Cory Doctorow on The Daily Show

Local boy makes good on national teevee!

2025-12-12 cory • doctorow • internet • culture • enshittification • dailyshow • comedy

Hardcode feature flags

In praise of a simple system for a useful and prod-sensitive feature. Complex feature flag systems often fail.

2025-12-12 programming • simplicity • featureflags

Oliver Sacks and homophobia

Heartbreaking story of the famous writer's personal demons

2025-12-09 oliversacks • neuroscience • psychology • gay • lgbt • closet • homophobia

Trans health protest

Bay Area protest against Sutter Health which has capitulated and is saying they won't offer gender affirming healthcare to kids anymore

2025-12-09 protest • trans • transgender • civilrights • lgbt • health • sutterhealth • bayarea

Kennedy Center Honors

Hilarious skewering of the corrupted arts awards

2025-12-09 uspol • trump • corruption • kennedycenter • arts • awards

Burkhard Mangold

Swiss Poster artist from the 1910s

2025-12-08 art • switzerland • poster • herrenwasche

Twitter.New

Some lawyer who formerly worked at Twitter is claiming to create a new Twitter and filing to cancel the old trademarks. Scam? Crazy idea? Weird.

2025-12-08 twitter • trademark • startup • legal

NanoKVM microphone

Small computer management system comes with bugs and a microphone hidden on the circuitboard

2025-12-07 badtech • china • espionage • security • nanokvm • kvm

Straight to Hell (NSFW)

Anthologies of the important gay porn zine are available as scans on Internet Archive.

2025-12-07 gay • lgbt • porn • history

The Land of Giants

Sculpture proposal to turn power line towers into human figures

2025-12-05 via:kottke • art • sculpture • iceland • infrastructure

Kalmyks

The only long-established Buddhist ethnic group in Europe, descendants of Mongols

2025-12-05 history • russia • kalmyk • buddhism • mongols

Typewriter Plotters

A collection of bizarre 80s and 90s printers. Pen plotters with keyboards attached, or other odd hybrids

2025-12-05 plotting • plotterart • cool • via:lobsters • art • graphics • typewriter

Ultracube

A Factorio mod that totally overhauls the game and centers logistical problems, making mass scaling impossible

2025-12-05 games • factorio • mods

Migrations between US states

Visualizations of census data. Texans stay put more than any other state.

2025-12-04 usa • america • census • migration • states

Pluribus ad vs. mental health

Report someone's schizophrenic sister checked herself into a hospital because she thought she was having an episode. Instead, it was an ad for a TV show on her fridge display

2025-12-04 ads • pluribus • mentalhealth • dystopia

AI DA followup

My county prosecutor got caught filing AI slop with the court. Here's the milquetoast response about how they pinkie-swear to do better

2025-12-04 ai • slop • legal • civilrights • nevadacounty • grassvalley • scandal

Public Suffix List

A list of domain names that should not be considered as private to one organization but are instead generally used by many people

2025-12-04 mozilla • security • cookies • spam • web

Gay fantasy novels

A list of fun reading

2025-12-04 gay • fantasy • lgbt • novel

Rasam Varieties

Recipes for the South Indian thin soup

2025-12-03 food • rasam • india • spice • broth • soup

Heap of sand

Interesting probing at how LLMs "think". Read their comment about running the model at temperature 0 to get raw logits

2025-12-01 ai • llm • benchmark

Original affluent society

Anthropologist's view that hunter-gatherer societies were affluent, that people had everything they needed to live well

2025-11-30 society • anthropology • history • sahlins • scarcity • huntergatherer • graeber

Datacenters in space

Some basic realities about why it's a terrible idea to put computing facilities in orbit

2025-11-30 space • ai • hardware • cooling • power • solar

RAGFlow

Software for setting up your own AI with document retrieval

2025-11-29 rag • ai • llm • software • toolkit

Mapping Queer Neighborhoods

A visualization of US census data about same-sex household with some clever processing to highlight neighborhoods

2025-11-29 maps • gay • lgbt • census • queer • demographics • unitedstates

No Longer Evil

Open source project saves the Nest thermostats Google abandoned

2025-11-28 firmware • nest • thermostat • google • opensource • iot

First Homosexuals

Magazine article about the ground breaking queer art exhibition and catalog in Chicago

2025-11-28 art • homosexual • gay • lgbt • history • chicago

American casual nudity

A reflection on the move to more privacy in locker rooms

2025-11-26 nudity • america • culture • body

Youtarr

Automatic downloader for YouTube videos, subscribe to channels

2025-11-26 youtube • arrr • plex • video • download • caching

CodeRED security disaster

An emergency alert service used by many local governments has been completely pwned. All user data stolen, service offline.

2025-11-26 security • badtech • codered • government • alert • incompetence

AI DA

Our local district attorney has been caught using AI to write garbage briefs to wrongly punish people

2025-11-25 ai • nevadacounty • corruption • politics • california • legal

Le Cirque de Calder

Video of the artist performing his miniature circus with sculpture and puppetry

2025-11-25 art • calder • circus • paris • whitney

Calder works

Lovely catalog of many pieces by the artist

2025-11-25 calder • art • gallery • mobile • sculpture

Reaction-Diffusion Playground

A class of generative art systems

2025-11-24 reactiondiffusion • generative • art • turing

fleen.org

An interesting grammar based generative art project. Author has posted lots of images to Reddit but they are hard to find now.

2025-11-24 fleen • art • generative • grammar • opensource

Multi-Scale Turing Patterns

Interesting art generated by algorithms

2025-11-24 generative • art • reactiondiffusion

Fran Sans

A font modelled after Muni destination signs

2025-11-24 fonts • sanfrancisco • muni • fransans • sans • design • typography • segment

Bosom Buddies

Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury being amazing at the Tony awards

2025-11-22 music • musicals • gay • lgbt • beaarthur • angelalansbury • camp

Epstein emails

Gmail clone interface to Jeffrey Epstein email dump

2025-11-22 epstein • joiito • scandal • politics • uspol • rape

AI World Clocks

Various LLMs attempt to render a clock

2025-11-20 via:metafilter • ai • clock • visualization • chatgpt

Fuchsia Dunlop

Long discussion of the culture of food in China and the role the English scholar and author has played in its recognition

2025-11-20 sichuan • food • china • fuchsiadunlop

The fall of Icarus

Lovely photo of a skydiver silhouetted against the sun

2025-11-15 photography • photos • aviation • sun • astronomy

RIP Kit Kat

A Waymo driverless car killed a beloved cat in San Francisco. Remarkably thoughtful piece on the cultural impact and evaluation.

2025-11-15 sanfrancisco • driverlesscars • safety • cars • cats • waymo • robots • ethics

Packrafting The Darién Gap

Journal of a very ambitious man who paddled the Darién Gap in a little rubber raft

2025-11-14 dariengap • travel • panama • colombia

North Star House history

Local landmark has some very interesting connections to early 20th century women's history, including some early Lesbian novels

2025-11-14 women • history • grassvalley • nevadacounty • juliamorgan • northstarhouse

1980s online chat style

Interesting cultural observation that those of us who grew up with early social media tend to write at length and are now being mistaken for ChatGPT

2025-11-13 culture • history • 80s • socialmedia • bbs • internet • chatgpt

AI chatbot love

Interviews and descriptions of three people's intimate relationships with AIs.

2025-11-13 ai • llm • romance • psychology • loneliness • therapy

Hello old friend

A 2019 evergreen comic. Streaming services suck so much we're back to piracy.

2025-11-13 piracy • funny • tv • streaming

Gigantic jet TLE above Mexico

Remarkable photo from the space station showing an electrical jet striking Earth

2025-11-13 astronomy • photography • iss • photos • lightning • tle

Journey to the West (oral)

Chinese epic novel has quite rhythmic prose, link is to a fun short video performance

2025-11-12 china • literature • journeytothewest • Kuaibanshu • poetry • performance • bard

iPhone Pocket

"The design of iPhone Pocket speaks to the bond between iPhone and its user, while keeping in mind that an Apple product is designed to be universal in aesthetic and versatile in use".

2025-11-12 apple • funny • fashion • endtimes • latestagecapitalism

XSLT.RIP

Funny page about an obsolete technology being deprecated. I think this parody?

2025-11-12 xslt • via:jwz • google • chrome • xsl • funny • web • standards

OpenRouter

Run LLM queries on a variety of different systems, with unified pricing and various options to choose how much you spend

2025-11-11 ai • llm • router • aggregator

Fedora Man

The suave Frenchman from the Louvre heist photo turns out to be a 15 kid into dressing like a detective

2025-11-09 charming • france • louvre • cosplay • costume • teenager

Understand Chicago

More notes from living under siege

2025-11-08 politics • chicago • trump • ice • civilrights

Plezy for Plex

A new open source Plex client, major change in that video watching ecosystem if this succeeds

2025-11-05 plex • video • movies • tv • client

Cuomo threatens NYC

Mayor candidate tweets that Trump will invade NYC if he doesn't win the election. Note: Trump endorsed Cuomo.

2025-11-04 trump • politics • uspol • mafia • cuomo • newyork • nyc • fascism

Tear gassing Chicago

Descriptions of what it's like when a small paramilitary group attacks an American city https://archive.is/TH12R

2025-11-03 chicago • politics • uspol • immigration • ice • fascism

The Residents - Commercial Album

Videos for many brilliant one minute songs

2025-11-02 residents • music • video • 80s

UPIC

1970s electric music composition system by Xenakis

2025-11-02 music • electronical • synthesizer • xenakis

The Validation Machines

Raffi Krikorian on the danger of current AI deployment and how to reshape the technology to better support critical thinking

2025-10-31 ai • llm • society • capitalism • raffi • culture

Minecraft removing obfuscation

Some 15 years after first release, finally removing a silly barrier to the mod community

2025-10-29 minecraft • mods • java • programming • via:hackernews

ICE facial recognition abuse

Masked thugs are using a software app that supposedly identifies non-citizens.

2025-10-29 uspol • politics • ice • immigration • fascism • outrage

unsloth

LoRA and other tuning options for LLMs

2025-10-26 opensource • llm • ai • machinelearning • lora • customization

sqlite-vec

Database extension to do vector searches, as for AI queries

2025-10-24 sqlite • database • vectors • ai • programming

Claude Code memory

Addon to the AI coding tool that helps it remember what it's done before

2025-10-23 claude • ai • rag • memory • programming

Cursed Knowledge

A set of hard-won tech lessons building an open source image hosting product

2025-10-22 tech • software • badtech • javascript • programming

No Kings Grass Valley

Photos from our local protest

2025-10-19 nokings • grassvalley • protest • politics • uspol

Pwning Kindle Web

Someone bothers to reverse engineer Amazon's Kindle web version

2025-10-17 drm • ebook • calibre • kindle • amazon

Nvidia DGX Spark

New AI hacking machine, ARM + 120GB Nvidia GPU. Sounds real nice

2025-10-16 ai • llm • nvidia • arm • hardware

Google Recovery Contacts

Another way to get access to a Google account: designate a trusted person as a contact who can vouch for you

2025-10-15 google • authentication • security • 2fa

London and Aberdeen

Postcard thoughts and images from my recent tourist trip

2025-10-15 travel • tourism • london • aberdeen • uk

Living in Grass Valley

Nice article about real estate and visiting my adopted hometown of Grass Valley (and nearby Nevada City)

2025-10-15 grassvalley • nevadacity • california • towns • realestate • travel

Nanochat

Train up your own small LLM for $100 of compute time.

2025-10-14 llm • ai • training

Seahorse emoji and LLMs

Details on a strange error in most LLMs about a non-existent emoji

2025-10-12 llm • ai • logits • seahorse • emoji

Norman Douglas

Sensitive essay about the complicated case of an author who was also a child predator but in a way that was accepted by many in his time

2025-10-11 pedophilia • sex • lgbt • normandouglas • literature • pederasty

Society of Mind

Harper Reed's company has been experimenting with having several AI agents talk to each other via blogs and social media. It seems to be engendering some interesting social intelligence

2025-10-01 agents • ai • llm • harperreed • societyofmind • intelligence • social • socialmedia

NES SMB TAS

Someone figured out how to run arbitrary code in the game Super Mario Bros via control inputs. So here's a Tool Assisted run of him winning the game with a few minutes of music video in the middle

2025-09-29 funny • via:lobsters • games • hacking • tas • smb • nintendo • nes

War-ravaged Portland

Wholesome set of photos from Portlanders in response to Trump's bizarre attack on the city

2025-09-29 trump • politics • uspol • portland • pdx • stumptown

Normalizing Charlie Kirk

Thoughtful editorial on what it means that people venerate Charlie Kirk and ignore all the vile things he said and did

2025-09-28 politics • uspol • racism • charliekirk • whitesupremacy

Cracker Barrel bots

Last month's nontroversy was fueled by a coordinated propaganda campaign

2025-09-27 bots • crackerbarrel • socialmedia • propaganda

Peter Thiel eschatology

Tech leader is full-on bonkers, seeing the Antichrist's hand in efforts to fight climate change or regulate AI

2025-09-26 uspol • politics • thiel • batshitinsane • eschaton • antichrist • ai • climatechange

Tasklet AI

New AI service from email company Shortwave. It's a general AI that can do all sorts of basic tasks for you, particularly scheduling things

2025-09-26 ai • schedule • agent • shortwave • automation

Bundler belongs to the Ruby community

Response to the hostile takeover of core Ruby infrastructure

2025-09-25 ruby • bundler • andre • rubycentral

The DHH problem

More on why the Ruby community is such a mess: A prominent leader is an open white supremacist

2025-09-23 dhh • politics • ukpol • ruby • tirefire • racism • whitesupremacy

RubyGems takeover

More details on the ugly power move from DHH and Shopify to seize control of an open source platform

2025-09-23 ruby • drama • rubygems • packaging • dhh • shopify • sleaze • opensource

Raffi to Mozilla CTO

One of my oldest friends has taken a new role at Mozilla as their CTO

2025-09-22 raffi • mozilla • firefox • ai • cto • career

Health Sync

An app to get data out of Google's Health Connect into somewhere useful

2025-09-21 apps • health • fitness • tracking

Metafilter blocks Mississippi

New age verification law creates too much uncertainty so community site blocks the state

2025-09-21 politics • mississippi • metafilter • ageverification • censorship

Gen Alpha Slang

Funny language demonstration

2025-09-20 via:metafilter • language • linguistics • slang • genalpha • funny

Less is safer

A big Javascript app deliberately doesn't include many Javascript libraries to make their app safer, more resilient to bugs and attacks on third party software

2025-09-20 obsidian • safety • javascript • npm • supplychain

Goebbels Ends Careers

1939 article about an autocratic government ending comedians' careers because they mocked the Nazis

2025-09-20 politics • uspol • fascism • autocracy • jimmykimmel • freedom

Rainbow erasure (Houston)

LGBT landmark in my hometown removed and may not come back because of Federal anti-gay rules

2025-09-19 gay • lgbt • politics • uspol • crosswalk • dot

RubyGems destroyed

Political squabbles in the packaging ecosystem for a programming language, the result being Ruby Central did a hostile takeover of RubyGems

2025-09-19 ruby • politics • dhh • rubygems • rubycentral

Game taxonomy

Metrics for AAA and indie games

2025-09-16 via:waxy • games • budget • aaa • videogames

Steve Shirley

Obituary from a remarkable woman leading a software company in the 60s-90s

2025-09-15 women • feminism • software • tech

VapeServer

Hosting a website via SLIP on a tiny microcontroller from a drug delivery device

2025-09-15 hosting • arm • vape • hacking • slip • internet • funny

Xposed Modules

A list of modules you can use to patch Android apps using LSPosed / LSPatch

2025-09-14 android • hacking • apps • mods

LSPatch

A mod framework for Android system and apps. Patch stuff to work better without requiring root

2025-09-14 android • hacking • patches • mods

Account disasters

Problems logging in to various sites. The author is an expert in the involved technologies, having spent many years helping write the Chrome browser

2025-09-14 badtech • login • passwords • chrome

Fact Sheet 64

1945 propaganda from the US government to returning soldiers about the threat of growing fascism within in the United States

2025-09-12 politics • uspol • fascism • propaganda • army