Assorted links #39

Dec 28, 2025 Updated on Dec 30, 2025

The top of 2025: photos, TV shows (#1, #2, #3), books (#1, #2, #3), movies (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13), electronic music, albums (#1, #2, #3), video games, movie posters, comics, journalism, video essays, medical breakthroughs.
52 things I learned in 2025: Yet another list of things Tom Whitwell learned. I only found a few of these noteworthy this year, but it is still worth sharing. For other collections of interesting facts from this year, see 52 Things I Learned in 2025 by Kent Hendricks and 102 Lessons from the 102 Books I Read This Year (as always, I am not sure they are all correct).
The London Picture Map: A lot of old pictures from London. The next time you go to London, make sure to check out old pictures from the different neighborhoods. I checked out my old hood in East London only to confirm that it is indeed ... old.
Expat Cinema: Foreign movies with English subtitles: A great overview of foreign movies in Dutch cinemas with English subtitles. The good thing about living in Amsterdam is that no movies are dubbed (as in most cinemas in France and Germany), but that also requires you to do a bit more work for foreign films (unless you are good at reading Dutch subtitles, of course).
We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof: Taarof is a weird cultural concept. It is difficult to explain as most people will say that they have something similar in their culture, but you do not need to spend a lot of time with Iranians to figure out that it is indeed unique, and a bit weird. I found this study interesting in the context of LLMs and even easier to understand in this context (it is also covered in Ars Technica).
Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement: Typst has been getting a lot more attention in recent years, but I have only tried a few small examples (mostly because most of the work I do nowadays is not related to writing documents as the final output or, when I do, I use Google Docs). However, if I were to use LaTeX again, I would most likely switch to Typst (the compilation alone looks like a massive improvement).
Greenland is a beautiful nightmare: A great piece on Greenland. Greenland is of course of geopolitical interest these days, but this piece provides a lot of insights on Greenland as a (wild) place. Do also check out the recent great piece in The New Yorker, One of the Greatest Polar-Bear Hunters Confronts a Vanishing World (h/t Jesse Onland).
IKEA catalogue: The Swedish IKEA catalogues available online (from 1950 to 2021). It is interesting to see the development over time, especially as the IKEA furniture of the 1950s looks nothing like what you would typically associate with IKEA.
Ultimate collection of online dos games: A great collection of old games you can play in your browser. I have played a lot of these games in the past and it is amazing how it is possible to now run a lot of these games without any problems directly in your browser. The future is now.
How to Travel Pockets-Only: I have never travelled pockets-only, but I do find it interesting to aspire to. That is, I can imagine at some point making a London trip for a few days soon with nothing but the items in my pockets. See also Indefinite Backpack Travel.
65 Essential Children's Books: A list of good children's books, spanning almost a century of literature (from 1936 to 2024). Might be of interest to people with kids, and bookmarked here for maybe later in life.
Open Source Anxiety Toolkit: A collection of tools to help with anxiety.
For Your Syllabus: Statistical Power: A primer on what to read to improve your understanding of statistical power within the social sciences. I was considering adding it to my awesome-statistics repository but I found it just as relevant to share here. That is, even if you do not care a lot about statistics, statistical power is one of the topics that is important to pay attention to.
Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers: My primary long-term fear is dementia. My primary short-term fear is having a stroke. Luckily, at the time of writing, I am not a stroke-surviving person (just a surviving person). I don't know how much I can affect the probabilities, but I guess the advice in this post is just as important for how to work prior to suffering a stroke as it is to adjust to a life after a stroke.
Cancer Survival Rates Are Misleading: A great post on how difficult it can be to conclude that a cancer treatment has improved just because the 5-year survival rate for said cancer has changed.
A YouTube Education: A lot of links to old-school educational material on YouTube. YouTube is such a popular resource and yet still underrated in terms of what you can find there (see, e.g., this piece in the Financial Times on the growth of YouTube). In other words, the issue with YouTube is not whether people use YouTube, but how they use YouTube.
The History of Cuphead World Records: Summoning Salt is at it again. This time with a video about speedrunning in Cuphead (primarily focusing on v1.1+). The video is already outdated (as per Speedrun.com), but it provides the context for understanding the most recent world records. You will most likely only find this video interesting if you have played Cuphead before (I found an old clip of me playing Cuphead during the pandemic) and understand terms such as RNG and DPS.
Stations and transfers: An overview of (primarily) European metro stations. For each station there is not only a good visualisation of the station but also a description.
Interactive World History Atlas since 3000 BC: A wonderful resource useful to explore how different areas have developed over time.
Death to the Penultimate Flashback Episode: I do enjoy when TV shows (and movies for that matter) play with time, but I also very much agree with the views shared here on flashback episodes.
The Greatest Books of All Time: If there is one thing I like more than lists, it might be meta-lists. I would like to see a resource that is working not only for books but also, say movies and albums.
I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person: Yet another fun piece in McSweeney’s. "I contain multitudes, and would appreciate it if you focused on the brunch one."