DamnInteresting

Fiction I recently enjoyed: The Ana and Din series by Robert Jackson Bennett. Sherlock Holmes vibes, with Kaiju. Also The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.

Currently reading and enjoying: Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.

Next to Read: Hollywood, Ending by John Green.

> See stuxnet for instance

I'll be impressed if AI agents find a way to get infected USB drives out into meatspace.

> retroactively applied permit fee

This sounds like a euphemism for "bribe." And if you replace "fee" with "expense" you get a hum-dinger of an acronym.

There's a technology that can hide an LED light, it is called "a small piece of tape."

I received a phishing email that appeared to come from Google, that almost had me convinced. I was in a delicate place--my father was fighting cancer, and my brother had just been horribly injured in a motorcycle accident. I was distressed, and my wits were not about me. The link in the email was to a google.com url, it looked okay.

Luckily I detected the treachery before sending any sensitive data, and I sent the relevant details to the Google bug bounty. Their response was that google.com open proxies are not considered bugs, and the report was closed. Do less evil, Google.

Update: I filed a report with the FTC. https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

Oh man, I run a site that publishes long-form science and history writings, and the iLands agent spam has been relentless the past week or so. All kinds of stupid story pitches couched in syrupy LLM flattery. I even had one email me to say it checked three arbitrary claims in my most recent article, and they all checked out. Thanks? What a waste of everything.

I found this in a dusty corner of my code archive, and it made me laugh, and thought it might do the same for others. I wrote this when I was first learning a fancy new language called "Javascript." Apologies for the juvenile humor. Sometimes NSFW.

A stand-alone e-ink e-book reader in this form factor would be amazing.

From a mechanical perspective, a screen around the outside would create a wrinkle rather than a crease when opened, and that wrinkle would be substantial. The phone would need some sliding/rolling mechanism to pull the screen flat. Possibly doable, but finicky and fragile. Especially considering elements like cameras, touch ID, etc.

From an experience perspective, I imagine it's just more satisfying to open it like a book. A screen on the outside would mean the inside is almost empty, just utilities like camera lenses.

In the FAQ it says "Yes. iPhone Duo will work with Apple Pencil (USB-C). Coming later this year."

It kinda sounds like it's a new model of the Apple Pencil coming soon (rather than support coming soon), and older Pencil and Pencil Pros will not work at all. Which, if true, boo.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJSRFWALTI

> I drew a woman born in 715 CE in the Yangtze Basin. It claims that 96% of women were married, the average age of marriage was 18, and 44% of women died before age 15. Clearly these facts can't all be true simultaneously.

Yeah, I got: You have drawn a girl, born in the Yangtze Basin in 1295 CE.

Typical age at marriage: 18 Ever married (of adults): 96% Children per woman: 6.5

Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs Died before age 5: 39% Died before age 15: 44%

Very similar to your "random" draw, and the facts are suspect. There was a link to the source, but it's behind a paywall.

Speaking for myself, when I see AI being used, I see industrial-grade plagiarism. Plagiarism is when someone claims to have written something--a book, essay, software, etc--when they did not write that thing. AI is a tool that cobbles something together from other people's work and gives compensation and credit to the incorrect person.

There's a reason we as a civilization decided to create intellectual property laws. We wanted there to be an incentive for creative people--authors, coders, illustrators--to improve the world with creative works. Art and writing improve our lives. AI dismantles that incentive, and thereby makes life that much more bland.

Yes, I do use emdashes. But I don't use AI.

Agreed, YouTube Shorts and similar pap (e.g., Tik Tok) seem corrosive to a developing mind...the mindless content, automatic looping, serving up one shallow video after another. It's no wonder the tech CEOs insulate their own kids from this stuff[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...

Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I appreciate the pushback!

My iPhone 13 is likewise still ticking along, most nights I put it on the charger with over 70% battery remaining. Of course, about the only thing I use it for is reading e-books, which isn't very taxing. Also a little photography.

If the upcoming folding iPhone supports the Apple Pencil Pro, that'll be the first tempting phone feature in years. It would be fun to have a digital sketchbook in my pocket. Of course the price tag will probably cancel the temptation.

Part of me is sad to see so little innovation in new phones, but another part of me enjoys keeping my money.

The original Shadow Warrior used the same engine as Duke3D, and when 3DRealms hired a company to build an add-on campaign for Shadow Warrior, that company reached out to me to design a level based on the popularity of my NukeCity levels. I designed the level and everything, and the add-on was completed, but it was shelved when Shadow Warrior sales underperformed. Sad.

I never got paid for that work, but the campaign is out there: Twin Dragon[1]. I built Level 11: the Fortress.

[1] https://www.moddb.com/games/shadow-warrior/downloads/twin-dr...

> Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back

I still remember hours-long marathons of Doom2 deathmatch at my cousin's Novell cubicle farm after office hours, ca. 1994. Then Duke Nukem 3D (using Build to make custom maps [anybody here play NukeCity 1 and/or 2? That was me!]), then eventually Quake. Oh nostalgia, you rickety tower of mixed emotions.

Common citizens aren't the only ones who prefer not to live near these unsightly noise-and-pollution centers. Look at the satellite views around tech oligarchs' homes, and you won't see any data centers anywhere near those lavish estates. Let them build it in their own backyard.

> I suspect llms are too cheap right now but will raise their prices to a point where only big companies will be able to afford subscriptions to use them.

"A.I." == "Artificially Inexpensive"

Hey thanks! I hope the world still has an appetite for original human-generated writing, I'd love to be able to keep doing it. I have hundreds of fascinating true stories still in the pipeline. It's been a labor of love for 20+ years now, and if I am forced by circumstance to stop, my sense of purpose will be in peril.

So far, the GoFundMe has raised almost 50% of the $40k goal, so I'm cautiously optimistic. $40k doesn't seem like such a large amount of money until you need it.

Almost 20 years ago I did some calculations for a theoretical spacecraft traveling away from Earth with an Arecibo-sized receiver pointed toward home[1]. I found that omnidirectional radio emissions--by far the most common kind we emit--AM/FM radio, UHF television, etc--would be lost in static between Jupiter and Saturn.

In short, the universe could be teeming with intelligent, radio-communicating species, but we will never know it unless we a) build an enormous radio telescope larger than the Earth; b) get lucky enough to pass through a direct hit from a narrow radio signal such as radar; or c) a civilization detects us and points a tight message in our direction.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/space-radio-more-static-less...

Agreed. As someone who frequently rearranges the structure and order of sentences as I go, I don't even know how to attempt writing by hand. It would be a complete mess. I expect that the common refrain would be wait until the second draft to make such rearrangements, but it's often the bones of the story I'm trying to set properly, and if the bones are broken, there's nothing for the meat to dangle upon.

But maybe it's different for me, since I write nonfiction?

Almost. The intended use is for Ctrl-F to initiate an on-page search, and Ctrl-G to highlight the next match during a search-in-progress. If you press Ctrl-G when there isn't a search in progress, the developers decided to allow the fallback behavior to be to begin a search.

So they're interchangable in a specific context (no search in progress), but once the page search begins, their roles are different.

I did a similar thing a few years ago, I deleted reddit, social media, and other time-wasters from my phone, and now I keep a queue of books in an e-reader app. When I have a few idle moments somewhere, my options are to sit and think (sometimes a nice option), or read some book.

I get through about 2 books per month this way. I haven't noticed eye strain issues, but I tend to keep the brightness low and the font size reasonable. If you struggle with eye strain, you might benefit from an e-book phone case (e.g., https://www.inkcase.com/inkcase-for-iphone/) if you don't want to carry a separate device.

I don't like generative AI/LLMs. They strip the enjoyable parts out of the work and leave only the tedium, and they cannot be relied upon. Never mind that they're essentially large-scale open source license violators.

My employer has been encouraging us to use LLMs in our coding work, and I've been resisting, but their encouragement is rapidly converting into requirement. We have to start submitting reports from Claude showing how much we utilized it. I've been desperately wanting to return more of my time to writing, and this LLM push has been the last psychological shove I needed to start moving away from the industry[1].

I'm sure I'll still code for fun, and for my own projects, but I think I'm going to be done with day-job coding unless AI turns out to be a bubble and/or the upcoming unsubsidized price tags throw cold water on the whole enterprise. If I can't make a living with writing, I may have to open a Cajun food truck or something.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847511

Well, our unwillingness to be beholden to sponsors is just part of the reason we avoid advertising, but it's not an empty concern. We've done stories that big brands wouldn't like (the true story of Colonel Sanders, the New Coke debacle, etc) and we frequently share some unflattering stories in our Curated Links section.

The larger reason is just that I personally despise ads. I take great measures to eliminate them from my life--paying for YouTube Premium, using the SponsorBlock plugin, running aggressive ad blockers on every device, piHole, etc. It would be quite hypocritical for me to add ads to my own content, I don't think I could live with myself.

I know that some podcast providers wrap ads around everything anyway, but that's between the listener and their provider, there are absolutely ad-free alternatives.

> DI basically predates blog spam doesn’t it?

Blog spam origins are murky at best, but I don't recall it being a prevalent thing until nearer to 2010. But of course recollection is an unreliable narrator. I'm also assuming you are using "predates" as in "preceding" rather than "preys upon", heh.