Links — #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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