Nelson's Linkblog 2025-12

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

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

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 digital • images • photography • tonecurve

Clock Synchronization

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

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

A collection of data storage systems like punch cards

2025-12-27 computing • history • media • punchcard • 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 • slop • spam

Claude Code router

Use the coding agent with your choice of LLM

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

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 adventofcode • ai • coding • llm • norvig

Potato pansharpening

Software for improving satellite images

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

Manhattan bar, Paris

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

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

Give AIs access to the popular note-taking tool

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

Spotify's pirate founding

Music streaming service was started with unlicensed MP3s

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

300TB of music and metadata available as a torrent

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

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 california • grassvalley • hatecrime • lgbt • nevadacounty • violence

Bolero chiptune

Ravel's piece performed on 8 bit homemade instruments

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

The end of time

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

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

ChòpnBlọk review

A very good West African restaurant in Houston gets national recognition

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

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 ai • aisuru • badtech • botnet • investment • llm • vc • venturecapital

Agent memory systems

A structured memory for AI agents that divides beliefs from facts

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

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 fishing • games • gay • lgbt • radiatoryang

Demon Hunters remade as Hanukkah songs, with remarkably good animation

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

Run an LLM against documents entirely locally, self hosted

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

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 • llm • parsing • programming • python • via:simonw

Cory Doctorow on The Daily Show

Local boy makes good on national teevee!

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

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 featureflags • programming • simplicity

Oliver Sacks and homophobia

Heartbreaking story of the famous writer's personal demons

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

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 bayarea • civilrights • health • lgbt • protest • sutterhealth • trans • transgender

Kennedy Center Honors

Hilarious skewering of the corrupted arts awards

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

Burkhard Mangold

Swiss Poster artist from the 1910s

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

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 legal • startup • trademark • twitter

NanoKVM microphone

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

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

Straight to Hell (NSFW)

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

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

The Land of Giants

Sculpture proposal to turn power line towers into human figures

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

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

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

Typewriter Plotters

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

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

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

2025-12-05 factorio • games • mods

Migrations between US states

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

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

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 • dystopia • mentalhealth • pluribus

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 • civilrights • grassvalley • legal • nevadacounty • scandal • slop

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 cookies • mozilla • security • spam • web

Gay fantasy novels

A list of fun reading

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

Rasam Varieties

Recipes for the South Indian thin soup

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

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

2025-12-01 ai • benchmark • llm