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Today's links Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us: A billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Librarians Against DRM; Copyright maximalist MP is a pirate; "The Monster"; The perversity of self-destructing ebooks; Space opera cliches; Social software politics; Game in a browser's location bar

As I wrote yesterday, Dario Amodei is no saint, but I fully support his company’s new lawsuit against the US government.

Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, reporting for the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten: It is stuffy at the top of the hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The grey sky presses the heat against the windows. The man in front of us is nervous. If his employer finds out that he is here, he could lose everything. He is one of the people few even realise exist — a flesh

Apparently I reviewed the previous version of this book four years ago but have no real memory of it. Did you ever have a dream which was vividly realistic yet somehow slightly askew from reality? Obviously there is no antimemetics division, nor could anyone write a book about it. If they did, their mind would instantly be liquefied and their mere existence would be purged. So, why is there a …

Technology has advanced to a point I could only have dreamed of as a child. Have you seen the graphics in video games lately? Zero to 60 miles per hour in under two seconds? Communicating with anyone around the world at the touch of a button? It's incredible, to say the least. But every time I grab the TV remote and decline the terms of service, my family watches in confusion. I don't usually have

On March 8, 1983, IBM released the follow up to its very successful IBM PC. The new model was called the PC/XT and it carried the model number 5160. “XT” stood for “eXtended Technology.” It offered greater expandability than the The post IBM PC/XT Model 5160 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I didn’t expect to make it here. Back in November 2025 I was on a call talking about how we should document more of how package managers work so people can more easily build tools to consume the data within them, and one attendee suggested we didn’t need to do that because their open source software provided everything you would need. This was pretty frustrating, so started rage documenting packag

I needed to ship this before my surgery, so I vibe coded it. It turned out well enough.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an indie hacker in possession of a widget must be in want of a business model... Every tool is a startup now. Every script is a SaaS product. Every neat little hack you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon to solve your own

AI-based assistants or "agents" -- autonomous programs that have access to the user's computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task -- are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, whil

When it comes down to it, Dario Amodei isn’t all that much different from Sam Altman

I like pie. And I’ve learned that if I want a pie done right, I gotta do it myself. Somewhere along my pilgrimage to pie perfection, I began taking a photo of each bake — pic or it didn’t happen. Despite all my rhetoric for “owning your own content”, I’ve hypocritically used Instagram to do the deed. Which has inexorably lead me to this moment: I want an archive of all the pie pics I’ve snapped. S

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on a composition table, analogous to a multiplication table, for trig functions and inverse trig functions. Making mistakes and doing better My initial version of the table above had some errors that have been corrected. When I wrote a followup post on the hyperbolic counterparts of these […] How much certainty is worthwhile? first appeared on John D. Cook.

Simon Willison: There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library. chardet was created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 and chardet’s maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for

Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs: Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to lea

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A sentence that I never really liked, and what is happening with AI, about software projects reimplementations, shows all the limits of such an idea. Many people are protesting the fairness of rewriting existing projects using AI. But, a good portion of such people, during the 90s, were already in the field: they followed the final par

Help us Obi-Wan Lemay, you’re our only hope. (Also, as noted by Joe Rossignol, Eddy Cue got an updated headshot.)  ★

What’s the least you can do to build an effective paywall for creators that’s mostly open-source? If we can figure that out, that might make it easier to cut out the big platforms. One of the reasons why companies like Substack have such a strong hold on creators is pretty simple: It’s hard to build a paywall. You have to deal with a lot of really hard stuff, like logins and payment methods. And

I like digging through old archives and tracing my way through quotes. Here's a particularly good one from Albert Einstein which is often peppered around the Internet without any sources. If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German…

I spend a lot of time studying package managers, and after a while you develop an eye for things that quack like one. Plenty of tools have registries, version pinning, code that gets downloaded and executed on your behalf. But flat lists of installable things aren’t very interesting. The quacking that catches my ear is when something develops a dependency graph: your package depends on a package t

LLM is a popular CLI tool for talking with language models. I built llm-eliza, a plugin to chat with the ELIZA language model. Usage: llm install llm-eliza llm -m eliza "I'm worried about computers." # => What do you think machines have to do with your problem? ELIZA, released in 1966, is a state-of-the-art language model. It offers zero-GPU inference with sub-millisecond semantic throughput, an

Recovery gave me things I didn't ask for and I'm not ready to give them back.

My thanks, once again, to WorkOS for sponsoring this week at DF. npx workos is a CLI tool, replete with cool ASCII art, that launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It’s not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fi

It’s about time

Today's links The web is bearable with RSS: And don't forget "Reader Mode." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Eyemodule x Disneyland; Scott Walker lies; Brother's demon-haunted printer; 4th Amendment luggage tape; Sanders x small donors v media; US police killings tallied. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep

Your Free Tier is Someone Else's Twenty-Minute Side Project

Data centers disconnecting from the grid, solar PV efficiency records, repairs for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Ford’s EV missteps, former OpenAI CTO’s new startup.

What can a fifty-year-old book teach us about cybersecurity? Written just as computing was beginning to enter the mainstream, The Electronic Criminals takes us into a terrifying new world of crime! Fraud over Telex! Ransomware of physical tapes! Stealing passwords and hacking into mainframes! The books has a strong start, but gently runs out of steam because there simply weren't many…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: [email protected] Subject: Open Source Foundations Consortium Announces Seven New Working Groups Embargo: None The Open Source Foundations Consortium (OSFC) has formed seven new working groups for open source ecosystem governance. The working groups were approved by the OSFC Steering Committee following a six-month consultation period during which fourteen comm

HN Skins 0.3.0 is a minor update to HN Skins, a web browser userscript that adds custom themes to Hacker News and allows you to browse HN with a variety of visual styles. This release includes fixes for a few issues that slipped through earlier versions. For example, the comment input textbox now uses the same font face and size as the rest of the active theme. The colour of visited link

Claude Code has 2-3 million users. That's 1% of knowledge workers. The compute math gets scary from here.

This is a small javascript snippet that removes most annoying website elements: /* HTML tags, keywords, commands */ h-n {color: #F27;} /* Values */ h-v {color: #B8F;} /* CSS selectors, attribute/varable names, file names */ h-s {color: #AEE;} /* Comments */ h-c {color: #777;} // For everything on the page... document .querySelectorAll ('*' ). forEach ((node) => { // Read style infor

At 4 AM in recovery, the machines that never sleep turned out to be exactly the right company.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrig

Google Threat Intelligence Group, earlier this week: Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023). The exploit kit, named “Coruna” by its developers, contained five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. The core

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy, uses Pages (from 2009 through today) to illustrate Apple’s march toward putting “greater focus on your content” by making window chrome, and toolbar icons, more and more invisible: Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise, but I cannot see how dialling back the lines between interface and document is supposed to be beneficial for the user. It doe

Ambassador visiting Renaissance Florence: “Where am I? None of this has existed for a thousand years."

The Verge: Sean Hollister: What would you say the differences are between the Apple and Google cases? Tim Sweeney: I would say Apple was ice and Google was fire. The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is internal to the company. They use their store, their payments, they force developers to all have the same terms, they force OEMs and carriers to all have the same terms. Whereas G

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Believe that there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn’t cost a thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because there is no root. Ancestors […]

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge: But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It’s right there in a binding term sheet for his settlement with Google. On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company over anything covered in the term sheet — Google’s app distribution practices, its fees, how it treats games and apps — he signed away his right to advocate fo

After seeing Oliver Ettlin's 39C3 presentation Excuse me, what precise time is It?, I wanted to replicate the PTP (Precision Time Protocol) clock he used live to demonstrate PTP clock sync: I pinged him on LinkedIn inquiring about the build (I wasn't the only one!), and shortly thereafter, he published Gemini2350/ptp-wallclock, a repository with rough instructions for the build, and his C++ app

It's already gone. If you need more information, you should have been remembering it. The post When <CODE>Read­Directory­ChangesW</CODE> reports that a deletion occurred, how can I learn more about the deleted thing? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Ethan W. Anderson, on Twitter/X: I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081. Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched wi

John McCoy: From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and components that reflected the most current techniques of printing and plastics molding. They were witty, silly, and weird. The other main

Steve Jobs, on Apple’s quarterly results call back in October 2008: There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. Harry McCracken, writing at the time: With that out of the way, the question that folks have been asking lately about whether Apple will or should release a netbook-lik

Hallo allemaal, Er is weer een boel te melden! Ik ga een beetje de politiek in, ik heb een prijs gekregen, twee zinvolle podcasts/radio-uitzendingen. En dat onze btw op het punt staat naar Amerika te gaan. Afsluitend links naar diverse interessante artikelen. Dit is de blogversie van mijn recentste nieuwsbrief. In mijn nieuwsbrief schrijf ik regelmatig over waar ik mee bezig ben, of wat ik belangr

Many who look at the high and rising cost of housing see the problem as fundamentally one of production methods; more specifically, that homes could be built more cheaply if they were made using factories and industrialized processes, instead of assembling them on site using manual labor and hand-held tools.

Last year I reviewed the Treedix USB Cable Tester - a handy device for testing the capabilities of all your USB cables. I noted that it had a few minor bugs and contacted the manufacturer to see if there was an update. For some reason, lots of Chinese manufacturers don't like publishing updates on their websites. Instead they supplied me with a link to a Google Drive containing an instruction…

I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter.

On March 7, 1983, one of the greatest New Wave songs of all time was released. And it shipped in an unusual record sleeve shaped like a floppy disk, complete with cutouts so the record could show through like the The post Blue Monday by New Order released, 1983 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

That's the answer I would always get from the lead developer on my team, many years ago. I wanted clear, concise answers from someone with experience, yet he never said "Yes" or "No." It was always "It depends." Isn't it better to upgrade MySQL to the latest version? "It depends." Isn't it better to upgrade our Ubuntu version to the one that was just released? "It depends." Our PHP instance is rea

I was building a CLI tool that records sensitive info in a dot folder, and went looking for best practices to avoid those folders being accidentally committed to git. To my surprise, git doesn’t really provide a way for tool builders to declare that their files shouldn’t be committed. That got me thinking: what if there was a file you could drop in your dot folder, or a comment you could add to th

Hard-won wisdom from a week of fluorescent lights and beeping machines.

Today's links Blowtorching the frog: If I must have enemies, let them be impatient ones. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bill Cosby v Waxy; Rodney King, 20 years on; Peter Watts v flesh-eating bacteria; American authoritarianism; Algebra II v Statistics for Citizenship; Ideas lying around; Banksy x Russian graffists; TSA v hand luggage; Hack your Sodastream; There were

In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executives would sit on stools and take questions from the media. For this one, Steve Jobs was flanked by Tim Cook and Phil Schiller.

“The problem comes down to how A.I. chatbots are fundamentally designed”

Perhaps it's because you dispatched it. The post The mystery of the posted message that was dispatched before reaching the main message loop appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I'm a fan of R.F. Kuang's books - but this is the first which I've found laugh-out-loud funny. What if your University advisor died and the only way to graduate was to descend into hell and bring him back? In a terrible sort of way, I'm glad that Kuang had such a miserable time at University. Being able to mine that psychotrauma has led to the brilliant Babel and now the excellent Katabasis.…

Remember the Michelangelo virus? If you don’t remember, on March 6, 1992, Michelangelo was programmed to overwrite the first 100 sectors of a hard drive–not quite as destructive as formatting a drive, but to the average user, the effect is The post Remembering the Michelangelo virus appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A follow-up to my post on git’s magic files. Most package managers have a manifest and a lockfile, and most developers stop there. But across the ecosystems I track on ecosyste.ms, package managers check for dozens of other files beyond the manifest and lockfile, controlling where packages come from, what gets published, how versions resolve, and what code runs during installation. These files ten

Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different design for that implementation. In many ways, the functionality was the same, but the path it took to get there was different. The way that port worked was by going via the test suite. Something

JJ LSP Follow Up Mar 5, 2026 In Majjit LSP, I described an idea of implementing Magit style UX for jj once and for all, leveraging LSP protocol. I’ve learned today that the upcoming 3.18 version of LSP has a feature to make this massively less hacky: Text Document Content Request LSP can now provide virtual documents, which aren’t actually materialized on disk. So this: can now be such a virtual

$599. Not a piece of junk. That’s not a marketing slogan from Apple for the new MacBook Neo. But it could be. And it is the underlying message of the product. For a few years now, Apple has quietly dabbled with the sub-$1,000 laptop market, by selling the base configuration of the M1 MacBook Air — a machine that debuted in November 2020 — at retailers like Walmart for under $700. But dabbling is t

Not sure if this page was there yesterday, but the main “Displays” page at Apple’s website is a spec-by-spec comparison between the regular and XDR models. Nice.  ★

Juli Clover, at MacRumors, notes that neither the new Studio Display nor the Studio Display XDR are compatible with Intel-based Macs. (I’m curious why.) Also, in a separate report, she notes that Macs with any M1 chip, or the base M2 or M3, are only able to drive the Studio Display XDR at 60 Hz. You need a Pro or better M2/M3, or any M4 or M5 chip, to drive it at 120 Hz. Update: My understanding i

Of course, anything can happen if you break the rules. The post Aha, I found a counterexample to the documentation that says that <CODE>Query­Performance­Counter</CODE> never fails appeared first on The Old New Thing.

It is sometimes said that neural networks are “just” logistic regression. (Remember neural networks? LLMs are neural networks, but nobody talks about neural networks anymore.) In some sense a neural network is logistic regression with more parameters, a lot more parameters, but more is different. New phenomena emerge at scale that could not have been anticipated at […] From logistic regression to

I was working with a colleague recently on a project involving the use of the OpenAI API. I brought up the idea that, perhaps it is possible to improve the accuracy of API response by modifying the API call to increase the amount of reasoning performed. My colleague quickly asked ChatGPT if this was possible, […] An AI Odyssey, Part 2: Prompting Peril first appeared on John D. Cook.

Jason Snell, Six Colors: Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actuall

I dropped into a pub in central London and ordered two pints of draught beer. Obviously the price of everything is nuts these days - and doubly so in London - so I only winced a little bit when the cost came to about twelve quid. Shocking, obviously. But as we supped on our pints and discussed the state of the world, I tried to remember how expensive it was to have a pint when I was a lad young…

The Homebrew Computer Club was a legendary early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California. The book Fire in the Valley and the 1999 movie Pirates of Silicon Valley describe the group’s pivotal role in the computer industry. Its first The post Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I have a hard time listening to music while working. I know a lot of people do it, but whenever I need to focus on a problem, I have to hunt down the tab playing music and pause it. And yet I still wear my headphones. Not to listen to anything, but to signal to whoever is approaching my desk that I am working. It doesn't deter everyone, but it buys me the time I need to stay focused a little longe

This post was requested by Seth Larson, who asked if I could do a breakdown of dependency cooldowns across package managers. His framing: all tools should support a globally-configurable exclude-newer-than=<relative duration> like 7d, to bring the response times for autonomous exploitation back into the realm of human intervention. When an attacker compromises a maintainer’s credentials or takes o

1. It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished. Richard Gatling (1861) 2. In 1923, Hermann Oberth published The Rocket to Planetary Spaces, la

By the summer of 1945, West Berlin had been reduced to rubble. Allied bombing, the Soviet ground assault and Hitler's insistence on Götterdämmerung had destroyed roughly a third of the city's buildings and left most of the rest damaged. There was no

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced a new family of displays engineered to pair beautifully with Mac and meet the needs of everyone, from everyday users to the world’s top pros. The new Studio Display features a 12MP Center Stage camera, now with improved image quality and support for Desk View; a studio-quality three-microphone array; and an immersive six-speaker sound system with Spatial Audio

Apple Newsroom: MacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB, so customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s N1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seamless connectivity on the go. MacBook Air features a beautifully thin, light, and durable aluminum design, stunning Liquid Retina

The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”. For whatever reason, that phrase at that moment made me pause and reflect — and led me here to this post. It’s an interesting label. You could argue the widget doesn’t even need a label. You can look at it and understood at a glance: “This is a list of people sorted by their AI

Today's links Supreme Court saves artists from AI: Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: KKK x D&D; Martian creativity; Scott Walker's capital ringers; UK v adblocking; Shitty jihadi opsec. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'l

Editor's Note: Apologies if you received this email twice - we had an issue with our mail server that meant it was hitting spam in many cases! Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s

Spinning a lot of plates this week so skipping the newsletter. As an apology, have ten free copies of Logic for Programmers. These five are available now. These five should be available at 10:30 AM CEST tomorrow, so people in Europe have a better chance of nabbing one. Nevermind Leanpub had a bug that made this not work properly

LLMs are an epistemic nightmare

Just some useless trivia. The post Just for fun: A survey of write protect notches on floppy disks and other media appeared first on The Old New Thing.

My new year's resolution is to play more video games. Specifically co-operative games. I hate playing competitively; it's rubbish to achieve victory at the expense of someone else. So I asked for recommendations and picked the cheapest thing that looked reasonable. Unravel Two is a little gem! It's a 2D platform puzzler dressed up in a 3D engine. You and your friend play little string…

We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here's how to fix it.

The Intel 486DX2, introduced March 3, 1992, was the first clock-multiplied x86 CPU. It was a clock-doubled version of the earlier 486 CPU. A DX2 ran at speeds of 50 or 66 MHz, using a 25 or 33 MHz front The post Intel 486DX2 CPU appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Package managers are usually described by what they do: resolve dependencies, download code, build artifacts. But if you look at the structure of the system instead of the process, nearly every part of it is a naming problem, and the whole thing works because we’ve agreed on how to interpret strings at each layer and because a registry sits in the middle translating between them. Registries When y

I once turned down Substack because of their design limitations. As they emerge yet again in the news cycle, I thought I’d make my point with some of that design stuff they don’t do. So, this is not a normal issue of Tedium. I have been messing around with some email design stuff recently, and I decided to try out an experimental new layout. This was built using MJML, an email scripting tool, an

I recently talked with a contact who repeated what he’d heard regarding agentic AI systems—namely, that they can greatly increase productivity in professional financial management tasks. However, I pointed out that though this is true, these tools do not guarantee correctness, so one has to be very careful letting them manage critical assets such as […] An AI Odyssey, Part 1: Correctness Conundrum

I’ve worked as a developer for 20 years, and I’ve always cared about clear writing. When I join a new dev team, the first thing I do is ask to update their onboarding docs. I capture what I learn in writing and encourage my teammates to do the same. Sometimes, other developers ask me why I put so much emphasis on writing. Programming is a technical pursuit, so why should we spend time on a “soft s

The road to where we are now was (mostly) paved with good intentions — but mixed with too much uncritical acceptance of hype.

To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico: This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040). The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse. Since the original Pico's RAM is fairly constrained, you

You get notifications that might not make sense. The post What sort of horrible things happen if my dialog has a non-button with the control ID of <CODE>IDCANCEL</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In grad school I specialized in differential equations, but never worked with delay-differential equations, equations specifying that a solution depends not only on its derivatives but also on the state of the function at a previous time. The first time I worked with a delay-differential equation would come a couple decades later when I did […] Differential equation with a small delay first appear

I use Auth0 to provide social logins for the OpenBenches website. I don't want to deal with creating user accounts, managing passwords, or anything like that, so Auth0 is perfect for my needs. There are a wide range of social media logins provided by Auth0 - including the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Discord, etc. Sadly, there's no support for Mastodon. All is not lost…

There is a popular misconception that AMD wasn’t good at cloning Intel CPUs. This is largely based on the observation that Intel released its 386 CPU in 1985, and AMD didn’t counter with its Am386 clone until March 2, 1991, The post AMD Am386 released March 2, 1991 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Last year, I pushed myself to write and publish every other day for the whole year. I had accumulated a large number of subjects over the years, and I was ready to start blogging again. After writing a dozen or so articles, I couldn't keep up. What was I thinking? 180 articles in a year is too much. I barely wrote 4 articles in 2024. But there was this new emerging technology that people wouldn't

Ken Thompson’s 1984 Turing Award lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust, described a C compiler modified to insert a backdoor into the login program, then modified again so the compiler would replicate the backdoor in future versions of itself without any trace in the source. The source was clean, the binary was compromised, and the only way to discover the backdoor was to rebuild the entire compi

Today's links No one wants to read your AI slop: If you must do this, for god's sake, do it privately. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: AOL email tax; Ebook readers' bill of rights; Sanders media blackout. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'l

The Odido breach leaks were towards the beginning during this week's update. I recorded it the day after the second dump of data had hit, with a third dump coming a few hours later, and a final dump of everything the day after that. From what I hear,

My post-surgery medication stack gave me the most on-the-nose dream of my life.

After migrating this blog from a static site generator into Drupal in 2009, I noted: As a sad side-effect, all the blog comments are gone. Forever. Wiped out. But have no fear, we can start new discussions on many new posts! I archived all the comments from the old 'Thingamablog' version of the blog, but can't repost them here (at least, not with my time constraints... it would just take a nice im

Today, DDoSecrets published data about ICE contracts hacked from DHS's Office of Industry Partnership. The hacker group, Department of Peace, published a statement that included: Why hack the DHS? I can think of a couple Pretti Good reasons! I'm releasing this because the DHS is killing

For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book. A take from one historian on the Luddite movement: If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new Can’t help but think of AI. I don’t worry about AI becoming AGI and subjugating humanity. I worry that it’s put to use consolidating power

The writer Tyler Austin Harper (of The Atlantic, etc.) sent me a thread this morning, asking whether a mistargeting yesterday that killed nearly 150 school children in Iran could have been the result of AI.

After writing the previous post, I poked around in the bash shell documentation and found a handy feature I’d never seen before, the shortcut ~-. I frequently use the command cd - to return to the previous working directory, but didn’t know about ~- as a shotrcut for the shell variable $OLDPWD which contains the […] Shell variable ~- first appeared on John D. Cook.

Everyone knows that Black people didn't exist in the UK until recently, right? Despite mountains of evidence of everything from Black Tudors and Victorian actors, some myths perniciously persist. What was the experience for Black Britons during the second world war? I find it fascinating how the US cultural hegemony rewrites history. I've heard people in the UK talk about "Jim Crow laws" as…

Publieke of in ieder geval breed aangekondigde praatjes. Tenzij anders vermeld was het onderwerp minstens deels digitale autonomie, soevereiniteit, of cloudafhankelijkheid. Share on Mastodon De lijst is nog niet compleet. Eerdere jaren zijn op mijn oude praatjespagina te vinden. Ook zijn er praatjes die niet publiekelijk aangekondigd zijn. 2024 27 augstus, AFM (AI) 25 november, Kiesraad 18 decembe

Here LLM and coding agents can find: 1. Exhaustive documentation about Redis commands and data types. 2. Patterns commonly used. 3. Configuration hints. 4. Algorithms that can be mounted using Redis commands. https://redis.antirez.com/ Some humans claim this documentation is actually useful for actual people, as well :) I'm posting this to make sure search engines will index it. Comments

Polynomial interpolation is a method of finding a polynomial function that fits a given set of data perfectly. More concretely, suppose we have a set of n+1 distinct points [1]: \[(x_0,y_0), (x_1, y_1), (x_2, y_2)\cdots(x_n, y_n)\] And we want to find the polynomial coefficients {a_0\cdots a_n} such that: \[p(x)=a_0 + a_1 x + a_2 x^2 + \cdots + a_n x^n\] Fits all our points; that is p(x_0)=y_0, p(

A new law passed in California to require every operating system to collect the user's age at account creation time. The law is AB-1043. And it was passed in October of 2025. How does it work? Does it apply to offline systems? When I set up my Raspberry Pi at home, is this enforced? What if I give an incorrect age, am I breaking the law now? What if I set my account correctly, but then my kids us

The information about how a library is actually used lives in the dependents’ code, not in the library’s own tests or docs. Someone downstream is parsing your error messages with a regex, or relying on the iteration order of a result set you never documented, or depending on a method you consider internal because it wasn’t marked private in a language that doesn’t enforce visibility. Hyrum’s Law s

HN Skins 0.2.0 is a minor update of HN Skins. It comes a day after its initial release in order to fine tune a few minor issues with the styles in the initial release. HN Skins is a web browser userscript that adds custom themes to Hacker News and allows you to browse HN with different visual styles. This update removes excessive vertical space below the 'reply' links, sorts the sk

On surviving surgery, confronting mortality, and finding peace on the other side.

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond. Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, and expanded thoughts from this edition of the programme: SETI@Home’s Final 100 Signals This month’s show had a theme — lette

In short: in my mind, errors are divided into two categories. Expected errors (think “user entered invalid data”), which are part of normal operation, aren’t the developer’s fault, and should be handled. Unexpected errors (think “null pointer exception”) are the developer’s fault, likely indicate a bug, and are allowed to crash. Error handling is an important, but often neglected, part of programm

On-device AI agents sound great in theory. The maths on KV cache scaling, RAM budgets, and inference speed says otherwise.

That is, for what they represent

I’ve never been good at shell scripting. I’d much rather write scripts in a general purpose language like Python. But occasionally a shell script can do something so simply that it’s worth writing a shell script. Sometimes a shell scripting feature is terse and cryptic precisely because it solves a common problem succinctly. One example […] Working with file extensions in bash scripts first appear

Just like everyone, I read Sam Altman's tweet about joining the so-called Department of War, to use ChatGPT on DoW classified networks. As others have pointed out, this is the entry point for mass surveillance and using the technology for weapons deployment. I wrote before that we had the infrastructure for mass surveillance in place already, we just needed an enabler. This is the enabler. This co

The fix was in, and Dario never had a chance.

The End of Feedback

LA permitting costs, trickle-down housing, Panasonic stops making TVs, robotaxi remote operators, geothermal progress.

Back in August 2023, we installed a Moixa 4.8kWh Solar Battery to pair with our solar panels. For the last year and a half it has chugged away slurping up electrons and sending them back as needed. Its little fan whirrs and the lights on its Ethernet port flicker happily as it does its duty. I estimate that it has saved us around 3 MegaWatt hours since it was commissioned. In monetary terms,…

In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to assemble Kimwolf, the world's largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf -- who goes by the handle "Dort" -- has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and email flooding attacks against the researcher and this aut

Today's links California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners: These are the right states' rights. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Octavia Butler; "Midnighters"; Freeman Dyson on "The Information"; Korean Little Brother filibuster; Privacy isn't property; With Great Power Came No Responsibility; Unsellable A-holes; Cardboard Cthulhu; Chinese map fuzzing. Upcom

From: Data Protection Officer, npm, Inc. (a subsidiary of GitHub, Inc., a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation) To: [REDACTED] Date: 26 February 2026 Re: Data Subject Access Request (Ref: DSAR-2026-0041573) Response deadline: Exceeded (statutory: 30 days) Dear Data Subject, Thank you for your request under Article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 to access all personal dat

The number 22/7 and the pigeon flock of Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet.

HN Skins 0.1.0 is the initial release of HN Skins, a browser userscript that adds custom themes to Hacker News (HN). It allows you to browse HN in style with a selection of visual skins. To use HN Skins, first install a userscript manager such as Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey in your web browser. Once installed, you can install HN Skins from github.com/susam/hnskins.

Things I did and saw this February. Things I made I shipped my first feature at Ghost: Inbox Links. When a member enters their email to log in or sign up, we now show a button that takes them straight to their inbox. In addition to shipping a neat feature, I also enjoyed learning about MX records and RFC-compliant email address parsing. The source code for the main logic is here. I was surprised t

Ok, the title is a tongue-in-cheek, but there's very little thought put into files in most languages. It always feels a bit out of place... except in C. In fact, what you get is usually a worse version of C. /* HTML tags, keywords, commands */ h-n {color: #F27;} /* Values */ h-v {color: #B8F;} /* CSS selectors, attribute/varable names, file names */ h-s {color: #AEE;} /* Comments */ h-c {c

We will learn a lot about Silicon Valley in the upcoming days

I am not alone in seriously doubting it

Dave Rupert articulated something in “Priority of idle hands” that’s been growing in my subconscious for years: I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me […] This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, hobbies, education, entertainment, news, communities, and curiosities are all on the internet. I love the internet, it’s a big p

No vagueposting here, just look at the Estimated Read Time.

We have a global intelligence crisis, in that a lot of people are being really fucking stupid. As I discussed in this week’s free piece, alleged financial analyst Citrini Research put out a truly awful screed called the “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” — a slop-filled scare-fiction

Chapter 14: The Dialogue

Making sure it triggers when you need it, and not when you don't. The post Intercepting messages inside <CODE>Is­Dialog­Message</CODE>, fine-tuning the message filter appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case, and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object detection, it's been dutifully surveilling my property—on my terms (100% local, no cloud integration or account required). I've wanted to downsize the setup while keeping cheap large hard drives1, and an AI accelerator.

Remember back in the early 2010s when any moderately popular Twitter account could become a book (or even a TV series)? This is a collection of Tweet-sized "overheard in" stories. All set in book shops. Isn't it funny that some people don't know how books work! ROFL! Aren't the general public strange? LOLOL! That's a bit harsh of me. It only rarely becomes mean-spirited. But in a book this…

GEM was an early GUI for the IBM PC and compatibles and, later, the Atari ST, developed by Digital Research, the developers of CP/M and, later, DR-DOS. (Digital Equipment Corporation was a different company.) So what was it, and what The post What happened to GEM? appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

How do you manage a company with 50,000 employees? You need processes that give you visibility and control across every function such as technology, logistics, operations, and more. But the moment you try to create a single process to govern everyone, it stops working for anyone. One system can't cater to every team, every workflow, every context. When implemented you start seeing in-fighting, pro

Since last month, I have been collecting brief notes on ideas and references that caught my attention during each month but did not make it into full articles. Some of these fragments may eventually grow into standalone posts, though most will probably remain as they are. At the very least, this approach allows me to keep a record of them. Most of last month's notes grew out of my

hat tip to Kylie Robison.

”No LLM, anywhere, in its current form, should be considered for use in a fully lethal autonomous weapon system. It's ludicrous even to suggest it.”

Apparently Apple thinks nobody with a modern Mac uses spinning rust (hard drives with platters) anymore. I plugged in a hard drive from an old iMac into my Mac Studio using my Sabrent USB to SATA Hard Drive enclosure, and opened up Disk Utility, clicked on the top-level disk in the sidebar, and clicked 'Erase'. Lo and behold, there's no 'Security Options' button on there, as there had been sinc

Editor's note: a previous version of this newsletter went out with Matt Hughes' name on it, that's my editor who went over it for spelling errors and loaded it into the CMS. Sorry! Hey all! I’m going to start hammering out free pieces

Thinking that UBI will solve anything comes from a misunderstanding about money. Money is a map, not a territory. All UBI experiments have been small scale, and of course UBI works at a small scale. No shit you can give a few people money and it’s all good and they are happy. Because the people they are buying from aren’t also on UBI. But once you add in the U part… What do you plan to buy with yo

Call you Congresspeople, right now.

On Saturday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts.

Using an Is­Dialog­Message extension point. The post Intercepting messages inside <CODE>Is­Dialog­Message</CODE>, installing the message filter appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Soms denk je, kan het nog gekker? We gaan het beheer van het platform waarop DigiD draait overlaten aan een Amerikaans bedrijf. Dit was niet de bedoeling, maar het gebeurt nu toch. Maar het blijkt dat het nog erger kan. DigiD is nog wel van ons, maar het beheer van de computers wordt Amerikaans. Maar wat nou als je die stap overslaat, en alles door Amerikanen laat doen? Dat is wat de belastingdien

3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. The problem is, the same dudes (and it was nearly always dudes) who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial…

26 years ago this week the Pentium III launched. It was noteworthy for being the CPU that broke the gigahertz barrier, but also for being a better chip than its successor. The Pentium 4 clocked higher, but a Pentium III The post Pentium III launched Feb 28, 1999 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it): Trump wants Big Tech to win, not to play fair. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Harpercollins v libraries; Rothfuss x Firefly; Bookseller seethings; If magazine; HBR v executive pay; Apple caves on encryption. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest bo

(English below) Ik heb een aantal kleine formele nevenfuncties: Technisch adviseur bij de Kiesraad Raad van Advies bij de Autoriteit online Terroristisch en Kinderpornografisch Materiaal (ATKM) Adviseur bij Beta in Bestuur en Beleid Redactieraad Delta van de TU Delft English I hold a number of small formal secondary positions: Technical advisor at the Dutch Electoral Board Member of the Board of A

We’ll be working with the set P_n(\mathbb{R}), real polynomials of degree \leq n. Such polynomials can be expressed using n+1 scalar coefficients a_i as follows: \[p(x)=a_0+a_1 x + a_2 x^2 + \cdots + a_n x^n\] Vector space The set P_n(\mathbb{R}), along with addition of polynomials and scalar multiplication form a vector space. As a proof, let’s review how the vector space axioms are satisfied. W

The post A curious trig identity contained the theorem that for real x and y, This theorem also holds when sine is replaced with hyperbolic sine. The post Trig of inverse trig contained a table summarizing trig functions applied to inverse trig functions. You can make a very similar table for the hyperbolic counterparts. The following Python […] Hyperbolic versions of latest posts first appeared o

In short: gzip streams contain metadata, like the operating system that did the compression. I built a tool to read this metadata. I love reading specifications for file formats. They always have little surprises. I had assumed that the gzip format was strictly used for compression. My guess was: a few bytes of bookkeeping, the compressed data, and maybe a checksum. But then I read the spec. The g

Why I replaced SaaS code review tools with OpenCode running in CI/CD pipelines - cheaper, more secure, and works with any Git provider

The Trump administration is literally playing with fire.

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research I’m glad I’m not the only one sayin

Process the message before you let Is­Dialog­Message see it. The post Intercepting messages before <CODE>Is­Dialog­Message</CODE> can process them appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The problem with making coding easier for more people is that it makes spam more conventionally attractive. Which is bad. I have a problem: Unlike most people, I actually read my spam folder on a regular basis. (Often, they’re some of the most interesting emails I get.) I find spam to be intriguing, interesting, and often highlighting some modern trends. And sometimes, it surfaces something I act

This is fun, silly, charming, and much better than The Murderbot Diaries despite being superficially similar. Imagine you are an interstellar ship and, of course, your AI is conscious. What would you do if your passengers were killed - not by a terrifying alien, but by Count Dracula??? What if, on the return journey, another set of your passengers were similarly slaughtered. Except, this…

Legendary game designer Sid Meier was born February 24, 1954. After creating a run of popular flight simulators in the early and mid 1980s, he shifted to strategy games in the second half of the decade, creating some of the The post Game designer Sid Meier born Feb. 24, 1954 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Let's do this thought experiment together. I have a little box. I'll place the box on the table. Now I'll open the little box and put all the arguments against large language models in it. I'll put all the arguments, including my own. Now, I'll close the box and leave it on the table. Now that that is out of the way, we are left with all the positives. All the good things that come from having the

Today's links The whole economy pays the Amazon tax: You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Math denial; Disney v young Tim Burton; Make v Sony; American oligarchs' wealth (2011); New Librarian of Congress; The Mauritanian; Bossware. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep re

I ran across an old article [1] that gave a sort of multiplication table for trig functions and inverse trig functions. Here’s my version of the table. I made a few changes from the original. First, I used LaTeX, which didn’t exist when the article was written in 1957. Second, I only include sin, cos, […] Trig of inverse trig first appeared on John D. Cook.

February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die. In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to the early days of COVID, telling

It’s hard to get optimizers right. Even if you build up a painstaking test suite by hand, you will likely miss corner cases, especially corner cases at the interactions of multiple components or multiple optimization passes. I wanted to see if I could write a fuzzer to catch some of these bugs automatically. But a fuzzer alone isn’t much use without some correctness oracle—in this case, we want a

Against Query Based Compilers Feb 25, 2026 Query based compilers are all the rage these days, so it feels only appropriate to chart some treacherous shoals in those waters. A query-based compiler is a straightforward application of the idea of incremental computations to, you guessed it, compiling. A compiler is just a simple text transformation program, implemented as a lot of functions. You cou

Here is an identity that doesn’t look correct but it is. For real x and y, I found the identity in [1]. The author’s proof is short. First of all, Then Taking square roots completes the proof. Now note that the statement at the top assumed x and y are real. You can see that this assumption is necessary […] A curious trig identity first appeared on John D. Cook.

Anthropic recently released a blog post with the description of an experiment in which the last version of Opus, the 4.6, was instructed to write a C compiler in Rust, in a “clean room” setup. The experiment methodology left me dubious about the kind of point they wanted to make. Why not provide the agent with the ISA documentation? Why Rust? Writing a C compiler is exactly a giant graph manipula

Intercepting the flow in your message loop. The post Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Isolating the Close pathway appeared first on The Old New Thing.

What Lies Ahead I have no Way of Knowing, But It’s Now Time to Get Going Tom Petty This post previously appeared in Philanthropy.org A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here.)  […]