Links, October 10, 2025

§the sudoku affair

A week ago my ADHD decided to become obsessed with Sudoku again. Joking about it on Fedi, Sam Stephenson sent me this piece by Zach Tellman (who wrote one of the best books about computer programming ever written), on the nature of genre programmers and the way in which, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. More to the point, I think it illustrates one of the things that’s always rubbed me the wrong way about Object-Oriented and big-A “Agile” programming:

By the end of the fifth post, Jeffries had a working Sudoku solver. But then he kept going. He continued to tinker with the solver for another two months and forty posts. And in this prolonged epilogue, we can see the limits of his incremental approach to software design.

§Psychoacoustics for Music Producers

A free/pay-what-you-want video course (also available on Youtube) full of approachable information on Loudness, Masking, Localization, and other things which will help anyone looking to improve their mixing game.

§Decent Sampler

I’ve been surprised by how few people I know doing music work know about this awesome, free, Linux-supporting sampler plugin which for most uses could replace Kontakt (which didn’t support HiDPI displays until version 8 a year ago) for many uses. Its data format is open, well-documented, and XML-based, has first-class support for MPE, and there is a growing library of great samples; I even subscribed to Decent Sampler’s creator’s Fave Hilowtiz’s patreon for his quirky sets, and his youtube channel is a lot of fun as well.

§Freewheeling Apps are a durable substrate for the future of software

I’m not entirely sure how clear I’ve made this preference, but I personally have a strong dislike for software that runs on web pages which require a server to maintain state, which people tend to call “webapps”, even though I’ve recommended such software. This is in spite of, and perhaps a result of, spending most of my career building such things; though in my defense most of my work in the last 10 years has been directed towards internal tooling and not meant for public consumption.

Anyway, when software doesn’t require networking to function, I have a strong preference for downloadable programs. Partly this is because I have my phone set to disable cellular service for my web browser, but mostly it’s about feel and control. Give me a well-built desktop app instead.

This link is a summary of a topic which resulted from a talk about building simple and extensible apps for desktop and mobile using Löve 2D, a small Lua-scriptable engine meant for making games, which I’ve been learning lately, partly because it has first-class support for my current favorite programming language. It has links to several sample apps including one which lets you write and run Lua scripts on your phone. I think it’s an interesting experiment in the vein of Hypercard and is the sort of direction I’d like to see more of in general computing.

§Dewaffling the tech industry

A piece about how centering “technical” skills in technology has led to the current road of fascist-adjacent technologists:

fixing this starts with killing the concept that typing arcane runes into a machine is anything beyond a literacy skill. It’s useful, it’s helpful, but it’s no good without knowledge and experience of actual substance behind it. We need to demonstrate loudly, clearly and publicly that tech is fundamentally not about this, and to centre domain knowledge front and centre in every way we teach software engineering skills.

§Supply chains and watering holes

Essentially, watering hole attacks are a broad category that leverage a popular resource to stage some kind of offensive maneuver, often relying on stealth. There are a bunch of ways this can be adapted to the digital realm:

This is a more useful lens for thinking about the kinds of problems that people tend to lump under “supply chain attack”, given how software ecosystems work.