links, mostly longreads
Jun. 21st, 2026 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishStoried Colors: "One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison." This is, I think, the best of what the internet can be: a deep dive into a niche subject, presented in a visually attractive and easily navigable way.
Chili Peppers of the World: "A visual field guide to the chili peppers of the world, from wild origins to cultivated forms, illustrated with 176 hand-drawn peppers." This, too, is a Good Thing On The Internet.
Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog (warning: PDF): "So far as we have been able to determine, no quantum factorisation has ever factorised a value that wasn’t either a carefully-constructed sleight-of-hand number or for which most of the work wasn’t done beforehand with a computer in order to transform the problem into a different one that could then be readily solved by a physics experiment." Perhaps the snarkiest math/CS paper I've ever seen.
Exiting the Draugr Castle (A Tragicomedy in Twenty-Four Acts): "But since one of the fundamental privileges of being a professional essay writer is that absolutely any terrible experience you have can be refined into material, I figured I’d write about the five years where I was [a heathen]."
Extinction-Level Capitalism: "To replace labor, AI doesn’t need to actually deliver comparable outputs. It only needs to fulfill a certain executive fantasy of 'what work looks like'."
And, because jobhunting is where about half my attention goes these days, The Truth About Referrals, From Someone in Tech: "Because of all of the layoffs, recruiters are spoiled for choice. You can be an incredibly strong candidate and there is still someone who 100% fits a narrow set of criteria and you only 99% fit." It's a bad time and it's gonna get worse, even in the increasingly unlikely event that it gets better for me personally.
Chili Peppers of the World: "A visual field guide to the chili peppers of the world, from wild origins to cultivated forms, illustrated with 176 hand-drawn peppers." This, too, is a Good Thing On The Internet.
Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog (warning: PDF): "So far as we have been able to determine, no quantum factorisation has ever factorised a value that wasn’t either a carefully-constructed sleight-of-hand number or for which most of the work wasn’t done beforehand with a computer in order to transform the problem into a different one that could then be readily solved by a physics experiment." Perhaps the snarkiest math/CS paper I've ever seen.
Exiting the Draugr Castle (A Tragicomedy in Twenty-Four Acts): "But since one of the fundamental privileges of being a professional essay writer is that absolutely any terrible experience you have can be refined into material, I figured I’d write about the five years where I was [a heathen]."
Extinction-Level Capitalism: "To replace labor, AI doesn’t need to actually deliver comparable outputs. It only needs to fulfill a certain executive fantasy of 'what work looks like'."
And, because jobhunting is where about half my attention goes these days, The Truth About Referrals, From Someone in Tech: "Because of all of the layoffs, recruiters are spoiled for choice. You can be an incredibly strong candidate and there is still someone who 100% fits a narrow set of criteria and you only 99% fit." It's a bad time and it's gonna get worse, even in the increasingly unlikely event that it gets better for me personally.
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Date: 2026-06-22 10:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-23 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-26 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-28 10:33 pm (UTC)I did have to restrain myself from laughing out loud at the "of course norse heathens are the drunkest of all pagans" bit, too. :)