Links
Putting the “hyper” in “http”. So also, I guess this is restricted to things that can mostly be enjoyed online.
This page used to have like four hundred random links. I decided that was a little overwhelming. It got culled. Here are the highlights.
Link feeds and reading material
- My single favorite feed is probably Casey Newton’s newsletter Platformer (formerly The Interface), “your daily guide to understanding social networks and their relationships with the world”. This is a niche interest in some sense, but social networks are so ubiquitous that I think most people would find something of interest.
- Two more general-interest blogs which both post infrequently but are generally very high quality, so I think most people would gain from following without being overwhelmed: Wait But Why (Tim Urban); Melting Asphalt (Kevin Simler).
- For career planning and doing good, I really like 80,000 Hours. For techies, the specific essay Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Values is mandatory.
- For personal finances, the /r/personalfinance sidebar and wiki are a great resource. If you’re in tech like me, The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation may be relevant. For figuring out what stuff (e.g. laptop, mouse, headphones, kitchenware) to buy, I tend to trust Wirecutter.
- Typography: Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography. ‘Nuff said.
- FiveThirtyEight is still the gold standard for statistical analyses and political forecasts in my book.
- Unsurprisingly, I skim Hacker News, mostly on the alternative interface hckr news filtered to “top 20”, which cuts out a lot of noise IMO.
- Finally, for an every-so-often meta-commentary on everything: /r/outside.
Individual essays/pages
- I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (Scott Alexander)
- Something is wrong with American culture (eevee)
- Although of course you end up becoming yourself (Chris Peterson, MIT Admissions) — although this post is nominally about choosing which college to attend, it’s also about much, much more
- Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now (Alexey Guzey)
- Doomsday prepping for less crazy folk
For programmers:
- The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). In the same vein, much more modern: It’s Not Wrong that “🤦🏼♂️”.length == 7
- Web developers: Alt-texts: The Ultimate Guide
- Nobody talks about the real reason to use Tabs over Spaces
- How to make a racist AI without really trying
- Cryptographic Right Answers
Humor
- how is prangent formed (YouTube) (voiceover of Yahoo! questions with some mildly NSFW text)
- Hyperbole and a Half
- The World According to Student Bloopers
- (not everybody may “get” this, but) Math Experts Split the Check
For programmers:
- A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
- aphyr.com’s Technical Interview series.
- mango.pdf.zone’s Operation Luigi and Tony Abbott’s passport number
Music
I want to pull out a bunch of obscure channels with great music and 10 subscribers, but unfortunately my music tastes are generally pretty mainstream and unadventurous. God I’m such a sheep. Anyway here are some neat musicians.
While you’re here, listen to Sam Tsui’s #Selfie Piano Ballad.
Videos
- Shop Vac (kinetic typography animation): The Jonathan Coulton song is good but I wouldn’t say it stands out. But this is, literally literally, the best kinetic typography animation video I have ever seen.
- Kylie Minogue - Come Into My World (Music Video): The song isn’t bad, but it’s not stand-out; this is mostly for the music video, which might seem pretty normal at first, but I promise the payoff is worth it, more so when you realize it was filmed and released in 2002. Give it a little over a minute. You’ll know when it happens.
- SIAMÉS “The Wolf” [Official Animated Music Video]: The song is good but I love this video to pieces for the masterful use of its limited colors.
- Ninja Sex Party - I Own a Car
- I have to pick something from Pentatonix. Okay, Bohemian Rhapsody it is.
- What is ligma
- Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough: What starts out as a juvenile videogame walkthrough becomes… (Somewhat NSFW, fairly long at 21 minutes.)
Stories/Webcomics
- A lot of qntm’s Fiction is very good. This certainly includes his sequences on the Antimemetics Division Hub, but almost everything is worth it.
- Wilde Life is I think the only webcomic I’ve managed to routinely read long-term, because I am terrible at following plots with more than about three major characters. Stock lite-horror fantasy, but just really charming.
Technical Tools
- fish shell: clean syntax and phenomenal out-of-the-box defaults/features like autocomplete. The big thing about it is that it’s not POSIX-compliant. I think it’s worth it but YMMV.
- Pandoc for plaintext markup. I even added Hugo support for it.
- GnuCash (reluctantly)
- The Old Reader is my RSS feed reader. I don’t actually use its social features meant to emulate Google Reader but I just like the vibe.
- GoatCounter: privacy-aware self-hostable analytics
- ripgrep (fast Rust substitute for
grepwith better defaults and regexes) - fasd (quick access to files and directories on the command line)
- The Most Dangerous Writing App: If you stop typing for more than five seconds, all progress will be lost.
- Some fun URLs for that moment you need them: textfac.es (copy common Unicode faces/things quickly); bigtextbox.com (exactly what it sounds like); lockyourscreen.com (for when you want to tell somebody, “lock your screen”).
- chordify.net automatically generate chords for a song. It’s far from perfect, but still pretty awesome.
- Cult of the Party Parrot for all your animated parrot emoji/react needs!
Wallpapers
- I really dig LimeCatMastr’s minimalist vector wallpapers.
- Flight Rising has a bunch of wallpapers (dragons! draaaagons!).
- I’m aware of at least one incredible cache of How To Train Your Dragon wallpapers, but honestly, it’s probably of questionable legality, so I will refrain from linking to it.
Some last things
Dipping just briefly into the pool of particularly interesting but less immediately relevant:
- English Pronunciation (a poem)
- “How old is the shepherd” — the question that shook school mathematics
- A BuzzFeed quiz that I won’t reveal the content of. As of 2020, the images are broken but the content is still correct.
- The timeless Dragon Tax Return Simulator 2015.