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04 November 2025

I’m imagining these “week links” roundup posts to come either on Fridays or Mondays, but this one’s on a Tuesday thanks to yesterday’s “special announcement” post. The date range in the title may or may not stay; time will tell. The idea is to curate some things that I enjoyed from my morning RSS feed reading ritualMaybe more on that in a future post. In the meantime, here’s Cory Doctorow on why you should use an RSS reader. and share them with the world. Like Google Reader, almost. RIP.

Charles Mudede is always worth reading. He, and the Stranger at large, are a Seattle treasure. While he often offers insightful economic and historical analysis rooted in a wide-ranging intellectual background, his latest is a fun observation stemming from an interaction at a restaurant: someone asking him “Are You Going to Eat That Pickle on Your Plate?”

My brother sent me a storyI now realize it’s from 2024. But these timelines are about when I read something, not when it’s written. about how to build an origami computer. I’ve been known to love a good universal model of computation, proved by a clever simulation of a universal Turing machine. To be honest, I was surprised that this wasn’t known until late 2023. And, like all good models of computation, this one seems like it would run up against the physical limits of its medium—paper folding—long before any nontrivial computation could be actually carried out.

Out of principle-based prudence, the Python Software Foundation withdrew a proposal to the NSF which had been recommended for funding for $1.5m.

Seattle Cranksgiving 2025 is November 2022. I’m looking forward to participating in an event that combines my love of biking with community-building and giving back to those in need.

In case you didn’t get the memo, Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way. While I’m often not a fan of pieces which outline exactly how he can carry out his grossest impulses—why give him ideas he might not have had yet!—this one is more retrospective, outlining the groundwork that has already been laid and how that can manifest in a few different possible scenarios. And training grows for National Guard troops to be deployed against US citizens in US cities.

Yet more evidence that our primate cousins are more sophisticated than previously thought: a clever series of experiments shows that they are responsive to new evidenceI’m not willing to go all the way to the headline of “rational thought” just yet. in subtle ways. For instance, after two boxes, one with strong and one with weak evidence of containing food, are shown, a third, empty one is presented and the strong one is removed. Chimps are happy to choose the weak-evidence box. They also respond to “defeaters”—for instance, shaking a box with a stone, not food—in reason-responsive ways. Neat!

Nikolai Schirmer’s feature-length movie “SKI: the greatest ski tour of all time” finally released on YouTube after a cinema-only run for a long time. Although I’ve been a fan of his long-formMedium-form, now that he’s doing feature-length work? videos, which tend to both be beautiful and tell a good story, I was skeptical about this movie, especially given the title. Nikolai, however, delivered. Not exactly the story I was expecting, but one I was having a hard time putting down (while on a recent trip to Georgetown).