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Today's links Trump's fruitless search for a goreable ox: You can keep billionaires happy, or you can fight the cost of living crisis, but not both. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Typewriter bust; Phrack's new issue; Panama Papers whistleblower speaks; The PRO Act; Zuck's new mind-control ray. Upcoming appearances: Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.

Trapped buildings, in-home data centers, cardboard military drones, Brightline’s potential bankruptcy, and more.

This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it. The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence. A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive and violent husband? In one strand she does, in another she doesn't, and in the third she makes a compromise. We…

Every attempt to score open source projects for criticality, risk, or funding need ends up built on roughly the same dozen signals, because those are the dozen signals you can get from a registry API and the GitHub REST endpoints in an afternoon. I wrote earlier this week about the 2015 CII census, whose formula scored xz-utils a 6 out of 13 and let it sink to row 254, and which nonetheless got mo

Last evening, a short blog post appeared in my feed reader that felt as if it spoke directly to me. It is Chris Morgan's excellent post I've banned query strings. Contents Wisdom on the Web Wander on the Web Misfeature Broken URLs Qualms Conclusion Wisdom on the Web Chris is someone whose Internet comments I have been reading for about half a decade now. I first stumbled upon his comme

Your software is blocked from fetching my syndication feeds because it is using a generic User-Agent header in its HTTP requests. Your software has been redirected to this special single-entry feed so that you can hopefully find out about this and ideally remedy it. Please see my general web page on generic user agents.

I had previously learned a lot from this book review by George Orwell, which is actually a lot more than a book review. Recently I had cause to look it up again and found it had vanished from the searchable internet. With some sleuthing I have recovered a copy of the review from the internet archive. Orwell’s review was first published in The Adelphi in January 1939. The review can also be found i

"Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."

Opus 1: The Comedy of Errors In other news, I’m afraid there will be no article next week, as my wife and I do some much-needed springtime home-and-garden work. I’ll see you in two weeks with some piping-hot fresh content — dealing very directly with games this time, I promise.

Remember that MIT study that showed that the ROI for generative AI wasn’t really there for most businesses?

In this week’s free newsletter, I explained how bad the circular AI economy is in the simplest-possible terms:  Anthropic not have money to pay big cloud bills, because Anthropic company cost lots of money, more money than Anthropic make! So Anthropic only PAY cloud bills if OTHERS

You can track the file ID. The post Developing more confidence when tracking renames via <CODE>Read­Directory­ChangesW</CODE> appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I'm at home, sitting on the kitchen table. I just took my boys to school and I'm about to start my work. I'm writing this message directly to you. And you are reading it. Hello! Isn't that funny? I've been trying to write consistently, and it gives the impression that I am this serious person with some serious insights. But no, I'm just writing. Sometimes you respond, you send a nice email, other

Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago, in 2020. I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection. I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my knowledge, Apple was just using AirPlay over WiFi... so how does it work? Through the magic of buying two

Curvature is conceptually simple but usually difficult to calculate. For a level set curve f(x, y) = c, such as in the previous couple posts, the equation for curvature is Even when f has a fairly simple expression, the expression for κ can be complicated. If we define then the level set of f(x, y) = c is […] Calculating curvature first appeared on John D. Cook.

Today's links Lee Lai's "Cannon": A beautiful, subtle, long-lingering tale of duty, sex, and working for a shitty restaurant boss. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Ebay paying to run newspaper classifieds; Chuck Tingle v Sad Puppies; FBI v TOR; Daycare v Goldman Sachs; Scammers re-used covid nose-swabs; "The Adventures of Mary Darling." Upcoming appearances: Guelph, Barc

On May 8, 2006, corporate and straitlaced Dell completed its purchase of Alienware, a maker of edgy gaming computers. It was a long courtship. Dell considered buying Alienware for four years before making the deal. And the tie-up of this The post Dell buys Alienware, May 8, 2006 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

In the 1989 film, two junior employees turn up at their boss’s beach house to find him dead, and spend the rest of the weekend wheeling him around the party with sunglasses on so nobody notices. The other guests keep slapping him on the back and putting drinks in his hand. It works because nobody looks too closely and because everyone has a strong incentive for Bernie to still be alive. I have spe

An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today, after a cybercrime group defaced the service's login page with a ransom demand that threatened to leak data from 275 million students and faculty across nearly 9,000 educational institutions.

We lost Ted Turner, a patron saint of Tedium, just as an entrepreneur made an audacious Turner-style bet. What can we learn from that? This week, word came out that the CEO of a name-brand, heavily memed company was trying to do something completely audacious. Also, Ted Turner, the guy who arguably invented that trick and arguably did it better than possibly anyone else of his generation, just di

Cruise ships are bad for the world.

I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a hosted API after five minutes. There are a lot of reasons why I want this, but the biggest quite frankly is that we’re so early with this stuff, and the thought of

Steering Zig Fmt May 8, 2026 Two tips on using zig fmt effectively. Read this if you are writing Zig, or if you are implementing a code formatter. For me, zig fmt is better than any other formatter I used: rustfmt, the one in IntelliJ, deno fmt. zig fmt is steerable. For every syntactic construct, it has several variations for how it might be laid out. The variation used is selected by looking at

Wander Console 0.6.0 is now available. This is the sixth release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website discover interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent website owners. To try it, go to susam.net/wander/. To learn how it works and how to set it up on your own website, see the project README.

Sign of things to come?

Stu Maschwitz: Prolost Watches is an iPhone app for managing your watch collection. It’s part database, part journal; designed for the detail-obsessed mind of the watch fanatic. As you log each day’s choice of watch, insights are revealed. Wear logs trace a path on the map. Events from the past are resurfaced at opportune times. Finances mange themselves as you buy and sell. Your entire collection

The previous post constructed a triangular analog of the squircle, the unit circle in the p-norm where p is typically around 4. The case p = 2 is a Euclidean circle and the limit as p → ∞ is a Euclidean square. The previous post introduced three functions Li(x, y) such that the level set of each function forms […] Smoothed polygons first appeared on John D. Cook.

Mostly not very long

I’m sure there’s a scene marker right at the cut, so that’s why an ad got inserted there. But, my god. Someone at Amazon should go to prison for this. (I think it’s a total coincidence that the Febreze ad seems roughly color-matched to the sky. But scroll down in the Bluesky thread for some links to the absolute genius campaign from Cerveza Cristal beer, with spots specifically designed to integra

Otherwise, it'll get mapped back down to the 8-bit code page. The post When you upgrade your resource strings to Unicode, don’t forget to specify the L prefix appeared first on The Old New Thing.

A few weeks ago, I went on a mad quest to find the newspaper used in 1995's Bottom Hole TV show. During the episode, Eddie starts reading this newspaper: Obviously, the "Hammersmith Bugle" is not a real paper and they never ran a headline "No News Shocker". But judging from all the other shots, the prop is based on a real newspaper. So I decided to rip off Dirty Feed's shtick and find out…

29 years ago, on May 7, 1997, Intel introduced its Pentium II processor. It wasn’t the first followup to the very successful Pentium. But the Pentium II overcame problems with the Pentium Pro that kept it from gaining more widespread The post Intel Pentium II introduced May 7, 1997 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

LibreNMS has been a faithful companion for years now. It quietly handles the monitoring of my servers, devices, and services without demanding much in return - exactly what you want from a tool whose job is to watch over everything else. It's a solid alternative to heavier solutions like Zabbix, and it gives you alerts, data, and graphs on virtually anything reachable over SNMP. I usually install

The free software movement gave us two prepositions to argue over. Free as in beer: it costs you nothing. Free as in speech: you can do what you like with it. Stallman spent decades insisting the second was the one that mattered and the first was nearly a distraction, which is why the FSF ended up maintaining a page about the word “free” that runs longer than most licences. Somewhere around the ti

I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of the

Today's links Bubbles are REALLY evil: Bernie Ebbers got what was coming to him. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Mozilla v DHS wiretaps; Judge v FCC's internet wiretaps; Foxconn workers must promise not to kill themselves; "Shannon's Law"; How to password; Stimmies killed the McJob; "Little Bosses Everywhere." Upcoming appearances: Guelph, Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye,

The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of “high-risk” systems, the systems in question had moved twice and grown various new appendages. The regulators

Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns

Since about three years past time immemorial, the RSS feed for this site has been very anaemic. It had article titles and dates, and that was it. Many readers have requested that I include the full article in the feed, or at least a preview, but I’ve always put it off because it has sounded difficult to accomplish technically. The way the RSS feed for this site is generated is in two steps:

Great stuff around MLB: Those around the league quickly honored that legacy during Monday night’s slate of games. Tributes rolled in from across the league, with various play-by-play announcers deviating from their typical routines to give a nod to Sterling’s distinct style. It started with the Yankees and TV man Michael Kay, who called Aaron Judge’s first-inning home run exactly as Sterling would

TimF left a comment on my guitar pick post saying the image was a “squircle-ish analog for an isosceles triangle.” That made me wonder what a more direct analog of the squircle might be for a triangle. A squircle is not exactly a square with rounded corners. The sides are continuously curved, but curved most […] Triangular analog of the squircle first appeared on John D. Cook.

That previous item led me to look at Claris’s website for the first time in a while. And, lo, there’s a banner promoting a message from CEO Ryan McCann that was posted just yesterday, under the headline “How Claris Is Building for What’s Next”: Every AI-generated application creates the same problems: Where does it run, and how is it deployed, secured, and managed? The app needs a database. It nee

Apple Newsroom, back in August 2024: Apple today announced that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including information systems and technology, information security, and real estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s

So first the immediate news: I just released version 0.14 of Logic for Programmers! This release is pretty similar to 0.13. There are a few rewrites but the vast majority of the changes are layout, copyediting, and technical editing. Full notes here. In related news, I've started doing test prints of the book: There's not a whole lot left to be done. I've gotta fix up some diagrams, do more form

I try to maintain a consistent work environment across computers that I use. The computers differ for important reasons, but I’d rather they not differ for unimportant reasons. Unified keys One thing I do is remap keys so that the same key does the same thing everywhere, to the extent that’s practical. This requires remapping […] Unified config files first appeared on John D. Cook.

If you liked this piece, please 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 OpenAI&

Static libraries don't stand a chance. The post Why not have changes in API behavior depend on the SDK you link against? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were designed as universal constraints for any thinking machine powerful enough to harm us: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection

Yesterday a friend and I had a conversation about category theory, how it can be a useful pattern description language, but also about how people have unrealistic expectations for it, believing category theory can deliver something for nothing. Later I ran across the following post from Qiaochu Yuan. It felt as if he had overheard […] The mythology of category theory first appeared on John D. Cook

Before May 2013 there was always question about whether you actually owned software after you paid for it. But before May 6, 2013, you certainly had more control. That was the day Adobe switched to a subscription-only model for its The post Adobe’s subscription model appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links In praise of vultures: They screw you because they can. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Linus v MSFT; Argentina v MSFT; Danny Hillis on theme parks v games; Smartfilter v Distributed Boing Boing; Rental laptops filled with spyware; Torture didn't help capture bin Laden; Massively parallel Apple //e; Stephen Harper v election law; John Deere v Iowa cartooni

In July 2015, a year after Heartbleed, the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative published a census of open source projects. The idea was to find the next OpenSSL before it found us: take every package in Debian’s popularity contest, score it for risk, and produce a ranked list of where to send help. David Wheeler designed the scoring, a small team did manual review, and the output was

Juli Clover, MacRumors: Apple has removed more desktop Macs from its online store as the global memory shortage continues. Mac mini models with 32GB and 64GB of RAM are no longer available for purchase, nor is the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB RAM. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now available only in a 96GB RAM configuration, with higher-tier options eliminated. Both M3 Mac Studio and M4 Max Mac Stud

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Last March, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit after delaying the launch of the “more personalized Siri” that was first announced at WWDC 2024. Apple agreed to settle the case in December, and the full settlement terms are now available. Apple is set to pay $250 million to settle the lawsuit, equating to an estimated $25 per device. That number could reach up to $95

There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree - hard - in a meeting and walk out with our faces still attached. When bad news arrived at the dinner table, we finished the meal anyway. In hindsight, you could call

It's a fascinating display of leverage: the ShinyHunters folks, with very limited resources and experience (their demographic will be teenagers to their early 20s), consistently gaining access to the data of massive brands. Not through technical ingenuity alone (although I'm sure there's a portion

Open weights models keep frontier labs honest on price. If they disappear, we end up with a handful of oligopolists extracting consumer surplus.

I saw a post on X saying Changing a hyphen to an en-dash increases your PDF file size by ~10 bytes. My first thought was that it had something to do with hyphen being an ASCII character and an en-dash not. Changing a hyphen to an en-dash would make a UTF-8 encoded text file a […] Changing one character in a PDF first appeared on John D. Cook.

Taegan Goddard, quoting the Financial Times last week: The Pentagon said President Trump’s Iran war has cost the United States at least $25 billion, driven primarily by the military’s use of munitions, the Financial Times reports. The New York Times had an interesting piece trying to put that number in context (gift link): $25 billion is similar to: The annual budget of NASA. Spending on military

Back in 2009, Merlin Mann and I jointly gave a talk at SxSW titled “Obsession Times Voice”. Regarding how it turned out, I wrote: My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing. Merlin and I were talking about independent writers and podcasters, because that’s what we were (and rem

Two perspectives on what’s transpired so far

David Smith, “Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS”: I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore and navigate when I’m away from civilization. The most important habit I’ve found for not getting lost is to be very regular in checking your location

Sorry to use a technical term in the title

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Through the looking-glass, Lewis Carrol by John Tenniel To stay sane, we have to accept that our climate is

I want to speak to your manager. The post A dispute over the <KBD>TAB</KBD> key highlights a mismatch between Microsoft and IBM organizational structures appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links The three armies fighting for the post-American world: Hippies, investors and hawks. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: NK dictator's son v Tokyo Disneyland; Mainstream press and Bushies v Colbert; Taliban v Pakistan's first McDonald's; Norwegian sovereign wealth fund v exec compensation; Copyright v cheerleader uniforms; Dishwashers are Iphones. Upcoming app

Yeah yeah, I know, data-point of 1. I recently read Susam's blog post where they said that "most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds" - I wondered if that was true for my site. I've been writing this blog for a while. I've never much bothered with "aggressive" SEO - I have a fairly semantic layout, all my reviews have metadata, and stuff like that - but I'm not…

The first desktop computer dates to earlier than you probably think. And officially at least, it was an accident. Great inventions often are. But it was surprisingly similar to desktop computers that followed it. Design work on the first desktop The post First desktop computer: Datapoint 2200 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The previous post catalogued the bugs that get filed against package managers: path traversal in the extractor, argument injection in the git driver, XSS in the registry’s README renderer. Things you can find by reading code, point at a line number, and patch. This post is the other half. The properties below are working as designed, so nobody files a CVE for them. They’re also where almost every

William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The pages manufactured a mood, and that mood sold papers. Three years later, when his correspondent Frederic Remington cabled from

If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart. WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, C

Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out f

Nick Heer: If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React. [...] I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people

Paul Thurrott: I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called “On writing.” We’ll see. It’s odd how things turn out in

Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s excellent interview with Farrow on Decoder, either. Sam Altman was the president of Y Combinator for several years, and left

Last week, a tweet went viral showing a guy claiming that a Cursor/Claude agent deleted his company's production database. We watched from the sidelines as he tried to get a confession from the agent: "Why did you delete it when you were told never to perform this action?" Then he tried to parse the answer to either learn from his mistake or warn us about the dangers of AI agents. Watch on YouTube

Some decade ago I read a good implementation of fizzbuzz. What set it apart was its excellent modularity. The original article is no longer on the web, but this is my reconstruction: In[1]: module Main where import Control.Monad (guard) import Data.Foldable (for_) import Data.Maybe (fromMaybe) fizzbuzz i = fromMaybe (show i) . mconcat $ [ "fizz" <$ guard (rem i 3 == 0) , "buzz" <$

The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link): To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its competitive edge, Google has kept its ownership stakes in those start-ups a secret. Court documents recently obtained by The New York Times reveal Google’s stake in one of t

Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company: iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved down one position. [...] If you’re counting at home, roughly 70% of the interface is covered in ads. A casino ad, to boot. That was

Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin: For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, by most accounts, a reasonable arrangement. The cookies were local. The quality was consistent. Nobody was complaining. Then Monde

Marcin Wichary at Unsung: I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to. I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the

Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago: Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation hotbed, Jason Clinton, the company’s chief information security officer, told Axios. Agents typically focus on a specific, progr

Nobody should be surprised

I started working on the new Array data type for Redis in the first days of January. The PR landed the repository only now, so this code was cooked for four months. I worked at the implementation kinda part time (kinda because many weeks were actually full time, sometimes to detach yourself from the keyboard is complicated), and even before LLMs the implementation was likely something I could do i

Everyone, it’s time to talk about AI demand and the capacity constraint issues across the industry. These constraints are not a result of “incredible demand” for AI, but the desperation of hyperscalers and the avariciousness of two near-trillion-dollar failsons living off their parents’ welfare. Just

You don't. All files are binary at the file system level. The post How do I inform Windows that I’m writing a binary file? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Psssst! This top secret post is only available to RSS subscribers! A little while ago I added some locally hosted, privacy first stats to my blog. Using an offline GeoIP service I can get a very rough idea of where visitors are from. It doesn't deal with people using a VPN, or their mobile roaming to a different country, or rapid changes in IP allocation - but it's good enough for my purposes.

On May 4, 1984, Milton Bradley, a leading producer of board games for 124 years, agreed to sell itself to Hasbro. Changes in the way people played games in the 80s, especially kids, put pressure on the company. In this The post How the Vectrex game console sunk a 124-year-old company appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I went through every public CVE and security advisory I could find that was filed against a package manager itself. Clients and registries both: language package managers, system package managers, self-hosted registry servers, the lot. The same dozen or so failure modes appear independently in tool after tool, often years apart, because the people building package manager number nineteen don’t alw

Today's links Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure: Will Trump hormuz us into the full Gretacene? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Beck, Scientologist; Citizen journalism; Podcast-killing treaty; US x Kiwi copyright; Apple did a crime; DeCSS v civilian aviation; Navy x SF's queering; Micosoft v FLOSS; Sony-BMG needs a new DRM czar; Lossy copying sculptur

A fictional scenario about what AI changes for cloud security, written because the technical version of the argument doesn't land with anyone except engineers.

Language is constantly evolving, particularly in some communities. Not everybody is ready for it at all times. I, for instance, cannot stand that my community is now constantly “cooking” or “cooked”, that people in it are “locked in” or “cracked.” I don’t like it, because the use of the words primarily signals membership of a group rather than one’s individuality. But some of the changes to tha

Yesterday, I switched my website from RSS feeds to Atom feeds. In case you are wondering whether you have somehow landed on an ancient post from 2010, no, you have not. Yes, this is the year 2026, and I have finally switched from RSS feeds to Atom feeds. Yes, I am fifteen, or perhaps twenty, years too late. Contents Impulse Coding Atom Entries Temporary Workaround Does It Matter? Refer

I saw a post on X that plotted the function (log x)² + (log y)² = 1. Of course the plot of x² + y² = 1 is a circle, but I never thought what taking logs would do to the shape. Here’s what the contours look like setting the right hand side equal to 1, 2, […] The shape of a guitar pick first appeared on John D. Cook.

A new review suggests otherwise

I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach: I like it. I’ve tweaked a few things from that original post but the underlying idea is still the same, which I would describe as: Avoid in-page interactions that require JavaScript in favor of multi-page navigations that rely on HTML and are enhanced with CSS v

On April 28, 2026, Microsoft unexpectedly open sourced 86-DOS. This is the direct ancestor to PC DOS 1.0. I’ve written a number of things about the controversies around PC DOS 1.0 and early versions of MS-DOS, so of course I The post Microsoft’s open sourcing of 86-DOS and what it means appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

You’ve probably heard it’s futile, but that hasn’t stopped plenty from trying—some successfully, shockingly. Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from a periodic contributor, John Ohno, who last showed up in these parts around 2019. We’re happy he remembered the URL. Anyway, let’s get to it: Today in Tedium: Wheels (along with mousetraps) are the iconic inventions. And why not? The wheel is among the

I have a PHP function which uses Roman Numerals. It looks like this: $romanNumerals = [ "Ⅿ" => 1000, "ⅭⅯ" => 900, "Ⅾ" => 500, "ⅭⅮ" => 400, "Ⅽ" => 100, "ⅩC" => 90, "Ⅼ" => 50, "ⅩⅬ" => 40, "Ⅹ" => 10, "Ⅸ" => 9, "Ⅷ" => 8, "Ⅶ" => 7, "Ⅵ" => 6, "Ⅴ" => 5, "Ⅳ" => 4, "Ⅲ" => 3, "Ⅱ" => 2, "Ⅰ" => 1 ]; The problem is, the

If you’re the sun, I’m a black hole What killed the hacker culture I grew up in was spectacle. You can consume it without participating, and even worse it has signaling value. I never did CTFs to put them on my resume. I don’t even have a resume I take seriously. Just a battle between me and a machine and the glorification of my ego, sometimes public, but never performative. There was no purpose b

It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server, Apple's first through-and-through Unix server (previously, previously). The Apple Network Server was only ever officially able to boot AIX, IBM's proprietary Power ISA-specific Unix, though it was originally intended to run Novell NetWare and was demonstrated booting Mac OS with early pre-prod

I recently wrote a post for work titled "Callgraph Analysis", about how to write a custom lint with access to the full call graph of a program. You can read it on my work's blog.

Minimal Viable Zig Error Contexts May 3, 2026 fn process_file(io: Io, path: []const u8) !void { errdefer log.err("path={s}", .{path}); const fd = try Io.Dir.cwd().openFile(io, path, .{}); defer fd.close(io); // ... } Out of the box, Zig provides minimal and sufficient facilities for error handling — strongly-typed error codes. Error reporting is left to the user. Idiomatic s

png-cmp is a program I built that checks if two PNGs are visually equivalent. It’s inspired by the cmp command. Here’s how you use it: png-cmp a.png b.png Like cmp, it silently exits if the images are identical, and gives an error if they’re different. Unlike cmp, it checks pixel data, not binary data. PNGs can look the same but be stored differently. For example, png-cmp ignores text metadata.

QuickQWERTY 1.2.3 is now available. QuickQWERTY is a web-based touch typing tutor for QWERTY keyboards that runs directly in the browser. This release includes two small bug fixes. In the previous release, QuickQWERTY source code management moved from GitHub to Codeberg. During that update, the licence link in the footer was updated incorrectly. The broken licence link has now

The great skeptic gets taken in

This is a brief and simple [1] explanation of how to adjust the standard sinusoid sin(x) to change its amplitude, frequency and phase shift. More precisely, given the general function: \[s(x)=A\cdot sin(w\cdot x+\theta)\] We’ll see how adjusting the parameters , and affect the shape of s(x). Each section below covers one of these aspects mathematically, and you can use the demo at the bottom to

Chilling effects in the build-to-rent sector, how fast could robot manufacturing scale up, PJM’s new interconnection queue, the backlash against battery storage, and more.

Today's links The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus: Do bounties for ICE whistleblowers next! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Colbert v GWB; Wallaby milk; Jay Rosen's journalism precepts; Radical Media(TM); What is carried interest? TCP over pigeon; BNL v copyright; RIP Joanna Russ; GOP forcing students to repay scam loans. Upcoming appearances: Berlin, NYC,

Mat Duggan wrote up what he’d want from a GitHub replacement and it’s a reasonable list if you’re the one at the keyboard. Stacked PRs, pre-push feedback, offline review, lazy history, graduated approval states. Reading through it I kept noticing that almost every item is a client problem, and the clients are already solving it. Jujutsu does stacked changes better than any web UI is going to. Revi

Last year, I used AI to help me write articles. As I've mentioned before, it's convenient when you are doing so because it saves you time. But the problem comes up when you try to quote those articles back. Whatever you think you wrote is not what's in there. I always cringe when I read them back. As I've said before, I'm rewriting those articles so that they capture my voice, and so that I can a

How is it possible that a feature I use every day, in an app I rely on daily, entirely offline, just disappeared from my phone? I use a fitness app. My metrics, such as steps, workout routines, heart rate, are collected from a wearable device like a smartwatch and sent to the app via Bluetooth. No third-party servers are involved in that transaction. The data lives on the phone. It costs the devel

A lot of code is being written by AI, but what does it mean?

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It is possible to trace the Plantard family tree a fair ways back without relying on the Lobineau dossier, but not as far back as the time when the Merovingian kings ruled […]

Recovering from death of the owner. The post Developing a cross-process reader/writer lock with limited readers, part 4: Abandonment appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C. I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026, the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a bud

The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed Open Source. I spoke to dozens of departments about it, wrote guidance still in use today, and briefed Ministers on why it was so important. That's why I'm beyond disappointed at recent moves from NHS England to backtrack on…

Ad Lib, Inc. was a Canadian manufacturer of sound cards founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music and vice-dean of the music department at the Université Laval in Quebec City. Ad Lib’s best known product was an eponymously The post Ad Lib bankruptcy: May 1, 1992 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

When a dependency has a known vulnerability and no maintainer to release a fix, you have to fix it yourself. Clone the source, apply the patch, get the patched version back into your dependency tree. The volume of reported CVEs is going to rise, and many will land in packages where nobody is around to cut a release. System package managers handled this a long time ago. Debian’s debian/patches/ wit

It’s nice to see Jensen talk about this, and it’s super obvious when you think about it. AI and immigration are fundamentally the same. There’s new people showing up, and hopefully everyone understands how and why immigration creates jobs. Wants are effectively unlimited. It’s classic Jevons paradox that if we make something more efficient, we end up using more of it. Or a cool aphorism I learned

A couple days ago I wrote a post about turning a trick into a technique, finding another use for a clever way to construct simple, accurate approximations. I used as my example approximating the Bessel function J(x) with (1 + cos(x))/2. I learned via a helpful comment on Mathstodon that my approximation was the first-order […] Approximating even functions by powers of cosine first appeared on John

I wrote a simple script that translates text at the command line, completely offline. Here’s an example of how it works on my computer: echo '¿Cómo estás?' | translate # => How are you? It combines a few tools: TranslateGemma, a special-purpose language model for translation Ollama, a tool for running language models locally Efficient Language Detector, a library that detects the language for a

People are starting to worry

When a function is not differentiable in the classical sense there are multiple ways to compute a generalized derivative. This post will look at three generalizations of the classical derivative, each applied to the ReLU (rectified linear unit) function. The ReLU function is a commonly used activation function for neural networks. It’s also called the […] Three ways to differentiate ReLU first app

Today's links How not to ban surveillance pricing: Maryland's new consumer protection law is all loophole. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Google's 8,000 Linux servers; Battleshoe; Knitted potholes; Unpack the court; "Robot Artists and Black Swans"; Enshittifying tech jobs. Upcoming appearances: Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC. Recent appearances: Where

A Brazilian tech firm that specializes in protecting networks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has been enabling a botnet responsible for an extended campaign of massive DDoS attacks against other network operators in Brazil, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The firm's chief executive says the malicious activity resulted from a security breach and was likely the work of a competitor t

Let the exclusive acquisition have a fair chance against shared acquisitions. The post Developing a cross-process reader/writer lock with limited readers, part 3: Fairness appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

My friend and I have a game where we talk about what we'd do if we were rich. Not rich like 'paid off the mortgage' rich. Rich like a man who owns a submarine he's never been inside. Rich like a man whose third

On April 29, 1994, Commodore announced it was bankrupt and was going out of business. Its demise was a long time coming. Arguably it had been inevitable for 10 years. But the reasons Commodore went bankrupt are often oversimplified and The post Why Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Registration is now open for the sixth season of the Open Source Fantasy League. Twelve teams, snake draft, standard scoring. The board goes live next Tuesday and as commissioner I’m publishing the rule changes and some notes on this year’s class before everyone starts arguing in the group chat. For anyone joining fresh: you draft a roster of maintainers, you score points when their packages get d

This week the article Wasm is not quite a stack machine has been making the rounds and has caught my eye. The post claims that WASM is not a pure stack machine because it has locals and is missing some stack manipulation operations like dup and swap. While I don't necessarily disagree, IMHO it's a bit of a semantic discussion because - to the best of my knowledge - there is no formal definition of

After a busy March, April was a little quieter. But don’t worry, I still have a bunch of little links for you to click on. Things I published GitHub’s uptime hasn’t been great recently. Even though I dislike the Microsoft subsidiary, I wrote “In defense of GitHub’s poor uptime”, which argues that it’s not as bad as folks seems to be saying. See this Lobsters thread for some discussion. Published v

This is an essay that recently appeared in Asterisk. Consider the rest of the risk issue for all your risk needs. Lots of people die after overdosing on acetaminophen (paracetamol, Tylenol, Panadol). In the U.S., it’s estimated to cause 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths per year. Acetaminophen has a scarily narrow therapeutic window. The instructions on th

Stop coding. Stop hiring. Stop building. While the tech world obsesses over large language models and neural networks, I discovered the real disruptor that has been hiding in plain sight. Mine was originally installed on my desktop in 1992. And now, it's about to change everything in the world. We are talking about Microsoft Excel, of course. If you haven't looked at a spreadsheet lately, you are

It’s hard to root for either side, but Musk has a point.

It's shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations and a blackboard

Support for remote controlling Windows PCs may be added to Raspberry Pi Connect, Raspberry Pi's free remote access service. When they announced Pi Connect in 2024, I speculated the service was launched in response to RealVNC's sluggish adoption of Wayland, leading to Pi users lacking a solid remote access solution after Pi OS 12 'Bookworm' was launched. The service was helpful for those who had

Having learned enough about 10Gb/s Ethernet to be comfortable about setting it up in my house, it was time to bite the bullet: order it from the ISP, buy some kit, and get started. I already had 2.5Gb/s working. The apartment has structured cabling -- each room has one or more RJ45 sockets in the wall, and there's a patch panel downstairs by our front door that has a matching patch socket for eac

Please, not everybody, everything all at once. The post Developing a cross-process reader/writer lock with limited readers, part 2: Taking turns when being grabby appeared first on The Old New Thing.

As part of my quest to try new things I decided to dig for treasure in my local park. The wonderful folks at DigVentures allow members of the public to assist with archaeology projects in their local area. We arrived on a sunny Thursday to find a couple of areas of Lesnes Abbey cordoned off, with the turf taken up, and a set of tools waiting for us. After a suitable health-and-safety briefing

Palm was a high-flying brand in the late 1990s, creating the first really popular personal data assistant. Then it seemed to vanish almost as quickly as it came. What happened to Palm Pilots, and the company who made them? On The post What happened to Palm Pilots? appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Be wary of the cool new AI tools Anthropic and OpenAI are throwing—because you’ll eventually get stuck with the bill. (By the way, did you know there are cheaper options?) I think the point where it became clear to me that the AI bubble was hitting a wall came about two weeks ago, when Anthropic launched its Claude Design product. As someone who is interested in design and is trying to understand

The winterer is out of the loop; they're not maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain. They can do work that takes longer than a quarter, longer than a year, longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.

Executive Summary: The Information reports that OpenAI projects that its $20-a-month ChatGPT Plus subscriptions will decrease from 44 Million subscribers in 2025 to a projected 9 million subscribers in 2026. OpenAI projects to make up the difference by increasing its ad-supported ChatGPT Go ($5 or $8-a-month depending on the region)

Someone said a technique is a trick that works twice. I wanted to see if I could get anything interesting by turning the trick in the previous post into a technique. The trick created a high-order approximation by subtracting a multiple one even function from another. Even functions only have even-order terms, and by using […] Turning a trick into a technique first appeared on John D. Cook.

My ISP recently started offering a 10Gb option, and my "shiny new thing!" Pavlovian response immediately kicked in. So of course, I had to upgrade the wired networking in my home -- which meant I had to learn a few things to get it all working, and relearn a bunch of stuff I'd forgotten over the years. Wired networking for home and small offices hasn't really moved forward that much in the last 2

If you liked this piece, please 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 OpenAI&

Hello premium subs! This is your ad-free free newsletter for the week. Questions? Queries? Email me at [email protected], and if you have a scoop, ezitron.76 is my Signal. Yesterday morning, GitHub Copilot users got confirmation of something I’d reported a week ago — that all

An illegal state is a state we never want our system to be in. An unwanted state is a state we don't want to stay in. Many states that we wish were illegal are actually unwanted. Considering a calendaring software which stores calendar events as {user: {events: [event]}}, where each event has a start and end time. This allows one person to attend two events at the same time. We might consider this

A pot of tokens. The post Developing a cross-process reader/writer lock with limited readers, part 1: A semaphore appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Suppose you have an arc a, a portion of a circle of radius r, and you know two things: the length c of the chord of the arc, and the length b of the chord of half the arc, illustrated below. Here θ is the central angle of the arc. Then the length of the arc, rθ, […] Circular arc approximation first appeared on John D. Cook.

The TRS-80 Model 100 was an early laptop computer manufactured by Kyocera in Japan and marketed in North America by Radio Shack. Kyocera’s own version, the Kyotronic-85, didn’t set any sales records. But the TRS-80 Model 100 and the line The post TRS-80 Model 100 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

This article previously appeared in The Cipher Brief. For a decade the cybersecurity community was predicting a cyber apocalypse tied to a single event –  the day a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer could run Shor’s algorithm and break the public-key cryptography systems most of the internet runs on. We braced for a one-time shock we […]

Pick almost any open source supply chain incident from the past eighteen months and trace it back, and you end up reading a .github/workflows YAML file. Ultralytics shipping a crypto miner to PyPI, the nx packages that turned thousands of developer machines into credential harvesters, tj-actions leaking secrets from 23,000 repositories, Trivy getting compromised twice in three weeks, elementary-da

Today's links Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe": How Disney killed the movies and took over the world. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Zappa v censorship; Chemistry set with no chemicals; Short cons; Mitsubishi's Dieselgate; "Bellwether." Upcoming appearances: Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You

This is so "peak 2026" - writing an equality policy to ensure people treat our AI bot with the same respect as they do their human counterparts. It's intentionally a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's there for a purpose: we simply don't have

GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was. Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved projects to Bitbucket, back when Bitbucket still felt like a serious alternative place for Open Source projects, especially for people who were not all-in on Git

Over 500 new Pebble apps and watchfaces! Thank you to all the developers who entered the developer contest It was so much fun following the…

After presenting a demo of how an internal tool works, I was flooded with questions. Not about the tool, but about why I had bought a domain just to run the demo. "Why didn't you use the staging server?" they asked. I was confused. I didn't buy a domain. I was running it locally. But instead of the URL being localhost:3002, it was a fully formed domain. www.internaltool.com. In fact, some people

We keep replaying the same human mistakes -bubbles, strongmen, scapegoats, and panics -because the operating system in our skulls hasn’t updated in ten thousand years.

Some time ago I read an article on what makes a good tutor. It explicated many of the things I do when tutoring, so obviously I thought it was a great article. When I had a side gig as a private tutor, I covered mostly maths and physics, so that’s how I’ll frame things in this article. The same thing applies to other fields too, but it might be harder the further away from maths they are. The

What the AI cheerleaders don’t tell you

It's bad news no matter how you slice it, but Itanium makes it even worse. The post Looking at consequences of passing too few register parameters to a C function on various architectures appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Hodge podge of things I was thinking about this weekend.

Anaïs Mitchell has created something magical. I felt like giving a standing ovation after every song. Just pure theatrical joy delivered by a cast who know how to squeeze every drop of emotion from an audience. Perhaps it was sitting right at the front of the stalls, but the opening of Hadestown feels like dinner theatre; almost cosy in its intimacy. The first act is so busy - there are a …

Today's links The enshittification multiverse: It's a useful analogy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Every complex ecosystem has parasites; Prison for "attempted infringement"; When We Were Robots in Egypt; Golfing in The Blitz; Copyright vs privacy (NZ edn); GOP support for pedophile Hastert; EFF's music license; RIP Jane Jacobs; California is fanfic; DMCA v medical i

I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better: Faster individuals don’t make a fast company My mind immediately went to the 4✕100 relay at the Olympics. (Not sure which race that is? Watch the London 2012 one.) Imagine you were put in charge

Are you a C or C++ programmer?

#NoFollowUpNecessary A couple weeks back, I was arguing that when people come up with ideas, the satisfaction is in the telling, not in building. And I was making this statement generally for idea sharing. But then, I also mentioned that people share their "ChatGPT plan" with me now. Rather than sharing the idea, they share the business plan on how to achieve the idea, entirely generated by AI. T

The previous post looks at the nonlinear pendulum equation and what difference it makes to the solutions if you linearize the equation. If the initial displacement is small enough, you can simply replace sin θ with θ. If the initial displacement is larger, you can improve the accuracy quite a bit by solving the linearized […] Closed-form solution to the nonlinear pendulum equation first appeared o

Transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more.

There is a photograph of a coral reef on the wall of my dentist’s office.

There’s a nice formula for the nth derivative of a product. It looks a lot like the binomial theorem. There is also a formula for the nth derivative of a quotient, but it’s more complicated and less known. We start by writing the quotient rule in an unusual way. Applying the quotient rule twice gives the following. […] nth derivative of a quotient first appeared on John D. Cook.