me.micahrl.com links

Diegesis - Wikipedia

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:10:19 +0000

Diegetic events are those experienced by both the characters within a piece and the audience, while non-diegetic elements of a story make up the “fourth wall” separating the characters from the audience.

I encountered this word via this post on the Unsung blog, where it is repurposed outside of fiction storytelling to indicate a user interface that can manipulate itself; the author says:

inexplicably on macOS the floating thumbnail is diegetic, meaning it itself can be screenshotted.

A few days later, the word resurfaced on the same blog.

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Rolling Commercial Jetliners

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:23:11 +0000

Very few people have been on a plane performing a barrel roll, but we could fix this.

And we should!

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The Story of the Triumph Emoji

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:10:03 +0000

As always, the answer to weird emoji-related questions is Japan. Specifically, a face with steam coming from the nose is sometimes used to indicate someone triumphing or bragging in manga.

My spicy take remains that adding emoji to Unicode was a mistake, what people really want is the ability to send arbitrary pictograms, and we should have built generic image rendering into text fields instead.

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What’s with all the slide decks?

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:22:00 +0000

Dynomite notes:

News from the world of real jobs: Apparently, sometime between 10 and 20 years ago, it became standard for people to communicate by sending slide decks around. These slides are never presented. They aren’t intended to be presented. They’re born, they’re sent around, and they die. What?

I am reminded, as I often am, of the excellent opening paragraph to a great post from blogging history, published to the Omni Group blog all the way back in 2009:

One of my pet peeves, aside from possessive apostrophes on plural nouns and the belief that the virus-afflicted in 28 Days/Weeks Later are zombies (helllo-ooo, they aren’t dead), is when someone emails me an Excel document that contains information that has nothing to do with spreadsheet functionality. You use a spreadsheet as a text editor, really? What do you brush your teeth with, a CHAINSAW?

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My Custom Game Boy Advance – Tyler Sticka

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 14:51:13 +0000

A GBA in Metroid Fusion colors. Looks great. What a cool project.

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Last Rights

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:52:48 +0000

A proposal to fix Congress by drastically increasing the number of Representatives, by ratifying an early proposed constitutional amendment.

Seems less unlikely in light of the amazing story about the success of a UT student in organizing support to ratify the 27th Amendment (which the article refers to as the “failed eleventh amendment”). I assume teachers didn’t share this story with me in school in order to protect their limited power; if I had known that merely amending the US Constitution could get me two full higher letter grades on a paper, my life might have taken a very different course.

In any case, I am torn on this idea: the case it makes does sound interesting, but I also think that more populism in national government is unlikely to produce good outcomes. Still, one understands the impetus to poke our representative body with a pointy stick.

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How to Make Superbabies — LessWrong

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:25:32 +0000

A look at what’s technically possible today and how public morality isn’t sure what to think about it.

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Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025 – OSnews

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:11:44 +0000

I haven’t been so tempted to search eBay for retrocomputing hardware in a long time.

I used to collect whatever old enterprise Unix gear I could get for very cheap, including several Suns, an HP-UX box, and a couple of SGI machines. I coveted a Sun Ultra 45 / Power Mac G5 combo, because they were the most powerful non-PC workstations and also because I thought they would look so cool side to side. I’m also jealous of that SunPCi card. I did have a couple of little SBC PCs on PCI cards, but they were all industrial things that were smaller, slower, and with worse hardware support.

I think I need to go spend some time in a datacenter now.

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LAN Party House

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:05:06 +0000

This would have been the house of my dreams in high school. I used to draw out how I’d have a dedicated room with tables against the walls and 8 of those original iMacs each with a (separately licensed because the idea of having more than one license to a given game felt like wealth to me) copy of StarCraft, ready to play at all times.

That said, when I read this, my interest was most piqued by the infrastructure description. Racks, cables, netbooting, automatic updates… almost makes me want to build something like this myself just to design that part (I’d never have time to actually play games on it of course).

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The psychology of clickbait

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 03:22:47 +0000

A defense of clickbait from a practitioner. He frames YouTube, where he posts, as “consensual clickbait” — viewers want the videos to grab their attention, and they are satisfied with the payoff. All clickbait isn’t like this (he uses Upworthy as the antagonist, and I can’t say they don’t deserve it), but, in his view, the best clickbait is.

Related: How To Paywall — Edging your audience until they beg for it, by Aella. (If you think an article on that subject with a title that good isn’t itself paywalled, lol.)

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Software, in a Time of Fear

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:40:58 +0000

Six lessons about navigating your career during AI upheaval. I keep “Do not look down” and “Put the summit out of your mind” at the top of my long-term projects plan at work.

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Thoughts on Farcaster

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:42:22 +0000

The tragedy of cryptocurrencies. Users still need transaction privacy, and vendors outside the sunny realm of expurgated pop culture still need a cash equivalent that can’t be clawed back. But if you build that, the people who show up are mostly gamblers. The good news is that facilitating gambling can make orders of magnitude more money than a private payment processor that can’t get your money back if someone scams you. The bad news is that it may not be possible to build the business you wanted to build at all, because if all the revenue comes from gambling, that’s where you have to spend all your attention too.

The irony of crypto’s 2025 collapse is that the technology worked. The Ethereum network processes transactions reliably. Layer 2 solutions have made fees manageable. Smart contracts execute as written. The decentralized exchange infrastructure handles billions in volume. The pipes do what pipes are supposed to do. What failed was the civilization we were supposed to build on top of them. What failed was…well, us.

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ByoWave Proteus controller

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:39:06 +0000

A review of a really interesting game controller. It’s completely modular and customizable, designed to let users change the way its held and button layout.

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Information Superhighway

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 02:02:28 +0000

Wikipedia articles: offline, infinite scroll, free. iOS/macOS app.

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GlassToKey - Apple Magic TouchStreamLP

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 21:50:27 +0000

I did not know that the Magic Trackpad was technology from a company that was originally founded to make a keyboard developed for people with RSI.

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llms-txt: ed, the standard text editor

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 14:53:47 +0000

In order to understand how llms.txt can be used with editors and IDEs, let’s look at how ed, the standard text editor, could work (assuming it’s updated to use this proposal).

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The Coach in the Operating Room

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:04:53 +0000

An account by an accomplished surgeon who hired a coach to join him in the operating room to help him improve over time.

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Things you're allowed to do

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:57:15 +0000

I can be really locked up in my head sometimes. Reading things like this feels like a dynamic mixture of peaceful and exciting — there’s all this possibility where the failure mode is okay.

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The Polish Lektor | One of the Weirdest Things in Poland - Chido-Fajny

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:17:50 +0000

The norm in Poland is for a single voice actor to cover every character in a non-Polish-language movie, speaking with a totally flat, emotionless affect. Apparently these voice actors are famous and well loved, and the population prefers foreign language movies this way. There’s an embedded clip from the masterpiece film Bad Boys 2 with the Polish lektor covering all characters. Via Unsung.

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Color e-ink MacBook Pro

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 03:51:01 +0000

E-paper is getting amazing, and it would be so cool to have a laptop with a display like this.

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In the Houses of Disordered Stars

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:37:11 +0000

A short story from CtrlCreep. Aside from this substack, also a great follow on Twitter.

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AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:36:40 +0000

“Fiction” from Uel. I’m so excited that he’s back. Several more where this comes from already over at https://www.greaterrealityarea.net/.

fortunate, a mini-project of mine for interesting fortune databases, includes Uel’s INVISIBLE STATES OF AMERICA: A TOURISM GUIDE.

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Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:44:59 +0000

Vim is now very popular and has spawned numerous successors. But its key feature, modes, is not obviously-beneficial, to the point that if Bill Joy didn’t make vi (vim’s direct predecessor) fifty years ago I don’t think we’d have any modal editors today.

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Wi-Fi sharing is a killer Android feature - Kaushik Gopal's Website

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:33:58 +0000

Cool feature I didn’t know that Android had — it can re-share not just cellular Internet connectiosn but other wifi hotspots via wifi, like a dedicated travel router.

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Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 14:31:52 +0000

Some musings from a practitioner. (Not a screed, despite the title.)

In His Dark Materials, every human has a dæmon, a companion that is an externally visible manifestation of their soul. It lives alongside as an animal, but it talks, thinks and acts independently. I’m starting to relate our relationship with agents that have memory to those little creatures. We become dependent on them, and separation from them is painful and takes away from our new-found identity.

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