Tag: ai beat

July/August ’26 Web Links

Cape Cod homeowner sues, says bank should not have given him mortgage for $5.5 million mansion at risk of collapse

Headline of the bi-month.

Ev Nova Wiki (miraheze.org)

The EVN wiki recently moved off the awful ‘fandom’ platform. This is a thrilling development and I’m extremely grateful to the hard work of Sharky et al. Update your links to the EVN wiki, people.

Trinket Box Purveyors Are Melting Down (defector.com)

Some good old fashioned Hobby Drama. Some delicious one-liners in here.

Behringer td-3 Rechargable Battery Mod (ekartco.com)

Someone figured out how to stick a battery into into the TD-3

Archives (datahoarding.org)

A links page that lists a number of other online archive resources.

Boeing will support SCAT Airlines (boeing.com)

I laughed at this for multiple minutes. It looks like a meme but it’s a real graphic put out by Boeing, go check.

Raspberry Pi as Alphasmart Dana Access Point and File Share (tinyhack.com)

This is another neat mod, interesting to see that Alpha Smarts are still used in some capacity. I would say I learned to type on those things but it would be more accurate to say that I tried to learn to type on those but didn’t ultimately succeed until I was shamed for my slow typing and spelling mistakes in Starcraft games.

dl.acm.org/

ACM digital library is now open access. This is something that I really enjoyed accessing back in college. This one’s my favorite: HOPL: The first conference book and subsequent conferences.

Some of my synths… and what i have been doing to them… (cykong.org)

Cool old-school site with some neat synths and technical specifics on mods for those synths.

cooldowns.dev

An intriguing approach to avoiding supply chain attacks, though I wonder if it’s going to cause a free rider problem and ultimately reach an equilibrium where it just pushes back how long it takes for supply chain attacks to get noticed and fixed.

vst.unplug.red

Now that is web design.

airwindowscheatsheet.aboni.dev

Airwindows is an audio plugin producer with slightly ideosyncretic documentation. Here we have a summary of what each plugin does.

How are images recorded in a hologram? (holocenter.org)

Holograms used to be everywhere. I have a vivid memory of someone swimming around with a pair of goggles with a pair of holographic sharks on them. but I’d never really considered how the effect was achieved. This helps one understand the surreal quality that holograms of this type tend to have; they’re often of a model!

Book Binding (tuxgraphics.org)

Bookbinding tutorial in immaculate HTML with retro graphics.

Alledged Dimethylmercury Incident (science.org)

Lowe in rare form on some local news.

Glades & Collier (soundcloud.com)

I’m finally back at it, now with way more music theory knowledge. I’m particularly pleased with this track.

AI Crisis

How Google and AI Nearly Made a Seasoned Reporter Spiral (propublica.org)

Used to be in order to professionally google bomb something you had to make like Sue Sch*ff and create dozens of websites to push everything else off the front page of Google. Nowadays you just vibecode a slopsite and the google bot will spit it out as gospel. Excellent!

My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite (andrewkelley.me)

Suitably savage “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” from the Zig camp.

AI in 2026 (www.eamoncaddigan.net)

Another guy named Eamonn! One N though (the more common spelling.) A post that captures the feeling of working in this industry this year.

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making (ludic.mataroa.blog)

Another banger blog post from the “I will piledrive you” guy.

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs (blog.codeberg.org)

Codeberg’s blog publishes one of the strongest-so-far arguments against acceptance of AI in open source communities.

Okay, we have a new contender for Most AI Thing to Ever Happen (infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea)

It’s not every day that I link to a Mastodon post with an anime avatar. But! This one is fascinating.

Tech has gotten weird (overripe.net)

Another ‘state of the industry’ essay, don’t miss the followup. Spoiler for the conclusion:

if you’re like me and getting forced to gain fluency with this tech, defend yourself. Go to absurd lengths to protect and grow your skills despite the potential slopification of your day job. Read more. Code more. Write more. Complain more. At least that’s what I’m doing.

Rust is adopting an LLM policy (blog.rust-lang.org)

Another major foss project has set out a fairly restrictive LLM policy. Though much more diplomatic than the others, it’s clear that the community sees that its continued existence as a community relies on human contributors.

OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say (www.scientificamerican.com)

This will of course not be echoed nearly as widely as the initial coverage was.

On AI Coding and Its Discontents (calnewport.com)

This last year has been exhausting. The PR departments of the frontier labs have done an excellent job convincing us that AI developments are occurring at an astounding, world-changing rate. But if you zoom out, it becomes clear that almost every “breakthrough” since last summer has concerned the narrow domains of computer code and math, which are defined by highly structured languages and come accompanied by massive amounts of specialized training data.

$TARFACE (pitchfork.com)

Nothing like a good old savage Pitchfork review.

Empire of AI (Hao, 2025, audio)

The AI Era (or, as I like to say, AI Crisis) can really be attributed to a single company: OpenAI. As such, it’s an important enough subject that I’m glad someone wrote a book about it before they vanish into a puff of debt.

The folly of OpenAI, thinking they could build a private nonprofit to create aligned AGI when they couldn’t even successfully align and control an Oligarch is an operatic tragedy and the meat of Empire Of AI tells that story. Hao manages to thread the needle between people-zooing the crazies as and the Hagiography of an Isaacson. Genuine appreciation for technological innovation is tempered with empathy for the people the process of its creation is harming. Its perpetrators are painted as human, not cackling villains, though you get the distinct impression of who gave interviews and who didn’t.

Empire also seems to set out to answer a nagging question I’ve had since the beginning of the AI Crisis: how serious are the folks at OpenAI about thinking they’re creating Skynet, and if so why are they doing it? What’s the backstory to the board coup? We get the inside story on both and the answer turns out to be that there were multiple factions within OpenAI (mirroring the opposing factions of accelerationists/safetyists) while still making it clear that both belong to a tiny subculture far out of step with the mainstream which suddenly has massive outsized influence on all of our lives.

A fine sequel to Weapons Of Math Destruction, incidentally.

May / June ’26 Web Links

This post marks ten years since I started this blog. Kinda wild. It’s been intermittent for most of those years and I’d say about half of the material is just notes I took because (back in the day) the easiest way to find a how-to later was to google it even if you were finding your own blog!

I should probably use a different wordpress theme… who uses black on white anymore?

The curious case of the 1875 Meteor Monitor (lovetobuild.net)

Bjarne Tveskov, the LEGO designer of the (in?) famous Meteor Monitor (as well as numerous other sets), one of the most confusing Space sets for theme-watchers, apparently has a blog and explains its origins. He also includes some concept ships that I’ve never seen shared anywhere else for what he jokingly calls “spectron”, a ZX-spectrum inspired iteration of what became BlackTron II. In these concepts I see the germs of the Warp Wing Fighter (above) and Particle Ionizer (below.) Maybe even the rover from Space Station Zenon. Not to mention the orange and white of Ice Planet.

internetpatternbook.neocities.org

A project to collect and share the types of tiled backgrounds you used to see on Web 1.0 sites. Exactly what you need for your Neocities site.

Someone made a studio quality model of an iconic EV Override Ship (youtube.com)

For crafting fans out there, this is an impressive build. Because the models for the EV Override ships were released and eventually converted into blender files, anyone can 3d print them to make physical versions. But Sublight Drive Crafts didn’t stop there, they did the hard part and finished the model to an amazing degree. There was discussion on the discord where we begged them to photograph the model to make a rotation sprite out of it! (When I was very young, I thought that’s how in game graphics were made!)

CNBC’s interview with GameStop CEO (youtube.com)

Gamestop declared that it wanted to buy venerable online marketplace Ebay, and CNBC tried to figure out why. The CEO didn’t really help matters and appeared to be under the influence during the discussion. The comedic timing is priceless.

Songwriting (donaldsonworkshop.com)

I think I finally found the real idiots’ guide the song writing. Very concise.

Trent Reznor Chord Theory (reverbmachine.com)

A piece on a particular music theory trick Trent uses.

CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on Github (krebsonsecurity.com)

One of those stories that just gets worse the more you read. Not only did someone forget to make the repo private. Not only did they commit sensitive keys to a public repo. But when warned privately about it, they didn’t do anything!

When were the [emperor’s children] first brought into the lore? (reddit.com)

A rather nice breakdown of the history (historiography?) of the lore of a particular 40k faction. I was going to write something like this, but it wasn’t going to be nearly as good, so I’m glad someone else did it.

gatherer.mtg.li

Searchable DB of old MTG card comments (from the “gatherer” site.) On the off chance that you want to know what’s up with a particular Magic card, this is a place to look.

The Samples of Jet Set Radio + Jet Set Radio Future (youtube.com)

I found these tracks fascinating back in the day. Very cool effort. Interesting to see so much is from Sonic Foundry.

flamewarriorsguide.com

Charming relic of Web 2.0 forum shenanigans. An illustrated guide to different types of posters.

Eighty Eight By Thirty One (neonaut.neocities.org/)

The slightly larger size of web badge. Complete with links to a treasure trove of these, the original digital collectable.

Balsa wood airplanes have taken flight-and delivered joy-from Wakefield for 100 years (wbur.org)

Short radio piece on the Guillows company. All this time I’ve been pronouncing it like Gull (as in seagull) but it actually rhymes with “willow.”

linuxsynths.com

Surprised I never ran across some of these before. Each synth listed includes demos you can listen to which is really helpful when compared to more mainstream sites like KVR.

Plague Music (kavarimusic.bandcamp.com)

Finally: industrial IDM. And dubstep. And lots of screaming.

AI Crisis

Bosses Are Becoming Obsessed With AI […] (futurism.com)

“I am at a point where I am tired of hearing about it every other day,” he lamented. “I just want my salary and to not lose my sanity.”

Leaving Mozilla (unitedheroes.net)

The un-website-like look of this page is striking. Here is someone who really cares about web design. They also apparently care about Mozilla even as they are leaving. This comes in the wake of some unpopular decisions by Mozilla management and I think other FOSS folks ought to take notice.

Google Search as you know it is over (techcrunch.com)

“Google Zero” is a concept online publishers have used for a while, but now we have a concrete date: this summer, Google plans to stop linking you to people when you search for stuff. This makes perverse sense on some level, since those sites are getting ad dollars that Google could be getting instead. The incentive for actually doing the work of publishing information to the open web is about to nosedive, and it’s not clear where Google will get the information to drive its summaries when they starve out the folks actually generating the data they summarize. I’m hoping that people like the web more than they like Google and will reject this, and perhaps the folly of killing the source of all that data they want to sell you might become apparent, but I’m mildly pessimistic.

See also: this response which I think sums up the reasonable take well.

Contributor Poker and AI (kristoff.it)

A great discussion of why Zig isn’t accepting AI contributions that generalizes to any type of community cultivation. It looks like I wasn’t the only one to notice this reasoning, since Godot Project took a similar position. I’m hoping this becomes the norm for community FOSS projects. Say Godot:

Reviewing PRs is already tedious work, but it is rewarding because reviewers generally feel that their efforts are contributing to educating a new contributor (who may become a future maintainer/reviewer). If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review.

But another section, one I didn’t see in Zig’s post, is something I think everyone should consider making their own policy:

No AI-generated text in human-to-human communication

When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect.

Richard Dawkin’s Claude Delusion (youtube.com)

Watch perennial Dawkins gadfly Rebecca Watson take a victory lap after Dawkins humiliated himself with an article where he got oneshotted by Claude.

A eulogy for Vim (drewdevault.com)

My relationship with the software is intimate, almost as if it were an extra limb. I don’t think about what I’m doing when I use it. All of Vim’s modes and keybindings are deeply ingrained in my muscle memory. Using it just feels like my thoughts flowing from my head, into my fingers, into a Vim-shaped extension of my body, and out into the world.

But there’s a problem

I don’t think it’s cute that someone vibe coded “battleship” in VimScript. I think it’s more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don’t understand how awful all of this is. I don’t want to use software which has slop in it.

So he’s announced a fork, “Vim Classic.”

November / December Web Links (2025)

Happy new year! I realize that this link list is practically wall to wall downers so I invite readers to, if it would make them feel better, just watch the first link then go outside and admire the show.

I’m gonna tell my kids this is the last known footage of Daft Punk (bsky.app/profile/jjvincent.bsky.social)

This video gets me every time. Really sums up the whole year.

Still with me? Whelp…

The Decay and Entropy Episode (textfiles.libsyn.com)

Jason Scott meditation on impermanence. One of his best.

The Lord Hobo Bar is Dead (allaboutbeer.com)

An interesting story in its own right, but it’s also a neat exploration of the craft beer boom in general.

w2.eff.org/Net_culture

Immaculate flavor of its time, “Last Updated Thu Mar 13 10:42:57 PDT 2003” web resource I stumbled across while trying to find a rumored dump of old chain emails. If anyone has such an archive, let me know.

How did Skannerz work (matthodges.com)

One of those fairly obscure video game devices that you can’t find in MAME, I appreciate that someone did a write-up on at least some of how they worked.

Quake Indicators (fabiensanglard.net)

I was trying to google these at one point, and Fabien Sanglard went and wrote an article about them.

Lamenting Malice (cynthoni.bandcamp.com)

Finally Cynthoni, who’s career has mostly been about rage against her own existence, has turned that caustic eye outwards and made a razor-edged criticism of our present moment, in the form of a banger Drum’N’Bass record. With samples of Palentr’s CEO, OpenAI’s CEO, and bass riffs reminiscent of early Pendulum, it’s sure to please a very specific set of electronic music fans.

The AI Beat

I’m pulling this into its own list so you can easily skip it if you’re tired of hearing about it.

Mastodon thread about a bot that writes alt text (ieji.de/@anantagd)

Alt text is text used to replace an image for screen readers. It’s an accessibility feature that helps blind people navigate the web.

In this thread, a blind person explains why a bot that merely describes the images in your post to generate alt text is worse than useless, because it describes what the picture looks like, not necessarily what’s in it or what it means.

It’s also a reminder to use meaningful alt text; consider it a new year’s resolution.

The Politics of Superintelligence (noemamag.com)

This good introductory article goes a long way to explain why some (rather highly placed) folks breathlessly talk about how AI is going to kill everyone and everything but also why we should spend all our money and time on it.

Ashley MacIsaac concert cancelled after AI wrongly accuses him of being sex offender (cbc.ca)

I had a different, more lighthearted article about hallucinations in Google summaries that I was going to run here, but this one is a bit more serious. It gets to the heart of one of the issues with the way AI is deployed; when an AI says something, who’s saying it? I suspect that companies like google are going to cry “Section 230” and try to wash their hands of the matter. But I don’t think it’s a good fit. And I don’t think “Generative AI is a work in progress and info quality may vary” hidden behind an elipsis button is enough to cover defamatory statements.

I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. (huffpost.com)

This is an example of the way people are using AI systems in the wild. Deception and dereliction. I don’t know how anyone can read this and not see we’re in the grip of a crisis.

Anyway it’s worth it for the author photograph alone.

Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era (thelocal.to)

It’s interesting to see the other side, someone actually doing an audit of someone who’s ‘productivity’ has been boosted by extensive AI use. Self reports are one thing, but I rarely see stories of coworkers, interviewers, and others tasked with accountability. Here’s one.