The Link Stream

or, the section where I link to various articles, pages and videos I find interesting. Dates represent when the article was added to the list, not when it was published.

2026-09-03#

  • “The Worse on Purpose Brand Ledger” - a site tracking brands and their ownership (still tied to original company or bought out/licensing out their name?) to determine whether they're undergoing enshittification. Seems to be somewhat US-centric though.

2026-09-01#

2026-08-31#

  • There is apparently a name for those weird channels from satellite TV providers that play looped ads for the service and VOD movie commercials - “barker channels”.
    • I remember switching over to the “For subscribers” (Dla abonentów) channel carried by Cyfrowy Polsat as a kid, and listening to its classic music loop. (Apparently they were still using it in 2024, even after a rebrand of the whole service.)
    • …I should probably make a note dedicated to my occasional recurring special interest in old TV :p

2026-08-30#

  • “There's no such thing as Just a Tool” - on how the tools we use influence our perception of what we can do, and thus our decisions, thought/problemsolving patterns and views, with both non-tech examples as well as tech examples. (It also proves that writing UIs in code is harmful after all. I feel vindicated.)
  • “Creepy crawlies” - some worrying statistics on AI crawlers from git.kernel.org. “Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. […] With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic — everything else are scrapers.”

2026-08-26#

  • Fridgle - daily “writing toy” where everyone gets the same shuffled set of words, you get to make your own poem with it, and read what everyone else made on “the world fridge”.

2026-08-20#

  • “What if maintainer burnout isn't burnout?” - on a slightly different type of burnout, languishing - losing meaning. Some good quotes on AI contributions here - notably on how AI contributors can't learn about the codebase in the way human contributors can.
  • “All the Lonely People: The Atomized Generation” - on what many would call “the loneliness epidemic”, but as the article argues, could be explained through a shift in how the systems building society work. (I think this article doesn't read very well and is very vague at times, but it makes a few good points - notably on how we equate freedom with individualism, and society's focus on individuals, rather than communities, being the one to change the world).
    • Found through a link from “The Thursday Council”, a community whose main page makes an unusual though surprisingly to-the-point comparison - just like the calendar and days of the week are societal norms arbitrarily chosen/agreed upon by humans, with no objective root (or one rooted in old misconceptions), so is wealth, class, gender, etc.

2026-08-19#

  • “NixOS on a Cadillac Lyriq” - they put NixOS on a car dashboard. Funniest thing I've ever seen. (There's also a blog post explaining how they got the car infotainment system running without a car, with supposedly a part 2 coming soon to explain how they rooted it.)

2026-08-18#

  • “On 'scaling up' and being the right size” - there's a limit to how large a project can be, without significantly changing its structure (likely for the worse, with more hierarchies and a larger level of detachment from the community); shown here through a parallel to evolutionary biology - how “a gazelle cannot be above a certain size, unless it grows stronger legs”.
  • “Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner” - an incredibly interesting and in-depth article about a project involving an industrial 1x2048 camera and taking very, very, very wide photos - complete with custom photo capture and post-processing software, accelerometer-to-velocity maths and 3D printed mounts.