Nelson's Linkblog

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This webapp doesn't just validate, it provides previews

2026-10-09 atom • blogs • feed • rss • web

The people holding up the internet

A lovely summary of some of the essential open source technologies the whole Internet is built on and who maintains them

2026-10-08 community • contribution • opensource • tech • via:metafilter • xkcd

Banana Blender Surprise

A 1989 Houston music performance by my friends' high school band. They were good!

2026-10-08 davidbeebe • highschool • houston • music • rock

Steam Cloud download

Web site to download files for saved games in Steam

2026-10-08 backup • cloud • games • steam

Garriott reclaiming Ultima

Early influential videogame series was sold to EA in 1992. US copyright law lets the creator take back the copyright after 35 years, no payment required.

2026-10-08 eavesdropping • games • richardgarriott • ultima

A DInner, a Talk, A Walk with Forster

A 1971 article about a remarkable evening with EM Forster and general appreciation for the man and his homosexuality

2026-10-08 forster • gay • history • lgbt

OpenAI 377 math problems

AI company half-publishes solutions to many major open math questions. It's sort of overwhelming.

2026-10-07 ai • llm • math • openai

EM Forster photos

A good collection of otherwise hard-to-find images

2026-10-06 emforster • forster • photographs • portrait

A very precise map routing system for finding the flattest walk from A to B in San Francisco

2026-10-06 elevation • maps • routing • sanfrancisco • sf • via:hackernews • walking

Vintage gay porn reviews

Remarkably scholarly reviews of early gay porn. Most from the 70s on but a few from before, detailed descriptions and links.

2026-10-05 gay • history • lgbt • porn • review

Glashütte Trash Clock

Artist builds a working mechanical clock from trash collected in the famous watchmaking town

2026-10-04 art • clock • sculpture • timekeeping

SuchFriends Blog

A blog about 1920s literati and their social lives. Bloomsbury Group, Americans in Paris, etc.

2026-10-03 bloomsbury • history • literature • salon

Start With The Fact That He Was Homosexual

Introduction to Wendy Moffat's excellent biography of E.M. Forster. This intro lays out the whole thesis that Forster's sexuality is key to understanding the man.

2026-10-03 biography • forster • history • lgbt • moffat

OpenAI security culture

Employee quits because he's concerned about safety practices at the AI company, writes an exposé

2026-10-03 llm • openai • risk • security • startups

A newish slippy map of the famous French Cassini map, in a nice color copy

2026-10-03 cassini • france • history • mapmaking • maps

EM Forster romantic relationships

A collection of hard to find photographs of the author's homosexual lovers

2026-10-02 books • forster • gay • lgbt • writing

Lovely global map with animated lights sweeping the waters

2026-10-01 infrastructure • lighthouse • maps • via:kottke

A classic video, a fan edit with captions of the Deep Space 9 romance

2026-09-30 bashir • deepspace9 • ds9 • fanedit • garak • gay • lgbt • love • startrek

Linux distro just landed a new system update that involves deferring installing critical packages until the next reboot

2026-09-30 linux • nobara • systemd • updater

systemd.offline-updates

A new-to-me systemd capability: you can defer userspace package updates to the next reboot

2026-09-30 linux • systemd • update

Boulder Opal Ring

A local jeweler describes his process creating a unique opal ring

2026-09-30 artisan • grassvalley • jewelry • lapidary

Victorian Queer Archive

A collection of primary sources, late 19th century writing on queer themes

2026-09-29 gay • lgbt • literature • victorian • writing

Because I Liked You Better

A chilling early 20th century poem of unrequited gay love

2026-09-29 edwardian • gay • housman • lgbt • poetry • repression

A fan imagines if Grand Theft Auto had a London map

2026-09-28 games • gta • london • maps • rockstar

Origin of mail-in vote fuckery

Details of how the White House tried to suppress the vote by messing with mail-in voting. An early proposal was that all ballots would have to be sent via certified mail.

2026-09-28 politics • trump • uspol • usps • voting • votingrights

A somewhat tongue-in-cheek observation about how math nerds are dominating business now.

2026-09-27 ai • business • math • nerds • olympiad

Goodreads alternatives

A recent rundown of social book reading apps. Written by one of the competitors, so as much a marketing piece as anything, but it seems to have good info.

2026-09-27 amazon • books • goodreads • monopoly • socialmedia

An essay examining Kojima's videogame women in his early games, talking about how misogynistic his writing is. (It does not get better in his newer games.)

2026-09-26 feminism • games • kojima • metalgearsolid

AI safety update

Broad overview of where industry and tech stands with AI safety, including some geopolitics. Has lots of technical details I haven't seen elsewhere.

2026-09-25 ai • alignment • china • politics • safety

A gay camping social group

2026-09-24 california • community • gay • lgbt • radicalfaeries

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

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