Links — #essays

• Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits (Apr 26, 2026)
  Halvar Flake on bringing classic infosec discipline — checksums, sandboxes, careful diff review — to the new era of LLM-assisted code.
  #ai #security #essays
• AI cybersecurity is not proof of work (Apr 26, 2026)
  antirez argues that volume of LLM-generated security findings is meaningless unless the false-positive rate keeps pace with human triage capacity.
  #ai #security #essays
• AI may be making us think and write more alike (Apr 26, 2026)
  USC research finds measurable convergence in how people phrase ideas after sustained LLM use — and asks what that does to our intellectual diversity.
  #ai #essays
• AI will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it (Apr 26, 2026)
  On the predictable backlash to widespread AI displacement, and why the response is unlikely to make anything better.
  #ai #essays
• Book Review: There Is No Antimemetics Division (Apr 26, 2026)
  Stephen Diehl on qntm's novel about an SCP-style agency hunting ideas that erase themselves from memory.
  #blogs #essays
• Dropping Cloudflare for Bunny.net (Apr 26, 2026)
  Migrating a personal blog away from Cloudflare to a smaller, less politicised CDN.
  #essays #ops #web
• Drunk post: things I've learned as a senior engineer (Apr 26, 2026)
  Everything your mentor wants to say but HR won't let them. The rare career-advice essay where the title is also the disclaimer.
  #essays
• Email could have been X.400 times better (Apr 26, 2026)
  A history of X.400 — the formally-specified email standard SMTP defeated — and what we lost by shipping the simpler thing.
  #essays #systems #web
• Epicycles all the way down (Apr 26, 2026)
  Rohit Krishnan on the tendency of every domain to accrue Ptolemaic complications until someone bothers with a Copernican rewrite.
  #essays
• Flickr: the first and last great photo platform (Apr 26, 2026)
  How Flickr quietly became the only general-purpose photo community that survived web 2.0, and why nothing has replaced it.
  #essays #web
• Helium is hard to replace (Apr 26, 2026)
  Brian Potter on why helium has no good substitute and how the supply chain is more fragile than most people realise.
  #essays
• I've sold out (Apr 26, 2026)
  Mario Zechner on accepting the AI-tooling money he spent years criticising — and what it does to the part of you that still cares.
  #essays
• Investigating split locks on x86-64 (Apr 26, 2026)
  Chester Lam measures the real-world cost of split locks — atomic ops that span cache lines — and the mitigations that hurt almost as much.
  #essays #systems
• It is time to ban the sale of precise geolocation (Apr 26, 2026)
  The case for treating commercial sale of fine-grained location data the way we treat other privacy-corrosive markets: outright prohibition.
  #essays #politics #privacy
• The seven programming ur-languages (Apr 26, 2026)
  An argument that essentially every programming language descends from one of seven foundational forms — and that knowing them clarifies what you're really learning when you pick up a new one.
  #compsci #essays
• Age verification as mass surveillance infrastructure (Apr 26, 2026)
  Findings from monitoring age-verification rollouts: the systems being deployed function more like population-scale identity registers than the targeted controls they're sold as.
  #essays #politics #privacy
• On sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing (Apr 26, 2026)
  Kevin Lynagh on the patterns by which capable engineers reliably wreck their own projects — usually by trying too hard.
  #code-quality #essays
• Open source isn't dead (Apr 26, 2026)
  A response to the Cal.com closed-source pivot: AI changes how vulnerabilities get found, but closing your code doesn't shrink the attack surface.
  #essays
• PCR is a (surprisingly) near-optimal technology (Apr 26, 2026)
  Why photonic PCR could finish a reaction in six minutes, and the physical and economic reasons it probably won't displace the existing tech anyway.
  #essays
• Running out of disk space in production (Apr 26, 2026)
  A misconfigured nginx access log fills the disk on launch day — a story about the small infrastructure mistakes that compound under traffic.
  #essays #ops
• Some unusual trees (Apr 26, 2026)
  A tour of tree data structures you don't usually meet — finger trees, radix trees, kd-trees — and what each makes easy that a balanced binary tree doesn't.
  #compsci #essays #math
• The beginning of scarcity in AI (Apr 26, 2026)
  GPU rental prices surged 48% in 60 days. Tomasz Tunguz argues the bottleneck is shifting from speed of iteration to access to compute.
  #ai #essays
• The bromine chokepoint (Apr 26, 2026)
  How the world's memory chip supply quietly depends on a single Israeli plant for high-purity bromine, and what would happen if it stopped.
  #essays #politics
• The cult of vibe coding is insane (Apr 26, 2026)
  Bram Cohen: shipping bad software is a choice, and 'vibe coding' is just dogfooding bad practice and calling it innovation.
  #ai #essays
• Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't (Apr 26, 2026)
  The free-market story the U.S. tells itself about ISPs falls apart against the public-utility infrastructure that actually delivers bandwidth elsewhere.
  #essays #politics
• The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work (Apr 26, 2026)
  Aphyr on what it means to build software when LLMs can fabricate plausible signals at every layer of every system you touch.
  #ai #essays
• The git commands I run before reading any code (Apr 26, 2026)
  Five git log queries that diagnose a new codebase before you open a single file: churn hotspots, bus factor, bug clusters, crisis patterns.
  #essays #tools
• The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. (Apr 26, 2026)
  On AI agents, the grunt work they replace, and the part of doing science that the grunt work was teaching us along the way.
  #ai #essays
• The mystery in the medicine cabinet (Apr 26, 2026)
  Asterisk Magazine on what we still don't know about acetaminophen and ibuprofen, the two most-taken drugs on Earth.
  #essays
• The Quiet Colossus: on Ada (Apr 26, 2026)
  A long appreciation of Ada — its design, its safety culture, and the ideas modern languages keep rediscovering decades late.
  #compsci #essays
• The West forgot how to build. Now it's forgetting code. (Apr 26, 2026)
  How the same skills-erosion that hollowed out Western defence manufacturing is now showing up in software, and why the timelines look identical.
  #ai #essays
• They're made out of meat (1991) (Apr 26, 2026)
  Terry Bisson's classic two-page short. The single best fictional reaction to the question of biological intelligence, and it's just dialogue.
  #essays #fun
• Treetops glowing during storms, captured on film for the first time (Apr 26, 2026)
  Penn State researchers capture corona discharge in tree canopies on camera — tiny ultraviolet pulses dancing at leaf tips during thunderstorms.
  #essays #fun
• USB for software developers (Apr 26, 2026)
  A practical introduction to writing userspace USB drivers — descriptors, transfers, endpoints, and what the kernel does on your behalf.
  #essays #systems
• Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers. (Apr 26, 2026)
  James Hague's case for skipping the dragon book entirely and reading two short papers that get you to a working compiler faster than any textbook.
  #compsci #essays
• What physical life force turns biology's wheels? (Apr 26, 2026)
  Natalie Wolchover at Quanta on the bacterial flagellar motor, finally understood after 50 years — and what its workings reveal about the essence of life.
  #essays
• What we learned building a Rust runtime for TypeScript (Apr 26, 2026)
  Encore on shipping 67K lines of Rust to back TypeScript — handling HTTP, DB, pub/sub, and tracing in Rust while exposing it via NAPI.
  #essays #systems
• Why the most valuable things you know are things you cannot say (Apr 26, 2026)
  On the dimensionality problem: tacit, hard-won knowledge resists transfer because the real signal lives in the parts you can't articulate.
  #essays
• You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings (Apr 26, 2026)
  Eclectic Light Co. demonstrates how to access privacy-protected folders even when System Settings claims they're locked down.
  #essays #privacy #security
• Write less code, be more responsible (Apr 26, 2026)
  orhun on AI-assisted programming as a discipline of restraint — letting the model help, but accepting fewer lines than it offers.
  #ai #code-quality #essays
• Your file system is already a graph database (Apr 26, 2026)
  On treating directories of interlinked markdown as a queryable graph instead of yet another bespoke note-taking app.
  #essays #systems
• Against Vibes: When is a Generative Model Useful (Apr 4, 2026)
  A rigorous framework for evaluating when generative models actually help versus when they just feel helpful.
  #essays
• Allow Me to Get to Know You, Mistakes and All (Apr 4, 2026)
  On embracing imperfection in how we present ourselves and our work.
  #essays
• “Async Programming Is Just Inject Time” (Apr 4, 2026)
  “Reframing async as dependency injection for time — a clean mental model.”
  #essays
• A Decade of Docker Containers (Apr 4, 2026)
  CACM retrospective on how containers reshaped how we build and deploy software.
  #essays
• Austin’s Housing Surge Drove Down Rents (Apr 4, 2026)
  Data showing that building more housing actually lowers rents — Austin as proof.
  #essays
• Backrooms and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic (Apr 4, 2026)
  How liminal spaces and decaying institutions became the dominant horror aesthetic.
  #essays
• Bird Brains (Apr 4, 2026)
  On the surprising intelligence of birds and what it tells us about cognition.
  #essays
• Challenging the Single-Responsibility Principle (Apr 4, 2026)
  Why SRP is more nuanced than the typical conference-talk version suggests.
  #essays
• Good Ideas Do Not Need Lots of Lies (2008) (Apr 4, 2026)
  D² on the epistemic principle that fraud-driven projects require proportionally more deception to sustain.
  #essays
• Do Your Own Writing (Apr 4, 2026)
  On why outsourcing your writing to AI means outsourcing your thinking.
  #essays
• Shall I Implement It? No (Apr 4, 2026)
  A case for saying no to implementation requests until the requirements are actually clear.
  #essays
• A Sufficiently Detailed Spec Is Code (Apr 4, 2026)
  When your specification becomes detailed enough, the gap between spec and implementation disappears.
  #essays
• I Am Definitely Missing the Pre-AI Writing Era (Apr 4, 2026)
  A lament for the lost certainty that what you're reading was written by a human.
  #essays
• “The Small Web Is Bigger Than You Think” (Apr 4, 2026)
  “The indie web isn't as small as people assume — it's just harder to find.”
  #essays
• The Future of Version Control (Apr 4, 2026)
  Bram Cohen on what version control should look like next.
  #essays
• Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for Lazy People (Apr 4, 2026)
  A practical, minimal-effort guide to migrating your repos to Codeberg.
  #essays
• Take Better Notes, By Hand (Apr 4, 2026)
  Why handwriting beats typing for retention and thinking.
  #essays
• Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript (Apr 4, 2026)
  How the Temporal API finally landed in JavaScript after nearly a decade of standards work.
  #essays
• End of an Era: No More Self-Hosted Git (Apr 4, 2026)
  On giving up self-hosted Gitea after AI-generated spam made it untenable.
  #essays
• The Cognitive Dark Forest (Apr 4, 2026)
  When AI floods the information landscape, trust becomes the scarcest resource.
  #essays
• The L in LLM Stands for Lying (Apr 4, 2026)
  A deep critique of how language models generate plausible-sounding text without understanding truth.
  #essays
• How to Talk to Anyone and Why You Should (Apr 4, 2026)
  The Guardian on the art and science of talking to strangers.
  #essays
• “The Window Chrome of Our Discontent” (Apr 4, 2026)
  “On the steady erosion of window chrome in macOS and what it means for usability.”
  #essays
• We Should Revisit Literate Programming in the Agent Era (Apr 4, 2026)
  Knuth's literate programming idea might finally make sense now that AI agents read our code.
  #essays
• What Happens After You Die? (Apr 4, 2026)
  A vivid, unflinching account of what physically happens to your body after death.
  #essays
• When Do We Become Adults, Really? (Apr 4, 2026)
  The New Yorker on the blurring line between adolescence and adulthood.
  #essays
• Wikipedia officially bans AI-generated encyclopedia entries (Apr 4, 2026)
  “Wikipedia draws a hard line against AI-generated content in encyclopedia articles.”
  #essays
• Willingness to Look Stupid (Apr 4, 2026)
  Looking stupid is a genuine competitive advantage in creative and intellectual work.
  #essays
• Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers (Apr 4, 2026)
  Cultural context for collaborating effectively with Japanese engineering teams.
  #essays
• Working on products people hate (Apr 4, 2026)
  On the reality of building software that users resent but depend on.
  #essays
• Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989) (Apr 4, 2026)
  Five timeless rules from the co-creator of Unix and Go.
  #essays
• You Gotta Think Outside the Hypercube (Apr 4, 2026)
  lcamtuf on the importance of lateral thinking in security research.
  #essays
• The Day the Telnet Died (Mar 8, 2026)
  GreyNoise documents the decline of telnet traffic — internet infrastructure history in real time.
  #fun #essays
• Lessons From Living in a Very Snowy Place (Mar 8, 2026)
  Eukaryote Writes Blog on the practical wisdom of deep winter.
  #essays #fun
• Clinejection (Mar 8, 2026)
  How a GitHub issue title led to prompt injection that compromised 4,000 developer machines via AI coding tools.
  #fun #essays
• Aesthetics of Single Threading (Mar 8, 2026)
  Why single-threaded designs have genuine aesthetic and practical appeal.
  #essays #fun
• nCPU (Mar 8, 2026)
  A CPU that runs entirely on a GPU. Deeply weird and genuinely educational systems hack.
  #fun #essays
• Good Software Knows When to Stop (Mar 8, 2026)
  On the discipline of knowing when a feature set is complete.
  #essays #fun
• I'm Reluctant to Verify My Identity for Any Online Service (Mar 8, 2026)
  A privacy-first take on why age and identity verification is a bad default.
  #fun #essays
• The Windows 95 UI: A Usability Case Study (1996) (Mar 8, 2026)
  A detailed ACM case study on the usability engineering behind Windows 95's interface.
  #fun #essays
• Loon (Mar 8, 2026)
  A functional language with invisible types, safe ownership, and algebraic effects.
  #fun #essays
• No Coding Before 10am (Mar 8, 2026)
  On structuring creative work around your actual productive hours.
  #essays #fun
• 406.fail (Mar 8, 2026)
  A protocol spec for rejecting AI-generated pull requests. The RFC parody format is half the fun.
  #fun #essays
• Spying Chrome Extensions (Mar 8, 2026)
  Research uncovering 287 Chrome extensions silently tracking 37 million users.
  #fun #essays
• The Eternal Promise: Attempts to Eliminate Programmers (Mar 8, 2026)
  From COBOL to AI — the recurring cycle of promising that programmers are about to become obsolete.
  #essays #fun
• Those Who Can, Teach History (Mar 8, 2026)
  A defense of teaching as intellectual work, not a fallback career.
  #essays #fun
• On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) (Mar 8, 2026)
  A 1974 paper on what makes a programming language well-designed. Still relevant.
  #fun #essays
• What Not to Write on Your Security Clearance Form (Mar 8, 2026)
  Real answers from security clearance forms, collected in 1988. An internet classic.
  #fun #essays
• Why C Has the Best File API (Mar 8, 2026)
  A case for C's file I/O design being more thoughtful than its successors.
  #essays #fun
• Why Vampires Live Forever (Mar 8, 2026)
  Approaching vampire mythology through biology and evolutionary logic.
  #essays #fun
• Claude's Cycles (Mar 8, 2026)
  A Knuth paper on mathematical cycles. The naming coincidence with the AI is a bonus.
  #fun #essays
• Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension (Mar 1, 2026)
  What happens when teams ship faster than they can understand their own code.
  #essays #code-quality
• Everything changes, and nothing changes (Mar 1, 2026)
  Reflections on AI transforming software engineering while fundamentals persist.
  #essays #ai
• Fentanyl makeover (Mar 1, 2026)
  Scripps researchers redesign fentanyl's molecular core to eliminate overdose risk while keeping efficacy.
  #essays
• HUMAN=true (Mar 1, 2026)
  Essay on slowing down and letting humans think before reaching for AI.
  #essays #ai
• Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardry Explained (Mar 1, 2026)
  How Hendrix engineered his guitar signal chain like a systems engineer.
  #essays
• The happiest I’ve ever been (Mar 1, 2026)
  On finding genuine fulfillment outside tech career ambitions.
  #essays
• The United States needs fewer bus stops (Mar 1, 2026)
  Systems argument for why fewer, better-spaced bus stops would improve transit.
  #essays
• Back to Basics: Why We Chose Long Polling Over WebSockets (Feb 7, 2026)
  Real-time updates with Postgres and HTTP long polling instead of WebSockets. Simpler, fewer moving parts.
  #essays
• DuckDB isn't just fast (Feb 7, 2026)
  A whistlestop tour of the cool bits of DuckDB
  #essays #systems
• How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math (Feb 7, 2026)
  A former math-phobe on how she retrained her brain through deliberate practice and repetition.
  #essays
• Half My Life with Perl (Feb 7, 2026)
  A Perl Advent Calendar 2024 entry reflecting on decades of working with Perl.
  #essays #perl
• Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life (Dec 17, 2025)
  We're hungry for more but have more than we need. We're hungry for less while more accumulates.
  #essays
• Wilted lands and wounded worlds: Nausicaa's environmental costs of war (Jun 20, 2025)
  Visualizing ecological destruction through Miyazaki's lens — beyond the usual narrative and character analyses.
  #essays #anime

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