Reading

This page is for linking other sites/articles that I would recommend you read if your interests and mine overlap.

Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up

A great piece from a former AI optimist who became disillusioned with the technology and its promises at a very basic, input/output level.

“My argument: If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.”

Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple

An extremely niche deep-dive on the origin and purpose of the X windowing system’s root window texture.

“So why write about something that seems purely like an indulgence? Surely the stipple still lives with us today and requires no further discussion? Well, up until the early-2010s (at least on the Linux distributions I was using), this boot up scene was common to see — until it suddenly wasn’t.”

I Am An AI Hater

The title’s a bit harsh, I know, but this article goes places. Extremely worthwhile idealogical critique of AI. Plus it’s only like 2 pages long, go read it!

“Altman tells lies for money. And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again”

Step right up and test your knowledge! Simply identify if the given email address is valid or not! Discover intricacies of the RFC 5322 Internet Message Format standard you never even asked for! Can’t get enough? Try the JSdate quiz from the same author and try to identify valid JavaScript dates!

“normal(wtf␣is␣this?)@example.com? Technically valid. Did you know emails could have comments? Anything (in parens) is a comment. Introduced in RFC 822, but made obsolete by RFC 5322.”

Apple Rankings

Yes, it is technically a website rating different varieties of apples. However, the writing style is practically burning with passion. This isn’t some “Apples Weekly” joint or Buzzfeed-tier ranking, this is for the real apple-heads.

“Oh how the mighty have fallen! Believe it or not, the coffee grinds in a leather glove known as “The Red Delicious Apple” was once a robust firebrand credited with reinventing the apple from mere cider-fruit into a full-fledged lunch-worthy sidepiece. It even won the Stark Brothers apple contest in 1894. Likely your great-grandma’s favorite apple, this once flavorful Prometheus has been mass-produced into desolation.”

Coding Without a Laptop - Two Weeks with AR Glasses and Linux on Android

The smartphone market has stagnated surprisingly fast in the last decade or so, but this project shows the first novel way to package a portable computer since the iPhone. All for ~$250 if you already have a decent android phone!

“I do feel a little weird wearing these in public, but not that weird. They more or less pass for sunglasses, so the odd part is wearing sunglasses indoors and typing on a keyboard with nothing in front of you. I had couple people ask me about them, but they seemed to just think they were cool. One guy said he was going to buy a pair. That may be selection bias though; I’m sure some people thought I was an idiot.”

Hell Is Overconfident Developers Writing Encryption Code

The main content of this article is very “shop talk” and impenetrable to the layman, but the context makes it entertaining nonetheless. If you’re the kind of person to google every unfamiliar term, you’ll definitely learn a thing or two.

“I’ve seen people use md5($password) as their key derivation function for libsodium. I’ve seen people encrypt fields in a database, and then store the decryption key right next to the ciphertext. And then, in a stunning display of brilliance, they wrote decryption logic in SQL so they could query their database over encrypted fields. At least once, when reviewing an end-to-end encryption project that implemented cryptography in JavaScript intended to run in the web browser, my question of “how do you know which public key to trust?” was answered with something shaped like, “Oh, we just store those in MySQL and fetch them from the server.””