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Back in the primordial days of AI, PARRY was an ELIZA-style chatbot created by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate the words of a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone had the genius idea to connect it to ELIZA (a.k.a. “DOCTOR”). Vint Cerf published the transcript as an RFC in 1973, and I laughed my ass off reading it. A taste: Do you know anything about bookies? What makes you think I know anything

Tyler Hall: We all know about macOS Tahoe’s terrible app icons and how 3rd party developers have been confined to squircle jail. If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App Store, you can break free of squircle jail using NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But it can solve the problem. So tod

After reading my posts earlier today about ELIZA, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million “friends” (a.k.a. users). I don’t recall ever hearing of SmarterC

“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?” Buzz! “Apple!” Survey says: Yes! Apple at the number one spot. Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition of a great Mac app than the people who make the Mac? No brainer, I suppose. Granted, they’ve had some misses, but nobody bats 1000. Ok, let’s keep going. “We

This post is the capstone of the most long-running series on my blog. In December 2024 (!), I started reading Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)", and worked through it carefully. Being who I am, despite trying to apply a strict "no side quests" policy, I found myself zooming off and digging into all kinds of things. It's time to wrap it up. I had decided that

I vaguely recall first trying some version of ELIZA back in the 1990s. I never found it all that impressive nor understood its stature in the AI literature. It’s better than a bunch of if/then statements but not by much. There’s some natural language grammar parsing that is somewhat interesting, but I never thought it came close to passing the Turing Test, and I was always skeptical of claims that

The ELIZA Archaeology Project: ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents. It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it’s [sic] designer and programmer, Joseph Weizenbaum. ELIZA not only allowed Weizenbaum to develop a mode of interaction with computers that is highly interactive, it also co

Dr. Drang, in a post replete with examples of icons of popular apps from the original Macintosh, in their one-bit glory: You can see that Apple liked the idea of app icons being a tilted rectangle with some image inside the rectangle to indicate what the app did. The hand was Apple’s way of telling you that this icon was for doing things, and the rectangle was tilted to match the orientation of th

Users expect apps and agents to reach the tools they already work in. Every integration that gets you there is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of infrastructure before you write a line of product code. WorkOS Pipes handles it with one API call. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential s

A two-in-one package. The post The other kind of control flow guard check: The combined validate and call appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The 'Special Value' Pi 4 pictured above is probably the rarest Raspberry Pi I own—even rarer than my blue special edition Pi. A Raspberry Pi reseller briefly listed a special 'value edition' Pi 4. But the product page 404's now. While it was up, my curiosity got the better of me, and now I have two 'value' Pi 4s. What makes them a 'value'? They're only certified to run at 1.25 GHz (retail Pi 4s ru

How's this for a location?! I mean, last week was nice with Scott in Mallorca, but Marrakech is, well, wow 😮 Anyway, about those data breaches... This week I'm talking about the futility of attempting to remove piss from a pool, yet here we are, with

A cybersecurity startup dangling millions of dollars to acquire zero-day security vulnerabilities in popular software is run by a pair of far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons whose most recent ventures included fake intelligence companies and a now-defunct AI-based lobbying platform they operated under assumed names.

Verily, some of our brethren (and sistren) be afflicted with a sinister disposition. While the righteous scroll using the thumb of their right hand - as is good and proper - an accurs'd minority swing the other way. Look, you try writing an interesting bug report without sounding like a clanker, OK! I try to optimise my blog as much as possible. It may not look like much, but it has got it…

In July 1981, at the height of Pac-Man fever, Nintendo released its third stand up arcade game. This game, Donkey Kong, took over as the most popular arcade game in the world, but it had a lasting repercussions. It irreversibly The post How Donkey Kong toppled Atari appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Imagine being worth $2 billion. Would you give away $550 million? That's a quarter of your wealth, more money than I could spend in several lifetimes. Yet that's how much Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, and his wife have donated to a charity in California. Specifically, they donated to Undue Medical Debt, an organization that buys Californians' medical debts and expunges them. A noble act.

I managed to write this without using the word endofunctor once. Wait, shit, I just did. Uhhh, oops!

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: With the latest iOS 27 developer beta, Apple is giving testers an early look at one of the upcoming improvements to its AI-powered Siri: the ability to adjust how quickly and expressively the AI assistant speaks. In iOS 27 beta 3, out today, Apple has enabled the voice controls for “Pace” and “Expressivity” that were previously labeled as “Coming soon” in the f

It used some heuristics. The post How did Windows 95 decide that a setup program ran? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech: Their common enemies are Trump and his tech giants. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Sex work synonyms; Carthedral; French pirates; Suffragette surveillance; Hidden library apartments; "The Meaning of July the Fourth for the Negro" x James Earl Jones; Farage quits; Peak indifference; Self publi

Raymond Edward Kassar was born January 2, 1928 and died December 10, 2017, aged 89, in Vero Beach, Florida. Ray Kassar was president, and later CEO, of Atari Inc. from 1978 to 1983. Atari’s parent company, Warner Bros, hired him The post Ray Kassar, former Atari CEO appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Content addressing identifies a piece of data by a cryptographic hash of its contents rather than by a name or a location. Two copies of the same bytes get the same identifier wherever they came from, a single changed bit produces a completely different one, and because the identifier is derived from the data itself it works as a lookup key and an integrity check at the same time. I keep running i

Gisteren deed ik op Mastodon live verslag van het kort geding van de aandeelhouders van Solvinity tegen de staatssecretaris van Digitale Economie en Soevereiniteit. Gek genoeg zag ik in de rechtbank dingen die ik later in het nieuws niet of weinig vernam. Pers en media waren in grote getale op komen draven, wat leidde tot de volgende artikelen: AD: Nederlandse overheid wilde bedrijf achter DigiD n

Paul Kafasis, in a post at Rogue Amoeba’s blog titled “Free the Icons”: Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes. It’s clear that s

Alternative titles: … earns you a high-risk pregnancy … earns you an ascent of Matterhorn … earns you 10,000 km on a motorcycle … earns you two BASE jumps … earns you a day on the frontline in Ukraine (Continue reading the full article on the web.)

The third developer betas of Apple’s 27 OSes dropped today, and this new page in Apple’s developer documentation drew my attention — a built-in Uniform Type Identifier for Markdown data: The identifier for this type is net.daringfireball.markdown. This type conforms to [utf8PlainText]. My main link here is to the Swift documentation, but it’s available in good old Objective-C too. I had previously

There’s a been a lot of (justified) concern and consternation over the last year regarding Backblaze — an online backup service whose simple pitch is that it backs up your entire computer, including the startup drive and external drives — and online file storage services like iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Backblaze stopped including the contents of such services in i

Allen Pike, back in November (and corresponding Hacker News thread): Still, I wouldn’t count out the possibility of a change in course here. While mobile is king, desktop is still where work happens. While OpenAI has acquired Sky to double down on desktop, Google has long been all-in on the browser. That leaves Anthropic as the challenger on desktop, with their latest models begging to be paired w

A banger of an Accidental Tech Podcast members-only special, right on time. ATP memberships are just $8/month or $88/year, and the members-only episodes alone are worth the price. They do a great job explaining what makes for a Mac-assed Mac app, but an even better job talking about why users and developers should care about them.  ★

Maestral developer Sam Schott, on the Maestral website: As of June 2026, Maestral is no longer actively maintained. The current version will continue to work until certificates expire. Schott, on Maestral’s GitHub project page: As of 2026-07-28, this project is archived. It’s been a fun challenge to develop a syncing client, but unfortunately, I find too little time to invest in Maestral these day

Jason Snell, at Macworld: My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, there was nothing. Apple’s sur

Soundtrack: Ozzy Osbourne — Mr. Crowley A lot of people have been making a lot of fun of the SoftBank 46th annual shareholder meeting and Masayoshi Son’s (to quote Bryce Elder of the Financial Times) Untethered Goose Game, specifically referring to slides that, well, looked like this: As

I ran across a geometry theorem with the following diagram. The theorem corresponding to the diagram is interesting, but I found reproducing the diagram more interesting. The segment AB is a diameter and the line CD is perpendicular to the diameter. Assume the outer circle is a unit circle. I guessed C = (cos(1), sin(1)) and made the […] Reproducing a geometry theorem diagram first appeared on Joh

You can't change your mind, but you can do it a different way. The post I opened a file with <CODE>FILE_<WBR>FLAG_<WBR>DELETE_<WBR>ON_<WBR>CLOSE</CODE>, but now I changed my mind appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I ran across the approximation e ≈ 2721/1001 recently. What makes this remarkable is its accuracy relative to the size of the denominator. You can create a trivial approximation just by truncating a decimal expansion e ≈ 2718/1000 but this is only good to four significant figures, but 2721/1001 is good to seven, almost eight, […] e approximation first appeared on John D. Cook.

I'm just so bored of talking about AI. It's like listening to vapers tell me how delicious their flavoured poison is. Did you ever meet someone at university who'd just tried drugs for the first time? Listening to a stoner ramble on about their mystic crystal revelations is amusing for the first five minutes, but quickly gets tiresome. Wow! You got your little computer friend to automate calling

On July 6, 1995, IBM bought Lotus Development for $3.5 billion. Lotus had once been the second largest software publisher in the world and was worth $5.5 billion at its IPO. Its flagship product, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, had been The post Why IBM bought Lotus appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Amazon has been accused several times for ripping off merchants on its platform. And every single time they denied any wrongdoing. A merchant, or anyone really, can create a product (or source it from China), then resell it on amazon. Amazon is the service provider, and hosts all the metrics concerning the products. If Amazon themselves were in the business of creating and selling products, th

GLM 5.2 is the first open weights model I'd call a genuine competitor to Opus and GPT for agentic work - at ~15-20% of the price. Part one of why AI inference margins are about to collapse.

If you read anything about health or longevity, you’ll soon find yourself in a world of hazard ratios. Some study might say that eating more fiber might change your risk of dying by a factor of HR = 0.90. Another might say that occasional smoking might change it by HR = 1.30. But how much should you care about that? Is HR = 0.90 or HR = 1.30 a lot? What if you don’t want to eat more fiber? What if

North is right (mirrored). 0.53"/pixel [17'x12' field]. FWHM=3.7" Ok, this is a crazy one. Five tightly spaced galaxies with visible tidal interactions: However, looking at redshift data, the blue spiral on the left is ten times closer than all the other objects: at z=0.0026 instead of z=0.022. This means it's not actually a member of the group, even though it's in the same part of of the sky

Capacitor vendors don't want you to know this! Save money on capacitors by spending more on other components

I made some updates to my notes blog, including a change to how my “Shuffle” feature worked. Figured I’d blog about it. Shuffle? On a Blog? At the time of this writing, I have 974 “notes” that I’ve published. For fun, I have a “shuffle” button that digs up a random note from the past. I like to press it from time to time and re-encounter some insight from the past. It’s like going through an old

I had another excellent PLDI this past June. It was my fourth1. I continued to meet new people and learn new things! Overall: I got to meet a lot of new people, which was exciting. I had some good chats about research. I asked a question at a talk! I got to show Aaron and Jacob PLDI and see them enjoy it. I missed hanging out with CF Bolz-Tereick and Chris Fallin, the usual suspects at conferences

My thanks to Day One Journal for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Day One first launched in 2011 and has been the stalwart of journaling apps on Mac and iOS ever since. Day One’s apps exhibit a commitment to technical and design excellence, and, more importantly, everything they do is deeply informed by the intense personal nature of keeping a journal. (Or journals — Day One lets you create

Yours truly, back in 2018: I don’t share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps, but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform that attracts people who care. But I worry. In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that shoul

Flexibits: Calendar Mirroring allows you to connect two separate calendars (like work and personal) so that events from one automatically show up on the other. The best part? No event information is sent to Flexibits servers or saved outside of your device. You can choose to show full event details or just block the time out as a mysterious, professional “Busy”. Your coworkers don’t need to know y

Households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more.

This was a little idea gnawing at the back of my brain. The humble barcode has been in use since the 1970s. In the next few years it will likely be replaced with a 2D QR Code. I couldn't find anyone who'd made a QR code with an embedded UPC - so I decided to make one. If you move your phone close to the code (so it can't see the squares in the corners) it should read the number in the 1D…

Week seven of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases Hex 2.5.0 adds organisation-defined dependency policies: an organisation publishes a named policy through its repository, a project opts in via HEX_POLICY or the :hex block in mix.exs, and resolution then filters out versions that carry an advisory above a given

A discussion over lunch today brought up the fact that additional data does not always decrease the size of a confidence interval. This post will look at this from a Bayesian perspective. In general, new information reduces your uncertainty regarding whatever you’re estimating. The posterior distribution becomes more concentrated as more data are collected. That’s […] Does additional data always r

A very strange Pi issue sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit itself is usually correct but the arguments do not match the schema as the model invents made-up keys and Pi thus rejects the tool call

Anthropic released the first version of the Claude “desktop” app for MacOS in October 2024 — an Electron clunker that did not impress UI designers. When it came out, I wrote: ChatGPT’s native Mac app, on the other hand, is a truly native Mac app. It looks like a Mac app and feels like a Mac app because it really is a Mac app. I’ve liked it ever since it launched back in May, and it keeps getting b

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring. — Will Wright Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a […]

Contextual clues. The post How did we conclude that <TT>CcNamespace.dll</TT> was the ringleader of a group of DLLs that unloaded prematurely? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I was recently summoned to a meeting in Stockholm, a city I had somehow managed to avoid despite living in Copenhagen for years. My Swedish experience, up to this point, consisted entirely of trips to Malmö — the closest Swedish city to Denmark and, more importantly, home to a

Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.

In July 1983, one of my personal favorite Commodore computer magazines of all time, Compute!’s Gazette, was born. An offshoot of the general computer magazine Compute!, Gazette’s first issue was dated July 1983 and quickly proved successful, closely following the The post Compute!’s Gazette magazine, 1983-1995 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code: With great abstraction comes great power comes great responsibility comes great loss of fidelity. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Real elections v reality TV; Copyright troll loses license; Who gets fed housing subsidies? Trump x forced labor. Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, B

I can't recall if someone else originally came up with this saying or if I said it in some off-the-cuff comment and it just propagated, but since it's often attributed back to me, I'll relay it here regardless: Trying to delete yourself

Mike Dano, in a long (too long, I say) report for Ookla (makers of the nifty Speedtest app): Further, few other countries in the world followed in the mmWave footsteps of the U.S., with international spectrum regulators instead putting a focus on releasing mid-band spectrum for 5G. However, mmWave networks haven’t disappeared. New drive test data from Ookla’s RootMetrics, coupled with crowdsourced

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a sprawling residential proxy service operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies [NASDAQ: ALAR]. The action comes roughly two weeks after KrebsOnSecurity published findings from multiple security firms connecting NetNut to the Popa botn

I was popping off about negation being an act of creativity, when Blake Watson introduce me to the idea of the “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”-Project (Internet Archive): In former times printed manuals had some blank pages, usually with the remark “this page intentionally left blank”. In most cases there had been technical reasons for that. Today almost all blank pages disappeared […] [this

Oops, I didn't realize that I was still doing that. The post The case of the thread executing from an unloaded third-party DLL appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Afgelopen 25 juni deed ik het openingspraatje van de Surf Privacy en Security Conferentie. Nou heb ik vaker over digitale autonomie gesproken, maar deze keer heb ik het nadrukkelijk meer over wat er nu moet gebeuren. Of zoals de titel zegt “en nu echt”. Ondanks dat ik nu letterlijk meer dan 50 praatjes over dit onderwerp heb gegeven had ik nog niet eerder de moeite genomen een goed transcript te m

Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known. Here's the thing. No. All my blog posts start with a simple declaration: <!doctype html> <html lang=en-GB> There's a reason for that. It is more than the…

On July 2, 1984, Atari got a new owner. After a disastrous 1983, its owner, Warner Communications, wanted out, just a year and a half after Atari had $2 billion in sales. It went from being called the greatest acquisition The post Jack Tramiel and Atari appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

July 2026 Understanding is the new bottleneck AI Engineer conference in July 2026, also shared as a tweet thread. Hot take: I think it's still important to understand the code that our agents write! In this talk I'll explain why that's the case, and show some ideas for how to efficiently understand code. Alright, let's dive in. Agents are writing more and more code for us, and we all know i

Today's links The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work": Sometimes, "I got it working" is fine, but sometimes it isn't. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Series of tubes; Paralyzed teen beaten bloody by TSA; "Ultra unreal" Chinese lit; London property prices v Brexit; Biden v surprise billing; "Feeding Ghosts." Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Syd

Web forums were rough around the edges and faded in relevance as seemingly better options emerged. But what if we had stuck with them? Today in Tedium: Recently, I passed 20,000 followers on Bluesky, which I didn’t really say anything about. Sure, I thought about it, but then I had decided to myself, what’s the point? Soon, there will be another mark I can point to and feel weird about. The thing

Abolishing pandemics/ Getting out of the way of AI automation/ Learning from Honk Kong MTR's business model

Today's links Technocarcinization: Enshittification is the great leveler. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Grampa's backyard Disneyland; Elizabeth Warren on monopolies; Spotify v Apple (antitrust edn); Exxon lobbyist confesses; "When the Sparrow Falls." Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I'v

Unlocking the door from the inside. The post It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Changing administrative settings appeared first on The Old New Thing.

For roughly the last ten years, a meaningful percentage of my working hours have been spent thinking about observability. If you're not familiar with the term, "observability" is what we call it now that "monitoring" doesn't sound expensive enough. The actual work

The earliest dated article still active on Tom’s Hardware Guide is dated July 1, 1996. It was an article about CPU softmenus, something we pretty much take for granted today, but at the time was only available on select Abit The post The earliest surviving Tom’s Hardware Guide article appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

At FOSDEM in February and again at UN Open Source Week last week, the Cyber Resilience Act was the answer on offer whenever anyone asked what governments are doing about open source security, and the foundations and corporate advocates presenting it framed it as good news for open source. It is the largest piece of software legislation the EU has passed, the open source community spent two years l

Uit een vandaag verschenen onderzoeksrapport (PDF) blijkt dat de AIVD en MIVD slordig en soms onrechtmatig omgaan met bulkdatasets. Bulkdatasets zijn grote bestanden vol data over vaak miljoenen willekeurige mensen, data die op een of andere manier in het bezit van de diensten gekomen is. Uit het rapport: “De diensten kunnen bulkdatasets bijvoorbeeld verkrijgen van informanten, andere overheidsorg

"The Nuremberg Trial" by John Tusa and Ann Tusa - a detailed, meticulously researched account of the Nuremberg Trials. There's not a whole lot of side questing in this book - it's all focused on the trials themselves. Interesting read overall, though somewhat dry and academic. "Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir" by Craig Mod - a kind of travelogue of the author walking across Japan's Ki

This morning I wrote a post that included the central Delannoy numbers. The nth central Delannoy number Dn counts the number of ways a king can move from one corner of a chessboard to the diagonally opposite corner without backtracking. The more general Delannoy numbers Dm,n are the analogy for an m × n rectangular board, not […] DNA Sequence Alignment and Kings first appeared on John D. Cook.

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anyone asks what the story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. Flannery O'Connor i fall back into stories because i don't know any other way to explain myself. stories conv

For over a year, I've been using Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)" -- and the multitude of side-projects that have branched out from reading it -- as something like a curriculum for learning about modern AI. The one final task I had set myself was to build and train an LLM from scratch just using my notes -- no reference to the book, no reference to the model

Imagine the following dialog. Professor: f is a function of a real variable x that takes a real parameter k. Student: What’s a parameter? Professor: It’s a constant that can vary. Student: Then if it can vary, isn’t it a variable? Professor: Sorta, but no not really. This conversation plays out over and over, and unfortunately it often […] Distinguishing variables from parameters first appeared on

Watch now (94 mins) | Math is where we’ll see superintelligence first. What will it look like?

How's the view?! Back to business, it's now 8 years ago that Scott and I thought it would be a cool idea to build Why no HTTPS? We used the site to shame companies for not implementing their transport later security property, and to make it

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and

Golden rectangles The defining property of golden rectangle is that if you stick a square on its longer side, you get another golden rectangle. The smaller vertical rectangle is similar to the larger horizontal rectangle. This means φ / 1 = (1 + φ) / φ which tells us φ² = 1 + φ and […] Silver Rectangles and the Ways of Kings first appeared on John D. Cook.

Made it to another midpoint. The post 2026 mid-year link clearance appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Finding an illicit place to hide data. The post A compatibility note on the abuse of Windows window class extra bytes appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Thanks to BookSirens for providing me with a review copy. This is an intriguing self-published novel with a backstory almost as interesting as the plot. The story is a descent into paranoia as an author is convinced that an AI is plagiarising his work. As the madness takes over, he's forced to confront whether his creative processes are genuine or not. It raises some excellent questions about …

Today's links Jo Walton's "Everybody's Perfect": A mystical tour-de-force that makes you feel like your mundane life until this point has all been a boring dream. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Corruption; How much (little) are the AI companies making? Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I'

You hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we The post Apricot Computers: An underrated British brand appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I spent last week at UN Open Source Week, where officials from a dozen governments stood up in turn and described open source as critical infrastructure. That framing has been the standard one since Nadia Eghbal’s Roads and Bridges report for the Ford Foundation in 2016, and after ten years it has finally reached the audience it describes. Sitting in a UN conference room full of people whose job i

I've always been interested in how dating apps work. You really only have two choices if you want to get in the business. Help people find a match, and they will never come back Make people pay and keep them on the platform as long as possible. Let's pretend for a second that we actually want people to find love. Love is such a weird thing that we don't even know how to define it properly. As

Here’s kind of a strange problem with an interesting solution: find a function f such that the derivative of f equals the inverse of f for all positive x. f ′(x) = f−1(x) This is a differential equation, but a very unusual one, one that cannot be solved using any of the techniques taught in a class on differential equations. […] Derivative equals inverse first appeared on John D. Cook.

Chicago’s weather is pretty lousy most of the year, but when it’s nice, it’s very nice. June blessed the city with dozens of idyllic days. But don’t worry—I still spent most of the time inside on the computer. Things I did I launched my first big project at Ghost: automations! It’s still in beta, but it’s one of the biggest projects I’ve led. If you happen to be a Ghost publisher, please try it ou

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. Instead, I’m going to occasionally jump into the parts of it that look interesting. Last week, we looked at tagged data in Haskell. The authors of SICP weren’t convinced that’s the best approach, so they move on to data-directed programming. We’ll

Today's links Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search: We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Microsoft antitrust overturned; Scammer carves C64; RIP Jim Baen; GOP rep to constituent's child: "drop dead" (literally); CCTVs jacked for botnet; Olympic profitability lie; Human factors in health infosec; Exfilt

The intended usage is encoded in the prefix. The post The evolution of window and class extra bytes in Windows appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Leaving you with a couple laughs

The calculator utility bc has a minimal math library. For example, there’s no tangent function because you’re expected take the ratio of sine and cosine. (The Gnu version of bc does have a function for tangent, but the POSIX version does not.) And yet bc includes support for Bessel functions J(x). The bc function j […] Who you gonna believe: Grok or the docs? first appeared on John D. Cook.

For as long as I can remember, my home page has been about:blank. But for a good chunk of the 1990s, I would have done well to set it to altavista.digital.com. Here’s what happened to Altavista, the search engine that The post What happened to Altavista appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I got sent a link to a pull request against Dan Burton’s composition, a tiny Haskell package whose whole gimmick is that it depends on nothing, not even base. The upcoming GHC 10.2 breaks it: built-in names resolve through a real module, GHC.Essentials, which is in base, so from 10.2 every package picks up an implicit base dependency whether the cabal file declares one or not. The PR added a flag

It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.

I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide. Some of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs, they were company-destroying bugs: bugs that, if they couldn’t be fixed, would sink the entire company. And the difficulty in solving these bugs was that they had no

The Space Shuttle's five1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands of sensors, displaying data to the astronauts, and navigating the Shuttle. Each computer consisted of two 60-pound aluminum-alloy boxes: the box on the right is the CPU, a 32-bit processor that executed 420,000 instructions per second. These computers were design

Has the US been focused on the wrong things?

Despite vowing not to read sequels of books I love, I'm constantly surprised that regression to the mean is an iron-clad law of the universe. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the series, so eagerly gobbled up the second. What a burlap fool I am. What was charming and wry in The Satsuma Complex is now overdone and clichéd. The violence, which was an undercurrent in the first book, is now …

I don't understand why this generation can't afford a home. When my grandfather was 18, he had already saved enough money from his paper route and various odd jobs to buy his first home. By the time my father turned 26, he was already married, had his first child, and was moving into his first home. We lived frugally, and our parents taught us the value of spending wisely. Today's man-children

Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.) selected deliberately because it can operate with no binary blobs and no firmware you couldn't examine or replace with your own, and runs his choice of fully libre operating systems. The fact it has a Chinese MIPS64 derivative in it was undoubtedly just more compound on the heat spreader. Now, in my case, the fac

Here’s a crazy bash one-liner I found via an article by Peter Krumins: echo {w,t,}h{e{n{,ce{,forth}},re{,in,fore,with{,al}}},ither,at} This prints 30 English words: when, whence, whenceforth, where, wherein, wherefore, wherewith, wherewithal, whither, what, then, thence, thenceforth, there, therein, therefore, therewith, therewithal, thither, that, hen, hence, henceforth, here, herein, herefore, h

The previous post looked at how many digits are in the reduced fraction for the nth harmonic number. I was curious about how long the cycle of digits in a harmonic number might be. I wrote about the period length for the digits of fractions almost a decade ago. This post includes code so I can […] When will the decimals in a/b repeat? first appeared on John D. Cook.

Who’s to blame for the memory crisis that turned Macs and Steam Boxes into unobtanium this week? The memory-makers have a convenient answer. If I was Micron and everyone was hating on my company for making life just a little more unaffordable, I might try looking for a scapegoat, too. But given how little the RAM folks have stuck their necks out in the year of the RAM crisis, this quote from a re

The previous post looked at writing the harmonic numbers as reduced fractions and estimating the number of digits in the numerator and denominator based on asymptotics. This is a follow up post with plots. We’ll choose our base b to be 2. And we’ll look at the total number of bits in both the numerator and […] Height of harmonic numbers first appeared on John D. Cook.

Trump refuses to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slow trucking, why we stopped making new land, and more.

Today's links Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers: Under no circumstances should you rush out and read the book that prompted Mark Zuckerberg to demand $111m and eternal auctorial silence. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Flame warriors; Cryptography and casinos; TSA v dying 95 year old woman's adult diaper; Neoliberalism and Brexit; Beyond solutionis

Week six of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases Spack 1.2.0 makes the rewritten parallel installer the default, adds concretization groups and concretization caching, and ships SBOM generation alongside experimental build sandboxing and a spack isolate command. pnpm 11.9 computes a tarball’s integrity from the d

This radio station gets many requests for treatises on formal logic.

The Washington Post reported that the US government will decide who can use state-of-the-art LLMs. After the ban of Fable and the limitations coming to ChatGPT 5.6, what's next? My bet is Chinese models. For all of Anthropic's doomsaying and propping up of their secret model Mythos, several open-weight models have proven capable of similar feats, and at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek rocked

The nth harmonic number is the sum of the reciprocals of the first n positive integers. Hn = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + … + 1/n The product of all the denominators is n!, so you could write Hn as a fraction Hn = p/q where p = n! Hn is an integer and q = n!. While […] Writing down harmonic numbers first appeared on John D. Cook.

Data is from 2026-06-20. North is right. 0.53"/pixel (27'x27' field). FWHM=4' A nice, if rather small (~100") edge on spiral galaxy. Arp filed this one under "low surface brightness companions", but the companion doesn't seem to exist. There's a bright spot to the north (right) of the core, but hubble data shows it's just a bright HII region and star cluster. This part of the sky isn't cover

June is not over, and anything could still happen, but a lot already has.

It’s been an incredibly long few weeks, and as a result my previously-planned Hater’s Guide just isn’t possible within what little time I have left in this week, which is why I’m starting an ongoing series — Notes From The Bubble

Opus 3: Henry VI, Part 2

Labs are throwing away the most valuable data.

Tying two bugs together. The post The case of the DLL that was not present in memory despite not being formally unloaded, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I'm not paying seventy bloody quid for an official PS5 controller - so I found a knock-off version for a smidge under £40. And this one has lots of unnecessary blinkenlights! Gamrombo is the consumer-facing brand of the generically named Professional Controller Manufacturer. AKA "Huizhou Ronghui Technology Co., Ltd" - there's virtually no information about them online other than paid-for …

Quick: Who was the first browser manufacturer to hold an IPO in the dotcom era? Netscape? WRONG! Its competitor Spyglass beat it out, holding its IPO June 27, 1995. Its IPO did rather well too, issuing two million shares at The post Spyglass: A web browsing pioneer’s IPO appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Report filed: 04:13 UTC Status: Resolved (by treaty) Severity: Informational → Critical → Withdrawn → Critical → Negotiated Duration: 96 hours (billable: 2.1 trillion tokens) Affected systems: All of them, plus several we do not own Executive Summary: A security incident occurred. Our AI-augmented defence-in-depth strategy, deployed in direct response to CVE-2024-YIKES, performed exactly as config

This is a quick post, mostly for my own reference. I've avoided LUTs and 'Log' video footage for years1, mostly because of the extra tiny bit of workflow involved. Like RAW photos, 'Log' footage retains the video sensor's full dynamic range, so you can pull more color and luminance information out of the footage later. But unlike photography, where RAW has been a thing for decades, and many workfl

Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content.

I write every word I post on this blog myself. I can’t prove this, of course, but there’s some evidence: This blog existed before AI could write blog posts. If you put any of my posts into an AI-detector they will (I assume) come back squeaky clean. And now let me add this: I, dynomight, guarantee that every word I post here is the product of me physically hitting keys with my fingers. The only ex

Hart’s theorem says If a triangle be formed by the arcs of three circles, the inscribed and the three escribed circles are all tangent to a new circle or line. Here “triangle” means a three-sided figure whose sides are portions of a circle. The inscribed circle is the largest circle that can fit inside the […] Hart’s theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.

If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away. People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him. This one is mine. Back at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts. I was puttering along, publishing whatever came to mind, mostly figuring that nobody was reading any of it. But that was ok. The process was therapeutic and it helped clarify my professional thinking, so I

Disclaimer: Anything can happen at anytime in the market; I don’t give stock picks, and as the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

This post will reveal the connection between my two previous posts: one on the Star Trek lemma and one on Pythagorean triples. In the process of writing the latter, I looked at the Wikipedia article on Pythagorean triples and noticed this curious paragraph. In every Pythagorean triangle, the radius of the incircle and the radii of the […] Incircles and Excircles of Pythagorean triangles first appe

I wrote the following piece for IFP’s Transit Abundance Playbook, a collection of 15 ideas to improve transit delivery in the US.

In this post we find all Pythagorean triples that contain consecutive numbers, all Pythagorean triples (a, b, c) such that a + 1 = b or b + 1 = c. a + 1 = b George Osborne wrote a paper [1] addressing the question of when the squares of two consecutive numbers is also a square. Geometrically this is asking […] Consecutive Pythagorean triangle sides first appeared on John D. Cook.

In the wake of the dotcom bubble bursting, the record-setting startup VA Linux made a difficult decision. On June 26, 2001, it exited the hardware business. It was a curious decision but probably the right decision, because it survived nearly The post VA Linux’s transformation after leaving the hardware business appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Scrutineer scans open source repositories for security vulnerabilities and then handles everything that follows: verifying each one, working out who to contact, drafting a fix, and tracking it through to a published advisory. I’ve been building it for Alpha-Omega for the past couple of months. Large language models have made finding vulnerabilities in open source code much easier. Point one at a c

Today's links Jailbreaking isn't theft: It wasn't progress when they did it, it's not piracy when we do it back to them. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Major AI breakthrough; Disney v Pooh tombstone; Vancouver riot kiss; Farage admits Brexit lies; Protecting the web from its founders; Sanders x Hillary; Surveillance pricing v your dollars. Upcoming appearances: Philade

I was reading an article this evening and saw a footnote to a book by Arthur Baragar [1]. This caught my eye because he was my officemate at UT for a year. I found his book on Archive.org and was surprised to see “The Star Trek Lemma” in the table of contents. What could this […] The Star Trek lemma first appeared on John D. Cook.

Capital won't save you from disempowerment.

The other day, I came across "Prompt Injection as Role Confusion" (via Simon Willison). It's a really interesting blog-style version of a paper by Charles Ye, Jasmine Cui and Dylan Hadfield-Menell, where they find that LLMs seem to almost ignore 'role' tags like <system>, <user> or <think>, and instead use the tone of text to infer roles. This seems to explain a lot of jailbreaks. The paper When

John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John: If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting t

I've been following WisdPi's development of various 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet adapters for the past couple years. They use newer Realtek Ethernet chips, which sometimes have performance quirks—most frequently encountered under Linux. In today's video, I tested the new WisdPi 10G Ethernet Expansion Card for Framework computers. It fits in any available Framework Expansion slot—even on the Framewo

I find it baffling just how poorly documented most big projects are. Auth0 by Okta has a fair bit of cash, lots of customers, and almost completely absent documentation. Here's how to successfully authenticate a JWT supplied by Auth0. Once your user has authenticated with Auth0, they will be given an accessToken and an idToken. Only the idToken is needed for our purposes. It will look…

I know enough about home cinema audiovisual to know there's a lot I don't know. It's conscious incompetence, if you like, which is different to the unconscious incompetence most people have on the topic. That's not to sound derogatory (it's

The most frustrating aspect of regular expressions is that implementations vary. Features supported in one tool may not be supported at all in another tool, or they may be supported with slightly different syntax. I learned regular expressions in the context Perl, a maximalist regex environment. This led to frustration when features I expect to […] Regular expressions that work “everywhere” first

A good design doc can save you years of development time. Writing a design doc forces you to think through important decisions before you waste time on the wrong implementation or paint yourself into a corner. It’s also the best way to coordinate design decisions among teammates and partner teams. I’ve written design docs as a developer at Google, Microsoft, and within my own companies. The specif

Two men pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom this week to criminal charges stemming from an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London, the entity responsible for the public transport network in the Greater London area. The duo were key members of a prolific cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, and their guilty pleas came on the first day of what was expected to be a six-wee

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and

Today's links Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid: First they came for the VPNs. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Darwin's tortoise; ISPs conspire to create copyright jail; Waxy v fair use; Broken Windows is BS; Google is a machine-learning company; "Writing the Other"; Canadian wealth-tax. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, NYC, Philadelphia, Ch

On December 2nd 2026, CocoaPods trunk goes read-only. Orta Therox set the plan out in 2024: the server stops accepting new pods and new versions, while the more than 100,000 libraries already published keep resolving through the Specs repo on GitHub and the CDN on jsDelivr, so every existing Podfile resolves exactly as it did the day before. The maintainers had run out of people, Apple’s Swift Pac

It’s crazy how much Fullmetal Alchemist mimics how AI is playing out. We pour human souls into a philosopher’s stone that we think will solve all our problems and cure death. It doesn’t exactly do this, but you can use it to create homunculi that behave like people, Chat, Claude, GLM. The homunculus is a puree of the souls that were used to create it. It’s easy to rage against the bubble and the h

North is right. 0.52"/pixel (18'x9' field) FWHM=4.5" The pair of galaxies near the center is NGC 6285 (top) and NGC 6286 (bottom). The lower one has a distinct tidal trail below it, and a faint bridge to the upper galaxy is visible. Both sit around z=0.018. My field also included a galaxy cluster around 16h57m49s +58°46'55": The brightest member, LEDA 2582489 has a reshift of around z=0.11,

Last week, the Tasmanian Greens announced they’ll move for an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the AI data centres going up across the north of the state. I think this is a very good idea. These projects appear to have been approved without any specific regulations or parliamentary oversight, and the public has barely had the chance to have a say. The announcement also put a new number on the rec

I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny Over the last months I have watched more and more people build something on top of coding agents that feels meaningfully different from just using a coding agent. Some of this happens on top of Pi which is cool to see for sure! The pattern is the same every

For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now overwhelmingly that taking vitamin D does nothing unless you’re severely deficient. The central argument is that while vitamin D levels are correlated with ~all positive health outcomes, whe

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. However, sometimes I jump into parts of it that look interesting. Today, we’ll see how to support multiple representations of data through tagging. This article is written in Haskell throughout, but at the start it will look a lot like the Li

Let f be an even function with period π. Then the following remarkable theorem by Lobachevsky holds. This theorem is useful in Fourier analysis and signal processing. It’s useful to know even in the special case f(x) = 1. For a “jinc” analog, see this paper. *** Every time I see the name Lobachevsky I […] Lobachevsky’s integral formula first appeared on John D. Cook.

Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients, simplified forms, restrained depth, etc. In contrast (and by modern standards) the originals

The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security when he was building all that software. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits. Currently, I’m in the midst of writing a big post about the roots of web forums, but I hit on an aside weird enough that I decided to stop writing that and work on a separate post. Because I think it a

Today's links Good politics: Just make people's lives better. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: WWII online; Xbox security blunders; Homeless bloggers; Thermal printer racing game; Robbing a bank to get healthcare in jail; Crumb v Trump; "The Blues Brothers"; Bagelheads; Pickpocket training mannequin; Windmill joke; Singularity skepticism; GPU Dieselgate; Peleton bricks t

Over the years, I've worked for organisations with various levels of risk tolerance for business travellers. Some have been (rightly) paranoid and others have been (wrongly) placid about the threats their employees face. The fact is, individuals are often targeted for espionage, blackmail, or other state-sponsored attacks. Here's a list of some of the different advice I've received, roughly…

- "If you talk to me, I'll punch you in the face, are you ok with talking with me?" - "Nods in agreement." - "Proceeds to punch the man in the face." That's how I feel whenever I hear the Miranda rights being read. It was designed specifically to scare anyone being read to, into silence. Don't incriminate yourself. If you are like me, guilty of watching those police bodycams videos on youtube,

I am a father of twin boys. There is a question I often think about. It often appears as a midlife crisis where I am not sure when I became a man responsible for a family. It looked so easy for my father. It was as if he was born into it. He was a leader, a strong man, one that an entire community could rely on. When does that kick in for me? When do I become this leader? Or have I already become

The n queens problem is to place on an n × n chessboard n queens so that none attacks any other. This means there is only one queen on every horizontal, vertical, and diagonal line. When n is a prime number ≥ 5, it is sufficient to place the queens on a line that has slope 2, 3, 4, …, […] Queens on a prime order board first appeared on John D. Cook.

Profiling a MoE model to find which experts matter for a specific task, then quantising the cold ones hard. The result: near-Q4 quality at near-Q2 size for local models.

I’ve been in Berkeley for the last 2 weeks. I haven’t really been back here for a while, and it’s worse than you can believe. This is a cult of atheistic hedonists needing AI doom to be true to justify their life choices. Or acceleration. Or something. They need to make impact. I mean, narcissism of small differences to an extent, but I stopped long before these people did. If San Francisco was nu

One of the most painful arguments I keep having with fellow techies is the question of whether you can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text.