Friday Links Roundup: August 21, 2026

Since this is the first iteration of these links posts, it’ll be a bit more than just stuff from the last week.

Tech

• Fabien Sanglard writes about how the encryption on Quake shareware was cracked. I’ve never been much of a gamer (and definitely not for FPS games), but it’s an interesting view into what feels in 2026 like an ancient world. And it’s brief enough that you don’t get bogged down in all the technical details.
• Richard Hipp is the main developer of SQLite, which if you haven’t heard of it, is a database engine that is very likely the most widely deployed software on the planet. Earlier this year, he gave a talk on the reliability lessons he’s learned from developing it. The talk’s pretty technical, but approachable for those with an interest.
• Brett C. has a blog post about being done with AI: “Upon reflection, I’ve come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There’s an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don’t think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that’s a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software. Sure, it’s faster to build initially, but I think to the detriment of the quality of the code and the user interface and the user experience…. To put it simply: I do not like this world where people are using AI to generate art, music, writing, and software. So I will not use AI.”
• Somewhat relatedly, Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier published a piece on “Separating AI’s Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems.”
• As a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, we had an Apple //c (and its much cheaper—and arguably better—clone, the Laser 128). Like I said above, I’ve never been much of a gamer, and we didn’t have much software anyway; so I would “play” a lot with AppleWorks. Yes, the 1980s equivalent of Microsoft Office,¹ not to be confused with later Macintosh editions which bore the same name and purpose, but no code. So I was pleased to see Christopher Drum’s article revisiting and trying out AppleWorks.

Theology

Fr. Stephen Freeman is still blogging in his retirement and had two posts that caught my eye.

• Why Mary Has Always Been Honored: “The historical evidence for Mary’s veneration is so obvious that it is simply overlooked: her place in the gospel accounts…. Mary’s place within the gospels carries a message of veneration. Those who do not see this obvious feature of the New Testament generally get lost in the details, reading too much into sayings such as Jesus’ ‘Woman what have I to do with you?’ and the like…. [I]t is the seemingly ‘gratuitous’ material that points to veneration of Mary.”
• Learning to Read: “Orthodoxy, at present, is inundated with inquirers…. With inquiry comes the deep temptation to leap forward to the ‘deeper’ things, to look for a mastery that cannot be found on the internet or in a book. Self-appointed apologists, without training or accountability, offer a knowledge that they themselves do not possess. We are not saved by information—quite often, we are destroyed by it. What is so dangerous? The knowledge of God is personal and relational, not academic. God cannot be studied like a lab rat under a microscope, nor is theology a philosophical system, a simple matter of ideas.”

¹ If you’re now thinking “What kind of weird kid plays with office software?” you…would not be wrong.