Stuff I found on the Internet
"The morally serious position is not do not impose costs. The morally serious position is impose costs on people attempting to end democratic governance, because failing to impose those costs will result in democratic governance ending. The alternative is losing the country to a movement that will not extend to you the courtesy you are extending to them."
"Console only- no x11 or Wayland, no desktop getting in my way."
good iso keyboard layout, for reference, even if the specifics aren't for me
good statement, very direct, cc0/public domain
"Have you ever wanted to host a server at home or in your office, but you can’t because the ISP won’t give you static IPs? This guide is for you."
"The mediocre 'journalists' covering Jason’s downfall are vultures. His death was a breaking news event in the New York Times, Guardian and BBC—publications, I can personally attest, which have ignored the work of many brilliant Blackademics in recent months, but which will giddily announce their deaths."
"On my trip to Montréal, I was stopped by security in Gare Centrale and informed that tripods weren't allowed and asked, au franglais, whether I was recording or taking a picture. Rather than try to answer that philosophical question in a language I don't speak, I just said 'désolé' a few times and put away the tripod, which seemed to be sufficient."
"So in summary: using AI for coding led to depression, apathy, existential dread, and worse software. Not good. Add on top of that the negative environmental, community, and economic impacts of AI, and it became extremely apparent to me that something's gotta change."
gorgeous and thoughtful data visualization/embroidery
"To paraphrase Tolstoy, 'Accurate data retrieval is all alike; every LLM response is inaccurate in its own way.'"
"This curve behaves surprisingly similarly to a cubic Bézier, especially at smaller angles, but when pushed has very different behavior. Overall it has smoother curvature variation and is more likely to have monotonic curvature. It contains within it a few valuable analytic curves, and is also good at approximating a wide range of others."
small, sweet little guide for forming a permacomputing collective. "Fermentation is a method, a slow, interdependent process shaped by invisible collaborators. Like microbes that preserve and transform, our work ferments beneath the surface, unfolding, unfinished."
succinct, clear, good references
strange as it sounds, i feel like there must be a part of the human brain that evolved specifically to produce pleasure in response to breeding Jovian monster trucks
"And the vocabulary in which you are asked to evaluate the arrangement is supplied by the same master. Accept that the product is an intelligence, that ingesting your work is learning, that its failures are hallucinations, and that freedom means you are free from owning anything of all that. Every sentence available to you has been arranged in advance, so that refusal comes out sounding like superstition and fear of the future." really wonderful synthesis
"it is possible to make C code run quickly but only by spending thousands of person-years building a sufficiently smart compiler—and even then, only if you violate some of the language rules. Compiler writers let C programmers pretend that they are writing code that is "close to the metal" but must then generate machine code that has very different behavior if they want C programmers to keep believing that they are using a fast language"
"Conviviality matters for science for multiple reasons. One of them is epistemic: if you want to derive knowledge from your work, you need to know exactly what you are doing, and that includes a detailed understanding of your tools. Moreover, research is much facilitated if you also have the inverse: the ability to create a tool that does exactly what you want to do. And since science is a collective activity, in which participants critique and build on each other's work, the understanding of tools needs to be shared inside a discipline." (also discusses the Python 3 transition as an example of a loss of conviviality)
"Instead of regarding the obligation to use formal symbols as a burden, we should regard the convenience of using them as a privilege"
"An Arabic font is a small program. The text you store is its input, not its output. The word is performed fresh every time you look at it, like music from a score."
this ink is water-soluble