~/Postroll

Brandon Rozek

Photo of Brandon Rozek

Computer Science PhD Candidate @ RPI, Writer of Tidbits, and Linux Enthusiast

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!

Blog Posts Are The Ideal Form of the Written Word by Nathan Dyer

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Added: March 2, 2026


15 years of blogging by Nolan Lawson

Congratulations to Nolan on 15 years of blogging! So much life unfolds in that time period and it takes a steadfast commitment to keep going. Here’s to another 15 years!

Added: March 1, 2026


A programmer's loss of a social identity by Dave Gauer

I’m unsure what it means to be a computer programmer in 2026. I agree that technology discourse has changed dramatically over the last three years.

Though that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people passionate about crabs, creating local-first software, etc. Those folks are still there, even if they’re not the mainstream.

This is why I’m such a big proponent of curating your web experience using RSS feeds. It might take some effort to find people on the small/personal/indie web, but it’s soo worth it.

Added: March 1, 2026


Home-cooked software by Ham Vocke

It’s heartwarming to see someone create an app that brings joy to the people around them. Ham’s Doppelkopf Club not only lets you play a traditional German card game, but also teaches you how to play as well! This preserves cultural knowledge.

Home cooking to me is a necessity (lest I go broke) as well as a craft. Recently, I’ve been cooking Paella weekly slightly tweaking each time to get to a recipe that I enjoy.

Added: March 1, 2026


Saying 'No' In an Age of Abundance by Jim Nielsen

In an age of abundance, restraint becomes the only scarce thing left, which means saying ’no’ is more valuable than ever.

I fully agree! We all excel at different tasks, and with time and focus we can cultivate them. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should. There’s always a trade-off.

The piece was written in the context of building a product in a business, but honestly many of these points apply to our lives in general.

What’s our story? What do we care about? Saying yes to everything muddies the waters. At the same time, however, don’t say no to everything. The most rewarding oppurtunities are not always the most obvious.

Added: March 1, 2026


The Web is Larger Than Facebook by Nathan Dyer

It annoys me how much of a grip Facebook still has on being able to digitally participate in your local community.

Same with Instagram. Though I get it – it’s so easy to pull up your phone and post on these platforms.

Recently, I found The 518 which is a newsletter which covers events happening in the capital region of New York. Luckily they surface all the events posted on Instagram for me. Though I do wonder what my life would be like if I acquiesced and signed up for Meta’s platforms.

Added: March 1, 2026


Tano Bonfanti by Lucas

A nice interview with a concept artist. What Tano said about overcoming creative blocks reasonated with me.

You have to sit through that uncomfortable feeling, once you have done this enough you realize that is just a fleeting moment of insecurity, be aware that sometimes it will be present, and then it will pass, the inspiration comes back.

The problem is how much importance we give to this feeling and how afraid we are that they will never go away. Once you realize that they do fade, you have learned how to deal with the block.

Added: February 1, 2026


The RAM Nightmare: How I Lost My Sanity (and Almost My Deadline) by David Revoy

Ouch a RAM stick going bad sounds no fun. I haven’t had that happen to me before, so it’s informative to see the possible symptoms.

Added: February 1, 2026


Tiny Talk with Keith Wehmeyer by Ty Finck

I really enjoyed this interview. It’s cool to read about the life of a farmer. It’s also wholesome to see how the folks in their community help each other out.

Added: February 1, 2026


Optimization Countermeasures by Miguel Young de la Sota

Every so often one has to fight the compiler to prevent certain optimizations from taking place. This article talks about using value barriers (which are essentially empty inline assembly blocks) to prevent the compiler from optimizing code based on the value of a variable. Miguel writes about how these techniques are used all the time when writing Cryptographic code which fights against the constant-time threat model.

Added: January 27, 2026


Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers by Sean Goedecke

This system relies on your celebrity target being dazzled by receiving a large sum of free money. If you came to them before the money was there, they might ask questions like “why wouldn’t people just directly donate to me?”, or “are these people who think they’re supporting me going to lose all their money?“. But in the warm glow of a few hundred thousand dollars, it’s easy to think that it’s all working out excellently.

Personally, I find it weird how some crypto platforms are trying to conflate supporting a creator and expectations of profit. I agree, why wouldn’t people just directly donate?

Added: January 25, 2026


Why there's no European Google? by Ploum

This article is a great reminder of all the successful technology projects that came out of Europe: the web, Linux, git, OpenStreetMap, VLC – to name a few. While some of these projects might not be multi-billion dollar corporations, we can all agree that they have made a large impact on the world.

Added: January 25, 2026


Wikipedia's 25th birthday proves the power of free speech by Kunal Mehta

Happy birthday to Wikipedia! Here’s to another 25 years.

In this article, Kunal writes about how Wikipedia is able to flourish in part due to a lack of censorship by the US. This, however, should not be taken for granted. Free speech (like many rights) have to be continously fought for.

Added: January 25, 2026


Some internet history reading by Andreas

Title says it all. A nice list of books which go over the history of the early Internet.

Added: January 24, 2026


The Toll No One Charges but Everyone Pays by Kyle Piira

We all pay in time for sitting in traffic. Even with that, Kyle points out that there’s no positive incentive to carpool. I see this in my own life. To get to my office, I can drive 7 minutes and park near the building. Or, I can walk 10 minutes to the bus stop, take a 20 minute bus ride, and then walk 10 minutes to my building. A trip that nearly takes 6 times the amount of time!

If as a society we had better incentives, then we would have a lot more resources to get me to my office. Imagine if there was a van that can pick me up from my apartment and take me directly to my office.

Added: January 24, 2026


Simulating consumption by Steven Garrity

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


Not the Elves by Ton Zijlstra

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 Kevin McDonald

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 Jim Nielsen

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 Andreas

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 Andrew Plotkin

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 Daniel Fedorin

Great collection of human, mathematical, and pragmatic reasons to love programming languages.

Added: January 4, 2026


Friendly Little Wrapper Types by Chris Krycho

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


My website is snowed in by Dries Buytaert

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 Nolen Royalty

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 Alex Chan

These truchet tiles look very cool and funky. Another awesome example of algorithmically generated art.

Added: December 27, 2025


Grow slowly, stay small by Herman Martinus

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 Seth Larson

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


Encryption vs. Compression by Kevin McDonald

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

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 Kevin McDonald

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 David Wertheimer

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


The Abilene Paradox by Cassidy Williams

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 Andrew Plotkin

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