Nelson's Linkblog 2026-08

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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

McMillan 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. See also InfiniDysk

2026-08-15 infinidysk • 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

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