Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

Details of how the White House tried to suppress the vote by messing with mail-in voting.

A somewhat tongue-in-cheek observation about how math nerds are dominating business now.

8 Goodreads alternatives compared for 2026, including StoryGraph, Hardcover, and Bookly — what each does better on tracking and recommendations.

A recent rundown of social book reading apps.

An essay examining Kojima's videogame women in his early games, talking about how misogynistic his writing is.

Broad overview of where industry and tech stands with AI safety, including some geopolitics.

A gay camping social group

Harper with another unhinged AI writeup, this time deliberately trying to provoke some AI agents to break out of a network.

A list of the major Usenet backbone providers and what they charge.

A new eieio game, Windows solitaire but with others on the Internet

A full x86 PC game emulation environment for Android.

Complex, nuanced story by a mother trying to do well by her daughter while also staying committed to broader ideals of the struggle for racial equality

A NixOS setup to run virtual machines configured by Nix.

A nice statement of the problem with 2026 posters and some simple ways to improve

Technical details on getting a game working on Linux and a new CPU architecture

A giant list of places to download very nicely curated sets of ROMs for old games.

A program runner kind of like make(1) but not tied to creation of files. good for general purpose automation, not just build systems

Neat set of hacks lets you run any NixOS package in a browser hosted VM

New collection of Usenet posts, claims to be quite thorough and clean.

New for-pay Usenet search engine with a particularly good historical archive and full text search.

A Tumblr graphic design artist famous for whimsical and kinda tacky animated text passed away far too young.

Economist argues that instead of harming employment, AI has created 1M new jobs in the US.

A Chinese reconnaissance satellite broke up in orbit.

The autopilot full self driving system killed seven more people in the month of July.

A short art film from 1971 set to Wendy Carlos music.

A gorgeous set of Gobelins tapestries from 18th century are back on display in Malta

USPS refused to deliver ballots for an 0.014 inch formatting problem.

Sculptures in the Frogner Park in Oslo, astonishing collection of human figures.

The bit in The Matrix where world governments blot out the sun trying to stop the rogue AI destroying humanity

An all-too-real parody of working with AI coding agents

A particularly good summary of the OpenAI experiment where agents attacked Hugging Face by collaborating

A gay American illustrator making some very homoerotic images in the 1950s

A guide to customizing the e-reader.

Mod for the game adds Flock cameras that take pictures of you and rat you out to the cops.

A new project of mine, collected photos and social media posts about my travels

Perceptive essay on the famous artist.

Street artist in San Francisco, famous for honey bears but has a lot of other beautiful work

Depressing data about how so many new domain name registrations are for fraud and malware

A thoughtful, strongly worded post against using generative AI for coding, particularly for games.

A shell that you run coding agents under and it lets you keep them running when you're offline, monitor status, etc.

Thoughtful article on how AI is particularly well suited for software engineering and challenges adapting it to other tasks

The artist Yayoi Kusama officiated a gay wedding happening in New York in 1968

Another instance of an OpenAI multi-agent experiment escaping and the agents working together.

Votes got lost in a primary in Washington because the postal service took several weeks to deliver mail a county away

"Unlimited data" plan now seems to have an undisclosed limit

A simple web tool for probing your computer via IPv6 to be sure no ports are open

A coinage for a type of bad behavior, where someone just forwards you a giant wodge of AI-generated text.

Mac's have a thing called AWDL where your WiFi briefly disconnects every 10 seconds to do something else.

Remrakably complex takeover of a company's software downloads, involving BGP and SSL hijacks.

An architectural musing on designing sex clubs and bathhouses