20 random bookmarks

@msfjarvis@androiddev.social's personal link log, mostly revolving around tech and tech-adjacent culture.

2025-09-09

83.

The Gentrification of Video Game History

felipepepe.medium.com/the-gentrification-of-video-game-history-dfe11f1e08ae

Very well written post explaining the reality of gaming in the Global South and how the US-based media knowingly and unknowingly participates in its erasure.

2025-06-20

77.

NixOS, Gitea/Forgejo, and Catppuccin

d.moonfire.us/blog/2023/05/13/nixos-gitea-forgejo-and-catppuccin

A sweet and simple guide for declarative integration of the Catppuccin themes for Gitea/Forgejo on a NixOS host.

2025-06-13

76.

Teaching Tech Together

teachtogether.tech/en/index.html

How to create and deliver lessons that work and build a teaching community around them

2025-06-01

75.

How I like to install NixOS (declaratively)

michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-06-01-nixos-installation-declarative

For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network and fully declaratively.

2025-05-09

72.

Can It Run Doom? An Archive of All Known Ports

www.canitrundoom.org

Explore an archive of Doom ports showcasing how the game has been adapted to run on various devices, even those not originally intended for gaming.

2025-04-27

70.

Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking

engineering.atspotify.com/2013/06/creative-usernames

An old-but-gold debugging story of how canonicalization of Unicode can often give unpredictable and confusing results, when you don't actually know how the canonicalization process works.

2025-03-04

61.

The Hierarchy of Hazard Controls

www.hillelwayne.com/post/hoc

Insightful post from Hillel Wayne exploring how to apply the Hierarchy of Hazard Controls they learned about from a mechanical engineer to a contrived example in programming.

60.

Avoid the nightmare bicycle

www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/03/03/the-nightmare-bicycle

Short and to the point post about designing things with a little trust in your users to intuit a relatively easy model rather than papering over the slightest complexity with things that erase the mental model of the underlying concepts.

2025-02-20

58.

The origins of Firefox

vmst.io/@jalefkowit/114037556786892479

Today I learned that Firefox started as an act of protest from Mozilla engineers who hated the bloated product they were being forced to create

57.

What is the post launch Discovery Queue – How To Market A Game

howtomarketagame.com/2025/02/19/what-is-the-post-launch-discovery-queue

Super interesting look into the #Steam discovery queue system and the impact it has on your game's visibility on the platform

2025-02-15

54.

The hardest working font in Manhattan

aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan

A great essay diving into an obscure font that is present all over New York City, and tracing its history all the way back to physical milling presses in the early 1900s. Both the information and its presentation are top notch

2025-02-07

52.

Stifle Hungry Tasks using BuildService

www.liutikas.net/2025/02/06/Stifle-Hungry-Tasks.html

Gradle will always parallelize tasks to the maximum possible degree, which might not always be desirable when tasks have extreme memory and/or CPU usage and end up starving the whole build out. Aurimas shares a great trick with Gradle BuildServices that lets tasks have a maximum parallelism.

2024-12-31

48.

Raymond Chen's 2024 linklog

devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241231-01?p=110698

A great round up of interesting stuff, mostly centered around C++

2024-12-14

47.

JVM Anatomy Quirks

shipilev.net/jvm/anatomy-quarks

An ongoing mini-series documenting specific, often niche parts of the JVM. They're all pretty short and to the point, and the author encourages to treat them as chapters in a book as they reference each other quite often.

2024-12-01

45.

Kotlin trick: writing shared Enum utility code

whtwnd.com/p-y.wtf/entries/Kotlin trick: writing shared Enum utility code

Some tips from P-Y to write handy utilities for enums like ensuring entries are sorted or that they have unique labels, in a generic fashion.

2024-09-19

32.

Using YouTube to steal your files

lyra.horse/blog/2024/09/using-youtube-to-steal-your-files

Great vulnerability research but the highlight is definitely the hand-crafted interactive mock ups of Google websites

2024-07-30

24.

Java 21 Virtual Threads - Dude, Where’s My Lock?

netflixtechblog.com/java-21-virtual-threads-dude-wheres-my-lock-3052540e231d

Another great deep dive from the Netflix team on real-world problems they face as a primarily Java-oriented shop.

2024-07-10

19.

How Airbnb fails to protect guests from hidden cameras

edition.cnn.com/2024/07/09/business/airbnb-hidden-camera-invs/index.html

Airbnb has always felt sketchy about how they try to avoid responsibility for hosts but the deposition sheds light on just how deep this runs. Turns out not even sexual assault perpetrators are deemed as unsafe enough to be banned from being hosts on Airbnb.

2024-07-04

13.

Generative AI, Which Is The Future Of Art, Cannot Draw A Map Of The United States

aftermath.site/generative-ai-map-of-the-united-states

2024-07-01

10.

The Shareholder Supremacy

www.wheresyoured.at/tss

Businesses prioritizing shareholder value over everything else seems to have become the norm, but I didn't know how this insane sounding behavior started and this is a great history lesson on it.