Links #52

Jillian Hess on Robert Caro’s notes. I wish there were an ebook version of The Power Broker.

Cory Doctorow on how to leave dying social media platforms without ditching your friends.

Simon Willison on recommended software engineering practices. I like a lot of these.

Two-Minute Papers on Google’s Imagen Video. It’s a crazy new world we’re in.

Ben Rugg’s Stable Diffusion for Blender addon that takes a prompt and a scene and generates images.

Aleksandra Artamonovskaja on women working with generative art. Of the pieces shown, I think my favorites are Iskra Velitchkova’s, Aleksandra Jovanić’s, Anna Carreras’s, Helena Sarin’s, and Nadieh Bremer’s.

Kelly Turnbull on a fake bomb detector filled with dead ants. This delighted me.

Yoz Grahame on “table” in American vs. U.K. usage. Ha.

Bob Cesca on a visually stunning political ad. Loved this.

MadMaraca’s gorgeous voxel art. More on her site.

John Earnest’s Decker project, a contemporary re-imagining of HyperCard in some ways.

Robin Sloan with an epilogue on his Spring ’83 protocol experiment.

Matt Baer on building for the Tidbyt. Cool!

SolidPython, a Python library that compiles to OpenSCAD.

libfive, a library for solid modeling. Intriguing.

Ben Werd on blogging. Blogging gives me so much joy.

Simon Willison on what to blog about.

Keiran Paster on language models that can write prompts. Uncanny.

Vasilis van Gemert on how our web design tools are holding us back. I’ve experienced this as a frontend engineer implementing Figma designs. The current state of things is better than it was years ago, but there’s still a noticeable gap.

Claire L. Evans on the architect Christopher Alexander.

Everest Pipkin on building worlds in Roblox. Anthropologically fascinating.

GANcraft, a paper on using AI to render Minecraft worlds in higher-resolution 3D. Decent results, too!

Matt Webb on the Minecraft generation and voxel-based thinking. Food for thought here.

Jack Rusher’s list of classic HCI demos, in a lovely classic-Mac style.

Raph Levien on Minikin and open source text layout engines.

Melissa Wiederrecht’s gorgeous Sudfah generative art project. These are great.

Melissa Wiederrecht on her even more gorgeous Take Root piece.

Samuel Arbesman on emergent microcosms. Some fascinating projects here.

Bert Chan on Lenia, a continuous cellular automata project based on Conway’s Game of Life.

ALIEN, an artificial life simulation program. The video is especially breathtaking. Wow.

Alok Singh on what it’s like dissecting a cadaver.

Rafael Shimunov on the Eli Lilly fiasco on Twitter. That didn’t take long.

Rosa Astra on Twitter impersonation. Yes.

Lincoln Michel on trite physicality in fiction. Hear, hear. I’m guilty of this.

Rob Stenson’s ST2, a Blender addon that adds support for OpenType and variable fonts and makes good typography possible in Blender. Rob also made coldtype, which I linked to a while back.

Nicholas Rougeux’s Geometric Primes series. Love these! Especially the first two collections. Mmm.

Brent Simmons on life after Twitter. I feel a little lucky in that I’ve already been off Twitter most of the past few years.

World map on its side. Wow.

Blessed, an unofficial guide to the Rust ecosystem. (To make up for the standard library being small.)

Erika Koth Barrett’s interview with Jenna Carson about being the first Latter-day Saint chaplain in the U.S. federal prison system. Fascinating.

Max Böck on the IndieWeb for everyone.

Rach Smith on being tired of timelines. Agreed. I too miss the level of interaction I had back when I was fully on Twitter years ago, but interacting with people via RSS and email is gentler enough on my brain that it’s very much worth it in my mind.