isonotes
good writing + superfluous commentary
Rather than my own writing, this feed is articles that other people wrote that I shared here with commentary.
I'm not sure how I feel about the name, but given I'm pretty much stealing Jim Nielsen's idea wholesale, I figured I may as well yoink his name for it too. It'll do, I suppose.
THE RICH AND POWERFUL ARE DERANGED SURVIVALISTS
This analysis of the state of things makes a lot of sense to me. I desperately hope it's wrong.
“This Is Not The Computer For You”
It's easy to forget this relationship to computers once you escape it, even in spite of how formative it was for me.
I remember being this kid with my Haswell Celeron Chromebook, and being outraged that computers this underpowered were allowed to exist at all, what with how quickly I outgrew the capabilities of such machines.
It makes me feel like I'm betraying my past self and many other kids like her whenever I see some anemic little computing device and my reaction is "well, it's enough to check your email".
I'm hopeful that with how high-end Apple's phone chips are and how tightly integrated their software is, they can make something at least usable here, but I guess we'll see.
Audiophiles Fail to Hear Difference in Signal Passed Through Copper Cable, Banana, and Tray of Mud
I maintain that the banana gives a warmer and more pleasant sound, much like that of a vinyl record.
fuck windows: dreaming of an honest computer
This is probably the most sober assessment I've seen of why Linux is so desirable of late. This right here is the main factor that motivated me to adopt Linux as my daily driver OS 5 years ago.
Is Linux good? Debatable. Is it better than Windows? Depends. Is it actively hostile to you? Does it exist to harvest your data and juice the usage stats for Microsoft's LLM chatbot? Fuck no.
WORSHIP OF THE ENGINEER
BECAUSE SOFTWARE SENT PEOPLE TO THE MOON.
BECAUSE SOFTWARE SENT PEOPLE TO THE MOON.
BECAUSE SOFTWARE SENT PEOPLE TO THE MOON.
BECAUSE SOFTWARE SENT PEOPLE TO THE MOON.Playing "Minecraft" without Minecraft
Mojang should just open source Minecraft at this point lmao
Payment Processor Fun 2025 -- Making Your Own MSP
Very informative read regarding the incredibly obtuse inner workings of digital financial infrastructure, and why every online storefront is so helplessly beholden to these censorious intermediaries.
GitHub's Neutrality Is Over
Thoroughly unsurprising.
Now would be a great time to move to Codeberg, Sourcehut, git.gay, or GitLab, or do what I did and spin up your own instance of something like Forgejo. Unless you can't because of your job, then maybe see if you can convince them to do the same.
Honestly at this point I feel like the common thread is just "divest from American tech vendors as much as you can".
• eev.ee
The rise of Whatever
An excellent expression of everything insufferable about the pervasive push for "AI", as well as the rot at the core of large swathes of the modern internet.
The irony of the term "Content" is that the actual content of the Content is broadly irrelevant.
Crazy hacks #2 – Drill a hole in your chip and find out
Why don't iPhone repair technicians just do this?
Google Made Me Ruin A Perfectly Good Website: A Case Study On The AI-Generated Internet
That explains... a lot.
Tiktok's enshittification
inb4 Bluesky's little ~decentralized protocol~ becomes "deprecated" in a few years after they run out of money.
The creepy sound of online trackers
The second half of the first video is what's really interesting to me. Try as I might, I can't come up with what (even superfluous) purpose some of those pings to Google could possibly be serving, and that's almost the creepiest part.
Oh wait, it's Chrome. I guess that explains it.
Introducing: notes.jim-nielsen.com
I've wanted to do something like this for almost as long as I've had a blog, but it took seeing this for the idea to properly crystallize in my head. So I'm doing it now. You're looking at it!