This is a linkblog written by Dante.
By 'linkblog' I mean this is a blog consisting of links to other sites or posts that I find interesting, noteworthy, or generally of interest. Occasionally I'll include my own thoughts on the links as well. You can subscribe by RSS to get all posts including commentary, or get daily, weekly, or even monthly updates if that is more your speed.
All links include comments sections, and you're welcome to leave your thoughts as well.
You can find my main blog here.
The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!” Okay, what if they do? What if they do.
Anil Dash is on the money with this one. God, I cannot stand "unalive" and "grape" and all these fucking childish neologisms and I will call you out on using them if I see you using them! Talk like a fucking adult!
And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.
And he's also right about this!!
It’s midnight and Natalie knows where her girlfriend is but she isn’t ready to admit it.
Beautiful violent horror short fiction about transness and dystopia.
A Simple Site, offering (relatively) Slow Servers hosted on Secondhand Systems in Spokane, Washington, with (hopefully) Satisfactory Service.
Low power VPSes for cheap, with a focus on privacy.
If a person commits serious harm at twenty, accepts responsibility for it, experiences consequences, spends ten years attempting to become someone who will never inflict that harm again, and reaches thirty only to discover that nothing done during those intervening years possesses any moral weight whatsoever, then “rehabilitation” has become a word describing a process whose successful completion we have defined as ontologically impossible – asymptotic, even.
As far as I'm concerned this is the definitive writing on The Jacob Geller situation and also as close as you're gonna get to a stance on it from me. I am very frustrated and disappointed both by the actions and history revealed (obviously) but also by the unbelievably cruel and simplistic response on the social media spheres about this. A simple-minded focus on punishment with no clear end other than punishment.
Sexual assault deserves moral condemnation, full stop. It does not follow that every behavior performed under the banner of condemning sexual assault is therefore morally admirable.
Looking at my software peers in 2026 I see fatigued faces, I see frustration, and I see a lot of people looking for a way out of an industry that seems poised on the brink of collapse. LLMs are being pushed on us at every turn, most people seem at best frustrated by them, and ultimately they seem to appeal most to people who see the production of software as a purely mechanical means to an end.
Agreed.
This link is to a TIME article, which is fine. The actual letter from the Iranian government can be read here, and I recommend doing so.
As the first casualty of the endless wars waged by the U.S. government has without exception been the truth, with the American people perpetually receiving the greatest harm as the result of the U.S. government’s campaign of deception, we wish to highlight some of the facts that are being withheld from the American public. After all, it is the American taxpayers who will have to bear the cost of America’s unjust wars, and so they deserve to know the truth.
The amount of patience that the government of Iran has had with the United States active imperialist belligerence is honestly saintly.
You never have quite enough bullets for all the living corpses bearing down on you. If you throw that grenade at a monster now, what happens if you need it for a bigger one later? You always need more, and it’s never enough.
Some incredibly good writing about Resident Evil, movies, survival horror, and addiction.
If you are a vibe coder or vibe translator, I implore you to learn how to do this the correct way. You are better than this.
Great, frustrated writing from within the Sega Saturn retro scene.
This is very much all on brand for Meta, a company obsessed with impossible scale but completely unwilling to do absolutely any of the heavy lifting to ensure it's adhering to the most rudimentary ethical standards. This never changes because the entire company exists to coddle Mark Zuckerberg's bulbous ego, allowing him unlimited funding to cosplay as an interesting person.
The International Research Centre (IF DDR) researches the history of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and its enduring relevance for international movements today.
Cool resource that I want to dig more into later. I <3 the DDR (game and country)
When an informal network of amateurs questions the work of industry standard-bearers, it is rarely a matter of raw technical superiority but rather a fundamental difference in constraints. While restoration entities often operate on strict budgets and tight deadlines, preservationists can spend years cross-referencing decades of older releases.
Great piece on the labor and vision of amateur restoration film -- which, in this writer's opinion, is some of the most important work happening in historical preservation today, and it's all entirely illegal.
The fact is, while cycling’s affordability and low-environmental impact have made it more popular than ever, biking infrastructure has not caught up with demand.
Good, sobering writing from Grace Benfell.
The Blue Wave Democratic Club is a rightwing astroturf group controlled in part by Santa Monica city councilmember Lana Negrete, not a real Democratic Club.
Local politics. Yikes!
You'd have to be a complete fucking idiot, just railroad-spike-through-the-forebrain mind-melted, to not notice that like literally every fucking other thing Meta does this is about mass surveillance and rent seeking. I can't tell if all of these people are slowly making themselves unbelievably stupid by inhaling chatbot fumes, or if proximity to silicon valley tech sphere radiation is microwaving their brains by itself.
Bruno is right.
Marx and Engels were attempting to understand a new social order that had emerged from the destruction of feudal relationships and was rapidly expanding across national borders. Their argument was not that history had ended with capitalism. Quite the opposite: capitalism itself was historically produced, and therefore historically transformable.
I agree with this guy!
Yudkowsky also claimed that his (non-profit) company was probably the only one that could make AI safely[...] It is also a pitch for people to give you total control over them, because if they do not, the world might end.
Thorough write up of (one of) the suicidal sex cults that currently runs the American government.
This industry approaches regulation in this way because it has, at its core, a millenarian death cult that worships and fears AI, believes AI will end the world, feels compelled to create AI, and at least somewhat wants to destroy AI as an entire field.
Edit: The article has been deleted. Archived version available here.
If you haven't looked at the Napster website lately, get ready for some major AI-related indigestion. The former music-sharing rebel is now peddling AI digital twins of teachers and serving the Saudi market.
Very... odd? Very odd. I mean, anything Saudi related these days is sort of strange but this is a particularly weird product fit.
A free QR code generator that works entirely in your browser. No ads, no trackers, no data sent to any server.
Hey, this is neat.
After a popular uprising against neoliberalism, an attempt to charter a new constitution, and a politically dead Gabriel Boric administration, the Pro-Pinochet right now holds power in Chile. In an interview with Gabriel Delacoste, Daniel Tutt asks what went wrong.
I have a lacking knowledge in South American leftism, and I know there's a lot there to learn from. This piece offers a pretty digestible history of Chile from the colonial era all the way to today, and all of its various swings.
Speaking personally, I think you can see (as shows up time and time again in national histories in the 20th century, both in South America and outside it), a stronger Leninist (or Lenin-ish) vanguard being opposed by a more moderate leftist current that wins victories in the democratic arena, only to be targeted by a revanchist imperialist/colonialist wing and deposed. I think it's a bit more complex than a simple "Leftist or liberal" binary -- many of the powers that held on for some time or another were closer to what we'd call social democrats -- but the tendencies appear often.
It is possible to say that Boric started as a radical and then turned to the center, but if we understand what kind of radical he was this becomes less clear. He came from a radically pluralist left-libertarian intellectual milieu that fiercely criticized neoliberalism and the party system, but that didn’t necessarily have roots in the socialist tradition. He had tattoos and a mohawk but had not necessarily spent hours studying how to transition to a planned economy.
Right, a classic left-libertarian approach, basically. "Depower the state", but before the machinery of power is fully held by the people. A simple error by Leninist analysis, but a deeply harmful one. After beating back the Communists for seventy-odd years, this is where the resisting forces often end up -- without a clear theory of power or transition.