The internet's one-man safety net

  1. We should be more ambitious with the software we build: A Rust rewrite of Postgres called pgrust has already surfaced real bugs in Postgres itself, making the case that ambitious side projects pay off even when dismissed as AI slop. (danluu.com)
  2. Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages: An essay argues rewriting slow software in a faster language rarely helps, since most real programs are bottlenecked by I/O rather than language speed, making performance a design problem. (seangoedecke.com)
  3. How to run a city builder on 16 MHz: A deep dive into the original SimCity's source code explains how Maxis managed to simulate a whole city's traffic, power, and crime on a 16MHz 386SX chip. (larstofus.com)
  4. If anything happens to this guy, everyone is screwed: An Atlantic profile follows the lone volunteer whose unpaid work keeps critical PHP infrastructure running, and asks what happens to the internet if he ever stops. (unverified) (theatlantic.com)
  5. Bunkering down: After 27 years of self-hosting, Matt Webb describes shutting down his servers for a static host, spooked by a fresh wave of PHP, TLS, and Linux vulnerabilities. (interconnected.org)
  6. Why the concept of data poisoning annoys me: A graphics and audio programmer pushes back on tools like Nightshade, arguing that any perceptual gap a model fails on today will eventually close, so poisoned art isn't permanently safe. (blog.demofox.org)
  7. PlottyBot, a pen plotter you can build: An open-source, Raspberry Pi Zero-powered pen plotter you can 3D print yourself, complete with a web interface, GCode support, and fountain-pen compatibility for UV inks. (ben.akrin.com)
  8. Making a heart with maths, with maths: A roughly 280-character Shadertoy shader draws a beating heart using nothing but pure math functions, in the tiny-code tradition of demoscene size coding. (unverified) (shadertoy.com)
  9. PICO-8 fluid effects inspired by a Flash-era classic: A PICO-8 demo recreates a Flash-era multiphase fluid simulation in pixel art, crediting the original beautifl.net piece that inspired it. (beautifl.net)
  10. Cayley graph of the Heisenberg group: A short creative-coding video turns the Cayley graph of the Heisenberg group into a generative geometric animation, making abstract group theory watchable. (youtu.be)

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