Links — #essays

• 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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