Link Log 23
2026-07-05
Miniature dioramas by Derrick Lin. Colossal is such a great publication; they consistently feature such good artists. I always love seeing this amazing work, and it gives me a greater sense of optimism for humanity and what we can achieve.
n10.as is another cool internet radio find. I had to dig a bit to find the direct streaming link, and in my journey, I found this Github repo for basically every internet radio station out there. Hopefully, I can keep this for reference and go through the gems. I LOVE INTERNET RADIO!!!
Space Age Pop set from NTS. I love 50's pop, man.
Essay from Aeon on how AI changes investigative workflows. Sorry skids; the discourse on AI has given us an immense level of fatigue, but we simply cannot deny that it's interesting. Paradigm-shifting? Kind of, but not at the scale Silicon Valley predicts. It's true that AI has changed how we think through things and process information, and the author makes a very salient point: the querying process for questions has gotten faster, and what we see now in writing isn't a change in the fundamentals, but in how we investigate the questions that get us there. AI cannot replicate your unique voice, and that still takes years of disciplined effort to master. Better yet, it is a continuous work in progress, which is why I am so passionate about this medium. However, for more polished work, the polish can get done much faster and more cheaply. I still find my best work done in the drafting process, but revisions have gotten a lot easier for me; since I don't have an editor, LLMs do a great job at catching my basic mistakes. Many would argue that the mistakes are what make the writing more genuine, and that's just a massive cope. Proper grammar and syntax are the most effective signals we have for intelligible thought, so I want my writing to be unique in voice and grammatically sound. Having an LLM assist in that is not a problem for me, just in the same way spell check was never a problem for my entire life. Is it worth all the legal investment fraud? No, but we're going to live in the moment anyway. Whatever comes from that will work itself out as it always does. Trust in the process, skids.
Another personality quiz, the vibe-coded AI Compass. Most of these archetypes are stupid. Most of the "patron saints" are people I don't really care too much for (but am envious of their followings, full disclosure), and I found its assessment to be quite gauche—such is the problem with any psychological assessment. I got "The Tired Parent," which I found funny because I am neither tired about AI (see previous paragraph) nor a parent (maybe one day), and most of the archetypes are, uh, not really anything that gets to the core of the actual issue. I'm still working on that response to the Palantir Manifesto so I don't want to give the whole thing away, but basically y'all, this is all it boils down to: these are technologies used to fight wars. Keep that in the absolute forefront of your mind whenever people talk about this shit, lest you become another cognitive victim to it. The discourse is fraught with disinformation, so hopefully, you'll find your way to the core root of the issue that literally nobody else wants to talk about. If other people have already made that point, I'd be happy to read or listen to them; but right now, no one seems to be saying the quiet part out loud, and that's the scariest part to me.
Article from p4k on this year's Fête de la Musique at the French embassy in D.C. It led me down a short rabbit hole to find out more about the DMV music scene. DMV stands for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia—it's an interesting blend of sounds found in larger hip hop metro areas like Atlanta and NYC, and while I haven't been too interested in the genre these last few years, I enjoyed the write-up I read about the festival. Many would like to make themselves known as artists, but from reading the article, I found the sacrifices people make for it to be disconcerting—mostly in trying to gain and maintain relevance through Big Social Media. I always find it odd that my work here is basically one big fat counter-signal to it, but hey, at least I don't know who's actually reading this stuff, right?
Article from Slavoj's Substack on the case for the European Union, even 70 years later. I used to pay to read this publication, but giving Substack money is stupid, and I still can't figure out an easy way to bypass the paywalls. But honestly, after reading this piece, I don't think I'd want to return to Slavoj's work again any time soon. I remember when I was younger and liking Slavoj was really cool and hip, but now that I am a bit older and significantly less leftist, I find his prose to be loquacious and long-winded, and realized just how much of a chore it is to actually read. Worse than that, most of his talking points in that piece lacked a throughline; the Lacanian stuff he constantly invokes no longer feels esoteric, and it's just cheap at this point. Even worse, the idea of collapse he and many others on the left like to espouse (even more so these days thanks to Trump) is brutally exhausting; at this point, the only thing justifying European sovereignty is the fact that the French have nukes. Otherwise, Europe will always be a melting pot of hapless nation-states that somehow manages to be even more pretentious and racist than the US.
A post from a personal blog and my Indie Web neighbor. A funny take on my read: I initially opened this up in LYNX and so I couldn't see the photo of donthatedontkill upon first perusing his site. While reading the post, I was under the impression that the author was a woman, and when I opened the link in my full-feature browser, I was surprised to see the author is a man. It made me think of how easy it is to make implicit assumptions from the things I read, and jotting down this little note about this experience will hopefully help me remember to drastically reduce the assumptions I make. Either way, this was a very interesting read from this well-designed personal blog, and I look forward to continuing to read his work.
I'm begrudgingly sharing this link because it's a dumb podcast with — shudders — a journalist, but here you go. I have no idea why I listened to this entire thing, but I did. The journalist, a self-proclaimed ex-American, went on an essentially uninterrupted yapping spree mostly about how fucked up and self-destructive Latin America is, and of course had to blame it on every leftist's biggest boogeyman, the American (and more broadly Western) "imperialist" regime. I want to say about the Venezuelans: they had every means to not fuck up their nation if they just copied Norway or Canada's playbook, yet instead of taking all their money and properly diversifying it into a sovereign wealth fund, Hugo Chavez wanted votes and popularity—so he gave the people welfare instead. Leveraging your country's entire economy on a single resource is obviously going to make your currency worth nothing when that resource's market—a literal cartel—decides to make that resource worth nothing on a whim. But even if you want to blame oligarchs for their lavish and selfish lifestyles, I think it's important to understand that social services of any kind—welfare, state-sponsored whatever—don't fucking work. They generate no tangible value because people don't give a fuck about stuff if it's simply given to them. Worse than that, they grow entitled and start to think that they themselves are inherently valuable for Metaphysical Reasons They Do Not Wish To Elaborate On, and run those state-sponsored services to the ground. The money required to finance those services doesn't move around, doesn't generate growth, and is the economic equivalent of putting your life savings under your mattress and then burning your mattress because you never cleaned it. Delusional, man.
On a lighter note, check out paperchan, an imageboard inspired by pictochat where every post is written and drawn by hand. Yes, they're drawing penises.
The Parable of Alien Chess from revered FOSStuber, Luke Smith. However, it's not a video, but an article from his website—that I read—with my own two eyes! I enjoy Luke's writing, though he clearly has a better talent for public speaking. His colloquialisms come off much more cleanly in his videos than in his prose, but either way, I respect the rigor behind this essay. I particularly enjoyed his illustration of the local maximum, and how getting off of one mountain to climb a taller one might look like taking steps back, but it's only in the service of going higher. Honestly, with where we're at in the AI space, that's kind of how it feels. Sure, parts of the internet are getting worse right now because of it, but we genuinely might be getting off the smaller mountain to climb the taller one. We'll see, anyway.
Article from Compact on why we need to stop talking about mental health. Interesting how the mental health discourse has been making its waves in the publications again, isn't it? A hard truth: destigmatizing mental health conditions is a good thing, but it doesn't just lead to clinical over-diagnosing and a pathologizing of certain social behaviors; the true population that it should be meant to serve is a small, deeply oppressed minority. Despite the increased press, however, their voices still remain unheard: people shouting at traffic, people so unable to live because of paranoia, delusions, and depression—there are no campaigns for those people, are there? What we've seen is a further stigmatization of those people because some receptionist with ADHD and GAD can look at a homeless schizophrenic and say, "Hey, I know exactly what you're going through, champ. You've got this!" while proceeding to make absolutely no progress whatsoever. Well, at least I keep seeing those Caplyta and Austedo commercials on TV, right?
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