Hello all and welcome to the third (and hopefully final!) replatform of my newsletter! I’ve taken the liberty of migrating you all to Buttondown, but if you object (or just don’t want to get my emails any more) then the unsubscribe link is at the bottom.

Anyway, hello - I hope you’re well and that life is treating you wonderfully! I’ve recently started offering “Office Hours” to anyone who thinks a one-to-one conversation with me could be useful to them - if that’s you, then do get in touch!

Meanwhile, a selection of things I’ve read recently and enjoyed, both tech and non-, from musings on aging to the virtues of coöperative web hosting!

Assorted

  • Everyone’s talking about Generative AI, and unfortunately that includes a lot of hype and magical thinking. Cedric Chin’s “A Vaccine for Anthropomorphism of AI” is a “useful but not accurate” explanation of the workings thereof, which serves to help stop folks putting more trust in LLMs than they should
  • We’re all getting older, and though it beats the alternative, it definitely has a bunch of downsides. Ian Leslie’s “27 Notes On Growing Old(er)” was a poignant read - brutally honest about some of the realities and weirdness, while an important reminder of perspective and the joys.
  • After recent de-listing/de-indexing of adult content by Steam and itch.io as a result of pressure from payment processors, a common (naïve) suggestion was that they should just move or make their own. Voidfox’s “Payment Processor Fun 2025 – Making Your Own MSP” details the mechanics of building and operating one and why it’s far from easy (I’ve done it, and would agree). Unsurprisingly, it’s not that simple.
  • I find radio communications fascinating - the protocols, the things being transmitted right now that you can receive, and more. I put together “The Radio Ingress Project” to showcase a number of things people can do to explore more of the world of radio, without needing e.g. an amateur radio licence.
  • Finally, Hillel Wayne’s “Ten weird things you can buy online (and why you would)” was a whole Thing - I suspect many of these don’t ship outside of the US, but either way, I sure hope they’re paying for good quality delivery and nobody’s just leaving them on the doormat without even knocking…

Tech

  • There are often tradeoffs between security and availability / convenience. A common example people run into in practice is dealing with device loss when using end-to-end encrypted messaging - many current systems require users to choose between not being able to recover history, or significantly weakening security / introducing single points of failure. Emilie Ma and Martin Kleppmann’s “Kintsugi: Decentralized E2EE Key Recovery” is a neat protocol for doing better.
  • Several folks have reported issues with web service load caused by scrapers and crawlers, often AI-backed. Techaro’s “Anubis: Web AI Firewall Utility” is a lightweight proof-of-work-based tool to block non-human access to sites.
  • The continued centralisation and walled-garden-ification of the web is a growing and concerning problem. But self-hosting, while fun and educational, is an impractical solution. Drew Lyton’s “The Future is NOT Self-Hosted” explores the various challenges, and makes an excellent case for the value of hosting for communities.
  • Finally, for testing reasons recently I found myself wanting a small example PDF, and it turns out Peter Wyatt’s “The smallest possible (valid) PDF” has a whole bunch of fascinating explorations into PDF internals, with various hacks and tricks to stay as minimal as possible.

So

As ever, I hope these were of interest, and feedback is always appreciated, as are shares, likes, subscribes, et cetera!

Until next time, which will definitely be sooner…!

Kristian