reading list
2026
Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain , discussion @ Hacker News
Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail , discussion @ Hacker News
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making — Ludicity , discussion @ Hacker News
Jonas Hietala: Blogging in Djot instead of Markdown
libvirt: Libvirt Daemons , libvirt @ ArchWiki
Fred’s ImageMagick Scripts , discussion @ Hacker News
Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?
Reverse Outlining with Language Models
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity) | Larvitz Blog
Debunking zswap and zram myths
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower - apenwarr
Scaling Karpathy’s Autoresearch: What Happens When the Agent Gets a GPU Cluster | SkyPilot Blog
Warranty Void If Regenerated - by Scott Werner - Near Zero
Python Textual: Build Beautiful UIs in the Terminal – Real Python
“This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold
Keyboard Shortcuts every Command Line Hacker should know about GNU Readline - Mastering Emacs
benstopics/powerbasilisk: An open-source 64-bit PowerBasic compiler written in Rust targeting LLVM > PowerBasilisk was created by Ben Ward to modernize Wall Street Raider, a massive, decades-old financial simulation, by moving beyond a brittle bridge layer toward a robust 64-bit architecture. This approach aims to preserve the original engine’s complex logic while enabling cross-platform support and automated testing to ensure long-term stability.
Two thought experiments – Surfing Complexity
How I use Obsidian — Steph Ango discussion @ HN
What is happening to writing? - by Benjamin Breen
Thin Is In – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Never mind the lit-bros: Infinite Jest is a true classic at 30 - classic? great read though
Programming is Dead - argues programming is no longer a job
Prompt caching: 10x cheaper LLM tokens, but how? | ngrok blog - visual explainer covering prompt caching, tokenization, embeddings and the transformer architecture
Why Im not worried about AI job loss - David Oks - rebuttal to something big is happening, argues AIs impact on the labor market will be slower and more manageable than predicted
:D South Park episode inspired by something big is happening using Seedance 2
Something Big Is Happening - IMO, hype but stumbles on facts
Introduction to PyTorch | 0byte - visual guide to pytorch
microgpt - a single file of 200 lines of pure Python with no dependencies that trains and inferences a GPT
Kanchipuram Saris & Thinking Machines | Alter Magazine - discussion @ Hacker News - Using computers, cryptography and AI to design Kanchipuran silk sarees, revive an ailing business and combat fakes using cryptography.
World Models | Ankit Maloo - World Models move beyond mere pattern matching to predicting how interventions change states in the real world. The future of AI lies in learning the causal laws of environments, to simulate consequences
The CLOSURE companion - the final enigmatic work by the programmer ’_why the lucky stiff’, postmodern farewell
_why’s complete printer spool as one book
Prompting 101: Show, don’t tell - discussion @ Lobsters
Shotcut 25.12 Released With 10-bit Video CPU Pipeline, Linear Color Processing - Phoronix
39C3: Power Cycles - 39th Chaos Communication Congress Videos - discussion@HN
Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet - Cory Doctorow
A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet - Cory Doctorow
Variable Fonts — It Was Never About File Size - media.ccc.de - ‘A brief history of typographic misbehavior or intended and unintended uses of variable fonts.’
Celestial navigation with very little math - media.ccc.de - ‘Learn how to find your position using a sextant and a custom slide rule, almost no math required!’
Persist, resist, stitch - media.ccc.de - ‘What does knitting have to do with espionage? Can embroidery help your mental health? This talk shows how the skills to create textile art have enabled people to resist and to persist under oppressive regimes for centuries. And it offers ways to keep doing so’
Current Drone Wars - media.ccc.de
Kenji Tanaka LIVE // Insights into my workflow, structure and philosophy - media.ccc.de
From Silicon to Darude Sand-storm: breaking famous synthesizer DSPs - media.ccc.de
Lightning Talks - Tag 3 - media.ccc.de - Graphics Creation with Graphite - How to build a hackable graphics Editor - The Modulator: a Custom Controller for Live Music Performance
Lightning Talks - Tag 2 - media.ccc.de - Quantum computing myths and reality - What’s the most secure phone? - From word clouds to Word Rain: A new text visualisation technique - AI doesn’t have to slop - Introducing an open source alternative to big-tech AI agents
APT Down and the mystery of the burning data centers - media.ccc.de
51 Ways to Spell the Image Giraffe: - media.ccc.de
The art of text (rendering) - media.ccc.de
Xous: A Pure-Rust Rethink of the Embedded Operating System - media.ccc.de
AI-generated content in Wikipedia - a tale of caution - media.ccc.de
Agentic ProbLLMs: Exploiting AI Computer-Use and Coding Agents - media.ccc.de
NETFLIX OPEN CONTENT - initiative from Netflix that shares high-quality test and reference media assets under a Creative Commons license
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Silba - substack - about Nassim Nicholas Taleb, his approach to tail risk, notion of antifragility — systems that gain from disorder
2025
Useful patterns for building HTML tools
Inside the rise and fall of Podemos (Spain) ‘We believed we had a stake in the future’
Everyone in Seattle Hates AI Anyone trying to build anything new in Seattle. Say "AI" and people treat you like a threat or an idiot.
Missing in the Amazon - Guardian podcast "Missing in the Amazon" by Guardian Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips, dives deep into the 2022 disappearance of his colleague, journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous defender Bruno Pereira in the remote Javari Valley. It details the specific confrontation between Pereira, the dedicated protector and the poacher known as "Pelado"
Korea Has Surpassed Japan in Per Capita GDP
Has Google Quietly Solved Two of AI’s Oldest Problems?
AMD GPUs go brrr · Hazy Research
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation | Max Woolf’s Blog
Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break | discussion @ Hacker News
12 Things I’ve Heard Boomers Say That I Agree With 100%
Ilya Sutskever – We’re moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
Fifty Shades of OOP | Lesley Laidiscussion @ Lobsters
addyosmani/gemini-cli-tips: Gemini CLI Tips and Tricksdiscussion @ Hacker News
Game design is simple, actually – Raph Koster
Wemino/MadnessPatch A patch that fixes various issues in the PC port of Alice: Madness Returns
The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful - Arnon Shimoni
10 Smart Performance Hacks For Faster Python Code | The PyCharm Blog
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation | Max Woolf’s Blog
What if you don’t need MCP at all?
p-e-w/heretic: Fully automatic censorship removal for language modelsdiscussion @ HN
2024
Metaphor: ReFantazio - Rock Paper Shotgun
Rabbit Waves Asianometry & Dylan Patel – How the Semiconductor Industry Actually Works - YouTube
The Complete Guide to Yakisugi (Shou Sugi Ban)
Python Programming Exercises, Gently Explained
What are some good python codebases to read? - Lobsters
The Composition Over Inheritance Principle
miyuchina/mistletoe: A fast, extensible and spec-compliant Markdown parser in pure Python.
From Caveman to Chinaman - Cremieux Recueil
Briefly, seasonality is primarily dependent on three factors. The first is the Earth’s tilt, or obliquity, which determines how hemispheres will be tilted towards the Sun in summer and away in winter. The other two factors are lesser-known, but they are nevertheless important. They are the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit, which is how elliptical it is, and the precession, which is about whether the Earth’s closest approach to the Sun happens in the northern or southern hemisphere’s summer season
CORDIC is an algorithm for computing trig functions like sin, cos, tan etc on low powered hardware, without an FPU (i.e. no floating point) or expensive lookup tables. In fact, it reduces these complex functions to simple additions and bit shifts.
githublog/2024/5/10/cordic.md at main · francisrstokes/githublog
On April 5th, xkcd released Machine, the 15th annual April Fools project I’ve made with them.
It’s a game we’d been dreaming of for years: a giant rube goldberg machine builder in the style of the classic Incredible Machine games, made of a patchwork of machines created by individual xkcd readers
Machine, Development notes from xkcd’s “Machine”
2023
Sculpting a Python function - by Nobody has time for Python
Data Classes in Python 3.7+ (Guide) – Real Python
Make your own Tower Defense Game with PyGame • Inspired Python
Malcolm Gladwell and William Cohan on What Really Happened to GE
Life Lessons After 10 Years of BetterExplained.com – BetterExplained
‘Story Of Your Life’ Is Not A Time-Travel Story · Gwern.net
What “Drive My Car” Reveals on a Second Viewing
‘Drive My Car’ and ‘Uncle Vanya’: How Intertextuality Enriches a Film
Creating Isometric RPG Game Backgrounds - using Stable Diffusion techniques to create 2D game environments
Great game development is actively harmed by this assumption. Pre-allocating resources at an early stage interrupts the exploratory iteration needed to find the fun in a game. A written plan that stretches months into the future is like a stake through the heart of a good game process. Instead of quickly pivoting to amplify a delightful opportunity found during play testing, you end up blindly barreling towards completion on a some ineffectual paper fantasy.
A Skeleton Key to Ali Smith’s Artful — The Airship, from the Wayback machine
The most beautiful thing about Ali Smith’s book Artful — at once a series of real-life Oxford lectures and a metafictional post-love story — is the way she carries us through her unnamed narrator’s emotional progression
The Guardian review, theliterarysisters, #AliSmith
Google - We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI, discussion at Hacker News
Leaked internal document claims open-source will outcompete Google and OpenAI the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.
Development notes from xkcd’s Gravity and Escape Speed #gamedev
Escape Seed is a large space exploration game created and drawn by Randall Munroe.
This was one of the most ambitious — and most delayed — April Fools comics we’ve ever shipped. The art, physics, story, game logic, and render performance all needed to work together to pull this off. We decided to take the time to get it right.
The game is a spiritual successor to last year’s Gravity space exploration comic. Our goal was to deepen the game with a bigger map and more orbital mechanics challenges to play with.
Andreas Fragner - Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
Ted Chiang’s essay - Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?, comments from Schneier on Security. previously, Ted Chiang - ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Paul Theroux @LRB
2022
Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy and American History
The ‘Dead-Internet Theory’ Is Wrong but Feels True - The Atlantic
An app can be a home-cooked meal
Ian Rankin on Patricia Highsmith’s hunger for love and thought
Arundhati Roy, novelist with a sting
Benyamin on how he became a writer
2021
The Truth, by Stanisław Lem by Stanisław Lem, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Lem’s 1964 story, published in English for the first time, tells the tale of a scientist in an insane asylum theorizing that the sun is alive.
The meditative empathy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi - Vox by Constance Grady
There is something meditative about watching Piranesi live, the purity of his life and the kindness of it. And Piranesi’s kindness is possible in part because he lives in such communion with the House, which is his world. He respects the House and knows how to live within it, and in turn the House blesses him with its bounties.
The Sellout won the Booker Prize. This blistering passage on white male privilege shows why. - Vox by Constance Grady
In the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose …
9 Fictional Friendships that Explore Male Intimacy - Electric Literature by Jackson Frons
At the fulcrum of Roberto Bolaño’s kaleidoscopic epic Savage Detectives, are the poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the author’s alter ego. The mysterious leaders of the Visceral Realists, drift through Spain, Israel, North Africa, and Mexico sharing an unspoken and often inscrutable bond as they phase in and out of contact
‘Heartbreak is part of doing anything you want to do’ - Paul Beatty, Kate Kellaway interviews Paul Beatty
You are wary of other people’s questions. What questions do you ask yourself?
I don’t ask myself big questions. I’ve a friend who was struggling, saying: “I don’t know why I am here… what is the purpose?” I said: “There is no purpose.” If there were a purpose, then I would be frozen.
Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama by Christian Lorentzen
Environmental despoliation, economic regression, and enthroned sexism and bigotry are already on the cards. For all the turmoil on our streets and abroad, literary historians may look back at the Obama years as a time of tranquility …
Joan Didion: Only Disconnect Off Center: Essays by Barbara Grizzutti Harrison (1980).
I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator’s having pleated instead of gathered her new diningroom curtains. These, and other assorted facts – such as the fact that Didion chose to buy the dress Linda Kasabian wore at the Manson trial at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills – put me more in mind of a neurasthenic Cher than of a writer who has been called America’s finest woman prose stylist.
A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon by Vulture Editors
A panel of critics tells us what belongs on a list of the 100 most important books of the 2000s … so far.
The World According to Peter Thiel - Erik Torenberg’s Thoughts
His claim is that we’ve had this narrow cone of progress around the world of bits—around software & IT — but not atoms. The iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old & unchanged our current environment is. If you were to be in any room in 1973, everything would look the same except for our phones. This explains his old Founders Fund tagline: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Zooming out, people don’t understand how important economic growth is. It’s the only thing sustaining the planet. Without it, we go into a malthusian war. Indeed: The only way our societies have worked for at least 250 years is by economic growth. Parliamentary democracies are built on an ever-expanding pie that they can continue subdividing. Once the pie is no longer expanding, everything turns zero-sum.
Cyberdecks For High-Tech Low-Lifes - The Dork Web
The term “Cyberdeck” was first coined in Gibson’s 1984 literary masterpiece, Neuromancer. He rewrote parts of Neuromancer several times after the release of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Blade Runner was based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Scott, Dick, Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, Goddard’s Alphaville and work by futurists such as Syd Mead and Moebius make the title of “father of Cyberpunk” hard to hang on Gibson alone. But he’s clearly a very important character in the development of Cyberpunk culture.
Just as Shakespeare brought in new words to describe new worlds, 1980s Gibson is Cyberpunk’s Great Bard. The Cyberdeck is just one of Gibson’s literary gifts. It’s the tool that lets Console Cowboys jack into the Matrix of Cyberspace and start hacking.
The anthropologist in an economist world - Altered States of Monetary Consciousness
Anthropology starts from the recognition that a person - in the first instance at least - cannot exist apart from a group. Put differently, anthropology assumes that a human network always precedes its individual members, and that care and reproduction precede any form of solo heroics. Human babies don’t survive long if they are left to fend for themselves, and - even if they miraculously survived without others - they would not be able to speak language, which would make all future social interaction, relationships and trade near-impossible.
The age-old strategy of buying cheap shares is faltering - Hacker News
the article is behind paywall, but the discussion at HN is interesting (premii)
Why You Should Use Component-Based Design in Unity
Let’s say that any weapon will have a component for damage, range, and projectiles (optional). Using Unity’s UI, you could create a weapon by dragging these components onto any GameObject and customizing the values of each one. Then, if the way projectiles are handled changes further into development, all you need to do is change one script, and all your weapons’ functionalities will be updated instead of just those defined at one level of a tree.
2020
The World According to Peter Thiel - Erik Torenberg’s Thoughts
His claim is that we’ve had this narrow cone of progress around the world of bits—around software & IT — but not atoms. The iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old & unchanged our current environment is. If you were to be in any room in 1973, everything would look the same except for our phones. This explains his old Founders Fund tagline: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Zooming out, people don’t understand how important economic growth is. It’s the only thing sustaining the planet. Without it, we go into a malthusian war. Indeed: The only way our societies have worked for at least 250 years is by economic growth. Parliamentary democracies are built on an ever-expanding pie that they can continue subdividing. Once the pie is no longer expanding, everything turns zero-sum.
Cyberdecks For High-Tech Low-Lifes - The Dork Web
The term “Cyberdeck” was first coined in Gibson’s 1984 literary masterpiece, Neuromancer. He rewrote parts of Neuromancer several times after the release of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Blade Runner was based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Scott, Dick, Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, Goddard’s Alphaville and work by futurists such as Syd Mead and Moebius make the title of “father of Cyberpunk” hard to hang on Gibson alone. But he’s clearly a very important character in the development of Cyberpunk culture.
Just as Shakespeare brought in new words to describe new worlds, 1980s Gibson is Cyberpunk’s Great Bard. The Cyberdeck is just one of Gibson’s literary gifts. It’s the tool that lets Console Cowboys jack into the Matrix of Cyberspace and start hacking.
The anthropologist in an economist world - Altered States of Monetary Consciousness
Anthropology starts from the recognition that a person - in the first instance at least - cannot exist apart from a group. Put differently, anthropology assumes that a human network always precedes its individual members, and that care and reproduction precede any form of solo heroics. Human babies don’t survive long if they are left to fend for themselves, and - even if they miraculously survived without others - they would not be able to speak language, which would make all future social interaction, relationships and trade near-impossible.
The age-old strategy of buying cheap shares is faltering - Hacker News
the article is behind paywall, but the discussion at HN is interesting (premii)
Why You Should Use Component-Based Design in Unity
Let’s say that any weapon will have a component for damage, range, and projectiles (optional). Using Unity’s UI, you could create a weapon by dragging these components onto any GameObject and customizing the values of each one. Then, if the way projectiles are handled changes further into development, all you need to do is change one script, and all your weapons’ functionalities will be updated instead of just those defined at one level of a tree.