Links

Links to things that I've found interesting. This is currently a combination of:

For now, I'm showing the latest 25 links. There is an RSS feed available.


Carmakers like VW are bringing back buttons because drivers loathe all the touchscreens

slate.com

“These screens are presented as this avant garde, minimalist design,” said Matt Farah, a car reviewer and host of The Smoking Tire, an auto-focused YouTube channel and podcast. “But really, it’s the cheapest way possible of building an interior.” Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls.

Hell yes.

elkowar/eww

github.com

ElKowars wacky widgets

jart/cosmopolitan

github.com

build-once run-anywhere c library

m-ender/hexagony

github.com

A two-dimensional, hexagonal programming language.

Computers and creativity with Molly Mielke — Metamuse podcast #30

museapp.com

I may have more to say still about the Muse app at some point, but in the meantime, this podcast was great. And I wish I had Molly’s togetherness when I was her age!

So many gems in this.

  • Tool humility — what you are building is one of many that a user is using
  • Computers should serve the user
  • Tool interoperability & data exchange
  • Blue sky academic ideas vs. commercial reality

thesephist/tabloid

github.com

A minimal programming language inspired by clickbait headlines

It's Not Cool to Overreact: How Normalcy Bias Will Define Our Future

jessicawildfire.substack.com

Psychologists have observed this pattern over and over again in everything from earthquakes to traffic accidents. It’s practically baked in that 70 percent of people will wait until it’s too late to solve a crisis.

AI and the American Smile

medium.com

This confrontation with the culture clash of smiling for an Eastern European immigrant in America hits close to home. Which is why seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, “cheese” smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring. It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.

Collections: On ChatGPT

acoup.blog

ChatGPT does not sit atop a great library it can peer through at will; it has read every book in the library once and distilled the statistical relationships between the words in that library and then burned the library.

Software is not defined by the language it's written in

garrit.xyz

When starting a new project, try to focus on the domain of the problem and pick a language based on that. Don’t decide on the language before you know what problem you’re trying to solve. If the answer to this is always one option (like Rust), you might be in a bubble.

Supersaturated Solutions - Working with Sodium Acetate

youtube.com

In this video, Mr. Krug shows how to make a supersaturated solution of sodium acetate and what these interesting solutions can do.

Jessica acquired an interesting heating pack based on this process. You flex a small steel disc, which is enough stress on the fluid to knock molecules out of suspension, beginning a chain reaction.

Competition

macwright.com

There are answers to those questions, but does it matter? The reality is that most people don’t have the time or need to understand the differences between different companies and products. If the first thing they try works, then great - even if it isn’t the perfect, most efficient way to do it. This is, after all, what advertising is: a way of telling people that some product is the thing that they need.

Americans Have Mostly Forgotten the Iraq War. I Haven’t.

nytimes.com

I spent almost a decade covering Iraq, first arriving in 2002 when the country was still under Mr. Hussein. It has now been 20 years since the start of the war, with all of its shock and awe. But on this anniversary, instead of thinking about how the war began, I’ve been contemplating whether wars end for the people who lived through them.

Something I wrote at the time (February 2003):

I think that peace should be given more of a chance, and that a multi-lateral inspections process, like the one we have, should be allowed some more time. It’s like watching impatient kids who just want to jump on the war bandwagon. Yes, we may have probably given Iraq more time than they deserved already (11+ years or what have you), but that doesn’t mean that Step 2 is to annihilate the country since inspections “haven’t worked yet”. I think all this pressure on Iraq is good, however I think it has moved past the point of military pressure to have become military preparation.

biscuitehh/pam-watchid

github.com

PAM plugin module that allows the Apple Watch to be used for authentication

CircuitPython on Raspberry Pi (Bare Metal / No OS)

learn.adafruit.com

Instead of Raspberry Pi OS, one can now use CircuitPython instead. CircuitPython running without another operating system (OS) is typically known as “bare metal”. This greatly simplifies system maintenance and makes it easier to treat the Raspberry Pi like a microcontroller. In addition, running CircuitPython on the Raspberry Pi increases the amount of flash and RAM available to CircuitPython programs. Finally, it also adds the ability to use displayio on HDMI displays.

Mountain Duck

mountainduck.io

Mountain Duck lets you mount server and cloud storage as a disk in Finder on macOS and the File Explorer on Windows. Open remote files with any application and work like on a local volume.

Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

prog21.dadgum.com

Would you trust a music notation program developed by a non-musician? A Photoshop clone written by someone who has never used Photoshop professionally? But I don’t want to dwell on the negative side of this.

Here’s my advice to people who make these queries:

Stop and think about all of your personal interests and solve a simple problem related to one of them.

So Long, Prog21

prog21.dadgum.com

It’s not about technology for its own sake. It’s about being able to implement your ideas.

xyproto/orbiton

github.com

🌀 Config-free text editor and IDE limited to VT100. Suitable for writing git commit messages, editing Markdown, config files, source code, viewing man pages and for quick edit-compile cycles when programming. Incl. syntax highlighting, jump-to-error, rainbow parentheses, macros, tab compl., cut/paste portals, a gdb front-end & ChatGPT supp.