These are some sites, webpages, talks, etc. I found interesting.
Blogs
All of the people of whom I list the blog here have one thing in common: they can get you interested in a subject you initially don’t care about just by writing about it.
This section is sorted alphabetically.
Ali Reza Hayati ~> Not a browser war but a Web war
Arne Bahlo ~> We Need to Bring Back Webrings
Benedict Evans ~> Generative AI and intellectual property
Brain Baking ~> Is Your Website Training AI?, ChatGPT Is Worse For Students Than Stack Overflow, Smartphone Pervasiveness
But she’s a girl…: Emacs and Vim, Split keyboards, Linux… Bsag has greatly participated in my interest for split keyboards (after it started).
Drew Devault: maintainer of Sway, Sourcehut, Aerc (which I use), and others.
Infinite Ink ~> Getting Started With qutebrowser, Generating Passphrases Like “correct horse battery staple"
Jake Ginesin: Great blog in terms of aesthetics but also in content. One of the rare blog where I’ve read every page.
Julia Evans ~> Monitoring Small Web Services
Martin Tournoij ~> The Art of Unix Programming
Michał Sapka: ~> Charybdis, Mastodon Has Already Won, Mastodon and ActivityPub, Reddit and the centralized Web
Ploum ~> Splitting the Web, How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse), Une bulle d’intelligence artificielle et de stupidité naturelle, Keynote Touraine Tech 2023 : Pourquoi ?, Gemini, le protocole du slow web, A Society That Lost Focus
Solène: ~> OpenBSD, Qubes OS, git-annex, NixOS, and I won’t list all subjects.
Vivek Haldar ~> Productivity porn, GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression
Bradley Taunt ~> My coffe maker just makes coffee, Switching to suckless software, Do you have an extra $10?, Stop using custom webfonts
mntn ~> Backbone surveillance and the future of privacy, Hello world! Building a multi-protocol blog with Nix, Hugo, gmnhg, and Sourcehut
mrus ~> Gemini is Solutionism at its Worst, Git on Roids, MailMan3 on OpenBSD 7.1, Linux on the Phone: Part One, How Do You Trust That Your Personal Machine Is Not Compromised?
nerdypepper: I love how minimal this site looks. If you are into split keyboards like me (and maybe also otherwise), you’ll have to check out their post programming on 34 keys.
Articles / papers
Index 1,600,000,000 Keys with Automata and Rust: A great article from Andrew Gallant, the developer of ripgrep, about “using finite state machines as a data structure, which enable storing a large number of keys in a small amount of space while remaining easily searchable.” I managed to get a 20/20 at my “Grand Oral” (part of the Baccalauréat, the french end of high school exam) talking about this concept.
Paul Ford - I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds: how the tildeverse started
“Here is what you do:
- Visit an article, blog post, or Russian-hosted text-file e-book site that you’d like to read.
- Click at the beginning of the headline, scroll to the bottom without clicking, and shift-click the end.
- Command-C.
- Paste into Your Friend the Text Editor.
- Print. Keep the lovely Monospace font. Print 4 pages per sheet, so it is small enough but still big enough.
- Fold your pages up. Take them to the park. Take them to work. Scribble all over everything. Make notes. Plan tweets about notes.
- Find your pages years later, under the desk. Wonder how you could have ever been so wrong, so very wrong.”
xkcd 1205: is it worth the time?, xkcd 806: Tech Support
oldweb.today: browse the web with old browsers like NetScape
I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren’t are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show “news”, ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.
You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter. This is why I created 12ft.io.
The Missing Semester Of Your CS Education
Let’s Design A Keyboard With Ergogen v4
Generative AI like Midjourney creates images full of stereotypes - Rest of World
The role of keyboard design in advanced shell programs
FediPrimer - Chatty, Basic, Easy To Understand Explanations Of Fediverse Concepts
Talks / Videos
Glenn Greenwald - Why Privacy Matters
Mattia Dal Ben - 34 Keys Is All You Need
Ultimateeick - Why Calvin and Hobbes is the Greatest Comic Strip Ever Made