Links, January 2023

I’m making good on tab purging this year. Now featuring favorites pulled from my RSS reader!

Every month (or whenever I get to it) I use the SessionBuddy extension to export a list of all of my open tabs, so that I can trap them in a mirror and hurl them out into space.

Media Diet

• Feedbin – I have begun slowly ease back into RSS after more than a decade away.

  RSS was both good and bad for me in the past. I enjoyed it thoroughly back in the day, but I remember Google Reader was starting to feel like an overflowing inbox rather than a stroll in the park. Feeds, chronological or otherwise, came to dominate my internet consumption since Google Reader shut down. I never replaced it with anything. It was a mixture of dead blogs and hyperactive feeds from publishers. Chris Coyier made a list of all of his feeds, which is a neat idea. I’m not looking to get all of them, but I should look through them and see if anything strikes me.

• tools for finding information on the internet | Roman Hauksson – Finding things online is underrated. This is a great list of tools, some of which I know and use, like metaphor.systems and anna’s archive

• RSS Club - daverupert.com - very cool idea (shh!)

AI

• Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT—Stephen Wolfram Writings
  • GPT+WolframAlpha+Whisper - a Hugging Face Space by JavaFXpert
  • Systems for orchestrating feedback loops and re-entrant style processing on top of one-shot models are starting to pop up, and this is a clever example of how LLMs can be scripted and patched into other tools to produce novel results. Watch this space.
• isekaidev/stable.art: Photoshop plugin for Stable Diffusion with Automatic1111 as backend (locally or with Google Colab) – There’s “fast” and then there’s “the first 6 months of the Stable Diffusion era” fast. Too many papers, models, and demos to even look at. This one sticks out for being one of many in the category of enriching “old media” tools with AI models.
• Streaming OpenAI completions with the Vercel Edge Runtime — Really belongs to the “code” heading but the AI-adjacency lands it here. Truly some black magic going on here, this must have been a real pain to figure out how to piece together. The Web API-only compute tier continues to evolve in novel ways.
• Stratechery - AI and the Big Five – Long read that amounts to “the story up until now.” Essential reading.

Social Web

• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden – I absolutely love this idea. It is a very inspiring vision for what the personal web can and should be. Blogging is not the only modality of self-publishing! It’s a good one but not the only game in town. I want to make good on the challenge here and start a few digital gardens here.
• Adding Webmentions to Your Site
• cloudflare/wildebeest: Wildebeest is an ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server
• microfeed/microfeed: a lightweight cms self-hosted on cloudflare, for podcasts, blogs, photos, videos, documents, and curated urls.

Tech Nostalgia

• Apple Lisa: Still More to Uncover – I have never used a Lisa but I’ve been fascinated with this era of computing since I was 13 and saw the made for tv movie Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) about young Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Part of it touches on the Lisa and so I’ve always had a vision of it in the back of my head that more or less lines up with what it really was. I really need to make it to the computer history museum someday!
• Mac 30th Anniversary Icons – This was widely shared and very well done, even the “garbage can” Mac tower gets a treatment.

Opinion Section

• Editorial: Scarcity, regulation, and the abundance society
• Software and its Discontents, January 2023, Part 1
• Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity
• Five Mildly Anti-Buddhist Essays - by Sasha Chapin
• The Artist Whose Book Covers Distilled the Nineteen-Eighties | The New Yorker
• Actually, Japan has changed a lot - by Noah Smith
• Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Code

• Reducing Go Execution Tracer Overhead With Frame Pointer Unwinding
• The Magic of Small Databases
• A Better Way to Work With Number and Date Inputs in JavaScript
• google/cdc-file-transfer: Tools for synching and streaming files from Windows to Linux
• Building Resilient Organizations
• Streaming OpenAI completions with the Vercel Edge Runtime