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In the beginning, it was simple. A website, a database and 150M+ email addresses to search. Time has added serverless functions (which run on servers 🤷‍♂️), code on the edge, new data storage constructs and a completely different mechanism for even just querying a simple email address.

Video isn’t just something to watch; it’s a boatload of context and data. Mux makes it easy to ship and scale video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows. Unlock what’s inside: transcripts, clips, and storyboards to build summarization, translation, content moderation, tagging, and more. Mux stewards Video.js, the web’s most popular open source video player. Video.js v10 is a co

Hallo allemaal, Vorige maand mailde ik over wat verbeteringen, waaronder dat als kamerstukken verwijzen naar andere kamerstukken, OpenTK daar nu klikbare links van maakt. Hier is een boel fanmail over binnengekomen. Het goede nieuws is dat deze feature nu nog wat uitgebreid is, waardoor ook document- en zaaknummers (2026D09757 of 2026Z04244) klikbaar gemaakt zijn. Dit is de web-versie van een beri

The real test of AI

Another crackerjack essay on design and attention from Terry Godier. (Note that the Casio in the essay not only shows the actual time, but has functional buttons.)  ★

Apple Newsroom today: Apple today announced AirPods Max 2, bringing even better Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), elevated sound quality, and intelligent features to the iconic over-ear design. Powered by H2, features like Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, and Live Translation come to AirPods Max for the first time. The new AirPods Max also unlock creative possibilities for p

Some camera-equipped Apple devices have dedicated camera indicator lights. E.g. recent MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs have them in the notch, next to the camera itself. The Studio Display has one in the bezel, next to its camera. Other devices — like iPhones and, now, the MacBook Neo — render a green indicator dot on the device’s display. One might presume that the dedicated indicator lights are si

Doing the math backwards. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: PowerPC appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links Tools vs uses: Don't fall for it. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Amazon coders x Amazon warehouse workers; Bruces's ETECH speech; Steven King x unions; Tax-free S&P 500 companies; Make Pop Rocks; "Ain't Misbehavin'"; "Car Hacker's Handbook"; Pirates in Iceland. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You

I couple of years ago, I developed ActivityBot - the simplest way to build Mastodon Bots. It is a single PHP file which can run an entire ActivityPub server and it is less than 80KB. It works! You can follow @openbenches@bot.openbenches.org to see the latest entries on OpenBenches.org, and @colours@colours.bots.edent.tel for a slice of colour in your day, and @solar@solar.bots.edent.tel to see…

In chapter 11 of Catch-22, two captains create a complex set of rules to ensure security in the military. Among them are some absurd requirements just to get food in the mess hall. Everyone knows the process is ridiculous, but they go along with it anyway. To enter the mess hall, you have to recite the pledge of allegiance. To be served food, you have to recite it twice. If you want salt, pepper,

On March 16, 1982, sales of the eagerly anticipated Pac-Man conversion for the Atari 2600 started. The game was supposed to launch April 3, 1982. But some retailers started selling the game early. This wouldn’t happen today, but the 1980s The post Atari 2600 Pac-Man went on sale March 16, 1982 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A personal reflection on my first encounter with FreeBSD in 2002, how it shaped the way I design and run systems, and why its philosophy, stability, and community still matter to me more than twenty years later.

It’s past time to look for new architectures

In many sci-fi shows, spaceships have a teleportation mechanism on board. They can teleport from inside their ship to somewhere on a planet. This way, the ship can remain in orbit while its crew explores the surface. But then people started asking: how does the teleportation device actually work? When a subject stands on the device and activates it, does it disassemble all the atoms of the person

Atonal music is difficult to compose because it defies human instincts. It takes discipline to write something so unpleasant to listen to. One technique that composers use to keep their music from falling into tonal patterns is the twelve-tone row. The composer creates some permutation of the 12 notes in a chromatic scale and then […] Twelve-tone composition first appeared on John D. Cook.

David Pogue absolutely killed it hosting this live event last week. Glad I saved it to watch on my TV. Special guests include Chris Espinosa, John Sculley, and Avie Tevanian. A legit treat.  ★

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it&

Notice anything special about the following sequence? 8 6 10 3 1 11 1 3 6 8 12 9 7 10 4 2 5 11 2 4 7 9 5 12 Each of the numbers 1 through 12 appear twice. Between the two 1s there is one number. Between the two 2s there are two […] Langford series first appeared on John D. Cook.

Greg Knauss has my attention with a food analogy in his article “Lose Myself”: A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth [...] The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature.

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners — that (with permission) pulls in your calendars, reminders, and health data. Its motto: “Most productivity apps help you organize tasks. Finalist helps yo

Sam Henri Gold: Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what compu

Resume.org, summarizing their survey of 1,000 U.S. hiring managers: 59% admit they emphasize AI when explaining hiring freezes or layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints. Reminds me of the “Not Me” ghost in Bil Keane’s The Family Circus comic strip.  ★

It’s just a matter of time before AI finds a polynomial time factoring algorithm. This isn’t like SAT, I see no reason factoring should be hard. There’s algorithms that rely (poorly) on the structure of the problem and we just need AI to see a little bit further into that structure, this isn’t like SAT where the problem may not have any defined structure. I believe something even stronger, that P

Horace Dediu, under the headline “The Most Brilliant Move in Corporate History?”: Apple used to be the biggest capex spender, mainly because it paid for most of the property plant and equipment in the factories that made its phones and computers. [...] But that all changed with AI. Amazon is spending $200 billion this year on AI data centers. Google, $185 billion. Microsoft, $114 billion. Meta, $1

Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for Reuters: Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. No date has been set for the cuts and the magni

Mars is the only planet entirely populated by robots. This book is a catalogue of the history of robotic explorers. Nary a human-crewed mission is mentioned, except in passing. Instead, we get to look at the practicalities of landing a little robot a million miles away, the people that made it happen, and the politics which inevitably stymied things. And there is a lot of politics. One of the…

Woensdag 18 maart gaan de meeste gemeenten stemmen (behalve Hilversum en Wijdemeren). Ooit was er de NerdVote campagne, waar we met een klankbordgroep heel zorgvuldig kandidaten kozen. Voor de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen kon ik niet geloofwaardig weer NerdVote doen omdat ik zelf als lijstduwer op de lijst sta voor Progressief Pijnacker-Nootdorp (de lokale GroenLinks-PvdA combinatie). Desondanks zijn

Find a comfortable position. Close your laptop halfway, so the screen light softens but the fan noise continues.1 That hum is your anchor. You will return to it throughout this practice. Take a deep breath in. Hold it. Now run npm install. Breathe out slowly as 1,247 packages are added. Do not look at the output. You are not ready. Body scan We will begin with a body scan. Bring your attention to

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.

Matt Mullenweg: One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done anything to elicit it. I even had Lockdown Mode running on all my devices. It didn’t matter. Someone was spamming Apple’s legitimate password reset flow against my account — a technique Krebs documented back in 2024. I dismisse

Anthropic's 1M token context window on Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 is a genuine breakthrough - and they're not even charging more for it.

iFixit: Is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever also one of its most repairable? For years, opening a MacBook has usually meant fighting your way through glue and buried parts. But the Neo stands out, with increasingly good day-one manuals, less-painful keyboard repairs, and a screwed-in battery tray that sent cheers across the iFixit office. This laptop proves that things can be made more affordab

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge: Somehow, the PC makers still don’t see it coming. Here’s how [Asus CFO Nick] Wu described the MacBook Neo, specifically its 8GB of RAM limitation: “I think when Apple positioned the product, it’s probably focused more on content consumption. This differs somewhat from mainstream notebook usage scenarios, because in that case, the Neo feels more like a tablet — b

Two more colossally expensive experiments have failed

Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism: Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece about a human engineer named Scott Shambaugh — was initially published on February 13. After Shambaugh pointed out that he’d never said the qu

Basic Apple Guy: Where I and the rest of the internet take this from here remains to be seen. All I know is that Apple should definitely keep this Lil Finder around. But no, I do not think this is the last we’ve seen of Lil Finder Guy… Apple’s MacBook Neo ad campaign on TikTok — and seemingly exclusive to TikTok — is the most fun they’ve had with a campaign in ages. I love it.  ★

Today's links Corrupt anticorruption: Notes from a target-rich environment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Tentacle sphere; EU Venn; Obama v cryptography; Trump v protesters; Amazon coders x Amazon warehouse workers; Bruces's ETECH speech; Steven King x unions; Tax-free S&P 500 companies. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Late

You had a technique.

When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced. The UK Government publishes a lot of Open Source code - nearly everything developed in-house by the state is available under an OSI Approved licence. The UK is generally pretty…

Closure of the Strait of Hormuz, banning build-to-rent homes in the US, Honda’s EV losses, Travis Kalanick’s new company, Corpus Christi’s water crisis, and more.

The FAIR package manager started as a response to the 2024 Automattic/WP Engine conflict, when Matt Mullenweg used access to the WordPress.org plugin repository as leverage in a business dispute. Plugin authors and hosting companies watched a single person effectively weaponize the central registry, and FAIR was built to make sure that couldn’t happen again, assembling federated package distributi

For me, being part of an online community started with Digg. Digg was the precursor to Reddit and the place to be on the internet. I never got a MySpace account, I was late to the Facebook game, but I was on Digg. When Digg redesigned their website (V4), it felt like a slap in the face. We didn't like the new design, but the community had no say in the direction. To make it worse, they removed the

One of television’s most important business models—syndicating first-run content to TV stations looking to fill airtime—might be losing strea … er, steam. If you’re a longtime reader of Tedium, you might be aware of my ongoing fascination with first-run syndication—TV shows that skip the network and instead get sold to local channels to air whenever. In the days before we found a fourth network,

To quote the human.json Protocol: human.json is a protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites. I think this is a neat idea, so I added it to my site. It’s available at evanhahn.com/human.json. For more, see the human.json documentation. A

Tim Cook: At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories rem

Chapter 15: The Trial of Galileo

Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times: Meta’s new foundational A.I. model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential matters. The model, code-named Avoc

Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline: While the rise of sports programming in recent years has been well-documented, new figures from Nielsen illustrate the extent of its dominance. The measurement firm said sports accounted for 29.2% of all advertising-supported TV viewing by people 25 to 54 years old during the fourth quarter. The stat, spanning broadcast, cable and streaming, was part of a report

Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan — Black Bubblegum To understand the AI bubble, you need to understand the context in which it sits, and that larger context is the end of the hyper-growth era in software that I call the Rot-Com Bubble.  Generative AI, at first, appeared to be

Business Insider, one year ago: Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year. “I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a Counc

Plus, why an H100 is worth more today than 3 years ago

Lilypond is a TeX-like typesetting language for sheet music. I’ve had good results asking AI to generate Lilypond code, which is surprising given the obscurity of the language. There can’t be that much publicly available Lilypond code to train on. I’ve mostly generated Lilypond code for posts related to music theory, such as the post […] Typesetting sheet music with AI first appeared on John D. Co

Craig Mod, on creating his own custom accounting software with Claude Code: Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local. Handles multiple curre

Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1, which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era. This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G41. And it wasn't the last—there were a few generations of Intel Xeon-powered RackMacs that followed. But in my opinion, it was the most interesting. Unfortunatel

Optimizing out the unnecessary probes comes with its own complexity. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: MIPS appeared first on The Old New Thing.

First up, you should go and watch The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa. It is a brilliant set of performances and a joy to see. While perusing the programme on the National Theatre website I stumbled upon a little bug. The incredible Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ has her name rendered in a most unusual style: It rendered just fine in Chrome - but both Firefox and Safari misrendered some of t

On the first day of my college CS class, the professor walked in holding a Texas Instruments calculator above his head like Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone. The students sighed. They had expected computer science to involve little math. The professor told us he had helped build that calculator in the eighties, then spent a few minutes talking about his career and the process behind it. Then

De belastingdienst is van plan om de BTW uit te besteden aan een Amerikaans bedrijf, wat echt waanzinnig is. Op 19 maart is er een commissievergadering in de Tweede Kamer hierover, en ik hoop van harte dat men bij zinnen komt. In de discussie over de btw-situatie de afgelopen jaren ging het eigenlijk alleen over dat de belastingdienst Amerikaanse software ging gebruiken. Lang was onduidelijk dat d

On March 13, 1986, Microsoft shook up the financial world, and to some degree, we are still feeling the reverberations from that 40 years later. That was the day of Microsoft’s very successful IPO. The hunt for the next Microsoft The post Microsoft’s 1986 IPO appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I keep ending up in the same place. With Libraries.io and ecosyste.ms it was package registries that all do the same thing with different APIs and different metadata formats. With git-pkgs it was lockfile formats. The pattern is always the same: open source infrastructure that does roughly the same job across ecosystems, but with enough differences in the details to make working across all of them

On the evening of February 28, 2026, American B-2 bombers lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. By the time they reached Iranian airspace, Tomahawk missiles were already in flight from submarines in the Persian Gulf. Operation Epic Fury hit over a thousand targets in its opening hours.

Today's links Three more AI psychoses: Everybody calm down. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Jules, Penny and the Rooster"; Superinjunction; Harper Lee's kids v cheap paperbacks; 3D printed cat battle-armor; Black sf. 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: Lik

Using Qwen 3.5 open weights models to OCR scanned PDFs - locally on consumer hardware or via OpenRouter for pennies

Unpacking a perplexing argument from the Pentagon

Many of us wonder if the MacBook Neo is 'the one'. Because I have a faster desktop (currently a M4 Max Mac Studio), I've always used a lower-end Mac laptop, like the iBook or MacBook Air, for travel. I've used MacBook Pros in the past, but I like the portability of smaller, cheaper models. In fact, my favorite Mac laptop ever was the 11" Air.

In the previous two posts, we looked at why Mathematica and SymPy did not simplify sinh(arccosh(x)) to √(x² − 1) as one might expect. After understanding why sinh(arccosh(x)) doesn’t simplify nicely, it’s natural to ask why sin(arccos(x)) does simplify nicely. In this post I sketched a proof of several identities including sin(arccos(x)) = √(1 − […] Inverse cosine first appeared on John D. Cook.

One of the weirdest calling conventions you'll see. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: x86-32, also known as i386 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Ofgem, the UK's energy regulator, publishes the current energy price cap per region. Note that it is only the current price cap. I couldn't find the complete historic data on their site. So I sent a quick email asking for it which they treated as a Freedom of Information request. Please can you supply me with a complete list of all previous electricity price cap figures? I have searched your…

It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods.

On March 12, 1989, computer programmer Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper titled “Information Management, a proposal.” Working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, he had a problem with information about particle accelerators and experiments being stored on The post The 1989 proposal that led to the World Wide Web appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

ENISA, the EU’s cybersecurity agency, published a Technical Advisory for Secure Use of Package Managers in March 2026, a 26-page guide aimed at developers consuming third-party packages. I’ve been writing about package management since November 2025 and wanted to see how their recommendations line up with what I’ve found. ENISA ran a public feedback call from December 2025 to January 2026 and rece

I have a complicated relationship with Hacker News. The site is the most important aggregator of geek news and a major source of traffic to this blog. At the same time, it has a fair number of toxic commenters, making it a dependable source of insults hurled in my general direction; if you want a taste,

I have always used the git checkout and git reset commands to reset my working tree or index but since Git 2.23 there has been a git restore command available for these purposes. In this post, I record how some of the 'older' commands I use map to the new ones. Well, the new commands aren't exactly new since Git 2.23 was released in 2019, so this post is perhaps six years too late.

Inspired by others, I’m publishing how I use generative AI to write this little blog. General feelings on generative AI Generative AI, like any technology, has tradeoffs. I think the cons far outweigh the pros. In other words, the world would be better off without generative AI. Despite this belief, I use it. I’m effectively forced at work, but I also use LLMs to help write this personal blog. I t

Out of all the things to love and hate with AI, this is what I miss.

EXHIBIT A Here is some text. It is made out of words. Here is a subsection And here are some bullet-points: Here is one. Here is another. Hierarchy Here is a numbered list. And now: Look at this. Bullets inside a number inside a section inside a section. What a time to be alive. Pictures The text can also contain pictures for you to look at with your eyes¹. ¹ There can also be footnotes; hav

Modern browsers are hugely complex: Chromium (the open source portion of google chrome) currently has 49 millions lines of code, making it bigger then any other program on my machine. My goal is to to read all the blogs on my link list: The pages have to be rendered (no printing HTML) and links must work. http :// maurycyz.com /real_pages/ http in the URL tells use that the server is expecting

Recently my partner's trusty old 5K iMac died after 8.5 years of service (Radeon gpu is fried). At first I thought it was finally time to get one of those cool little M4 Mac Minis, but then decided to conduct an experiment. I gave up my Mac Studio M2 Max (64 Gb unified memory and 1 Tb storage) and tried to use my Windows PC as the main machine. I originally purchased it to learn Unreal Engine and

Today's links AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit: In case there was ever any doubt. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Eggflation x excuseflation; Haunted Mansion stretch portraits; "Lost Souls"; Time Magazine x the first Worldcon; Obama v Freedom of Information Act; Ragequitting jihadi doxxes ISIS; OSI v DRM in standards. Upcoming appearances: Wher

“Preface to the highest stakes negotiations in history.”

A hacktivist group with links to Iran's intelligence agencies is claiming responsibility for a data-wiping attack against Stryker, a global medical technology company based in Michigan. News reports out of Ireland, Stryker's largest hub outside of the United States, said the company sent home more than 5,000 workers there today. Meanwhile, a voicemail message at Stryker's main U.S. headquarters sa

I got this e-mail yesterday about UBI, and it made me change my position. I think you’re misunderstanding the basic premise of UBI, as it’s in the name it’s basic income, for people to cover their basic human rights, as we should be striving for in our society. If every person on the planet would start receiving 300$ per month of course the prices would surely adjust, but as it’s the case, supply

Don't take steps that are too large. The post How do compilers ensure that large stack allocations do not skip over the guard page? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

A couple is facing the devastating prospect of divorce. Their young daughter is understandably distraught. In her fear, she doses both parents with a powerful hallucinogenic drug in the hope that tripping through therapy will save their marriage. Well, OK, that's not exactly what the game's about - but it might as well be! My aim this year is to play more co-operative games with my wife. So she

When the news broke that Meta's smart glasses were feeding data directly into their Facebook servers, I wondered what all the fuss was about. Who thought AI glasses used to secretly record people would be private? Then again, I've grown cynical over the years. The camera on your laptop is pointed at you right now. When activated, it can record everything you do. When Zuckerberg posted a selfie wit

The Amiga 600 was one of the last Amigas, and it became a symbol of everything wrong with Commodore and the product line. Retro enthusiasts like it today because of its small size, so it’s the perfect retro Amiga for The post Amiga 600: The Amiga no one wanted appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Until now git-pkgs has been a local tool, you run it in your terminal to query dependency history, scan for vulnerabilities, check licenses. Getting it into CI meant downloading the binary yourself, initializing the database, and wiring up whatever checks you wanted by hand. git-pkgs/actions is a set of reusable GitHub Actions that handle all of that. A setup action downloads the binary and initia

This blog runs on two servers. One is the main PHP blog engine that handles the logic and the database, while the other serves all static files. Many years ago, an article I wrote reached the top position on both Hacker News and Reddit. My server couldn't handle the traffic. I literally had a terminal window open, monitoring the CPU and restarting the server every couple of minutes. But I learned

Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing "zero-day" flaws this month (compared to February's five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations using Windows. Here are a few highlights from this month's Patch Tuesday.

AI tools push us to higher abstraction. I'm not sure I like what that costs us.

I'm still working on improving the test loss for a from-scratch GPT-2 small base model, trained on code based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". In my training code, I have this code to create the optimiser: optimizer = torch.optim.AdamW( model.parameters(), lr=0.0004, weight_decay=0.1 ) The values in there -- 0.0004 for the learning

Andrej Karpathy has a gift for coining terms that quickly go mainstream. When I heard "vibe coding," it just made sense. It perfectly captured the experience of programming without really engaging with the code. You just vibe until the application does what you want. Then there's "hallucination." He didn't exactly invent it. The term has existed since the 1970s. In one early instance, it was used

Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, 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 5000 to 185,000 words, including vast, extremely

No newsletter next week I'll be speaking at InfoQ London. But see below for a book giveaway! LLMs are bad at vibing specifications About a year ago I wrote AI is a gamechanger for TLA+ users, which argued that AI are a "specification force multiplier". That was written from the perspective an TLA+ expert using these tools. A full 4% of Github TLA+ specs now have the word "Claude" somewhere in them

The previous post looked at why Mathematica does not simplify the expression Sinh[ArcCosh[x]] the way you might think it should. This post will be a sort of Python analog of the previous post. SymPy is a Python library that among other things will simplify mathematical expressions. As before, we seek to verify the entries in […] Simplifying expressions in SymPy first appeared on John D. Cook.

Just kidding. Today we should ramp down rhetoric. I thought nobody would take three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass or you are worth $0.003/hr seriously. But it looks like some people do, and you shouldn’t. Social media has been extremely toxic for the last couple months. It’s targeting you with fear and anxiety. If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you hav

Some with “high blast radius”

Today's links Ad-tech is fascist tech: Surveillance advertising is just surveillance. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Washpo v Bernie; Activists v Saif Gadaffi's London mansion; Spacefaring v contract language; Tuna-can tiffin pail; France v encryption. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll k

I’ve written several posts about applying trig functions to inverse trig functions. I intended to write two posts, one about the three basic trig functions and one about their hyperbolic counterparts. But there’s more to explore here than I thought at first. For example, the mistakes that I made in the first post lead to […] sinh( arccosh(x) ) first appeared on John D. Cook.

Oh, this old thing? The post A snappy answer when asked about dressing casually at IBM appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I'm sure we have all met a person like this: People who have an AI habit use it by default. I have watched someone ask ChatGPT the weather for tomorrow rather than simply open the weather app. Another time, they asked AI the question even after I had shown them the website with the same information. It's a crutch.— Ibster (@ibster.bsky.social) 9 March 2026 at 09:46 At a recent tech event, I b…

26 years ago, on March 10, 2000, the dotcom bubble reached its peak. The tech-heavy NASDAQ reached its peak that day at 5,048.62, before the bubble burst and stocks went tumbling. Pinpointing when the dotcom bubble burst and when the The post When the dotcom bubble burst appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about storing git repositories in Postgres and built gitgres to prove it worked. Two tables, some PL/pgSQL, a libgit2 backend, and you could push to and clone from a database. The post ended with a missing piece: the server-side pack protocol, the part that lets a Postgres instance serve git push and git clone over HTTP without a separate application in front of it. I

I added a few modifications to the OSS Ghost theme that powers this site. You can get it here: https://gitlab.com/matdevdug/minimal-ghost-theme Added better image caption support. Added the cool Mastodon feature outlined here to attribute posts from your site back to your Mastodon username by following the

Since starting HIBP a dozen and a bit years ago, I've loaded an average of one breach every 4.7 days. That's 959 of them to date, but last week it was five in only two days. That's a few weeks' worth of

HN Skins 0.4.0 is a minor update to HN Skins, a web browser userscript that adds custom themes to Hacker News and lets you browse HN with a variety of visual styles. This release introduces a small fix to preserve the commemorative black bar that occasionally appears at the top of the page. When a notable figure in technology or science passes away, Hacker News places a thin black b

I’ve written a couple posts that reference the table below. You could make a larger table, 6 × 6, by including sec, csc, cot, and their inverses, as Baker did in his article [1]. Note that rows 4, 5, and 6 are the reciprocals of rows 1, 2, and 3. Returning to the theme of […] Trig composition table first appeared on John D. Cook.

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.

Think fast, no pressure. The post The fine print giveth and the bold print taketh away: The countdown timer appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Look for the conflicting definitions to see where they are coming from. The post Learning to read C++ compiler errors: Ambiguous overloaded operator appeared first on The Old New Thing.

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

The viral claim that Anthropic loses $5,000 per Claude Code subscriber doesn't survive basic scrutiny. Let's do the actual maths.

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.

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

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.

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: working-groups@osfc.org 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 l

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.

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

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 […]

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.

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

“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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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