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Yesterday Levent Alpöge announced that he and his colleagues had discovered a new Hadamard matrix using Claude AI. That motivated a post I wrote this morning on how to construct Hadamard matrices. I mentioned in that post that these matrices arise in applications. This evening I gave an example, describing how NASA used a Hadamard […] Hadamard Codes and Sphere Packing first appeared on John D. Coo

NASA set Mariner 9 to photograph Mars in 1971. The images had to be encoded for transmission using an error-correcting code, otherwise they would be significantly corrupted when they were received on Earth. The images were encoded for transmission using a code based on Hadamard matrices, specifically a (32, 6, 16) Hadamard code. This means […] How NASA’s Mariner 9 probe encoded images first appear

Quite simply marvellous! Three Scottish divas giving us their interpretations of the greats while backed by an excellent pianist. So many shows at the Fringe skimp on sets and props - not this! A luscious array of costumes, hats, wigs, and ruby slippers bring the characters to life. The framing is thin but serviceable - the backstage helpers are reminiscing about their favourite stars and bring

Walking down the street, I noticed a ringing phone box so, naturally, I answered it. What happened next was a few minutes of pure fringe magic! I had a little chat with the caller, he welcomed me to the smallest venue in the fringe, and then he improvised a banger of a song based on my peculiar proclivities. What a treat to have a front row experience at a one man (and one audience member)…

I'm not sure what they're teaching at LAMDA, but it certainly isn't vocal projection. We were forewarned about the technical difficulties - but if a trained stage singer can't reach the 6th row of a tiny theatre, that can't be blamed on the backstage team. The show advertises itself as: What happens when you take Sondheim’s most beloved music and turn it on its head? Ingénues become villains, vi

From: Third-Party Risk Management To: [address extracted from package metadata] Subject: ACTION REQUIRED: Annual Supplier Security Assessment Due: 5 business days from receipt Hi, Our software inventory has identified you as the supplier of a software component in our production estate (the “Component”). All such suppliers are required to complete our standard security assessment annually. We were

Are menopausal women hot? It is often said that pornographic actresses move straight from "barely legal" to "MILF" without so much as moment in between. Unlike the fringe's other burlesque shows - which seem to exclusively feature nymphettes and twinks with nary a grey hair between them - Hot Flush focuses on the over 40s. Look, you probably don't want to read a review of how tempting I found…

Philip Michaels, writing last September for Tom’s Guide: iPhone 17 torture test videos done by JerryRigEverything indicate that Ceramic Shield 2 certainly resists scratching, with scratch testing leaving only light scratches at level 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness. Scratches typically show up on glass at levels 5 or 6 on that scale. “Ceramic Shield 2 is indeed the best we’ve ever seen,” JerryRigE

A Hadamard matrix is an orthogonal matrix whose entires are all either 1 or − 1. For example is a Hadamard matrix of order 2. True to Stigler’s law of eponymy, James Joseph Sylvester investigated Hadamard matrices before Jacques Hadamard. Sylvester saw how to bootstrap the example above into more examples. If H is a […] Constructing Hadamard matrices first appeared on John D. Cook.

The undisputed queen of short-form viral video comedy snacks takes to the stage. Well, swims to the stage. The Mermaid is a delightful and gentle amble through the confusing world of a girl who just wants to become a mermaid. Less standup and more storytelling, nevertheless it packs in the laughs with some rather clever jokes, a bit of bawdy humour, and - a rarity on The Fringe - a decently…

This is a disappointing and frustrating book - not least because it so nearly hits the mark. The subtitle is "How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing" - but it never gets close to discussing that topic, let alone deeply examining it. Instead, it is a book mostly focussed on the history of what we mean by "literacy" and, by contrast, what it meant to be "illiterate". As per the standard…

The IBM 5170 PC/AT, launched August 14, 1984, is a very popular retro PC, for several reasons. It was the last of the open architecture IBM PCs. And from 1984 to about mid-1987, it was the fastest and most expensive The post IBM 5170 PC/AT appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A few years ago I’d have looked at this post and maybe leaned toward the idea that a precocious 8th grader somewhere hacked into the @GoogleDesign Twitter account and tried to pass off their little to-do app as having come from Google’s design team. But this is apparently real. I almost hope it’s AI slop and that there aren’t any human designers there who think anything in this app has appropriate

After reading Chris Fallin’s aegraph post, new ZJIT contributor dak2 landed a block-local version of the canonicalize function in #16828. The pseudocode of the block-local canonicalize function looks like this: for block in function.reverse_post_order(): rewrite_map = {} for insn in block.insns: insn.operands.map_in_place(lambda o: rewrite_map.get(o, o)) if insn.opcode ==

Joanna Stern, writing at The New Things (gift link): I used to love the blinking notification light on my BlackBerry, and later my Droid 2. It was a simple way to know I had a message without actually looking at my messages. Then BlackBerry let you customize the color, and it was a rainbow dream. Google’s HiLight takes it a step further by letting you assign different colors to VIP contacts. So wh

There are at least four different Heated Rivalry shows at the Fringe this year. Earlier this week we saw Edinburgh Fringe - Heated Rivalry: The Musical Parody!. This is different because it is the unauthorized musical parody. Oh, and it is in the much larger Udderbelly venue. Some people spend the fringe watching every possible interpretation of Timon of Athens - we decided to go for doubles of

David Imel, The Verge: But in our current moment, the photos people are drawn to are not flawless — and that’s created a real problem for the people making smartphone cameras. “The gap between what two random people want from their camera is growing dramatically,” says Isaac Reynolds, who leads the Pixel camera team at Google. Some people want a perfectly optimized photo, Reynolds says. “But there

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch: With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ behalf for table reservations or appointments. Google said that users can take over or stop tasks at any point in time and also r

Sam Rutherford, writing for Engadget: Granted, the P11 Pro Fold still includes IP68 dust and water resistance, which is better than what you get on the Z Fold 8 line (IP48). But after making an absolute tank of a foldable phone with last year’s model, I said Google really needed to cut weight and thickness this generation, and it just hasn’t. Instead, it seems like Google has leaned even more into

Victoria Song, The Verge: The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure, there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty battery bump. There’s a $50 price hike from last year, too, because the Pixel Watch 5 isn’t immune to RAMageddon — none of us are. Oth

This is a technically precise and emotionally complex show with energetic delivery from a talented performer. Sadly, it did nothing for me. I found it a little one note in terms of storytelling. The rhythm of the story followed all the predictable beats which I thought was a little repetitive. There's no doubt he's a gifted storyteller. The comedy is suitably dark with some good moments of joy

Mia Sato, The Verge: Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories. “Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an email about my retainer cleaning tablets read. Shoppers have posted other iterations of the redacted emails as well: “Ordered: 1

The 1980s proved surprisingly fruitful for licensed greeting card mascots. It turns out American Greetings understood the Marvel playbook before Marvel did. Today in Tedium: One of the most-common complaints that you hear about modern media is that it’s often a retread of retreads. (One word: Marvel.) The Big Bang Theory, a show that was on the air for a dozen seasons and remains a rerun juggerna

Easily the worst show we've seen at the fringe. Garrett Millerick has trained an AI on his stand up. Can it replace him? Yes, but only in the sense that the AI is obnoxiously dull and Millerick is simply obnoxious. He insulted a kid who he'd called on to stage to help him. Not even in a jokey way, just being rude. His splenetic rants against religion and politics were beyond tired. The dating…

I'm a sucker for anything Beatles related - and the fringe has no shortage of musicals, reinterpretations, and shameless cash-ins of the Fab Four. When Vincent Met John is an oddity in that it is a normal play, rather than a musical. It is also an oddity in being 90 minutes long rather than the standard fringe slot of no more than an hour. What if van Gogh and Lennon could have a conversation?…

Jeff Johnson: These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of every reviewer was a first name followed by an initial for the last name. If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it

Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing.  ★

Basic Apple Guy: Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5. This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.  ★

Understanding the temporal relevance. The post The comments that go into code versus those that go into the pull request description appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Suppose you’ve never worked at the command line and you’re reading a book about the bash shell. You read that !$ is a shortcut to refer to the last word of the previous command. That little fact will almost certainly not stick in your head for a couple reasons. First, you probably see no need […] Cryptic but consistent first appeared on John D. Cook.

There is a machine called Productivity, and on this machine there is a knob and a button. The knob increases productivity, and the button is labeled "reset." My job was data entry at a non-profit. It was my first job in the US where I didn't have to lift heavy objects. My main task was entering collected donations into a database. The data source was email attachments, which came in various fo

For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?" Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put

45 years ago today, IBM introduced the original IBM PC. This computer changed the industry and change the world. There is no shortage of analysis about its impact, but I find a lot of it self-serving and, in some cases The post IBM PC introduced, August 12, 1981 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Model collapse: Living in a world that's trained on itself. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Wired v Dutch hackers; NYT v DMCA; Hair gel terrorist threat does not exist; AT&T merger is a screwjob; Smart cities are stupid; RIP Reaganomics. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. L

A little wind noise, a little connectivity flakiness, and a little lip-sync issues from YouTube, but look at that view! 🤩 Back to business, it's the Brinks Home FAQ I found most interesting this week. I mean, how do you write your own FAQ then fail to

A list.

Sometimes at the Edinburgh Fringe, you take a punt on a random show because it's close by and you can't be bothered walking any further. Justina Seselskaite's set was round the corner and started in 7 ½ minutes - so we scurried into one of the less glamorous rooms of The Hilton, sat at the front (as is our wont), and wondered what on earth Lithuanian stand-up was like. It was sublime! There's a

The Economist (‘twas a gift link, but alas, I guess gift views have been used up — here’s an archive link in case the gift link is vexing you): You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive and familiar. The Economist turned to prose that we’re sure is human and that readers will recognise: our own. We designed a stu

Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today.

Part of going to The Fringe is to expose yourself to new ideas, different art forms, and a range of artworks. Not everything needs to be a "zany" comedy about AI or a loving pastiche of that 1990s disaster movie you love. So I found myself sat in a Unitarian Church listening to a harpsichord and choral organ intertwined with a violin and cello while a soprano soared through Handel's greatest…

Alex Micek: In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road. By contrast, I don’t feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement. Instead, I feel a deep, smothering, let-down at the promise of futurism. Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate; a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of. But. In the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, de

This didn’t occur to me but should have — BMW paid Sony to place BMWs throughout the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie. They’re not just in the movie but part of the story. So it’s probably the case not that Sony paid BMW to put Spider-Man animations in the dashboards of every late model BMW on the road, but that BMW offered to do it as part of the promotional deal they paid Sony. So BMW probabl

Two weeks ago Zuckerberg published a 1,000-word essay, “The AI Future Is for Everyone”. This week he published an expanded 6,500-word version of the essay on Meta’s website. Somehow it almost says nothing more than the original. This tidbit, however, struck me as notable: For example, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this

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

Terry Godier has a post titled “Mea culpa” (which, given his framing, might’ve been better titled “Claude’s Culpa”). I’m not sure how much to even trust anything in his post given the backstory, but this line stood out: I was careless in relying on AI [...] without doing the work to understand Let’s face it: carelessness is the grain of AI. It’s what the tool encourages and makes easy by default.

Chance Miller returns to the show. Topics include iOS 27’s progress over summer, live baseball in Vision Pro, the RAM crisis, Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI and io, and the EU/DMA situation. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW. Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one

Andrew Sharp, writing at Sharp Text last month after Netflix’s earnings, asking “Is Netflix Washed Now?”: I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix content reaches a staggering 85% of American viewers and has 325 million subscribers globally. Growth is slowing, but that’s the law

🎼"Hamlet's Mum Has Got It Going On"🎵 There you go, now you've seen the show. That's about the height it reaches. Distil the tortured Prince of Denmark down to an hour and sprinkle in parody pop songs. It so nearly works. There are a few good chuckles and a smattering of clever lyrics but, even for an hour, it feels a bit flabby. The cast are game, with KT Ihnatyszyn giving a tour-de-force per

Anthropic support page: Anthropic has signed the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems. This article describes how we’re planning to put those commitments into practice, how marking works, and what its limitations are. We’ll update this article and publish more detailed technical guid

A debate about recursive self-improvement.

Afrofuturism is a hot topic in the world of sci-fi. This is the circus version of "For All Mankind" where the Zambia Space Academy (a 100% real thing) attempt to land on the moon and win the space race. Told in an acrobatic style, naturally. It is delightful to see classic acrobatics find a whole new audience - the children in the audience (and the adults) screamed with delight at the human…

I was reading a blog post on boat names because it was on Hacker News this morning. The post contained a link to a data set on dog names in NYC and I poked around the data a little. The top names were not at all what I expected, but then again this is limited […] Dogs and fat tails first appeared on John D. Cook.

It had been there long before Windows 95, but nobody remembered. The post The little-known <TT>winstart.bat</TT> batch file appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Brief but significant news about a new poll

Things could get bad if this all falls apart

It is a brave children's show which starts with the song "I'm a smooth muthafukker"… This is sort of a live-action XKCD cartoon. A frenetic troupe of performers are decked with hand-drawn portraits and then… well, it is somewhere between a Sesame Street animation and the stick-figure kung-fu Flash animations of yesterday. The whole design is technically impressive. An endless stream of paper lit

Suppose you were able to go back in time, to an era before computers, and give someone contemporary cryptography. Encryption methods that are essentially unbreakable now would certainly be unbreakable then. But there’s a catch: not only do attackers not have computers, neither do users. Manual cryptography If you told someone about RSA encryption, for […] Manually unbreakable cryptography first ap

Last year, I reviewed a new type of Clip-On earphone - the Soundpeats Clip1 Cuff. I was a bit sceptical, but was won around by their comfort. The good folks at Soundpeats have sent me their new version to review. I had a few niggles with the Clip1 - so let's see how the UU2 Clip2 compare. Design The "cuff" design is fairly new to the UK - but is already popular in other parts of the world.…

Today's links Surveillance vs guillotines: Someone's gonna fleece these rubes, why not me? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: DeCSS; Warhol Worm; Camgirls x Amazon wishlists; 2021 State of Tech (in 2001); RIAA v grieving family; Stasi disguises. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest boo

It was 27 years ago this week, on Aug 11, 1999, that Red Hat, the Linux vendor, conducted its IPO. It was not the biggest IPO of 1999, and it wasn’t even the biggest Linux-related IPO of 1999. But Red The post Red Hat’s successful 1999 IPO appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Writing up the package manager CWEs list and then the --end-of-options survey, both of which come down to the same bug being fixed independently in tool after tool, left me wondering how much code these tools share with each other in the first place. So I went through the direct dependencies of twenty package managers1, each with at least two same-language peers in the set, looking for package-man

This is a great and wonderful contribution and you seem really nice and I’d like to show some appreciation but your comment is so complete and flawless that I can’t think of anything intelligent to say so I guess I won’t respond at all, sorry. This is a great and wonderful contribution and I have some further thoughts so I can respond naturally, great. This is a great and wonderful contribution an

Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.  ★

I have never done any time–frequency transformations. I understand the general idea, but I have never worked with the details. Today I had a reason to use it, but that means learning the basics first. The following is three seconds of a single 5 Hz sine wave, recorded at a sample rate of 100 Hz. (Continue reading the full article on the web.)

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of new features and changes in beta 5. Some app icons got tweaks (the Siri app in particular looks much cooler now), and a bunch of the existing American and British Siri speaking voices now have the Pace and Expressivity adjustment sliders. Also interesting: the OS 27 releases were stuck at beta 4 for 22 days. That’s a week longer than usual. Will Hains (my

Sex work is work, so we're told. There's no difference between picking up a night job stacking shelves and a night job jacking-off on screen. Right? Perhaps a couple need a little bit of extra cash and the siren song of OnlyFans is right there. Let's fire up the webcam and release ourselves from financial drudgery! Then reality hits. The script by Sean Stillmaker sounds like it was ripped…

OMG! If you remember A/S/Ling your way through MSN to fill in your MySpace top 8, then you'll love this show. You're also over 30 and, therefore, old. Ew. The stage is littered with a Nokia 3310, Bliss Magazine, and Charlie Red. Katie (15/F/UK) talks us through the complexities of her nascent love life, what shag band colours mean, and which quotes sum up millennial angst. All the while…

The terror of AI has come to comedy. There are a dozen shows this year about the threat that technology poses to the way we live, laugh, and love. In this case, AI stands for Austrian Imperialism and the fight is for Switzerland's independence. Well, sort of. It gets a bit lost in an endless stream of rambly diversions. There's a fine line between surrealist comedy and utter nonsense. If you…

How The New York Times just bungled this one, and why it matters, immensely

The following extraordinary paragraph comes from Knuth’s TAOCP Volume 4A, right before the last set of exercises. Many of the exercises below ask a modern reader to find and/or to correct errors in the literature of bygone days. The point is not to gloat over how smart we are in the 21st century; the point […] Learning from historical mistakes first appeared on John D. Cook.

In science and engineering classes, you might describe a system using Newton’s laws and end up with a differential equation. You then solve the differential equation, analytically or numerically, to see how the solutions behave. You might also do the opposite, especially in a mathematics class: look at what differential equation a set of functions […] Inverse differential equations first appeared

Try one of the fancier alternatives to Copy­File. The post How can I perform a <CODE>Copy­File</CODE> in unbuffered mode? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

My mum's friend Rachel has a one-woman show on at the Fringe. As, apparently, the only orthodox Jew on the UK comedy circuit she has constructed a fully interactive Jewish Mother experience. Like several shows on the fringe, it relies on the audience writing questions on cards and the comedian riffing on them. Unlike other shows, Rachel has a huge stream of anecdotes and songs to weave into her…

MP3 piracy was born August 10, 1996. That day, a pirate using the handle of Netfrack released a copy of Metallica’s Until it Sleeps for free download on IRC, an Internet protocol intended for chat, not file sharing. It’s appropriate The post The first pirated MP3 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction: The only way to win is not to play. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Seymour Cray's tunnels; War on moisture; $5 wrench cryptanalysis; Nauru files; People's Ride; German transit upholstery fashion; Monopolies v small business; Linkedin will put you in ads; NZ Parliament kicks itself off the inte

What are you supposed to do after you've created the most successful product? Not just successful, but the most useful. In an ideal world, you would sail into the sunset and enjoy your riches. In this real world, you have to come up with another, even more successful product, or you're a failure. That's why it feels like Stack Overflow has failed. I remember being in the middle of debugging my

The aliens arrived, and their first instinct was to check our networks. They accessed one of our most important websites. A government website. Unfortunately, they were met with a reCAPTCHA. Are you a robot? They are not robots. But after fifteen minutes of squinting and trying to select all the fire hydrants and traffic lights, they gave up. Defeated by a checkbox, they returned to the stars.

Last November UPS mistakenly charged me a $684 tariff on $355 worth of computer parts shipped from Europe. It was shortly afterwards reduced to $51.30, but I had prepaid the tariff to avoid warehouse fees, so UPS owed me $632.70. They finally issued the refund in July after repeatedly E-mailing their accounting office in India approximately monthly. (Phone number? Ha ha ha.) MADE IN USA." Until

I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out. I remember when I came up with my first idea that I shared with the world. It was a dating site for people who didn’t want to share photos of themselves, but build text-only connections. I didn’t know what I was doing; I only really knew HTML and CSS

For long agentic sessions cache reads are most of the bill, not input or output tokens. KV caches have shrunk dramatically while cache read pricing has barely moved.

In the past, search engines and the open web granted access to other people’s knowledge but the task fell to you to synthesize an understanding from it and build a capability to act. Now with LLMs, it’s possible to build things you don’t fully understand which then require a perpetual license in order to have the capacity to maintain and modify. LLMs don’t just do things for you, they do things in

I was reading a book on the history of the discovery of the structure of DNA [1] and was surprised by a few passing references to Bessel functions. According to Claude, When X-rays are diffracted by a helical structure, the resulting diffraction pattern breaks into a series of horizontal “layer lines.” Cochran, Crick, and Vand […] DNA and Bessel functions first appeared on John D. Cook.

At the end of my post on how not to calculate cosine I said that the first step in calculating cosine, particularly cosine of a large number, would be to do range reduction. This post will present a simple range reduction method by Cody and Waite that is adequate for moderately large arguments. If you […] A simple range reduction method first appeared on John D. Cook.

The Endangered Species Act and housing production, why it’s hard for LEGO to use 3D printing, robotic welding and shipbuilding, modular data centers, and more.

Week twelve of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases pnpm 11.20 fixes a package-substitution risk in projects with multiple named registries by recording packages under registry-qualified lockfile keys such as foo@work:1.0.0. 12.0.0-rc.1, the Rust-engine release candidate, resolves git dependencies on known hosts

Today's links Digital sewer socialism: Mamdani's Public Interest Technologists are what DOGE should have been. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Robot garage takes hostages; Thermostat ransomware; Correlate audience exhalations; Judges x TOR; Expectations management. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Wher

I have a program that shares files between my laptop and my phone. It works well, except for apostrophes. When I type an apostrophe ' on my laptop, it becomes ’ on my phone. And when I type 's on my phone, it becomes 痴 on my laptop. Apparently the phone turns the apostrophe (U+0027) […] Corrupted apostrophes first appeared on John D. Cook.

I recently overtrained a couple of GPT-2 style models, training them both on 40 tokens per parameter rather than the 20 per parameter that is generally regarded as "Chinchilla-optimal". The normal heuristic is that instead of doing that, you should scale up the number of tokens and the number of parameters equally -- so I would have been better off scaling up the model by 2 and the token count by

A new paradigm is developing, and the world is changing faster than most people realize

For a little under a year, everyone — myself included — has compared NVIDIA to Enron, largely because NVIDIA insisted, in detail, that it was nothing like Enron, WorldCom, or Lucent, a potent example of the Streisand Effect that would be much funnier if NVIDIA wasn’t holding up

Locking in AI safety regulation now is a mistake.

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I don’t think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There’s a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives. — Will Wright On the morning of October 19, 1991, two weeks after […]

Calculus professors with no experience in numerical computing will tell students that computers calculate trig functions with power series. They don’t. I worked on the implementation of trig functions in hardware, and I can assure you we didn’t just use power series. Power series are an excellent way to calculate functions near the center of […] How not to calculate cosine first appeared on John D

Cheating with std::unique_ptr. The post Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 5 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Shortly after Apple launched the budget MacBook Neo, Dell announced their response, a new low-end XPS 13. Matching the Neo's current pricing, it starts at $699, or $599 with an educational discount. That discount is currently set to expire on November 2, and with the current component pricing insanity, I'd be surprised if we don't see a price increase on both laptops by next year. I ran the XPS

In a footnote to the previous post, I said that Python’s math library can calculate the logarithm of extremely large numbers but not the cosine. This post will expand on that comment. In this post I’ll use n = 200! as my example rather than 1000! because this value of N is larger than the […] cos(200!) first appeared on John D. Cook.

The early star of the dot-com boom wasn’t Amazon or Ebay, it was Netscape, a company who produced a web browser of the same name. It went boom high and it went boom fast as it rose. And when it The post Netscape: The IPO that went boom on its way up and down appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The Software Stewardship Lab launches today, a Scottish non-profit set up to do applied research on the open source ecosystem, and I’m one of its directors. Vlad-Stefan Harbuz, who runs the Open Source Pledge, is the executive director and did the bulk of the work getting it incorporated. I’ve been trying to do this kind of research for about a decade, starting with Libraries.io in 2015 as a side

NB: This isn’t about crypto. I don’t care about crypto. Chris messaged me the other week asking if I wanted to implement zero-knowledge proofs. I initially was not interested, but then he said: What if I told you there’s a version of them that has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies? What if I told you it involves graph theory? What if I told you there’s a 30 line implementation? Now that was inte

Why don't we believe LLMs are people?

When we lost Glen Hansard last week, his work still fresh and lively, it was a reminder that the world has changed more than we think it has. A few months ago, when I was walking around a mall on a ninety-something-degree day. I made a claim to my wife that I thought profound, but she kind of saw through pretty quickly. “If you walked through a mall 20 years ago, everyone would basically look the

Down but still in the mix

A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort more than 165 organizations that used the cloud data storage provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka, of Kitchener, Ontario, also admitted to stealing call and text history records of more than 100 million AT&T customers.

Moving things around if possible. The post Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 4 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The previous post pointed out that the following code such as the following unexpectedly works. >>> from math import log, factorial >>> log(factorial(1000)) 5912.128178488163 If you don’t find this unexpected, note that if you replace math.log with numpy.log the code will fail [1]. Functions like natural logarithm operate on real numbers. Real numbers are represented […] Calculating log(1000!) fir

A few weeks ago the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. This is an enormous housing bill that’s been in the works for roughly a year — I first discussed it on Statecraft back in 2025 — and folks are optimistic that it will, per its description, “increase the supply of housing in America.”

On August 6, 1997, Apple and Microsoft reached a truce, to the tune of $150 million. At an Apple event, the two companies announced Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple, leaving everyone wondering why. The whole event had a weird The post Why Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple in 1997 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Eternal Sloptember: Mark Zuckerberg and the fantasy of social media without socializing. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Delany x The Onion; Duran Duran x Second Life; Spammers x blog pings; Privacywashing v Doordash; Good ideas are popular. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've bee

Stephen O’Grady’s RedMonk analysis of who is writing open source code looked at commits to fifteen large projects during the first half of 2026 and counted two forms of declared AI involvement: a known autonomous agent as the commit author, or a known AI identity in a Co-Authored-By trailer. The result was under one percent, framed as a floor. I ran a wider version of the same measurement over the

Zig’s Io.Threaded is Neat Aug 6, 2026 std.Io.Threaded is one of the implementations of Zig’s new Io interface that enables concurrency. This is a boring “just use threads” impl. I personally find it neat though — it does this weird thing that I wanted to do for ages, that to my knowledge no one else is doing properly, and implements it better than I thought to be possible. Io.Threaded uses blocki

Some predictions are off. This one is way off.

Executive Summary: Microsoft disclosures and Bloomberg analyses show that OpenAI's compute spend and revenue share accounted for 70% or more of Microsoft's FY26 AI revenues, and more than 7% of Microsoft's overall FY2026 revenues. Microsoft has spent $261.3 billion in capital expenditures since

Last week I wrote a post on hiding cryptographic keys in decks of cards. I wrote some code for that post that shouldn’t work, but before fixing I noticed that it in fact did work. The code computes logarithms for integers larger than the largest representable float. For example, the largest float is on the […] The code that didn’t break first appeared on John D. Cook.

Proxmox today announced their Proxmox Virtual Environment is now available for 64-bit ARM. I tested it on my Ampere Altra Dev Platform—the same machine on which I've booted Windows on Arm the first time, messed with multiple GPUs, and most recently tested Houdini's native arm64 support. Install was easy, as the Ampere Altra uses UEFI / ACPI for its hardware, meaning Proxmox didn't have to tailo

I got tasked to fix some bizarre issues a friend was having with their gaming PC. They had had lots of bluetooth issues, and recently their mouse stopped working entirely in Windows 11 - nothing would show up in Control Panel. Other mice also didn’t work. It worked fine in the BIOS and in an Manjaro installer, so I got suspicious and for the first time in my storied career there was actually bad s

Written with LLM assistance.Details at end. I've been meaning to write an update on how actually runs on Amazon's cloud, and it's been sat on my list for a good while now, somewhere behind the other random things that take up what laughably I refer to as my spare time.Compiler Explorer1 The last time I wrote about this was , when the whole site was a load balancer, a couple of instances and some

A few days ago I wrote a post on counting rooted trees. That post looked at the sequence c(n) which counts the number of rooted trees with n nodes. Here one node is distinguished as the root, but the nodes below the root are not distinguished from each other; all that matters is how the […] Enumerating trees and circles first appeared on John D. Cook.

Forcing an object into the global interface table. The post Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 3 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

There's a quote from the book City of Thieves by David Benioff where a character laments the fickleness of talent: Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence; your wife, your children, your friends. Sh

The eBay domain name was registered 31 years ago today, on August 4, 1995. But the site we know today as Ebay didn’t launch until almost month later, September 3, 1995, under a different name. Auctionweb, the original name for The post Ebay’s 1995 debut appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Google is a scammer's paradise: The internet's absentee landlord. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS; EZ realistic corpse; $300m login button; Short Uber; Who goes AI? Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll k

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. Instead, I’m going to occasionally jump into the parts of it that look interesting. Since last week, are in the process of simulating a digital circuit. The reason this is interesting is the solution in SICP uses hidden mutable state and mess

Although I try to keep navel-gazing to a minimum, I’m happy to report that this publication has crossed 7,000 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of RSS weirdos).

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

Using a reference stored in the global interface table. The post Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

After writing the previous post about metallic ratios, I thought about the analogy to alchemy and the attempt to make precious metals out of base metals. When can you make one metallic ratio out of another? Can you make the golden ratio out of the lead ratio? Before we can make gold out of lead, […] Mathematical alchemy first appeared on John D. Cook.

The golden ratio is the first and best known of the metallic ratios. I’ve written about the silver ratio a few times, most recently here. And I’ve mentioned the bronze ratio a couple times. The metallic ratios after bronze don’t have standard names. The nth metallic ratio M(n) is the number whose continued fraction representation […] Ratio of metallic ratios first appeared on John D. Cook.

Today's links Post-American compute for a post-American Internet: Building cooperative human rights computing infrastructure in Puerto Rico, the EU, Canada and Mexico. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Urine Luck; Germany v pornoscanners; Moorcock's 3-day novels; Women's voices can never be "right"; Drone delivery v reality; Abortion activists: TNG; AI coders are a market

When Radio Shack announced its TRS-80 Model 1 on Aug 3, 1977, designer Steve Leininger thought they could sell 50,000 units. Tandy executives didn’t believe him. But the response overwhelmed the company, and 250,000 people put their money where their The post Radio Shack’s TRS-80: Introduced Aug 3, 1977 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

In December I went through why uses: is a package manager with no lockfile, no integrity hashes and no transitive visibility, and in April through the run of incidents that followed from that. GitHub’s 2026 security roadmap has since committed to a lockfile, now in preview as gh-actions-lock, and made immutable actions the preferred resolution path. Neither of those changes adds any review between

In Physics simulations or game engines it’s sometimes useful to determine the speed with which two objects are approaching each other. This post will discuss the concept of closing speed, which is the normal component of the relative velocity of two objects. Relative velocity and its components Suppose we have objects A and B [1] with velocity vectors \vec{V_A} and \vec{V_B}. The relative velocity

The end of cheap compute?

First, abstracting from all the words in my long analysis on OpenAI Astra yesterday, the overall point was that Astra may not be the breakthrough that OpenAI wants you to think it was.

Since LLMs have been available, I've been doing a lot of coding using agents. Unlike shoving AI into every app, replacing customer support with chatbots, generating endless streams of slop, etc., agentic coding is actually useful. If used right – and, crucially, by someone who understands and reviews

Looking for a COM reference that is between strong and weak. The post Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 1 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

On August 2, 2000, a second-tier Linux vendor acquired a struggling Unix vendor. The merger received some press, but if you weren’t really following Linux at the time, it would have been easy enough to miss. But the merger of The post The Caldera-SCO merger of 2000 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Dualism: Why not both? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: UK's Great Firewall falls; Mint the coins; Virtual pets v DRM; Getty copyfrauds 47,000 photos; Net Mexico-US illegal migration is zero; Build a wall (around Trump Tower); Remote-hacking big rigs; Collectible AOL CDs; Indefinite Gitmo; Circuit City rips DVDs; Real Names policies are abusive failures; Es

During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. We were on a Zoom call, helping each other out and having fun. The first challenge was to escape a jail cell. To escape, each of us had to find clues in our own cell to figure out how to open the d

Today, we welcome the 47th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Nepal. Their National Cyber Security Centre now has access to monitor Nepalese government domains against the data in HIBP. This gives the NCSC the ability to identify exposure across government email addresses and

Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy, no, it's just

Review of Marcus Hutter's Job-Less Utopia.

Eight or nine misconceptions about Astra. See if you can spot the biggest fallacy.

Yesterday I wrote that a lot of the special functions that pop up in mathematical physics are solutions to second order linear differential equations with polynomial coefficients. More generally, holonomic functions are defined to be those functions that are the solutions to linear differential equations, of any order, with polynomial coefficients. Most special functions are […] Holonomic function

In this post I mentioned two series which I denoted t(n) and c(n). The former is the number of unlabeled rooted trees with n nodes. The latter is the cumulative sum of the former, i.e. The sequence c(n) is also the number of constraints on an n-step Runge-Kutta method; that’s how I became interested in it. Now the t(n) sequence […] Estimating a cumulative sum first appeared on John D. Cook.

As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Workgroup Server line and older cousin to our beloved Apple Network Server. And then I just had to pimp it out for MkLinux. sui generis IBM AIX-based Apple Network Server, one of our favourite machines here at Floodgap, there were the WGSes, the Workgroup Serv

For the first time I'm choosing my daily driver models on tokens per second rather than raw intelligence. Why ~100tok/s might be the new 100ms, where the speed gains stop mattering, and the price war that's coming.

(Inspired by a post from Eli Tyre.) Many people make some variant of the following argument: Evolution is an “outer optimizer”. It is trying to make us maximize reproductive fitness. We are “inner optimizers”. We just do what feels good. But what feels good has been set by evolution, which is hoping that it will make us maximize reproductive fitness. But we don’t maximize reproductive fitness. In

We must know. We shall not know.

The pricing gun should have been a dead technology years before it actually was. But state laws artificially kept it around as a shield against the scary barcode. Today in Tedium: Determining how much something costs shouldn’t be difficult, but in an ecosystem where everything is driven by highly personalized data, concerns are rising that prices might not be on stable ground. Recently, some stat

Today's links Why businesses lie about AI: Humoring the boss all the way into bankruptcy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Vinge x NYT; Syklarov x publishers; Human hair castles; Gingrich's bot army; Accessibility v Web DRM; David Byrne x WinXP; Furries don't fuck in fursuits; AI's pogo-stick grift. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, So

Pepper-spray drones, China’s chip Manhattan Project, Commonwealth Fusion’s fundraise, and a proposed Dulles Airport renovation.

Week eleven of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases mise 2026.7.14–18: the default shell-argument settings are now global-only, so an untrusted repo’s local config can’t influence command execution before trust evaluation runs. Experimental task output caching restores a task’s declared outputs and replays logs w

Inspired by this LessWrong post, I thought I'd write about how I use AI here. This is less in the interest of disclosure, more to provide a snapshot of what I'm doing right now so that I can revisit it in the future and see how it changes. And hey, maybe it'll be of interest to you, dear readers. If I were to summarise my working philosophy in fewer than ten words, it would be: AIs identify prob

I wish I could say I was comforted

» Mark has joined the call.

Hi, folks… I’ll have the last article in the series on Maxis Software for you next week. Today, I’m happy to say that the new ebook, covering the historical year 1999, is available, and on a far more timely basis than the last one at that. My thanks go to Richard Lindner, for developing the […]

In 1948, IBM introduced the 604 Electronic Calculating Punch. This machine was a programmable calculator, about the size of a double refrigerator. It was not quite a computer, but was programmed by plugging wires into a plugboard. This machine read numbers from a punch card, performed up to 60 calculations on these numbers, and then recorded the results by punching holes in the card.1 It processed

A great deal of the discussion of the so-called benefits or problems with AI comes down to the theoretical jobs that are (or are not) lost as a result of things LLMs can (or cannot do), or the equally theoretical productivity benefits that’ll come from using LLMs

I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.

What failure of the context callback means. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 10 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links Better to beg forgiveness: Don't ring the doorbell at the house of no unless you absolutely must. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Poul Anderson; P2P at PC Forum; Waitress handed her own stolen ID by carded diner; PDX bans fixies; Digital Economy Bill was a stitch up; NZ copyright disconnection flowchart; Fry v Widdicombe on Catholic Church; Moxie Marli

It was 30 years ago this week, on July 31, 1996, that Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 to manufacturing. The workstation version appeared on store shelves a month later, with the server version following in September. In many ways, version The post Windows NT 4.0: Released to Manufacturing July 31, 1996 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Agentic: bash. Function calling: RPC. Agent handoff: a pipe. MCP: CGI. Skills: markdown. Multi-agent orchestration: systemd. Autonomous agent: cron. Computer use: ssh. System prompt: .env. World model: /etc. Context window: scrollback. Short-term memory: Redis. Long-term memory: Postgres. Embeddings: grep. Distillation: ripgrep. Retrieval augmentation: locate(1). Cross-attention: a JOIN. Chain of

Recently I gave two presentations in quick succession to the Dutch Network of Government Service Providers and the Dutch Advisory Council for Science, Technology and Innovation about AI. In these two different and brief presentations, I hoped to share some insights that would be useful to the people currently at the helm, the people who can or must make decisions about AI policy. Many thanks to th

July! What a month! Things I did this July Gave a talk, for ClimateAction.tech’s “Responsible AI Series”, “What I know about local language models”. “Responsible AI” can feel like a bit of an oxymoron at times, but I hope I shared something useful. Participated in the Zelda Dungeon Marathon. My first time playing a video game (The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons) on stream! Released a new versi

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The GPT-2-style models that I've been training work really well, and I've even managed to train some that perform better than the original OpenAI small model in terms of cross entropy loss on a test set. But as I wrote previously, there's a mystery: why do they perform worse on my instruction fine-tuning evaluation? I had various theories about why that might be, and to me, the most plausible-see

You must use the tool. We must justify it. These aren't the words companies use, but that's what it comes down to. When you buy an expensive solution before you've clearly identified the problem, you have to use the tool to justify its line item in the spreadsheet. At most companies I've worked in, there's always some application I've used once or twice. The third time I want to use it, it's gone.

I'm digging into why my GPT-2 style models score worse on an instruction-following eval than OpenAI's original weights; I gave the details in this post. While I was writing up the results of my first experiment into possible causes, I ran the post past ChatGPT -- I always use an "editorial board" of AIs to check my posts for flow, style, and any technical errors (though all writing is always mine)

Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user's Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of sprawlin

Maybe it doesn't matter. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 9 appeared first on The Old New Thing.