Blog: #links

Vox on how Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse shifted the style of animated films. Into the Spider-Verse was probably my favorite superhero movie — live action doesn’t fit the genre nearly as well, at least for me.

Nicholas Rougeux on the making of his edition of The Four Books of Architecture. Loved this.

Luca on one way to do generative art landscapes. I like that it’s a 2D technique that makes things look 3D. (Which I guess could technically apply to all 3D content on screens. Ha.)

Matthias Ott on transient frontend frameworks. Yep. For personal projects, I find myself occasionally wishing there was a platform-native way to build reactive UI. I haven’t yet thought through what that would look like, though.

Jack Evoniuk on how the Atari 2600 game Pitfall generated its world. This was great. A single byte!

Jim Nielsen on LCH color space in CSS. I’m convinced too.

Damir Yalalov on Microsoft’s new VALL-E text-to-speech model. Only three seconds of training data needed, apparently. We are fully in the “be skeptical of the provenance of anything you see or hear” phase.

Steve Krouse’s Val Town project, a website for writing, running, and deploying scripts. Intriguing.

Brad Woods’ explainer on 3D in CSS.

Clive Thompson on the power of indulging your weird, offbeat obsessions. This was great.

Josh Comeau on clever code considered harmful. Yes. I love clever code (within reasonable limits), but I fully agree here. It’s sometimes hard when there are cultural currents flowing towards clever, but swimming the other way seems very much worth it.

Robert van Embricqs’ flow wall desk. Very cool.

Ben Abbott on the Great Salt Lake report. I had no idea. I hope things get under control.

Benjamin Dean Taylor on five Latter-day Saint video game soundtrack composers. A world I haven’t really been aware of!

Libre Arts, an online magazine for people who use free artmaking apps (like Blender, MuseScore, Krita, etc.).

Simon Thalmann on using ChatGPT to write surreal prose poems. I really liked these and am thinking about writing some myself (though without AI helping).

Colin Devroe on blogging being alive and well. Yes!

The 2022 State of JS report is up. (Given that I don’t think chasing trends is a great idea, I’m not sure why I’m linking to this. Anthropological interest, I guess. Ha.)

Gabriele Corno with a video of a white moose in Sweden. Wow.

3D VR Zelda. Ooh! Very cool, at least for those who grew up on the first Zelda game.

Shiftall’s mutalk, a muzzle for VR. Um.

Mike Crittenden on ChatGPT uses for lazy parents. Ha.

Keith Houston on what to call chapter summaries. That’s what I’ve called them.

Glen Nelson on The Cultural Hall podcast about trends in Latter-day Saint arts. His fifth trend certainly applies to me.

The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, sponsored by the BYU Maxwell Institute (though run separately). Love this. Had no idea it existed until recently.

Saahil Desai on the design of pizza delivery boxes.

Rachel Neumeier on positive fantasy. Also see her other post about it. I like this. (I also like other kinds of fantasy, but it’s nice to see the emphasis on kindness.)

Mike Wakerly on how your tech stack is not the product. Yep.

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Trying to catch up on these, so this batch will be long.

Codon, a high-performance Python compiler.

Lottie Limb on France banning short-haul domestic flights in favor of train travel. Bravo.

Ben Darfler on his analog productivity system. I’ve nostalgically wanted to start using something analog again, but it never sticks.

Christian Hammond on peer programming with ChatGPT. Crazy.

Helen Warrell on MI6’s top female spies.

Inkbase, programmable ink from Ink & Switch (who are doing some great research).

Crosscut, another intriguing project from Ink & Switch.

Cuttle, an interesting web-based design tool for digital cutting machines like laser cutters.

Chris Coyier on Arc (the new browser). After reading this I tried Arc (I wouldn’t say I’m super happy with Firefox) but alas, my brain really does not like tabs on the side.

RFE/RL with a map showing countries that have been renamed in recent years. I didn’t know about Eswatini or Cabo Verde.

International Intrigue, a global affairs newsletter I’ve recently subscribed to and quite like.

Mark Harris on Saudi Arabia’s new megacity, The Line.

Avid Halaby on the Twitter whistleblower report. Some of these things are…not great (from a technical perspective).

One-dimensional Mario. Love this, even though it’s barely playable.

The 2022 State of CSS survey results.

Peter Rogers on a new class of antidepressant that works in two hours. Great news. I wish my dad had stuck around long enough for us to see if it helped him.

A new gold nanocoating prevents glasses from fogging up.

Samuel Arbesman on emergent microcosms. (I linked to a Twitter thread he wrote earlier; this is a blog post with more details.)

Matt Webb on transcribing ourselves 24/7. Interesting thoughts as alwayas.

Erik Spiekermann and Google have released a new, free edition of his Stop Stealing Sheep typography book.

Kottke on Bill Tavis’s Mandelbrot set in the style of a vintage map. Mmm. I love vintage maps, and this is delightful.

Supernumerary rainbow on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Rupendra Brahambhatt on lab-grown 3D-printed wood. Ooh.

BBC has a new radio play version of The Dark Is Rising. (Which I still haven’t reread.)

Alex Russell on the browser performance baseline for 2023. Still pretty low. We’re not doing a great job at serving users on slower devices.

Tom on the topologist’s world map he made. Cool.

David Bauer’s You Don’t Know Africa games. Love this.

Paul Fairie with 2022’s Headline of the Year nominees. Many of these are great.

Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff several times for a stunt. Crazy.

Blink, an iOS terminal app I wasn’t aware of. Nice.

Matthew Guay on notes apps helping us forget. Yep. I hardly ever go back to review notes.

Cat Valente on how capitalism always ruins the internet.

Klim’s Epicene Text is a lovely text font.

Stephanie Eccles’ 2022 12 Days of Web Dev. Nice coverage of new features.

Jackson Huff’s Clipboard, a terminal-based clipboard tool.

Fernando Borretti on tools for thought. I’ve largely reached the same conclusion with my own tools (separate tools for separate tasks), though I wasn’t as conscious of what I was doing.

Mandy Brown on writing being hard and that being okay. Yes, yes, yes.

Rach Smith on blogging. After a long period where I worried too much about what other people think, I feel like I’m finally getting past that — finally comfortable with the idea that things on here aren’t going to be perfect, and it’s more important to publish.

Spinda on using ChatGPT as a Redux reducer. Oh goodness.

Ben Kuhn on writing for the internet. Several good ideas here.

Jeff Kaufman on blogging thresholds. Yes, agreed.

Jason Kottke on 36 things he learned in 2022.

Steve Nadis on some MIT research where they had programmers do an MRI while coding.

Justin Alvey and Karen X. Cheng on using Stable Diffusion to create architecture photos from dollhouse furniture. Very cool.

Carson Katri’s Dream Textures, a Blender add-on for creating textures with AI.

Tesseract.js, a pure-JS implementation of the Tesseract OCR engine.

EasyBPY is a more ergonomic wrapped library for Blender’s Python API. Awesome. This is much better.

Riley Cran on all the custom old-looking fonts Lettermatic made for their game Pentiment. Mmm.

Stanko on making a rope with SVG and JavaScript. Nice.

Monique Judge on bringing back personal blogging. If you can’t tell, I’m always here for posts about blogging.

Dave Rupert on prototyping. “The composting of failures produces rich and fertile soil.” Yes.

Dylan Black taught ChatGPT to invent a language. Whoa. This is mind-blowing.

Devine Lu Linvega on weathering software winter. As usual, this makes me want to make small VMs.

Maciej Cegłowski on why we shouldn’t send humans to Mars. Color me convinced.

Michael Irving on the apparent discovery of the first virovore, organisms that eat viruses.

Jillian Hess on twelve ways to use a diary.

Nathan J. Robinson on living in the age of BS. Good to be conscious of.

Alan Jacobs on AI. “If you’re trying to get through your work as quickly as you can, then maybe you should see if you can find a different line of work.”

Kate Rose Morley with a nice tree view using HTML and CSS. Thinking about using this for descendancy charts.

Kent Hendricks on 52 things he learned in 2022. “Compared to irritant-induced crying (e.g. caused by onions), the tears you cry when you’re sad contain 24% more protein, which means they roll down your face more slowly and are more likely to be noticed by others, who, in turn, can comfort you.”

The hands of Maarten Baas’ Schiphol clock are drawn on in real time. Whew!

Vadim Makeev on a skewed highlight effect in CSS. Quite nice.

Jenny on work. “Your job won’t love you back, no matter what love you give it. But the people you work with will.” Yep.

Sam Hughes on creating new people (looking forward to reading Valuable Humans in Transit).

Rodrigo Copetti’s site on the architecture of old game consoles. Looking forward to reading some of these.

Matthias Ott on it being the year of the personal website.

Hillel Wayne on microfeatures he’d like to see in more programming languages.

Joseph Homer Saleh with a statistical reliability analysis for Roman emperors. Intriguing!

David L. Chandler on some new research that purports to show why Roman concrete was so durable. Quicklime, it appears.

Personal Sites, a directory of personal websites.

Tech Jobs for Good, a nice site for highlighting mission-driven jobs. (I’m not looking for a job right now, but when that day comes, I’ll be checking here.)

William Hales on CGI. Not graphics — cgi-bin. Ah, the good ol’ days. This has really got me thinking about simpler and easier ways to get web stuff up and running.

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Robin Sloan on new avenues for the web now that the platforms of the last decade (like Twitter) are crumbling. Yes, yes, yes. This is so exciting. Very much looking forward to seeing the innovations that come out of this period.

Robert Epstein on our brains not actually being like computers. Food for thought. As an additional observation, and I’ve mentioned this before, I’ve found a lot of value lately in considering humans’ bad behavior as a function of buggy internal state that can be changed.

Daniel Huffman on redesigning a route map for an airline. Loved this.

Die with Me, a chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery life left. Ha. (I get antsy when mine goes below 60%.)

Brian O’Donovan on Ireland’s An Post adding support for handwritten digital stamps. Cool idea. Makes me wonder what else could be done in this vein.

Tom Scott on the benefits of the design of British plugs. Good points.

Zoni Nation with plots mapping perceptions of probability words — “probable” vs. “likely,” for example. Fascinating!

Max Brooker on writing being magic. Definitely agree. Writing is amazing.

Julia Evans’ debugging manifesto. This is great. Recommended.

Kamil Galeev on Russia’s imminent political crisis. I have no idea how likely this is, but it was compelling reading.

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Eric Chiang’s pup, a jq-like command-line tool for parsing HTML.

Scaife Viewer from the Open Greek and Latin Perseus Digital Library. Cool.

BrachioGraph, a cheap, simple DIY pen plotter. This one would be fun to build.

Leo McElroy’s SVG-PCB, which takes a code description and outputs PCB designs in SVG.

The Quill to Live on the best SFF of 2022. Some good recommendations.

Peter Baker’s Ygt, a TrueType hinting app. Peter wrote the textbook we used in my Old English class many years ago. He also designed the Junicode font.

Swyx on everything we know about ChatGPT, as of the beginning of December. (Which I acknowledge was eons ago in AI time.)

InvokeAI, another Stable Diffusion wrapper.

Jonas DeGrave and Frederic Besse built a VM inside ChatGPT. Sort of, anyway. This is pretty crazy stuff.

Tobias Ahlin on GitHub’s new open source variable fonts, Mona Sans and Hubot Sans. Nice.

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Slynyrd on making isometric pixel art. Mmm.

Oliver Burkemann on urgency not really existing. I’ve found this to be true. Loads of things are more deferrable than they seem.

Jeremy Keith’s 2008 Iron Man Flickr story. Ha.

David B. Parker on “y’all” going mainstream. Good. My dad was from Virginia, so I grew up with “y’all” embedded in my bones.

Matt Bell on there being no failure, only practice. I like this.

Palmer Luckey’s crazy VR headset that kills you for real if you die in the game. I guess it was only a matter of time. Still, hopefully just trolling.

Noah Smith and roon on generative AI being autocomplete for everything. Seems like a reasonable take.

Jason Kottke on Maastricht University’s animation of the Covid virus lifecycle. Well done.

Charlie Jane Anders on mosaics of small stories. I love this. It’s something I try to do with my fiction, too.

Wyldcard, e-ink playing cards. Cool. I’d love a small e-reader around this size (smaller than my phone, super lightweight, no bells or whistles), especially once e-ink resolution gets better.

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VectorFusion, text to SVG through diffusion.

Liza Daly’s A Letter Groove project, cutting words out of book page scans and showing the pages beneath. Cool.

John Keegan on visualizing rivers and floodplains with USGS data. A few months ago I played around a little with QGIS’s hillshade rendering for DEMs and with rendering DEMs in Blender and need to get back to all that. Also, Daniel Coe’s work (mentioned in the post) is lovely.

Clive Thompson on maximum viable product and stopping feature creep. Hear, hear.

Christopher Robbins interviews Robert Caro. I really need to start reading The Power Broker.

France brings out the horses Angelique Chrisafis on some French towns using horses for waste collection to try to combat climate change and slow down city life. Love that.

Rocks that look like food, part one of three. Fun.

ChatGPT came out. (I’m still about a month behind on these links, working through my list.)

Benj Edwards on Disney’s FRAN AI for re-aging actors. Decent results. I wonder how long it’ll be before fully synthetic actors are in use, and what that’ll mean for real actors.

Sony’s Mocopi motion capture system. Reminds me of the Hinge Health sensors.

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I’m so behind on posting these links (these are all from a month ago). Also, I’m going back to posting fewer at a time.

ooh.directory, a new blog directory by Phil Gyford. Nice way to find blogs. It has an RSS feed for new additions, too.

Ian Sample on a potential new universal flu vaccine. I hope this works out.

Tom M on things he wished he knew when learning C. Ah, C. (My first two languages were BASIC and Pascal, but then for a fairly long time my main languages were C and C++. Haven’t used either in years, though, other than during my master’s.)

Colima, container runtimes with minimal setup.

Ben Abbott on five positive developments in the global energy system this year.

Geoff Graham on color contrast issues in Apple Messages, on the green SMS bubbles. Yes.

Dioramas created from Van Gogh art, using AI-generated depth maps. Very cool.

Carol Ann’s Paper Quill Seascape piece, made with Midjourney.

Markos Kay’s process video for his Creature Perch piece using Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. (I’ll add here that the ethics of the training sets for these aren’t great, especially for the artists whose works were taken without permission. Hoping that gets better.)

Google’s Infinite Nature paper on generating 3D flythroughs from still photos. Slowed down a lot, this would make for a nice screensaver or decorative display. Reminds me a bit of those eight-hour train ride videos on YouTube, too.

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Lin Kayser on Hyperganic’s 3D-printed rocket engine using an algorithmically generated model. So cool.

Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens, a book-in-progress about keyboards. Looks interesting!

Leah Rodriguez on NASA sending a person of color and a woman to the moon as part of the Artemis program. This is admittedly from back in April 2021 but I hadn’t seen it till now.

Relativity on how they 3D print rockets. I didn’t realize 3D printing rockets was a thing. Wow.

Miriam Suzanne on how our tools might be holding us back, in respect to CSS.

The 2022 Web Almanac.

Paul Stamatiou on product quality. Some interesting thoughts.

Blender Conference 2022 video playlist. Putting this here to remind myself to go watch these. I really struggle to make time to watch videos, though.

Christopher W. Jones on the earliest complete sentence in written Canaanite. “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

Chris Randall with a video of a Brocken Spectre. Whoa. That’s just…whoa.

A lyrebird impersonating an evacuation notice in Sydney.

The United Nations on the world reaching 8 billion people last week.

The Bledwel Test, a catalog of movies mentioning menstruation. A fairly short list.

The Artemis 1 rocket launch. It still blows my mind that we can successfully launch rockets into space.

Mandy Brown on time and rest. Yes.

UNSW Face Test. I got 69% (31/40 on the memory, 52/80 on the sorting). It’s surprisingly hard.

Ear2Face, which can take a photo of just an ear and create a photo of what the face looks like straight on. It’s nowhere near perfect but still startling how well it does.

Andy Matuschak on doing-centric explanatory mediums. If I recall correctly, Figma’s tutorials are all like this. It’s great.

ByteOverlord’s port of Quake to the Apple Watch. Wow.

Harry Vangberg’s Foreign Dispatch, a project to take ideas from code editors and apply them to writing in foreign languages. Cool.

Ethan Hawke’s TED talk on giving yourself permission to be creative.

NASA’s list of citizen science projects. Quite a few. Reminds me I need to read Mary Ellen Hannibal’s Citizen Scientist book.

David Heinemeier Hansson on the bubble popping for unprofitable software companies. I think the current model (unprofitability + VC funding) is completely bonkers. Also not a huge fan of growth capitalism, where you have to grow just to survive. This has been on my mind a lot lately.

Howard W. French on coastal west Africa over the next century. “By 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people.” Fascinating.

Christopher Ekeroth on little languages — DSLs — being the future of programming. I like this a lot. It’s a space I’ve thought about in the past, and this has nudged me back into thinking about it some more. (Little languages for generative art, text processing, web apps, etc.)

Roy Tang on word people and web people. I’m very much a word person, which is probably why I struggle to watch videos as mentioned above. Also very much a web person.

David Nield on SuperGPS, which apparently can pinpoint location to within four inches. Which would be much more exciting if we didn’t live in a world run by surveillance capitalists.

Chris Young on a new hybrid EV battery that can recharge in 72 seconds. Can’t wait till electric minivans come down in price enough that I can justify getting one.

Gabriella Gonzalez on the end of history for programming. Some interesting thoughts here. I’m not far enough into the functional programming mindset for this to resonate, though.

Jim Nielsen on natural language inputs. Love this. I’ve done a little of this on some personal apps but want to do more.

Stable Diffusion v2 is out.

Matt Welsh with a cautionary tale about using Rust at a startup. While I do like Rust, this take makes sense to me.

Nat Friedman is hiring a tech lead to help solve an archaeological puzzle. Mildly gimmicky but still fascinating. I wonder what it is.

John Scalzi on weaving the artisan web by blogging. I look forward to more people blogging post-Twitter. I love blogs so much.

Thai Wordle. I already know I would not be very good at this.

Spline, a browser-based collaborative 3D modeling app. I remember hearing about this a while ago (before it launched, I think), and it’s nice to see how far it’s come.

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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.

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David Wolpe on a Mondrian painting that’s been hanging upside down for 75 years. I feel like this is something that could easily happen to my art as well.

R. K. Duncan on SFF’s fatphobia. Something I hope to do better at.

Tyler Boswell’s September set of generative art. Love these.

Tyler Boswell on grouping styles in generative art. Good idea.

Aerographene, which seems too amazing to be real.

Oh My Git, a game for learning Git.

Matthias Ott on not having to like your work.

Simon Collison on building for the web. Hear, hear.

Manuel Matusovic on learning modern CSS. Keeping an eye on this.

Fontshare, free fonts from the Indian Type Foundry.

Kent Dodds on MPAs, SPAs, Remix, and more.

Felt, a web app for making maps.

Keith Peters on building a raytracer. Made me a bit nostalgic for the small raytracer I worked on for classes during my master’s.

Iain Anderson on Adobe and the Pantone licensing change. Sheesh, I really don’t like capitalism sometimes.

Cameron Owens on how surgeon drill bits work — specifically, how they avoid drilling into your brain after they get through the skull bone. Comforting!

Evan Prodromou on ending frequent flyer programs to help fix the climate. Or at least not destroy it as quickly.

Austin Kleon on 30-day challenges. This was good.

Dave Karpf on how Kevin Kelly’s one thousand true fans idea maybe isn’t so great. Agreed, things haven’t turned out the way we might have hoped.

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