Programming note: remember link roundups? Well, I'm deciding to call them by a different name now. Why? So I can make a silly pun. I wanted to go with "Cool Stuff Sunday" at first, but I'm not fooling myself in thinking I'll stick to posting these on Sundays.

Let's get to it, there's a lot of stuff to talk about.

Social Media meta

For better or worse, I still think probably far too much about social media, so I can't help but be into articles about it.

Tom (Date 'em Ups): I want you to dream

You can have dreams, Cohost. And when you're finally done making one come true, you can go on and have more. Dreams are why I'm here, why I've survived, and I want you, all of you to have them, too, more than anything else. Wherever the winds take us all after this, I hope you hold onto those dreams. Don't let go of them for anything. Anything. No matter how crushing the world gets, no matter how tall the barriers to entry are, nothing whatsoever. I had to hold onto mine tightly for over two whole decades, but damn it, I willed it into reality and I'm going to keep doing the exact same thing with what's in my sights now or die trying.

Another cohost-related post, it will happen again, I'm not sorry.

Luna: Online following and Starter Packs

I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular, I don’t want a tech/demoscene/gamedev/etc audience showing up in bulk just because someone else decided to put me on a list without my prior consent.

It is not a secret that I am not exactly fond of Bluesky. I use it, but I tolerate it. Bluesky's "starter packs", much like Twitter's "Follow all"^[1] feature, are... misguided? I see where they're coming from, it's hard to "build a feed" when you start on a Twitter-like website but, like Luna here, I can't help but feel this will produce Some Weird Results.

I think following a starter pack is doing yourself a disservice because you're just injecting people into your feed without getting a feel of what their posts are like, and people who are added to them have little way of doing much about it. You can "just block the creator of a pack" but this isn't a great solution. Some people might prefer to never be put in the spotlight at all, sometime it might be awkward for people to block a starter pack's creator. The fact there isn't an "opt me out" button is bonkers to me, but ultimately doesn't surprise me coming from Bluesky. But I'm just a hater, so what do I know.

Build your feed slowly but surely, mute and unfollow liberally, avoid accounts that are just glorified RSS feeds. It's not perfect, but I know I would explode if I followed dozens of new people at once, so that's what I do.

Websites meta

Margot (a journal): "your website doesn't actually have to have everything"

(Sorry, Margot, but I felt the date wasn't a good title, hope you forgive me)

You don't have to recreate everything on the web, or even your favorite social media site! I recommend starting small, working on what you can or what you know, and plan to do more whenever you feel like you have the capacity to do so.

This is something I have to keep telling myself. The reason I never posted on my blog when it was at erambert.me/blog was that I had built a stack^[2] that was just too distracting to me. I would end up just tinkering and adding yet-another-feature instead of just posting.
I am starting to think about maybe migrating to something else in the coming months, but I've enjoyed Bearblog for its "limitations" that stop me in my tinker-instead-of-writing tracks. It's always a work in progress, and that's ok.

Ian: Having a Website Used to Be Fun

Kill the cop in your head that tells you to share the concerns that Google has. You're not Google. Websites should be fun. Enterprise tools like Cloudflare and managed containers aren't.

I felt Ian's post in my bones because, like I said above, I painted myself into a similar corner. Multiple times in my past. You, dear reader, know about damien.zone and erambert.me, but my past is full of the corpses of dead blogs. Hopefully, this one won't join the graveyard anytime soon.

pyeri: Robots.txt pitfalls: what I learned the hard way

Note: robots.txt is merely a suggestion these days, do not treat it as a silver bullet against scrapers and various bots.

Interesting post about, IMO, easy mistakes to make with the robots.txt syntax.

General tech stuff

Louie Mantia: Nothing Left to Solve

At some point, we solidified the layout of a calculator. If we change it too much, we diminish value rather than add to it. It might be time to recognize that we have solved some software problems, and the reason why all this stuff gets redesigned repeatedly is simply because companies don’t know what to do if these things have been solved already.

Louie is specifically talking about The Browser Company building another browser that isn't Arc, but his article could apply to so many things in tech at this point. Maybe this isn't the first time it happened, but it really feels like the tech industry is eating its own tail trying to find the Next Big Thing. Welp.

Jason Velazquez: Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something

Listen, I know we want to believe that things are changing for the better. For the first time in a long while, there’s hope for the future of the web. There’s something in the air, something that feels like meaningful change. Things are happening. It’s lovely, actually.
[...]
And if you’re on Mastodon or some other decentralized social media, that’s great! Don’t be a dick about it. For some people, TikTok is their livelihood. For others, Instagram is the difference between speaking to someone that day or not. We’re all just doing the best we can. But we’re fighting each other when we could be working together to take these motherfuckers down a peg.

A good essay about the threat of the ever-growing corporate control of the Web at large and what can be done to (hopefully) fix it.

H/t to Ewie and Dante for this one.

cathode ray dude: why am i interested in flip phones

Cathode Ray Dude has a blog now! I've been a fan of his YouTube channel for a while, and I always enjoyed his posting on cohost.

Anyway, this is a good article about flip phones, go read it.

asthasr: Generative AI and the Programmer

In other words, as LLMs become more prominent and produce larger proportions of available technical content, the ability of new programmers to bootstrap themselves into competence diminishes because they lack the context necessary to judge the content that they are reading. In effect, only content that is free of LLM influence is suitable for beginner use.

How many aspiring programmers will possess the caution and insight necessary to realize that, and the humility required to accept that older resources might be preferable?

The answer to that question will determine the fate of the industry.

I am more bullish than the author against LLM-based tools when used in programming tasks. Every time I tried them, they were genuinely distracting and fell on their face when asked to perform more complex tasks that would have been helpful. But this is a good post about the limits of these tools and how, if not used critically, they can be detrimental.

I'm of the opinion that a programmer is better off learning how to like, make automations and snippets and learn their coding environment by heart rather than using a mediocre plagiarism machine, but that's my opinion.

Music stuff

echosoul: New post

our scenes will be better off if we support each other openly. sharing the names of the artists and tracks you are playing as a dj is a simple important step.

I'm not a DJ but as a listener I can say that, DJ sets are such a useful discovery tool that it's saddening to see the practice of hiding your "sources" taking place. Besides, there will always be some sicko out there to figure out and post the track lists on dedicated websites, so what's the point?

Morning Music: Soichi Terada - Sounds from the Far East

Great musical recommendation from Misty on her (excellent) Morning Music blog. Love me some house music.

lynnedrum: NORMAL FOR GIRLS VII: REMIXED - postmortem

Normal for Girls is one of my favorite music events of the past few years. It's always a blast to virtually attend with my friend group in VR, and this edition was no exception. All the sets are great in their own way. Do check it out.

Rebecca Black: Boiler Room: DC

Not a post, but just a DJ set that surprised me. I only recently learned that A) Rebecca Black is still around and that B) she's fucking killing it. This set of hers is great and even funny at times. Highly recommend it.

Other things

Nat Clayton (Someplace Elsewhere): Drifting through the Empire State, in pictures

But that's the process, and it's a tremendously enjoyable process at that. It's been fun to get out of Edinburgh and try new things, to sneak out a few pics whenever the moment presented itself. I'm taking things as seriously as I need to right now - there's no pressure to post or monetize, this is just for me.

Nat's post resonated a lot with me because, boy, I haven't taken pictures with my "big camera" in such a long time that the next time I do will absolutely feel like learning everything again. I should get back into it.

Louie Mantia: The Most Famous Queen Song

Wondering how this possibly could be, I remembered we are from two very different parts of the world. [...]
Some things are not as universal as you’d think.

The same blog, twice in a link roundup? It's more likely than you think!
Louie's post hit close to home because I feel like I have a similar experience dozens of times ever since moving to the U.S. And you could argue that France and the U.S. are much closer to each than Japan and the U.S. are!
The world is both very small and very big, I just think it's neat.

Priscilla (ghoulnoise): Two BIG Reasons Cats Follow You Everywhere

I had to share this extremely important post.

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That's all, folks.

See ya in the next one,
- damien

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1. I cannot, for the life of me, find any coverage about this feature. But it exists and will show up if you follow someone with, I think, "a lot" of followers? It's basically a modal that shows a bunch of accounts' avatars and will prompt you to follow all of them. ↩︎

2. The stack itself isn't relevant, IMO. But if you have to know, it's using Astro, which I like! I just don't think I can trust myself (yet) to use it for a blog again, lol ↩︎