004 - Links 1 - 2026/05/20

A collection of interesting links and blogs I like in no particular order.

Marginalia

I found many of these links from this great search engine. It definitely has a bit of a tech lean to the results, but perhaps those are simply the people likely to make their own websites. I'd highly recommend poking around or searching a term or two.

Meditations on Moloch

An excellent analysis of why anyone should care about the prisoners' dilemma, and a deep well of evocative vocabulary on the subject of living together with other people. Not exactly a fun read but the underlying topic is extremely important to understand I think.

Dylan McNamee

The personal site of my undergraduate advisor. Not updated frequently, but the discussions of coffee are quite interesting. Also an illustrative example of what community outreach can look like in a technical sense.

Bootstrappable

A wonderful statement of the importance of keeping your supply chains simple. Aesthetically nice to boot. Hardly the only cell of people interested in doing more with less, but I think the mission statement here is the clearest. The importance of simplicity is drastically undervalued at the moment in tech and without people like this fighting the good fight everything we rely on will be swept out from under our feet at some point.

Make a Website

Small and simple exhortation of personal expression by way of public web page. Some nice tools for getting started if you don't have in mind already. Give it a look!

Program Stepping with Monads

Technical, but not incomprehensible if you have seen the machinery before. If not, consider becoming acquainted with monads, they can be hard to grasp, but understanding them, particularly with examples, is a powerful opportunity to understand at a deep intuitive level why some people really insist on the value of a certain view of types and functional programming, myself included.

Spelunker Game

A browser game with ASCII graphics and technical but meditative gameplay. I haven't spent as much time with it as I should, but I return and play a bit here and there. Fun, particularly if you like software with keyboard controls.

Tech (Not So) Utopia

A personal account and analysis of the image that (big) tech wants to maintain and project. This is extremely well trod ground, but I like this account for its sharpness, the clean analysis, the lack of a generic call to action without deeper consideration, and the measured disappointment that the whole thing exudes.

Lennart Augustsson

I don't have any particular post I like the most from this blog, but I just admire Augustsson's style and ethos in programming. In the functional space there is a temptation to try to make everything a crystalline, complete conception. Naturally that is a hard task. It is also generally motivated by the cultural expectation that these sorts of complete abstract productions are easier to compose and work with and build atop. I find that to be generally true, when done well at least. Augustsson represents for me the opposite style. His code is principled, but tends to be only exactly as complicated as it needs to be. It is often not more general than his particular problem, nor does it leave space for future extensions that are not currently present. Despite this, his language of choice remains Haskell, so you end up with these artifacts that have a bit of the same leanness of a battle tested C application, but couched in the mathematical elegance of Haskell. It's a bit of an odd feeling, but welcome in the landscape of increasingly arcane language features and extensions in the laboratory that is modern Haskell. A poor craftsman blames his tools, but reading Augustsson's code reminds me that a good craftsman tends to work with the same tools for a long time, and in that way builds a deep understanding of them. In a phrase I believe Lennart Augustsson to have that mechanical sympathy that makes good engineers.

Casual Agency

Again I don't have a particular sub-page of this site I want to pick specifically. I don't think I could pick just one. This site is what inspired me most recently to get back to work on my own site. The clean design sensibility, the calculant reliance on ironclad software (C language, irc, man pages, roff, etc), the brutalist photos mixed with scenes of the comfortably mundane, the brevity and soul of the text. Even just writing this I ended up re-reading a large number of the text posts.

I use some of June's software (for irc, go figure). Should the opportunity arise I would certainly use more of it.

Where was this site before? I needed to see it! I'm so glad that it was made and that I came across its path, if not it across mine.