Nelson's Linkblog 2025-12

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A video player by a major Korean company, an alternative to VLC

2025-12-29 vlc • movies • video • windows • software

Photo processing

A nice illustration of the basic steps a digital camera takes to turn raw sensor data into a meaningful picture

2025-12-29 photography • digital • tonecurve • images

Clock Synchronization

A rundown of different algorithms and systems for keeping computers in sync

2025-12-27 time • ntp • via:hackernews • ptp • clocks • synchronization

A collection of data storage systems like punch cards

2025-12-27 media • punchcard • history • computing • storage

Rob Pike vs AI smarm

Shitty AI project spams famous programmer with empty gratitude. He replies quite clearly

2025-12-26 ai • funny • llm • spam • slop

Claude Code router

Use the coding agent with your choice of LLM

2025-12-25 ai • llm • coding • claude • programming • claudecode

Turnkey AI coding system makes it easy to create disposable software

2025-12-24 ai • llm • programming • vm

AI vs Advent of Code

Peter Norvig puts three LLMs through the paces of coding puzzles with mostly positive results

2025-12-23 norvig • ai • llm • coding • adventofcode

Potato pansharpening

Software for improving satellite images

2025-12-23 satellite • aerial • imagery • imageprocessing • sharpen • detail

Manhattan bar, Paris

A 1970s gay bar famous as the site of a police raid that was later denounced

2025-12-23 lgbt • history • paris • gayrights • liberation • sex • gaybar

Give AIs access to the popular note-taking tool

2025-12-22 mcp • ai • llm • obsidian • notes • pim

Spotify's pirate founding

Music streaming service was started with unlicensed MP3s

2025-12-22 spotify • piracy • copyright • music

300TB of music and metadata available as a torrent

2025-12-21 spotify • music • annasarchive • archive • piracy

Grass Valley attacks

We've had a series of brutal youth violence incidents in Grass Valley, including some hate crimes. Nice article about the response

2025-12-21 grassvalley • hatecrime • lgbt • violence • california • nevadacounty

Bolero chiptune

Ravel's piece performed on 8 bit homemade instruments

2025-12-20 music • chiptune • classical • ravel • bolero • via:metafilter

The end of time

NIST's reference time servers are offline because of a power outage

2025-12-20 nist • ntp • time • server • power • boulder • weather

ChòpnBlọk review

A very good West African restaurant in Houston gets national recognition

2025-12-17 food • naija • nigerian • westafrican • restaurant • africanamerican • black • culture

Residential PCs used to be used for DDOS attacks, now they're being hijacked and leased to AI companies to scrape websites

2025-12-17 badtech • botnet • ai • llm • investment • vc • venturecapital • aisuru

Agent memory systems

A structured memory for AI agents that divides beliefs from facts

2025-12-16 rag • ai • llm • via:reddit • code • programming • agents

Rainbows are Carnivores

New gay art game from Radiator Yang. This doesn't look like fun exactly, but the explication sure is interesting

2025-12-14 gay • lgbt • games • radiatoryang • fishing

Demon Hunters remade as Hanukkah songs, with remarkably good animation

2025-12-14 funny • kpop • demonhunters • hanukkah • jewish • music • via:metafilter

Run an LLM against documents entirely locally, self hosted

2025-12-14 selfhosted • llm • ai • rag • openwebui

JustHTML AI coding

Detailed story of using AI agents to write a parsing library with very minimal hands-on work from the engineer

2025-12-14 ai • programming • llm • parsing • python • via:simonw

Cory Doctorow on The Daily Show

Local boy makes good on national teevee!

2025-12-12 cory • doctorow • internet • culture • enshittification • dailyshow • comedy

Hardcode feature flags

In praise of a simple system for a useful and prod-sensitive feature. Complex feature flag systems often fail.

2025-12-12 programming • simplicity • featureflags

Oliver Sacks and homophobia

Heartbreaking story of the famous writer's personal demons

2025-12-09 oliversacks • neuroscience • psychology • gay • lgbt • closet • homophobia

Trans health protest

Bay Area protest against Sutter Health which has capitulated and is saying they won't offer gender affirming healthcare to kids anymore

2025-12-09 protest • trans • transgender • civilrights • lgbt • health • sutterhealth • bayarea

Kennedy Center Honors

Hilarious skewering of the corrupted arts awards

2025-12-09 uspol • trump • corruption • kennedycenter • arts • awards

Burkhard Mangold

Swiss Poster artist from the 1910s

2025-12-08 art • switzerland • poster • herrenwasche

Some lawyer who formerly worked at Twitter is claiming to create a new Twitter and filing to cancel the old trademarks. Scam? Crazy idea? Weird.

2025-12-08 twitter • trademark • startup • legal

NanoKVM microphone

Small computer management system comes with bugs and a microphone hidden on the circuitboard

2025-12-07 badtech • china • espionage • security • nanokvm • kvm

Straight to Hell (NSFW)

Anthologies of the important gay porn zine are available as scans on Internet Archive.

2025-12-07 gay • lgbt • porn • history

The Land of Giants

Sculpture proposal to turn power line towers into human figures

2025-12-05 via:kottke • art • sculpture • iceland • infrastructure

The only long-established Buddhist ethnic group in Europe, descendants of Mongols

2025-12-05 history • russia • kalmyk • buddhism • mongols

Typewriter Plotters

A collection of bizarre 80s and 90s printers. Pen plotters with keyboards attached, or other odd hybrids

2025-12-05 plotting • plotterart • cool • via:lobsters • art • graphics • typewriter

A Factorio mod that totally overhauls the game and centers logistical problems, making mass scaling impossible

2025-12-05 games • factorio • mods

Migrations between US states

Visualizations of census data. Texans stay put more than any other state.

2025-12-04 usa • america • census • migration • states

Pluribus ad vs. mental health

Report someone's schizophrenic sister checked herself into a hospital because she thought she was having an episode. Instead, it was an ad for a TV show on her fridge display

2025-12-04 ads • pluribus • mentalhealth • dystopia

My county prosecutor got caught filing AI slop with the court. Here's the milquetoast response about how they pinkie-swear to do better

2025-12-04 ai • slop • legal • civilrights • nevadacounty • grassvalley • scandal

Public Suffix List

A list of domain names that should not be considered as private to one organization but are instead generally used by many people

2025-12-04 mozilla • security • cookies • spam • web

Gay fantasy novels

A list of fun reading

2025-12-04 gay • fantasy • lgbt • novel

Rasam Varieties

Recipes for the South Indian thin soup

2025-12-03 food • rasam • india • spice • broth • soup

Interesting probing at how LLMs "think". Read their comment about running the model at temperature 0 to get raw logits

2025-12-01 ai • llm • benchmark