Linkdump

I like stuff other people write. This is a linkdump list of some stuff I really like. The goal is to compile neat stuff I find in a given month and place it gently here, so that in the future when my squirrel brain goes haywire, I may again find delicious acorns.

Best Of/Personal Favorites

Articles

  • Playing to Win -- a gaming-oriented article, but applies to most everything. Life is a game and playing to win is great (keeping in mind ethics and morality are the rules by which we play).
  • Grugbrain -- one of my all-time favorite development related articles. Smol, smooth brains should make things they can maintain and update.
  • The Gervais Principle -- a hilarious look at the office politics and dark triad underpinnings of The Office (American version).
  • Software Disenchantment -- a good gawk at how performance has degraded over time in software development.
  • Agile and the Long Crisis of Software -- a wonderful longform piece about Agile and other development organizational methodologies.

The famed computer scientist Frederick Brooks compared software projects to werewolves: they start out with puppy-like innocence, but, more often than not, they metamorphose into “a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products.”

"...a managerial necessity to get developers to stop acting so weird."

  • Look Stupid -- great advice, boiling down to "don't worry one bit about looking stupid." Apparently, part of that whole knowledge-building process involves failure, and even when you are doing something very smart, some people won't get it and will think you are stupid, so you should not listen to them.

The benefit from asking a stupid sounding question is small in most particular instances, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large and I've observed that people who are willing to ask dumb questions and think "stupid thoughts" end up understanding things much more deeply over time. Conversely, when I look at people who have a very deep understanding of topics, many of them frequently ask naive sounding questions and continue to apply one of the techniques that got them a deep understanding in the first place.

  • The Internet is Already Over -- metaphorical and sharply satirical ranting on memetic cultural collapse and the cyclical nature of trends.

In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself: trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical time; what’s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new. It’s already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all our pop music sounds like a tribute act. But consider that the cultural shift that had all those thirtysomething Cut writers so worried about their survival is simply the return of a vague Y2K sensibility, which was itself just an echo of the early 1980s. Angular guitar music again, flash photography, plaid. We’re on a twenty-year loop: the time it takes for a new generation to be born, kick around for a while, and then settle into the rhythm of the spheres.

Podcasts

Podcasts I listen to regularly, as in most new episodes:

2025 March

Code and Tech

  • Ludic's Guide To Getting Software Engineering Jobs -- very accurate what he says about tiering and two very different markets. It's pretty jarring sometimes reading/interacting with some communities where things seem a little disconnected from my actual reality -- /r/ExperiencedDevs, for one. There aren't really communities for the "lower" tier of market because the people working those jobs by definition don't give a shit enough to read anything relevant to their just-a-paycheck day job. I wonder which of us really gets the shorter stick. Certainly the higher tier gets the bigger paycheck... but rampant burnout, corporate politicking, and other unsavory things seem more prevalent and at a higher degree than in lower market's jobs.
  • Visual Readability Patterns -- excellent walkthrough on what makes code hard or easy to read. One of the things I'd like to see more about is splitting things across files versus overly lengthy files, and naming conventions (or lack thereof -- what is src? what is lib? what is vendor? Some of these things are clearer than others).
  • How long you play doesn't matter as long as you love gaming -- yup 🎮💖
  • Bulletproof React -- looks like a neat structure/walkthrough for React things.
  • Win11 Deboat Soon™. 😭 (thank you Nathan)
  • AI Winter -- hmm, so we've been here before.

Nonfiction

  • Incoming.

Fiction

  • Book: The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner. Dystopian climate apocalypse sci-fi, I swear it has nothing to do with the current era times.

Media

  • Movie: Flow, I enjoyed it. Kitties and journies, very good.
  • The Grey Area but old, with Jaron Lanier. Very good episode about several things. Translation services stealing human output to produce (language changes rapidly, human input is still necessary to keep up with the deluge of new language). The weirdness of consciousness and how virtual reality (and games to an extent) sort of lets our brains time travel to different bodies in different points of past evolution, and speculate on future evolution. Good, good stuff about your consciousness and sensory perception at the center comprising the core "you" (and I have/had thoughts about how AI -- particularly not fancy autocorrect LLMs -- can't replicate that). Additional sprinkles of individualism versus "pack behavior" and how the latter brings out the worst in humanity. Extremely highly rated episode, wonderful. I read one of Jaron Lanier's books last year and it was so prescient of what we're going through now. I appreciate his perspective so very much.
  • Podcast: Scamanda, two day jaunt. Probably didn't need to be as long as it was, but frustrating look at terrible people. (thank you Nathan)
  • YouTube: How to Tame Your Advice Monster -- yes. Ask questions before you dole out advice. Puts other people in an awkard spot when you are being "helpful" but you are misunderstanding the situation or failing to catch nuance, and makes things worse for the other person (thank you Nathan).
  • lols: It Is As If You Were Making Love 🥵🍆🍑

2025 February

This was not a good month. No books, little fiction.

Code and Tech

Nonfiction

Media

2025 January

Code and Tech

Nonfiction

  • Still The Rebel from last month. Hard read!

Fiction

  • Got nothin'.

Media

Prior Years