Inspired by Jedda’s Postroll, here is an incomplete list of blog posts that I’ve read and enjoyed in the last 3 months. This list refreshes daily.
If you find any of these posts interesting, I suggest that you give them a follow!
Steven brings up an interesting trend that simulation games tend to simulate how we consume an experience rather than perform it. The strongest example he gives here is sports simulation games.
Part of it, I think is that watching sports is already a hobby. So why not make a game that engages people in their hobby more.
Another reason I think is that first-person perspective games are rare in general. Even in the shooter genre, we see third-person perspectives.
Funny enough, vehicle simulation games such as Truck Simulator and Flight Simulator are closer to the actual experience. I remember when I first played the former I was frustrated that I couldn’t park an 18-wheeler easily ;D
Added: January 11, 2026
This is the first time I’ve heard of a service where you have a Christmas tree at your house for a month out of the year and it spends the rest of its time at a farm. Very interesting!
Added: January 10, 2026
WHOIS is dead, long live RDAP by
Public service announcement that we should be using RDAP now instead of WHOIS.
Added: January 7, 2026
It’s Uncomfortable To Sit With “I Don’t Know” by
Overall as humans, we like self-confident people. I’m not an expert in large language models (LLMs), but I can only imagine that during fine-tuning they were optimized to exhibit confident behavior.
What this means for us is that we need to be skeptical and take responses with a grain of salt. Though that isn’t a new issue. What’s more interesting to me is how we treat these LLMs similar to how we treat news outlets: trusting that coverage in an unfamiliar area is correct even if we don’t trust it’s reporting in an area that we’re familiar with.
Added: January 6, 2026
How does a smoke alarm work? by
Wow, I didn’t think that a smoke detector is primarily a photo sensor! This post shows a cool picture-by-picture breakdown of one that was in Andreas’ house. Simple, but gets the job done.
Added: January 4, 2026
NarraScope is open for submissions by
It’s super cool to see an interactive narrative conference happening in my neck of the woods! If you’re interested, definitely check it out.
Added: January 4, 2026
Reasons to Love the Field of Programming Languages by
Great collection of human, mathematical, and pragmatic reasons to love programming languages.
Added: January 4, 2026
Friendly Little Wrapper Types by
I’m all for introducing opaque wrapper types. It also makes it easier to identify the parts of the codebase we need to change when we want our user id to wrap over something else.
Added: December 28, 2025
Oh no! I hope the solar panel has some windshield wipers to clear off the snow. At this time of writing, his solar dashboard shows that the battery is at 11%.
Added: December 28, 2025
Writing down (and searching through) every UUID by
This is such a fun idea! I also love Nolen’s idea of designing a bijective function between the natural numbers and the UUIDs themselves. This allows for a seemingly random order, while also staying complete and quickly searchable.
Added: December 28, 2025
Drawing Truchet tiles in SVG by
These truchet tiles look very cool and funky. Another awesome example of algorithmically generated art.
Added: December 27, 2025
I really enjoyed the fisherman and businessman parable. To me, the journey of life is important and I believe that we should strive to appreciate each year. Otherwise, we’ll get to the destination and realize it’s not all we imagined it to be.
Added: December 27, 2025
One weird trick for cheaper physical Switch 2 games? by
Buying a physical game and selling the box is such a funny strategy! Even if that strategy tanks with adoption, at least it’d encourage physical copies more. I worry about the day where everything becomes digital and tied to your account.
Added: December 27, 2025
No one can argue that both compression and encryption are highly useful. Who knew, however, that it’s difficult to have both!
This post goes over why one would never want to first encrypt and then compress, and how the other way around can be dangerous when an adversary can control the payload.
Added: December 22, 2025
This is Fine: an Interim Microblogging Protocols Update by
Nate seems to have tried out every protocol under the sun: Nostr, ActivityPub, Diaspora, AT, etc. It’s always great to read their thoughts about the latest developments :)
Added: December 22, 2025
On Creating My Own Cover Art by
I don’t add image thumbnails to my own posts. However, if I was, then I will likely take a similar approach to Kevin; writing code to generate art is cool.
Added: December 21, 2025
On economics by
There’s something alluring about feeling like one has the power to forsee the future. We see this in the rise of sports gambling and prediction markets. While I have no interest in betting with real money, I do think that the narcissist forecasting contest, that David shared is a fun idea. The questions in this contest sample from many categories including business, celebrities, crime, and politics. Most of which, I’m fully unqualified to make guesses in.
One summer, I had a roommate who was studying for a job in finance. They told me that estimation is a key skill. In other words, trying to get into the “ballpark” of the solution. Maybe they’ll excel in these contests.
Added: December 21, 2025
We can’t read each other’s minds, so making decisions that maximizes happiness in a group is difficult. In an ideal world, everyone would be open about their preferences and how strong those are. From there, we can use a classic algorithm like Plurality voting to come to a decision.
Though sadly, sometimes we can’t be open about our preferences. For our sanity’s sake, I hope we’re not in the Abilene Paradox too often.
Added: December 21, 2025
December 8th is Nighthawk's Solstice by
I hereby raise awareness of Nighthawk’s Solstice, which celebrates the day of the earliest sunset of the winter.
Reading this post got me excited. I don’t have to wait until the winter solstice to get more sun in the evening? I agree that the Nighthawk’s solstice should be discussed way more.
Added: December 8, 2025
Who wins when we filter the open web through an opaque system? by
I write informational blog posts in hope that it helps people solve their problems. Large language models (LLMs) also regularly ingest these blog posts and I imagine that some of that gets used when crafting a response to a prompt. Is the filtered information helpful? Is it succinct and to the point, or is it pedagogical?
Honestly, this makes me wish that LLMs by default exposed the sources it used to answer the queries. I appreciate the efforts that Kagi and Perplexity place in this regard.
Added: December 1, 2025
Being late but still being early by
Pierce talks about the technology adoption curve and how it’s easy to feel late even when the overwhelming majority of people have not tried it. To me, a great example of this is self-driving taxis. If you live in a city that offers them, you likely know several people who have tried them out. However, to many people it is still a pipe dream.
Though instead of focusing on adoption, the blog post discusses the internal conflict that arises when deciding whether it’s appropriate to invest money into a technology. As of the time of writing, I don’t often make targeted bets like these. Therefore, I’ll pull us back to discussing adoption instead.
Not all technologies make it past the first initial stages. Therefore, there is a cost to adopting a technology too early. Perhaps the shiny new JavaScript framework becomes obsolete in a couple years, and we have to rewrite our app. On the other end, there’s also a cost to waiting too long. Why refresh a webpage constantly for live updates, when instead we can use websockets?
Or, maybe what we have is good enough and we never have to update our computer to an operating system created after the year 2000.
So like Pierce, I’m constantly evaluating and re-evaluating what is out there. Immutable Linux distributions have been around for many years, but I’ve only recently started using them. Should I be looking into Quantum Computing? Would using a personal knowledge graph give me any additional insights?
There’s no right answer to these questions. But actively thinking through this likely puts us near the front of the technology adoption curve.
Added: November 30, 2025
I do find it ironic that a restorative piece of Benjamin Walter’s passport photo is used as the prominent image on his Wikipedia page. However, why this is the case makes sense to me.
Wikipedia aims to be the world’s encyclopedia. As such, the editors summarize many notable events, concepts, and people. This distillation process is inherently non-authentic or in other words lacks aura.
An institution which instead aims to preserve significant objects is a museum. Yesterday, I went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. There they proudly displayed sketches and color studies of famous artists of picture books. Not all objects on display were the original. However, those that were not were instead exact copies or facsimiles.
Added: November 23, 2025
This post actually inspired me to think about my own desk setup. In my home office, I have a L-shaped desk where one end faces the wall and the other end faces the rest of the room. I have my dual-monitor setup on the latter desk.
What ended up happening over time is that the desk facing the wall accumulated stuff and become more of a storage location than usable space. So let’s change that! I like sketching initial ideas of proofs and algorithms on paper, so I’ll start using that desk for that purpose.
Added: November 23, 2025
Great blog post pointing out the differences in how memory is treated between a thread and a process fork.
Added: November 23, 2025
The Overly Humble Programmer by
While we shouldn’t be entirely arrogant, Jimmy argues that we shouldn’t be entirely humble either. This might sound like strange advice as it’s a common belief that programmers on the whole aren’t that humble, but the blog post shows us that there are plenty of examples of the latter as well. For example, many projects use micro-libraries such as leftpad instead of writing their own implementation because surely someone smarter must’ve made it.
Part of the blame for this attitude also lies with those of us writing technical content. When giving advice online, we often don’t know whose reading it and their competence levels. Hence, it’s easy to advise that people reuse components instead of writing their own. This is not necessarily bad advice. The mantra “Don’t roll your own crypto” is generally appropriate since most people are not expert Cryptographers.
Ideally, we should be able to easily self-assess our competency and decide based on that whether to roll our own solution. However, especially when someone is early in their programming career, it is difficult to self-assess our ability. As usual, there’s a spectrum between arrogance and humility and we need to remind ourselves to not lean too much in one direction.
Added: November 21, 2025
Blogrolls are the Best(rolls) by
Blogrolls are like treasure troves to me. I’m always excited when I find new blogs to follow. What Seth has here, I would consider a postroll. Though it accomplishes the same mission which is to share the other people’s cool websites.
Added: November 16, 2025
When the good times are rolling, it’s difficult to think to prepare for a change. I like this simile that liquidity is like a winter coat. It’s undesirable to have a winter coat in the dead of summer, but you’ll definitely appreciate having one available in the winter (assuming you live somewhere that gets cold).
I don’t count lines of credit as liquidity. They’re access to cash when the economy is good, but not guaranteed to be around.
Speaking of liquidity in general, there’s a similar saying from Warren Buffett
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.
What I’m hearing is that we should swim with a winter coat :D
Added: November 16, 2025
I’m not a minimalist, but I do prefer when my environment is not cluttered. However, I never thought about the point that Nathan’s wife made: having everything fit in a suitcase makes it feel like we’d disappear at any moment.
This implies a lack of commitment. Don’t get me wrong, the minimalist’s lack of commitment is to physical objects, not to their family or community. I wonder if there’s another way to convey that.
Recently, a good friend of mine got married. I visited his house and he had words of affirmation shown with sticky notes. It’s quite heartfelt. Maybe that’s not for you, though I’m sure there’s another way to convey appreciation.
Added: November 16, 2025
Reflections on Weird Web October 2025 by
Woah! So many weird pages were submitted to WWO. Thanks to Georgie and others for making the web interesting again. From this post, the maps one was my favorite. It’s not everyday one sees image maps.
Added: November 16, 2025
Try-catch-finally in Java is Cursed by
I feel like this is a much needed public service announcement that InterruptedException exists in Java. This has to be a source of so many untraceable bugs.
Added: November 16, 2025
Fundamentals of Lambda Calculus by
Matthias wrote a cool series explaining lambda calculus and showed how to construct some common programming constructs like if-then-else and recursion.
Part 1: Fundamentals of Lambda Calculus
Added: November 13, 2025
Robbery by
Honestly my feelings whenever daylight savings time ends. Peak sadness is at winter solstice when it gets dark around 4 PM in NY.
Added: November 11, 2025
When your brain lies to you by
I need to get better at identifying when my brain lies to me. There’s a great piece that Andrew Yockey wrote over at The Conversation which discusses the impacts of drugged driving. The conclusion is the same, our brain somehow tricks us into thinking that we’re in peak condition. Sometimes, we even believe that we’re somehow more alert than usual.
Added: November 11, 2025
Scripts I wrote that I use all the time by
Great list of personal scripts! It seems that Evan uses both macOS and Linux so most of these scripts work on both platforms as well.
Added: November 7, 2025
It’s awesome that Cory put the time in to make his website work without JavaScript. Another reason for progressive enhancement is that even with JavaScript enabled, it’s great until it crashes.
Unfortunately, I encounter a non-trivial amount of websites that have some sort of JavaScript error which causes me to find a workaround for whatever task I’m doing…
Added: November 6, 2025
Taking steps to end abusive traffic from cloud providers by
This is a great reminder that just because a person may be fine unleashing web scrapers on the Internet, it does not mean that their Internet Service Provider (ISP) is.
In this blog post, Xe shows how to craft an email to these ISPs in hopes that they crack down on their customers.
Imagine if everyone who owned a website kept careful logs and sent out abuse reports. I feel that the Internet would be a different place.
Added: November 6, 2025
A text-wall is a very cool take on the guestbook concept! Take a look if you haven’t seen it yourself yet.
Added: November 2, 2025
Formal or not formal? That is the question in AI for theorem proving. by
Most work in LLMs and Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP) have been focused on using large language models to help construct a proof of a given statement. There’s some success in this area, and even I use large language models at times to help speed up my Lean coding.
I agree with Kevin though, that an extreemly diffucult problem that these tools don’t help tackle is formally stating the theorem.
It reminds me of a common discussion I have on what it means to prove something “correct”. It’s a loaded term. In software, people often use it to mean that the software does not have any bugs and does not conflict with some mental model. This is difficult to formalize!
We’re making strides though, and I’m happy that there are plenty of people working on formalizing the building blocks of mathematics and program semantics into theorem provers.
Added: November 2, 2025
Hazardous States and Accidents by
In this article, the author discusses how an accident is a combination of a hazardous state and bad environmental conditions. They say that we don’t necessarily control the environment, but we can prevent hazardous states. An example they give is that a car’s wheel turning on its own is a hazardous state. By itself, it doesn’t cause an accident but it’s easy to see how an accident may occur.
I agree with the points of this article. As someone who has done research in decision making, I view this as a Markov decision process. There are a collection of states that we say an accident has occured. From there, we want to look at all the states prior to the accident states and label those as “hazardous”. It’s not beyond me to think that these hazardous states have a collection of properties that we have control over and some that we don’t. Let’s call the latter exogenous properties our environment.
What’s difficult about this formulation is that in most real world settings we almost never are able to construct the entire trasnition graph. This makes identifying ahead of time states that are hazardous difficult. Even so, we can develop some heuristics to identify some of these which in turn will reduce the likelihood of an accident.
Added: November 2, 2025
Most of my life, I’ve avoided branded T-shirts. Nowadays, I’ve opened up to the idea of conversation pieces. The Internet Phone Book, to me, falls in the latter category.
If I wanted to find new blogs to follow, I could easily visit a website like Ye Olde Blogroll and click on links as I scroll. However, there’s more to this book than discoverability.
Henrique had this book on his coffee table and that’s enabled him to share with others the coolness of the small web. That’s wicked cool.
Added: November 2, 2025