Tootfinder

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

Series C, Episode 10 - Ultraworld
ULTRA 1: We have collected a great deal of information about earth and its dominant species, with one important omission. We intend to rectify that deficiency.
DAYNA: And if we agree?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/310/505 B7B5

"What has not changed in 50 years is the fact we are still using centralized architectures, prone to government intrusion and privacy leaks. Maybe it is time to think about a “Post Cloud” era where information is distributed instead of centralized. Of course this raises questions of trust, cryptography, security and collaboration, but the technology to build such systems already exists. It is more of a question of policy and education than of technology."

Somebody Else's Computer As A Service
On November 12, 1990, a 35 year-old Bill Gates introduced his "Information at your Fingertips" concept during his keynote at COMDEX. The PC, he said, would become "more personal," integrating "fax, voice and electronic mail," and providing "easy access to a broad range of information." More or less at the same time, Tim Berners-Lee was giving the final touches to the first web browser and web server software ever put in production. Bill Gates was right; as any Internet user can easily confirm 3…

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish
I wish they'd stop platforming TERFs, so I could start giving them money.

Semiconductor Meta-Graphene and Valleytronics
Praveen Pai, Aron W. Cummings, Alexander Cerjan, Wei Pan, Fan Zhang, Catalin D. Spataru
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05250 https://…

Semiconductor Meta-Graphene and Valleytronics
Nano-patterned semiconductor interfaces offer a versatile platform for creating quantum metamaterials and exploring novel electronic phenomena. In this study, we illustrate this concept using artificial graphene--a metamaterial featuring distinctive properties including Dirac and saddle points. We demonstrate that introducing additional nano-patterning can open a Dirac band gap, giving rise to what we term artificial hexagonal boron nitride (AhBN). The calculated valley Chern number of AhBN ind…