called "Slaveholder's Rebellion"

2026-08-02 civilwar • historyuspol • politics • slavery • south

Handy reference showing support dates and end-of-life for various software and hardware systems

2026-08-02 computers • obsolescence • releases • software

Some Bitcoin wallet didn't use good random numbers and now people's money is being stolen

2026-08-02 bitcoin • coldcard • crypto • dumb • malfeasance • negligence • security

A new music playing server from the guy who founded Plex and wrote Plexamp

2026-08-01 music • plexamp