Linkblog/2025/04/03

MCP Streaming HTTP transport, Convert OSM data to GeoParquet, Generate Odin bindings for C libs, US Gov is vibe tariffing, Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish, ucupaint Blender texturing, Bill Gates on Altair BASIC, Obsidian level maker.

modelcontextprotocol/specification - [RFC] Replace HTTP+SSE with new “Streamable HTTP” transport

This PR introduces the Streamable HTTP transport for MCP, addressing key limitations of the current HTTP+SSE transport while maintaining its advantages. Our deep appreciation to @atesgoral and @topherbullock (Shopify), @samuelcolvin and @Kludex (Pydantic), @calclavia, Cloudflare, LangChain, Vercel, the Anthropic team, and many others in the MCP community for their thoughts and input! This proposal was only possible thanks to the valuable feedback received in the GitHub Discussion.

Been looking into MCP stuff as of late, and was honestly pretty disappointed to see how developer focused it is.

I mean, I am a developer, so obviously cool, but I’m trying to think of the user-facing things that could be built with this, which currently does not seem to be the focus on the MCP world (as it currently stands).

Seems to be a good solution to an aspect the post critical of MCP I brought up the other day

ohsome-planet: Convert OSM data to GeoParquet

The good folks at Heigit have released ohsome-planet, a handy tool to turn OpenStreetMap history data from PBF into GeoParquet files, ready to use in common GIS applications.

GeoParquet sparks joy, this is a cool tool.

Karl Zylinski - Generate Odin bindings for C libraries

I’ve written a binding generator for Odin. You can check it out here: https://github.com/karl-zylinski/odin-c-bindgen

Another great tool for the Odin community from Karl.

I don’t have a library I can think of running through this at the minute, mostly because the vendor library collection is already stacked.

I’d love for JoltPhysics to get a good set of Odin bindings, but alas, C++.

@krishnanrohit - This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.. 4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.

The post on the orange site is titled “US Gov is vibe tariffing”.

Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish

Year after year, document formats like .docx, .ppt, and pdf lose a little bit of steam. You might not have noticed… But Markdown is growing over and into the old formats, slowly, and nicely, like moss on a stranded star destroyer. Notes on a revolution in slow motion.

This site is a sea of .mdx files, so obviously I am biased, but I agree with this premise of this article.

From online tools to native apps, from GitHub to Slack to ChatGPT, bit by bit Markdown is taking over. It’s not a big deal. Hardly anyone has heard the word Markdown. But awareness has increased significantly, especially among younger professionals, students, and AI tool users. Increasingly, it shapes the way we format and share ideas. And that’s fantastic news.

I never really thought of ChatGPT as being something introducing Markdown to the masses, but I guess it really does introduce folks to the syntax even if they’re not aware.

Same for Discord.

Discussion on the orange site.

ucupumar/ucupaint - Ucupaint is a Blender add-on that manages texture layers for the Eevee and Cycles renderers.

One of the coolest tools to use for texturing in Blender.

From Gamesfromscratch - “ucupaint — Turn Blender into Substance Painter”.

Bill Gates - Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company’s original source code

Before there was Office or Windows 95 or Xbox or AI, there was Altair BASIC.

A nice writeup, and a very well made website, with prose from Bill Gates on the early days of Microsoft.

And while its well made / aesthetic, it seems to get the cool ascii glitchy text, there is no ability to select text, not very accessible of you Bill.

obsidian-level-maker/Obsidian - A community continuation of the OBLIGE Level Maker, originally by Andrew Apted, combined with ObAddon.

The folks over in the Map Center Discord were discussing using an old version of OBLIGE that supports generating maps for Quake / Quake II.

Looks like there’s a more modern version of this that’s still supported!

No Quake support… maybe a potential project in my future?

Probably not, my list of projects grows faster than I can chew away at them.

This link blog is also currently a big time hog… mostly due to my own fault of collecting links and not writing these entries, until I have no real choice to sit down and just crank out 10+ of them in one / a few sittings.