Links for February 2026

Hi everyone. This is the inaugural links issue, which I announced previously. These won’t come out too often. You’ll find projects, philosophy, history, and other stuff. Enjoy :).

Links

• safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely · Issue #3792 · actions/runner (permalink)

  A hell of a dumb bug in GitHub Actions containers. Some research in the comments about where it came from has revealed still more bugs. The immediate problem has been fixed, but weirdly, the script still exists even though it is totally useless. More research on lobste.rs.

• Microsoft mishandling example.com (permalink)

  … and has been for the past six years?

• GitHub - nohajc/anylinuxfs: macOS: mount any linux-supported filesystem read/write using NFS and a microVM (permalink)

  Read any Linux filesystem on a Mac by mounting it in a Linux VM and exporting it to the Mac host over NFS.

• How To Get Cheap Ozempic (permalink)

  Part technically-not-medical-advice, part vision of the future.

• How Will the Miracle Happen Today? (permalink)

  Reflections on gratitude, the kindness of strangers, and that

  …this state of being embodied, inflated with life, brimming with possibilities, is so over-the-top unlikely, so extravagant, so unconditional, so far out beyond physical entropy…

  I was reminded of this piece in the section of Matt Lakeman’s Notes on Afghanistan where he talks about the generosity of the people he met there.

• Easy (Horizontal Scrollbar) Fixes for Your Blog CSS (permalink)

  A public service message for people who write their own CSS. Interactive!

• TildeTown on iPhone with Blink Shell (permalink)

  A walkthrough for using an iPhone to interact with this Unix server -based community. Highlights some tips and tricks with Blink. I love the photo near the bottom of the author sitting on a couch, typing on a bluetooth keyboard into their phone, which is on some sort of microphone/camera stand, and which is using AirPlay to show IRC on the TV.

• Strategies and Tactics for working with Coding Agents (permalink)

  Advice from experience. The two most surprising recommendations have to do with information architecture at the beginning and blindness at the end.

• Burnout is breaking a sacred pact (permalink)

  When the conscious fails to deliver on promises to the unconscious, the unconscious rebels. A predictive and actionable framework for thinking about burnout.

• Xteink X4 (permalink)

  A 4" e-ink reader with magnetic backing, designed to attach to the back of a phone. I’m not sure this is a good idea but it is neat. Who doesn’t love little tiny versions of normal-sized things?

• How Markdown Took Over the World - Tao of Mac (permalink)

  I can’t not include a link with a quote like this:

  I’m willing to bet that when (ok, if) we ever become a Kardashev type 3 civilization we’ll still be using Markdown to write our interstellar missives.

• The YouTube Bubble: Fame, Parasociality, and the Parts of Culture We Don’t See (permalink)

  Cultural knowledge is fracturing.

  If you don’t recognize the name of a YouTuber who has more subscribers than the US has citizens, what makes you think you’d understand the influence of one of the smaller ones?

• My blog_title_here · Using sharp bitmap fonts in modern GIMP (permalink)

  How to use fonts well-suited for e-ink. Linking mostly for the described use of no-battery-required (powered by NFC) e-ink screens as reusable scratchpads.

• taikonaut - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (permalink)

  The name for a Chinese astronaut. New to me; I encountered this word for the first time in the https://jatan.space/ blog.

• DIY Desk LED Lighting (permalink)

  Elegant desk lighting project.

• Pidgin Markup For Writing, or How Much Can HTML Sustain? (permalink)

  A unique syntax for a custom ed(1)-based static site generator.

• Beingpax/VoiceInk: Voice-to-text app for macOS to transcribe what you say to text almost instantly (permalink)

  A colleague at my last job recommended this as a replacement for supershisper. I love what we can do with local LLMs.

• How to Debug Your Life (permalink)

  A take on deliberate reflective practice, which brings me peace.

  Most of us treat these failures with a superstitious dread. We view our depression, our procrastination, our sudden outbursts of anger as weather events, storms that pass through us. Or we view them as moral failings: evidence of a corrupted soul. Instead: We should view the mind as a legacy codebase…

• Next steps for Cartesian Tutor (permalink)

  Documenting his decision to return to a corporate job after working on his own idea for 6 months. Clear introspection and decision making.

• My Rube Goldberg RSS Pipeline (permalink)

  Writeup of a project to assemble RSS feeds into a very personal magazine-like experience. I love reports from building personal projects like these.

  But the reason it’s been working out for me is not just having a single source of truth, or the apps themselves–it’s the way that I approached having multiple hundreds of new items (sometimes thousands) every morning and whittling everything down to a few meaningful things to read every day.

• Age is the Ultimate Example of a Receding Hrair Line (permalink)

  A great name for a useful handle in the conceptual space.

  We came up with the concept of the Hrair Line, defined by our hivemind as “a somewhat arbitrary line past which all numbers seem equally large”

  Coming up with this term also led to one of my favorite puns, the “receding hrair line” which is when you act like a number is unfathomably large when it benefits you, but quite reasonable when it doesn’t.

• Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane? (permalink)

  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.

• Wi-Fi sharing is a killer Android feature - Kaushik Gopal's Website (permalink)

  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.

• Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance (permalink)

  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.

Thanks for reading

I’d love to hear from you: me@micahrl.com.