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~ / 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. ↩

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Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Postfix Relay to SMTP2GO on NixOS

Postfix Relay to SMTP2GO on NixOS I am in the process of setting up a new NAS/Homeserver. But I nerd sniped myself by wanting to use NixOS on it. So things are going slow. But here's a thing I learned today… The goal is to set up a Postfix mail server t…

via splitbrain.org - blog July 25, 2025

Computational Tyranny

We are under constant cognitive assault. Buying plane tickets is navigating a minefield - one misclick blows a hole in your wallet. Resolving a mistake on your utility bill is a tactical operation: dodge hold music traps, outwit the chatbot, then convince t…

via One Happy Fellow - blog July 23, 2025

The rise of Whatever

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.

via fuzzy notepad - articles July 3, 2025

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