It’s this process that we want to discuss here, in the form of a few examples that give a sense of how we work to ensure that Signal is as useful as possible in diverse contexts, and to push back on regional norms that can often double as tech industry common sense.

The Literature-Map is part of Gnod, the Global Network of Discovery.It is based on Gnooks, Gnod’s literature recommendation system. The more people like an author and another author, the closer together these two authors will move on the Literature-Map.

I have this long running conjecture that used book stores are superior to commercial book outlets (including Amazon) for discovering books. One of the reasons for this I think has less to do with a skewed explore/exploit strategy, and more to do with the way exploratory suggestions are sourced. I think financial pressure skews exploratory search suggestions towards oversampling newer books rather than older adjacent books. I get that though; oversampling newer books is a simple way to help combat the rich getting richer trap. The problem is that I’m biased against new books; I think they’re mostly noise.

If you’re writing anything more complicated than a brief command-line script, reading this should help you write higher-performance, more-secure applications. This document is written with Node.js servers in mind, but the concepts apply to complex Node.js applications as well. Where OS-specific details vary, this document is Linux-centric.

Honestly? I’m saving this because it is a good bit of documentation writing more than it is useful to me as reference.

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people.

We currently live in an epoch that geologists call the Holocene, which began soon after the last major ice age ended around 11,700 years ago. But for over two decades, some scientists have argued that the label is far too antiquated. In 2000, the term “Anthropocene” — ‘anthropo’ for human and ‘cene’ for new — gained prominence. It highlights how human activities dominate the Earth’s land, atmosphere, and oceans, significantly impacting its climate and natural ecosystems.

Pixelbox takes inspiration from fantasy consoles like PICO8 and game creation frameworks like Unity3D.

Here is a simple way to make a fully navigable archive of an interesting static website, for instance for offline consumption, or because you are afraid that the Internet will cease to exist soon. We will be using redbean to make this archive easily viewable: this will make the archive an executable, that runs a simple static webserver when launched. For this example, we will be archiving redbean’s website itself.

In this case study, Gil gives a short description of the design philosophies behind Ed, a system for producing online digital editions. These design philosophies focus on the concept of minimal computing, which includes a holistic analysis of overall system costs in creating and, as importantly, maintaining online resources. The minimal computing approach analyzes these overall costs in the context of historical and current global inequalities in access to resources, including technologies, and suggests a way forward that increases local control while decreasing long-term maintenance costs.

The Analogue Pocket is finally able to run community-developed cores. Within the AP community, the term “jailbreak” is often used, but no jailbreaking is required; you simply need to be running the most recent version of the Analogue Pocket operating system, and then add the community cores.

https://archive.ph/pKp6p

Peter actually starts his talk by comparing the enterprise-level software and cloud services we build today to building a billions-of-dollars aircraft carrier. Somehow, because the tech behemoths are building aircraft carriers, the rest of us are all modeling everything we build as an aircraft carrier too.

rc is a Unix shell I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks, though it’s been in the design stages for a while longer than that. It’s not done or ready for general use yet, but it is interesting, so let’s talk about it.

No matter what, though, I argue that “information retrieval” is—despite how LLMs are marketed—is one of the least interesting and reliable things you can do with them. It’s mostly interesting, as described above, a “common wisdom” sampler to examine the common narratives that show up repeatedly in the corpus.

Final Fantasy scripted in forth!?

The APL programming language (a subset thereof) compiling to Common Lisp.

A simple, modern and secure encryption tool (and Go library) with small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability.

Funktal is a functional programming language for the Uxn virtual machine, a tiny VM with 8-bit opcodes and 64 kB of memory. I have written about implementing functional constructs in Uxn’s native stack based assembly language Uxntal in a previous post.

Wiki devoted to OS dev. Provides a very opinionated tour and guide for how to dive in.

Documents are documents. Books are books, recordings are recordings, and so on. As time has gone on, though, I’ve observed the probably obvious-to-others fact that Lore is the grease between the concrete blocks of knowledge, the carved step in an otherwise impossible-to-scale mountain, the small bit of powder sprinkled through a workspace to ensure sparks don’t fly and things don’t burn. Inconceivably odd to the outsider, but vital to the dedicated or intense practice of the craft.

In which “theory making” is talked about, but tangentially from the side

Without a game cartridge, a Gameboy is just displays “Gameboy” and freezes. Once slotted in, the bits and bytes contained within a cartridge created countless worlds and memories. How did a Gameboy cartridges store such a wide variety of games, while also enabling things like save files, rumble, and even infrared communication?