Links #158 (the long one)
I’m so behind on posting links that I’m going to declare link bankruptcy and post the whole long list without much commentary, rather than chunking it into smaller posts. (And then we’ll go back to business as usual.)
Teddy Macker on David W. Orr and a healing vision for America. This was so, so good. Highly recommended. This quote from Orr at the beginning sets the tone: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
Matt Glassman on how you should invite people over to your home regularly. This is good advice.
Han Lee on the AI Great Leap Forward. This really resonated. I really do not like AI mandates.
Becca Rothfeld on how you don’t have to use AI. “I am saying that the bar for using AI for anything, even something stupid and mindless, should be extraordinarily high.”
Christopher Drum on CAD-3D on the Atari ST. Particularly liked the parts about friction and UI density.
David Cain on enjoying things on purpose.
kqr on slide rules for kitchen measurements. After reading this, I ordered a slide rule. (Still need to learn how to use it, though.)
Photonist on documentary photography in the age of AI. This feels more human to me.
Elisa Gabbert on the essay as realm.
Ross Barkan on fiction and AI.
James O’Sullivan on writing with AI. “If you need a large language model to write, you are not a writer.”
Aubrey Hirsch’s comic on ChatGPT dads. Ha.
Alan Jacobs on redistributing your media portfolio (going analog, mainly).
Open Printer, “an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair. You can print on standard sheets or paper rolls and choose between black or color cartridges, refillable at your convenience.” Cool.
W. Evan Sheehan on LLM-generated code in Neovim.
Niels Leenheer wrote a DOOM with CSS. Wow.
Analog cameras that can be 3D printed.
Alex Chan’s personalized garbage collection calendar via a Python script.
Frank Elavsky on why people should stop saying AI is just a tool. Yep. His post on prototyping is also good.
Lisette, a little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go.
Heerich.js, a tiny engine for 3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG.
Playbit Runtime, an interesting “runtime designed for highly dynamic graphical apps that are collaborative, with a really good set of developer tools.”
Den Odell on Pretext, that shiny new text layout JS library.
Tracy Durnell on personalized computing and agentic AI.
Audrey Watters on AI. “The future that the vast majority of people want – for themselves, for their children – is not one in which we can only afford to buy digital replicas of products and digital real estate (Facebook board member Marc Andreessen has been quite explicit about this goal) because everything that’s actually real is only accessible to the rich; where we’re all yanked around by algorithms; where there are no jobs; where there is no art, only slop; where there is no green space, no wilderness, no water because the planet is covered in the data centers that power this destruction.”
Sharif Shameem on how willingness to look stupid is a moat in creative work.
Matthias Ott on AI and the shape of friction.
Christopher Butler on making art by hand.
Brian Leli on how LLMs are antithetical to writing and humanity.
Pavel Laptev on shiny new CSS features.
ReadBeanIceCream’s plain text kanban reading board.
Cory Doctorow on AI psychoses.
Marcin Wichary on AI autocomplete suggestions.
Jonas Hietala on one-bag travel for work.
Hyperwood, open source furniture.
Alexander Petros on how XML is a cheap DSL.
Lisa Charlotte Muth on moving all her content back onto her site.
Scott Smitelli on generative AI.
Sean Boots on generative AI vegetarianism.
Marcin Wichary on web haptics on iOS.
Ada Palmer on why all science fiction and fantasy writers are historians.
Lev Grossman from 2014 on getting to the halfway point in NaNoWriMo.
Michael Uloth on switching configs for Neovim.
Rusty Foster on how AI isn’t people.
Robin Rendle on how the world is still so full of dinosaurs.
Marcin Wichary on Lotus 1-2-3 and two-line menubars.
Lyra on how you no longer need JavaScript for a lot of things.
Matthias Ott on LLM bots scraping the web incessantly. I’ve run into this as well. Ugh.
Dave Gauer on the love of programming (in the face of AI). This resonated.
A post on holding on to your hardware since the AI data centers could very well make it hard to get in the future.
Scott on Gopher. Ah, nostalgia.
Halvor William Sanden on anti-intellectual tech.
Marcus Hutchins on the reasons he hates AI.
Bret Victor on AI. “If we take ‘AI’ to mean the current trend of deep-learning models trained on large datasets, there are a number of ways in which these techniques are incompatible with our values.”
Eliot on Henyapente and binary biology in the Gameboy OS.
An HTML quine. Also see Markdown CSS.
Matt Sephton’s WebGL CRT shader.
Matthew Walther on reading one hundred pages a day.
Oliver Burkeman on the power of immediacy.
Jim Nielsen on the anchor element’s href attribute.
Virginia Postrel on libraries of matter.
Fontquant, a tool to quantify what fonts can do.
Whew!