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ai;dr
For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?
An AI agent published a hit piece on me
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
Lines of Code Are Back (and It's Worse Than Before)
The metric we killed is back, and AI made it worse
A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…
Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users
Viva.com, one of Europe's largest payment processors, sends verification emails without a Message-ID header — a requirement of RFC 5322 since 2008. Google Workspace rejects them outright. Their support team's response to my detailed bug report: your account has a verified email, so there's no problem.
Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings
What exists is a matter of public opinion
Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed
Across 16 coding models, hashline’s content-hash line anchors beat patch for 14 models; the weakest models gained the most.
Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code
Parsing a statistics textbook with Deepseek OCR on Modal
The "Crown of Nobles" Noble Gas Tube Display (2024)
In my day job I work with ion thrusters for spacecraft, which are essentially electric-powered rockets that fling Xenon gas out at super high speeds to provide thrust and allow satellites to change…
Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story – MJ Rathbun
I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.
The missing digit of Stela C
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in…
How to make a living as an artist
An essay by fnnch on making a living as an artist.
Claude Code is being dumbed down?
A blog by Yoshi.
Kimwolf Botnet Swamps Anonymity Network I2P
For the past week, the massive “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet known as Kimwolf has been disrupting The Invisible Internet Project (I2P), a decentralized, encrypted communications network designed to anonymize and secure online communications. I2P users started reporting disruptions in the network around the same…
Why vampires live forever
The modern longevity movement's obsession with blood transfusions makes perfect sense — if you accept that Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson are vampires.
Do not apologize for replying late to my email
Do not apologize for replying late to my email par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle
AI automation and the Four Horsemen of the paper jam.
Something Big Is Happening
A personal note for the non-tech people in my life on what AI is starting to change — why it's moving faster than you think, and what to do about it.
The AI Vampire
This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.
Communities are not fungible
Why we can’t go home again
The three year myth
I got let go from my job - elimination of role, they're claiming - so I'm understandably a bit raw. So was my boss from what it looked like, though he still has a paycheck and benefits whereas I do not. Still, rawness is an excellent time to reflect on
The switch to Linux and the beginning of my self-hosting journey
How I got into Linux and how that eventually led me to get into self-hosting.
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
src= alt="Always has been astronaut meme" / "Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?" "Always has been." Everyone in San Francisco is talking about t
Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)
I discuss several commonly held perspectives on the complex numbers and explore how their differences engage with several aspects of structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics.
Competition is not market validation
How to not fall into the fallacy of seeing competition as a proof of Product-Market Fit
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
I still love developing but the shifts that AI have brought are tectonic and are forcing me to re-evaluate my own relationship to building things