Inspired by Annie Rauwerda’s lots of links. Links are in the format
YYYY-MM-DD : [label](hyperlink) | my comments
in Markdown (since I’m using Hugo), but it’ll appear differently when you inspect this page since it generates HTML. Anyway, the point is to have a consistent format that I can use to do something fun with this data later on.
Or I could use this as a teaching tool too – an easy site to practice scraping where consent’s not an issue. If you want to scrape this page, just go ahead. You can also visit this page’s .md file in my site’s Github repo if you want to work with markdown files instead. If you do something with it, please email me at hi [at] this domain name as I’d love to hear about it :)
How I decide to post a link: Does it make me feel curious OR happy? If yes, I’ll post it.
2023-10-06: The Complicated History of the Downtown Line | Train history is always fun
2023-09-28: Next time you read a food nutrition label, pour one out for Burkey Belser | His quote that “When design works, it looks like it’s always been there” is one that describes his work really well. I never thought about who designed those nutrition information labels because they just felt like they belonged there. RIP
2023-09-26: Command line interface guidelines | I’m trying to learn more about CLIs as I’m trying to write one to help me do site-specific Google searches but with fewer keystrokes
2023-09-24: A list of real-world uses of differential privacy by Ted Desfontaines | I struggle a lot with trying to bridge the gaps in my understanding regarding privacy enhancing technologies in theory, and understanding when to use them. This piece (and Ted’s differential privacy series in general) is a lifesaver.
2023-09-22: sam floreani’s list of recommended reading | Blood in the Machine; Extremely Online, Your Face Belong to Us etc
2023-09-21: slidev | Generating slides with markdown
2023-09-19: Altair 8800 Simulator | Flip lots of switches… online!
2023-09-19: GenLaw Resources | Great list of readings from the Workshop on Generative AI and Law ‘23. I learnt about this from Prof Elettra Bietti’s course syllabus linked below.
2023-09-19: The Regulation of Technology in the Digital Platform Economy - Syllabus by Prof Elettra Bietti | Can’t really articulate why, but I really liked this reading list. Another thing to work through when I’m funemployed :)
2023-09-19: Website Carbon Calculator | According to this, my site emits about 0.3kg of CO2 assuming that I get 10,000 views a month, which is a very generous assumption. Anyway, I wouldn’t know because I don’t run analytics here…
2023-09-18: Research Software Engineering with Python | Am curious about testing, and making code + research reproducible and this seems like a great resource. I wanna work through this during my funemployment. Software Design by Example is something I wanna do too.
2023-09-17: csvbase | Easier interactions with csvs. Small, flexible software is delightful :-) Also TIL that the European Central Bank distributes its data about the value of the Euro vis-a-vis other currencies with PDF, CSV (.zip), XML and RSS feeds.
2023-09-15: How I Started Coding | I like reading stories about developers’ journeys that span years and happen outside of formal schooling. I really like this one by Ines (co-founder of spaCy). Funnily enough, I also worked part-time at LUSH…
2023-09-14: Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents | Preserving mathematical expressions while turning things from PDF to LaTeX
2023-09-10: Chess-Analytica: chess analytics made easy | Came across this on Reddit. It lets you get data from the chess.com API and analyse past/current games of a given player.
2023-09-09: Meet Rivet, An Open Source Visual Programming Environment for Generative AI | Enjoying node-based interfaces, similar to natto.dev and Puredata. Also cheers to Ironclad for open-sourcing.
2023-09-08: What Adults Forget About Friendship | Good reminder about the importance of unstructured time to just be silly
2023-09-08: Sanctuary Working Cats | Cats with jobs!! The Best Friends Sanctuary targets adopters who are looking for cats to deter rodents (e.g. warehouses, churches etc). So cute :0
2023-09-06: Checking Websitesā GDPR Consent Compliance for Marketing Emails | I like questions that care about not just what the law is, but how agents actually respond to it. Also props for creating a unique email address for every service they signed up for, so they could track the sources of marketing emails…the other projects supervised by Karel Kubicek also look really cool (one is a Master’s thesis about GDPR-related Github Issues)
2023-09-05: Casual Birder is an Endearing Game About Photographing Birds | Sroyon recommended this review to me and it’s delightful. A handheld game where you take photos of birds. Done by the same folks that published Untitled Goose Game.
2023-09-05: An Empirical Study & Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs | CAPTCHAs kinda suck for accessibility, and now it appears that bots solve CAPTCHAs faster and more accurately than humans (see Page 10, Table 3). I think we should just throw the whole CAPTCHA thing away.
2023-09-03 : ohmygit | So cute, you get to learn git with a game and watch your git timeline grow as you make commits. I wish I could’ve started learning git with this instead of whatever I was doing back in 2020…