link.dump.3.23.2026
books, gambling, sharks, and mining the ocean floor
I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.
Great write-up on italics, grammar, and even if there are some whiffs of “get off my lawn” I love what David William Silwa has to say about ignorance and arrogance. Plain Text Nation.
Platform Engineering (what I do) makes a difference and how to prove it.
Slow Boring -- Worry less, do more. Even paywalled so you cannot read it all I really appreciated what Matthew has to say here.
Derek Thompson with a paywalled article that was value up to the wall anyways. The idea of AI being a bubble, but the bubble still bringing lots of value to civilization in the long run, is something I’ve been muddling over for awhile. There are some interesting historical examples of exactly this bubble->famine->feast type of technology.
Over four million books published in 2025. Vast majority being self-published. It’s interesting to see how this particular industry has been democratized and also how the removal of the gatekeeping has led to an incredibly amount of junk and made it even harder to find good things to read.
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower. While this is targeted towards software engineers I think this speaks more to organizations as a whole and how trust is general fragmented and damaged as the size increases. Thought-provoking read.
Arizona going after Kalshi for illegal gambling. Interesting.
Sharks in the desert feasting on over 300 pounds of fish a week. Joke is they eat better than the tourists.
Noah Smith dives deep on how AI can be a moderating influence and could actually sort of…inoculate…some of the social media problems. It’s an interesting take and feeds into my biases against social media, why I do not do particular things on this Substack to monetize the rage, and also appeals to my AI optimism.
Jonah Goldberg with An Anti-Manifesto on the Iran War. I think I pretty much stand with him.
Thoughtful piece on how to be warm when meeting folks.
Mining the ocean floor is not something I had heard of before. Except, you know, in Subnautica I guess?