Stuff I found on the Internet
"[T]he age of around 2000 years stated in the Guinness Book is contested. According to the latest literature, the oak is estimated to be between 700 and 800 years old. [...] In its root zone, directly below the hollow trunk, there is a brick-built crypt containing the body of the manor owner Hans Wilhelm von Thümmel [de], who died in 1824."
level translation with n-mosfets, with helpful circuit diagrams and explanations
heroism! and a great write-up
"Modern computing is far too rigid. Applications can only function in preset ways determined by some far away team. Software is trapped in hermetically sealed silos and is rewritten many times over rather than recomposed.... This community catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power"
incredible thread on concatenative languages that goes to some unexpected places
"a sketching tool for quickly generating profile/block drafts for weaving"
great timeline, including the 996ICU license and Huawei's labor-intensive response to being added to the US Department of Commerce's 'entity list'
"[LLM] advocates can’t have it both ways: either LLM coding will be an exclusive club for those who built up the necessary skills, XOR it will be a great democratizer and do away with the need for those skills." cogent, calm, well-sourced
"A visual explorer for Unicode. Browse the character set, discover related glyphs, and learn more about the scripts, symbols, and shapes that make up the standard."
great tool for comparing how hanzi are rendered in different regions
well argued and thoroughly researched
"Le Guin teaches us that legibility isn’t something imposed once by villains. It’s like a totally entropic force. It accretes."
"[L]es IA génératives... détruisent ce lien à l’humain que je perçois dans le code, cette base de raisonnement qui n’existe soudain plus du tout. Je n’ai plus d’autrice pour m’expliquer, je n’ai plus personne à comprendre." The part where she lists friends and acquaintances she learned particular technologies from is very touching
fun history and walkthrough of "the first 'official' (sold in stores) translation of an adventure game." DAISY EST MORTE
i swear i nearly died a dozen times on that / hellish stretch the challenge was exhilarating until / one day suddenly the whole lot had been repaved
"When something goes wrong, we’re as likely as anyone to assume the computer is cursed, has it out for us specifically, or needs to be appeased in some way. And at that moment, the computer does have an interiority that is hidden from us. There certainly is something we haven’t seen or don’t understand! A good programming tool or computer language, though, is a means for us to find and dissect that interiority, stripping away the illusion. AI actively worsens it instead."
"This policy toolkit is primarily geared toward stopping, slowing, and restricting rampant data center development in the US at the local and state level. Our approach recognizes the extractive relationship between data centers and local communities... This toolkit is intended to help organizers and policymakers identify the strongest possible actions."
beautiful comic describing the experience of chronic illness by juxtaposing it with tropes from "survival" reality tv (love the detail of the guy getting noticeably scrawnier over time, and the line work mosaic effect)
"A decolonial critique of technology is not simply 'the internet was always bad.' It is rather: the conditions that made the internet harmful to specific communities were never peripheral to its design; they're an integral part of it. And any politics that aims to restore something like the pre-enshittification internet without reckoning with those conditions is doomed to reproduce them."
"La preuve... ne se résume pas à quelques checklists ou à un vague 'human in the loop.' Elle exige une infrastructure documentaire, une collecte d’artefacts, des procédures de test, des moments de réflexion, bref tout un appareil organisationnel qui ralentit. Ce ralentissement n’est pas un défaut du système, il en est la condition de crédibilité!"