I've been saying this for years: CloudFlare's approach to information security is miles ahead of other infrastructure providers. Their latest annual founder letter reinforces my conviction.

CloudFlare clearly understands that the internet's operating model is undergoing a fundamental vibe-shift. They recognize that industrial-scale content production and content theft present massive challenges for creators, consumers, and infrastructure providers. But I think this isn’t just a technical problem, it's also a societal one. And CloudFlare gets it.

An era-defining demo of the pure software rendering days. Lots of alpha layers, a clean design, beautiful colors, and an incredible IDM soundtrack. It's been a favorite of mine since its release in 1999.

Chevy Ray goes into a lot of details on building her own tool to generate 175 (!!) pixel fonts. The post walks through the technical implementation including converting pixel clusters into TrueType contours, automatic kerning calculation, and deploying everything to itch.io with command-line scripts. Very cool read.

Recently, I have been working with the Discogs data dumps. Discogs uploads monthly dumps of their database in a gzipped XML format. They release dumps for: artists, labels, masters, and releases. I was curious about converting them to the Parquet file format. Parquet is a binary columnar file format heavily used in data engineering. It allows different compression algorithms per column and nested structures. It is also natively supported by databases such as ClickHouse or DuckDB. I was mostly curious about the size of a parquet file vs a compressed XML file. Would parquet files be smaller than a gzipped XML? If so, by how much? Also, what would be the conversion speed?

A 7-minute techno live set created entirely in GLSL shaders that fits in just 64KB. Yes, 64kb. This WebGL intro by 0b5vr was submitted to the Revision 2023 demoscene competition. Procedural visuals meets algorave meets extreme compression. My mind is blown.