Today, the world belongs to TCP/IP. Those two protocols (together with UDP) govern most of the remote communication that happens between computers. But I think it’s wonderful that you can still find, hidden in the plumbing of the internet, traces of this other, long-extinct, evocatively named system. What was Chaosnet? And why did it go the way of the dinosaurs?
Technology
See your identity pieced together from stolen data
abc.net.auHave you ever wondered how much of your personal information is available online? Here’s your chance to find out.
Tiny Electronic Desktop Sculptures
bhoite.com
badidea.zip
badidea.zipBrex’s Prompt Engineering Guide
github.com[This is] based on lessons learned from researching and creating Large Language Model (LLM) prompts for production use cases. It covers the history around LLMs as well as strategies, guidelines, and safety recommendations for working with and building programmatic systems on top of large language models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
pure sh bible
github.comA collection of pure POSIX sh alternatives to external processes.
Fairbuds XL
theguardian.com
This ethical and repairable design proves Bluetooth headphones can be more sustainable
QAZ Cyberdeck
github.com
A compact cyberdeck, featuring a QAZ 35% keyboard, Banana Pi M2 Zero SBC and 7.9 inch monitor.
Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Denormalized Tables
glean.ioI quickly learned that writing one giant query with a bunch of joins or even bunch of Python helper functions could get me stuck. My transformation functions weren’t flexible enough, or my joins were too complicated to answer the endless variety of questions thrown my way while keeping the numbers correct.
Instead, the easiest way to be fast, nimble, and answer all the unexpected questions was to prepare a giant table or dataframe and limit myself to it. As long as I understood the table’s contents, it was harder to make mistakes. I could group by and aggregate on the fly with confidence.
Energy Saving Road Lighting in Norway
dailyscandinavian.com
Only as traffic approaches, Norway’s auto-dimming roads get brighter. New LED lights dim to 20 percent when no cars are in area. When a car drives by, the lights turn to 100 per cent. Thus it reduces the country’s carbon footprint.
Chat with Open Large Language Models
chat.lmsys.orgUse and compare all the popular LLMs
Street Fighter II, Paper Trails
fabiensanglard.net
Over the past six months, I have spent my spare time studying Capcom success stories and in particular the genesis of Street Fighter II. If discovering the engineering behind the CPS-1 was fascinating, I found the side story of how developers tracked ROM budget using paper and scissors equally interesting.
Bluesky firehose
firesky.tvSee current activity on Bluesky in realtime.
You’re Wrong About – Napster with Niko Stratis
buzzsprout.comThis week, a tale of two Shawns/Seans, their impossible dream, and the file sharing service that lived fast, died young, and helped create the internet as we know it. Plus, Metallica.
How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed
pudding.coolI wanted to explore the malicious, confusing, and deceitful things that occur after signing up for digital services, as well as how design can nudge us to forget about a free trial or accidentally sign up for things that we didn’t intend to.
Dark patterns are often most egregious with subscriptions and free trials, especially when attempting to cancel, so I focused on those.