Assorted links (2025-08-10)
2025-08-10: art, history, and the agent experience.
It's time for another links post - I’ll highlight my sightings from around the internet that overlap with things you might be interested in reading on this blog. This edition covers video games and music, user interfaces and invisible runtime environments, and what might be the next big experience shift.
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What if we kissed at the intersection of art and technology? 😳
1) GiovanH wrote up the tale of SUPERHOT VR: a virtual reality game with strong narrative, originally released in 2017. But in 2021, the director had a change of heart and deleted significant chunks of the original plot. Reminiscent of Amazon removing 1984 from Kindle devices after purchase, but with the added twist of authorial intent: SUPERHOT VR's Story was Removed. What?
2) Splitter.fm is a tool that reveals the intricacy of modern music, by showing you the individual “stems” of each part in the band. I love to play around: muting different instruments (I never notice rhythm guitar, but it's excruciating when the guitar is missing), soloing the horn lines to practice them, or just muting the vocals for karaoke. It's a labor of love from the excellent band Lawrence and features several other pop-soul-funk-adjacent bands, including my personal favorite Couch.
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In history, two in-depth write-ups caught my eye recently:
3) A brief history of the numeric keypad, by Francesco Bertelli and Manoel do Amaral, explains how we ended up with two different common numpad layouts: 7-8-9 at the top, and 1-2-3 at the top. Thanks Jared Spool for sharing via Bluesky.
4) In The many, many, many JavaScript runtimes of the last decade, the Whatever, Jamie blog shows us the multitude of Javascript environments from microcontrollers to cloud. True to its name, is JavaScript the new “write once, run anywhere?”
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And in the present-day, let's talk about AI agents and the agent experience. I know there's a lot of hype right now; there's also real value that is already here today in certain areas. So I think it's worth paying attention to.
5) If the term agent experience is new to you, check out Netlify CEO and co-founder Matthias Biilman’s original blog post coining the term: Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters.
6) The first step to improving your agent experience is understanding your AI agent traffic. At my work (note: my writing here is always my own), my team just shipped IsAgent, a lightweight tool to identify and nudge agents: Introducing IsAgent: understand and support AI agents using your site. I'm excited about this because it helps close the loop on measuring if/how/when this actually matters.
7) And, not directly agent-related but about all forms of AI: Jason Wei’s blog post on Asymmetry of verification and verifier’s law is an insightful look into where AI excels, and where it will not.
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Finally, this week I was traveling through Singapore, and now I’m in Malaysia for a couple weeks - eating great food, sweating a lot, and failing to unplug. In the rare offline recommendation, I strongly recommend both bird parks: Singapore’s Mandai Bird Paradise and the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park. I'd love to hear your recommendations in and around KL as well.
And as always, if you see or create cool things, I want to see them - send them to bobbie@digitalseams.com or via Bluesky.