Links, July 31, 2026

§B-Rhymes

A rhyming dictionary for when you’re not particularly set on finding an exact rhyme for a word.

§The case of the 500-mile email

Another oldie but goodie, in case you haven’t seen it:

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

§Friction and not being touched

The idea of frictionlessness has very narcissistic, “player character” vibes: You don’t experience friction if the whole world is build around you and your needs. When you get whatever you want when you want it.

Nearly all the real-life drama going on among the people in my life is due to some variation of this idea.

§The Community is the Achievement; the Achievement is the Community

On the deterioration of tech communities, and its worth fighting to preserve them:

Without that community, there is precisely no chance that I could have become a technologist. The distributed technology community is an absolute marvel. It knows more than any individual could ever hope to know. It is generous in sharing knowledge. At its best, it is patient and encouraging and collaborative. It wants to invite you in and tell you everything it knows. Your biggest problem may be getting it to stop when your brain is full.

§AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

An excellent piece that echoes a lot of what I’ve been hearing, lately:

The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. Not at banks, not at hospitals, not in our government institutions. The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

§Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI

Look, when Amnesty International says this whole controversial technology is in conflict with international human rights law the thing you don’t say is – as someone I can’t believe I used to trust said – say that Amnesty International is a bunch of “backwards luddites standing in the way of progress”. This is a compelling report that doesn’t even get into the environmental, misinformation, or cognitohazard aspects of the technologies.

§Researcher poisons open-weight AI model for under $100

A refrain I’ve heard a lot is “but what about open weights! We can use this stuff with out the capitalists” and, well, good luck with that:

Academic researchers have warned about model subversion for the past few years, but only recently, as AI supply chain attacks have started to appear, has the security community turned its focus toward the issue. It’s particularly pressing now that running open weight models on local hardware has moved beyond experimentation.