Basement Whatever

Recognize helpful technology when you see it

February 9, 2026

If we don’t recognize good technology when it happens, we can get cynical by missing out on the good things. Downloading maps to your phone is an example of good technology. Having a downloadable map, anywhere – available to your phone at a high fidelity of detail, which can be deleted when you don’t need it, is an example of user delight – a positive feature that produces good in the world. Whoever designed that feature raised world happiness, and I like recognizing that because it’s a reminder that there are good people out there creating good things for their fellow humans.
Make Fun Of Them

February 9, 2026

They are powerful because it is seen as unseemly to mock them because they are rich and “running a company,” a kind of corporate fealty that I find deeply unbecoming of an adult.

We are, at most, customers. We do not “owe them” anything. We are long past the point when any of the people running these companies actually invented anything they sell. iIf anything, they owe us something, because they are selling us a product, even if said product is free and monetised by advertising.
— Read on www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/
Chris Dixon on X: “The long game for crypto ” / X

February 8, 2026

the core idea was never that every crypto application would emerge all at once, or that finance wouldn’t come first. The core idea was — and remains — that blockchains introduce a new primitive: the ability to coordinate people and capital at internet scale, with ownership embedded directly into the system.
— Read on x.com/cdixon/status/2019837259575607401
Dating Apps That Could Exist

February 8, 2026

I am also somewhat-serious about this one: dating app swipes are too “cheap”, and don’t signal anything. In this app, each user would set a multiple-choice question, and in order to match with someone you have to get their question right.
— Read on www.atvbt.com/dating-apps-i-would-like-to-see/
Building a Magic the Gathering Tagging System with Replit, Moxfield, and EDHRec (PROJECT FAILED)

February 7, 2026

I want to automatically tag my Magic the Gathering cards, because tags really help with making fast commander decks. But it takes time, and I’ve probably tagged <3% of my cards. So I set out to build a solution in Replit.
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Interstellar Space Travel Will Never, Ever Happen

February 7, 2026

I’m talking about interstellar travel. It will never be a thing. It turns out that starships exist on the exact same level of plausibility as wizards and it’s kind of weird that, as a culture, we assume the former will someday be reality.
— Read on jasonpargin.substack.com/p/interstellar-space-travel-will-never
Creating a batch Dolmenwood Character Generator

February 7, 2026

I was extremely happy with the Dolmenwood character generator I built with Replit. I then further updated the multi-prime classes (Magician, Friar, Knight) to adjust the mix, but I over indexed on it. So I decided to fix it.
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The Singularity Is Always Near

February 6, 2026

In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that “the singularity is near.” Immortal beings and global consciousness and everything else we hope for in the future may be real and present but still, a linear-log curve in 3006 will show that a singularity approaches. The singularity is not a discreet event.
— Read on kevinkelly.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-always-near
My experience building a Dolmenwood Character Generator using Replit

February 5, 2026

I was frustrated with the existing Dolmenwood character generator, because it doesn’t allow me to iterate levels, and doesn’t show the levels on the character creation screen. I did like the backgrounds though. So, armed with a sense of purpose – a quest, if you may – I set out to see if I could use Replit to build a better character generator for Dolmenwood. I had the PDF of the Dolmenwood Player’s Book, which I purchased from Necrotic Gnome, so with that in hand, I got started.
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Links of the Day

February 4, 2026
1. Witnessing modern society with an ancient lens?
2. “Pirates of the Ayahuasca.” Author holds lots of beliefs on how other people should behave, lacks beliefs to govern her own behavior, does ayahuasca with scary results.
3. Red hot takes on social media use
4. All editions of Dungeons & Dragons, ranked
5. Building community with friends
The Crucial Difference Between Being Educated and Being Cultured

February 4, 2026

“culture is what is left over after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn”

And:

“To be a cultured person is to be a person with some kind of original philosophy… This implies a desire to focus such imaginative reason as we possess upon the mystery of life.“

And:

“The more culture a man has, the more austerely — though naturally with many ironic reserves — does he abide by his own taste.”
— Read on www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/25/the-meaning-of-culture-powys/
After 54 Years, Astronauts Are Going Back to the Moon

February 3, 2026

As soon as February 6, the crew of Artemis II will also head moonward. It will certainly not spell the first human expedition to the moon, but it will be the first since 1972—when the crew of Apollo 17 came home, the Apollo moon program was canceled, and the translunar trail went dark.
— Read on time.com/7346146/artemis-ii-launch-nasa-astronauts-moon-mission/
Minecraft tool lets you create scale replicas of real-world locations

February 2, 2026

Arnis uses free geospatial data from OpenStreetMap to generate detailed Minecraft maps based on a specified real-world location.
— Read on www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/minecraft-tool-lets-you-create-scale-replicas-of-real-world-locations-arnis-uses-geospatial-data-from-openstreetmap-to-generate-minecraft-maps
Links of the Day

February 2, 2026
AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it’s getting weird fast

January 31, 2026

On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It
— Read on arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ai-agents-now-have-their-own-reddit-style-social-network-and-its-getting-weird-fast/
One problem with social media intellectuals

January 31, 2026

One problem with social media intellectuals is that they always need to be saying something new that’s optimized for drawing eyeballs. They can be a really smart person like Dwarkesh or Hanania that has worthwhile things to say fairly regularly, but of necessity so much of their product is marketing that it’s hard to tell how seriously they even take their own proposals much of the time.

Observant comment. From this post.
Premium: The Hater’s Guide to Oracle

January 31, 2026

Oracle has burdened itself with debt and $248 billion in data center lease obligations — costs that are inevitable, and are already crushing the life out of the company (and the stock).

The only way out is if OpenAI becomes literally the most-successful cash-generating company of all time within the next two years, and that’s being generous. This is not a joke. This is not an understatement.
— Read on www.wheresyoured.at/haters-guide-oracle/
The “Nowhereian” Advantage: Pattern Recognition Across Contexts

January 31, 2026

The more tech industry experience you garner across various fields, the more patterns begin to emerge—pattern recognition across contexts. In software engineering, programming languages follow similar conventions with each language serving particular use cases better than others. Pattern recognition begins to take hold the more experience you garner, allowing you to discern syntax and identify issues faster—and as a result, pattern recognition removes the self-imposed obstacle of “I only write in [this] language.”
— Read on treysystems.substack.com/p/the-nowhereian-advantage-pattern
Not Walking Chicago – Chris Arnade Walks the World

January 28, 2026

The book’s thesis is Chicago made the Great West, and the Great West made Chicago, and untangling which wagged which is impossible because they needed each other. The other less explicit thesis is that Chicago made great things, and that happened because its leaders and citizens believed in making great things, like turning the dreary Chicago River, a slow-moving silty creek, into the best harbor on Lake Michigan, which even required changing the direction it flowed.
— Read on walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/not-walking-chicago
An OSR Community List of Settings

January 27, 2026

Of course nothing is ever simple with TTRPGs – just ask someone to define OSR, whether systems matter, or whether variable weapon damage is the true way (it’s not). Predictably, curating the list sent me down a rabbit hole of questions and categorization.
— Read on uncannyramblings.blot.im/an-osr-community-list-of-settings

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