Andrew Conlin's blog

andrewconl.in is taking notes
blog til projects meta feed

[archive]

~ / archive / 002 - Trains, iPods and plagiarism 2023-12-10 | 1 minute

Hello again. Lots more interesting stuff this week, so I’ll jump right in.

This is a fascinating Mastodon thread. A very impressive reverse engineering of some train software, showing that it was deliberately designed to brick itself when being fixed at third-party repair workshops. Capitalism makes people do silly things.
A mammoth article by Emily Gorcenski, dissecting the recent A”I”¹ “revolution”. It is meticulously researched, and gets deep into the motivations behind the grift.
Next up, a technical breakdown of the inner workings of Shazam. This is always something that I have been amazed by, but never looked into the technology behind it. Who knew that Shazam used to be a phone number you could call? I’m certainly too young for that.
Something a bit different: I learned this week that you can play (online!) chess from you command line, through telnet and freechess.org. Just run telnet freechess.org 5000 and play some games. I love things like this, and that they continue to exist.
A tool for easily dithering images, very cool.
I learned this week about the Rockbox project, which is custom software for mp3 players (inlcuding iPods!). Here is a thread from Daniel Stenberg about how the iPod was “rockboxed”.
I was too quick to use “mammoth” earlier. For the final link today, this is a mammoth deep dive into the problem of plagiarism on YouTube. Some incredible stuff in here, and it is very interesting throughout, despite being almost 4 (four) hours long.

Thanks for reading!
A.

It is artificial, but certainly not intelligence. Just statistics. ↩

Issues or comments? Email me!

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Switching from GPG to age

It’s been several years since I went through all the trouble of setting up my own GPG keys and securing them in YubiKeys following drduh’s guide. With that approach, you generate one key securely offline and store it on multiple YubiKeys, along with a back…

via Luke Hsiao's blog November 4, 2025

Computer Says No: Error Reporting for LTL

Quickstrom is a property-based testing tool for web applications, using QuickLTL for specifying the intended behavior. QuickLTL is a linear temporal logic (LTL) over finite traces, especially suited for testing. As with many other logic systems, when a formu…

via Oskar Wickström November 1, 2025

Cosytober 2025

Cosytober 2025 CosyTober is a “cosy alternative to #Inktober”. The idea is the same, all during October, each day a prompt is given and artists are asked to draw, paint or otherwise create something inspired by the prompt and post it to social media. I'…

via splitbrain.org - blog October 31, 2025

Generated by openring

Be nice to each other!