Several Things #12

August 04, 2026

I had too many links open again... Putting them here is my contribution to the fight against tab-hoarding.

Hugh Howey, author of the Silo series on the end of book publishing as we know it.

The results for the Mowing Game experiment! These games were fun, and I should have picked up the fact that it was a proxy for the travelling salesman problem, but I did not. You can still play a some of the levels through that link if you want to try it yourself.

FlareSat runs TAK-like tools, using an existing LoRa radio without making any adjustments to its firmware or channel settings. Real-time team position, geo-fencing, and communication on top of Meshtastic without custom ATAK or ITAK servers or plugins. As long as you have a paired radio, there is no account or login required, and you can use the tool entirely for free. There're paid options though for larger teams, and cloud backed groups.

Please Use AI is a melancholic poem of sorts about all the ways that we like to "optimize" while neglecting the people around us.

An excerpt:

And be sure to use AI when your next child

gets married, so that you can write them

the perfect toast or poem or speech or song

because no one wants to hear your 

words, the actual poorly written words 

of a parent (you) who changed

hundreds of diapers for said child or fed 

them in the middle of the 

night from your actual body. Or cried 

when they were late home because 

you were positive they were dead. We don't 

want those words—we’d prefer the sterile 

words of a machine that never lived, never 

had an original thought, never felt 

the pain of miscarriage or broken

relationships or the joy of a friendship restored

or of seeing spring’s first 

robin dancing on frost.

Lastly, The Lost Joy of Music Piracy.


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Written by Grant Brinkman, husband and father. Coffee, tech, photography, book, film and outdoors enthusiast.

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