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!
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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