Featured Links - August 12. 2025

Thins I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Summer flowers looking a bit wilted

Bullets in the windows. "Until now, it was only a metaphor." This is horrifying and should have had more prominence in the news. 

Scientists reveal Alaska could get up to two minutes’ warning before the next big quake. "A new study suggests Alaska could get 10–120 seconds of warning before major quakes, with more seismic stations adding up to 15 extra seconds. Researchers emphasize challenges like harsh winters, remote sites, and alert transmission delays, but say the benefits could be lifesaving."

The War for the Web Has Begun. "One of the internet's biggest gatekeepers has accused a rising AI star of breaking the web's oldest rules. The explosive feud could change how we all get information online."

 A Valid HTML ZIP Bomb. "Many sites have been affected by the aggressiveness of web crawlers designed to improve LLMs. I’ve been relatively spared, but since the phenomenon started, I've been looking for a solution to implement. Today, I present a zip bomb gzip and brotli that is valid HTML."

2025 Aurora Awards. "The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) today announced the winners of the 2024 Aurora Awards for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror in an online awards ceremony."

Why Are We Funding This? "People often wrongly believe that scientific progress is made by a few “great geniuses” working on a few “big questions,” and that those geniuses have some sense in advance of what the answers are going to be. In reality, knowledge is advanced by many independent teams of people working on chipping away at the boundaries of knowledge a little bit at a time. Sometimes doing so leads to a world-changing discovery. Other times it just tells us one more thing that doesn’t work, a vital step toward eventually learning what does work."