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”The only way out is through”

Read enough articles about The Beatles and you'll repeatedly hit the claim that Frank Sinatra frequently introduced his cover of George Harrison's "Something" as his "favourite Lennon & McCartney number." Much like the misquote about Ringo not being the best drummer in The Beatles, I think this might be one of those semi-apocryphal lines which has taken on a life of its own. Here's what Paul…

Recently I came upon Pluggy, a Python library for developing plugin systems. It was originally developed as part of the pytest project - known for its rich plugin ecosystem - and later extracted into a standalone library. You're supposed to reach out for Pluggy if you want to add a plugin system to your tool or library and want to use something proven rather than rolling your own. In this post I w

Some of our recent (and some upcoming) projects are oriented to systems with serial consoles, but it's been getting pretty old dragging around old CRT terminals or tying up Mac laptops with a serial port. I'd like something that's self-contained, a little more portable and a bit less heavy. I'm sure there's any number of all-in-one setups you can buy to do this, but I'm cheap, so I'm going to DIY

Back when the US government classified strong encryption as “munitions,” RSA public key cryptography was illegal to export. In 1995, Adam Back protested this by creating a terse, obfuscated implementation of RSA in Perl code and used it as an email signature. The code was also printed on T-shirts. The shirt was classified as munitions […] RSA munitions T-shirt first appeared on John D. Cook.

Today's links Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO: A bright line test that's totally unfalsifiable. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Msft v Linux geeks; James Joyce scholars v Joyce estate; iPod sweatshops; Pratchett initiates assisted suicide; Lego-making machine made of Lego; Laid off workers v gag clauses; The ACCESS Act. Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Tor

Jonathan Edwards reporting for The Washington Post: President Donald Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center. Crews at the performing arts venue started removing it from the front of the building around 3 a.m., several hours after the center missed a federal judge’s two-week deadline to do so. The judge had ruled that the decision by the center’s board of trustees to rename it was illegal. A perfec

From Apple’s Developer site: To ensure getting started with a large cloud model is as accessible as possible, developers in the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running on Private Cloud Compute (PCC) with no cloud API cost. The model provides access to frontier level intelligence with unparallele

Anthropic: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Ac

Also , why states are taking things into their own hands, and what might be better

In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic and square roots, the 8087 computed transcendental functions including tangent, exponentiation, and logarithms. But it all depended on a 69-bit adder: "The arithmetic heart of the floating-point execution unit is centered about a nanomachine comprised of the

Homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more.

Week four of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Security GitHub announced the breaking changes coming in npm v12, estimated for July. npm install will stop running dependency lifecycle scripts unless they’re allowed via the allowScripts field that 11.16.0 introduced in advisory mode, covered in the install-script allowl

After two years of underregulating AI, the US government suddenly takes the nuclear option

There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit by the US government’s export control directive to suspend access to Fable and Mythos. Anthropic and their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own technology as dangerous and in need of strict controls and regulation. Now that the US government appears to have taken that framing seriously and

On people who use AI to think.

This page discusses sealing metal through borosilicate/lab glass: other chemistries behave quite differently. When making vacuum tubes, the glass is actually the easy part: premade tube stock of almost any size is easily available. Because glass is practically impermeable, it will retain that vacuum for a very long time, which can be shown by bringing it close to high-voltage AC (like a tes

Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose on Tuesday 9 June 2026, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join John Gruber to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2026. Immersive 3D video with spatial audio: Coming soon, exclusively in Sandwich Vision’s Theater on Vision Pro, available on the App Store. The bandwidth-constrained immersive livestream Tuesday

Today's links Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme: Not even a QR code can produce a kissable pig. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Arrested at Toronto G20; Rule by rentiers; Wrong about the First Amendment; Mounties x Stingrays; (EU) Privacy without monopoly. Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, N

Apple’s Developer app lets you download local copies of every session, including the State of the Union, except the keynote. Why this is I don’t know. But if you want a local copy, you can grab it from YouTube. Speaking of the State of the Union, the full version runs just over an hour, but Apple cut together a 4.5-minute recap. If you haven’t watched the full thing you should at least watch that

Friends, I believe we’re approaching the end of this era. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed the paperwork to go public, starting a race for exit liquidity for two companies that burn billions of dollars a year and have no path to profitability. Both of these companies are

Thomas Regnier, spokesperson for the European Commission, in a statement posted to LinkedIn (with edited video, if you’d like to watch him read parts aloud): What is the true story behind Apple’s decision not to roll out “Siri AI” in the EU? This decision is Apple’s and Apple’s only. Because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from rolling out new features in the EU. Yes, the European Co

Opus 2: Henry VI, Part 1

The thread pool is designed for throughput, not latency. The post How can I schedule work on a thread pool with low latency? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely, without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints. While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two bigger use cases for me have been a pain for years:

Hallucination of the day:

My younger sister graduated with a CompSci degree a few years ago. I've been behind her, motivating her and demystifying the world of programming from the very beginning. There was a piece of advice I repeated everyday, trying to make her understand how to operate. The problem was, she was trying to read and understand every line of code in a function before using it. I thought it was non-sense. S

When I ran Ethernet around our house, I thought I was being clever. A CAT6 cable for every room - lush! Some of my rooms have lots of devices, so they get a nice big Ethernet switch with lots of ports and blinking lights. But most of my rooms don't have that many devices. Our gym had only an Internet connected TV so that I could watch Quibi while exercising. Recently we added a Kodi box so that…

On June 13, 1994, a mathematics professor discovered a bug in Intel’s then-new Pentium CPU. Intel’s new CPU was fast, but it couldn’t divide correctly. The bug became known as the Pentium FDIV bug. It resulted in Intel recalling 60 The post Intel’s Pentium FDIV bug and recall appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: naming@vna.example Subject: Vulnerability Naming Authority Announces Naming Process and Domain Allocation Embargo: None The Vulnerability Naming Authority (VNA), in coordination with the CVE Numbering Authority consortium and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, has published a unified process for the assignment, registration, and disclosur

TL;DR: the GPU doesn't have to math as hard

Apple Newsroom, in an Apple Newsroom post Monday: According to EU regulators, the DMA requires Apple to give any AI system nearly unlimited access to a user’s device, as well as the ability to act on that access autonomously without a user’s ongoing visibility and control. That includes the ability to read and send messages, make purchases, access files, and execute actions across any app. Securit

Steven Spielberg, on The Rest Is Entertainment on YouTube: I approached Cubby Broccoli after Jaws was a big hit. I’d always wanted to make a James Bond film from the day I saw Dr. No, so I called Cubby after Jaws and volunteered. I said, “If you need a director, I would love to direct one.” And he said no. And he moved on. And then Cubby called me again after Close Encounters came out. And that wa

Today's links The world has moved on: Notes from the enshittocene. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Jpod"; Barlow v Glickman; Cyclist v bike lanes; Judge v copyright trolls; "The Uncertain Places"; Thatcher v Palin; NY v Time Warner; Banks v negative interest rates; Keeping the new web decentralized; "Prisoners' Inventions." Upcoming appearances: LA, Menlo Park, Toronto

I mean, technically I didn't do it. The post Understanding the rationale behind a rule when trying to circumvent it appeared first on The Old New Thing.

And that’s a sign of weakness

Prolog is the original logic programming language. The name comes from programming in logic. More specifically, the name comes from programmation en logique because the inventor of the language, Philippe Roussel, is French. Prolog has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that the language represents logical problems directly. One of the disadvantages […] Solving a chess puzzl

A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly combining increasingly useful existing components.

On June 12, 1997, 3Com and US Robotics merged at a cost of $8.5 billion. At the time, it was the merger of the two biggest names in their respective fields, and it seemed poised to become a telecommunications giant. The post The failed 3Com and US Robotics merger appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

On June 4th, tea.xyz launched what it had been promising since 2022: a cryptocurrency that pays open source maintainers. Within the first hour of official trading, the token fell 75% from its opening price. A week later it trades about 90% below its first-day high, the company’s GitHub org has been near-silent for six months, and the founder’s public commits are going to a different project entire

The funny thing about Anthropic haters is that they still mostly believe Anthropic’s marketing. They think Claude is a recursively self-improving silicon God, and that we are all a couple refusals away from falling into the perpetual underclass. This gives them way more power than they deserve. Of course they believe they should dictate morality to you and control the future light cone of the univ

This new eGPU barely works in Linux, gets quite hot, and is based on tech gamers already rejected. So why am I so excited about it? It’s hot. It’s kind of heavy. And on my computing weapon of choice, it’s hard to set up. But honestly, I love that it exists. Recently I’ve been taking a look at an eGPU, the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5060 Ti AI Box, which is essentially a desktop GPU in a relatively small

An idea inspired by the new German ruling that could turn everything upside down

Chance Miller, at 9to5Mac on Monday: Apple’s Siri team, led by Craig Federighi, held a post-WWDC keynote tech talk with members of the press this afternoon to talk through iOS 27 and the new Siri AI. During the talk, Federighi shared more details about Apple’s collaboration with Google. Federighi was joined by Amar Subramanya (vice president of AI), Mike Rockwell (Siri lead), and Sebastien Marinea

Perhaps the worst UI crime in MacOS 26 Tahoe was the inexplicable decision to add inscrutable, distracting icons next to every item in the menu bar. You will recall Jim Nielsen writing about it, rightly describing it as exactly the sort of thing that Mac users look down upon in platforms like Google Docs and Windows. You will also recall Nikita “Tonsky” Prokopov writing about it, illustrating that

What happens when you unleash an AI across all of Google's infrastructure? 1,500 APIs, 3,600 keys, and $500,000 in bounties later, here's what I found.

I ran an experiment today to see whether Claude [1] could generate Lean code to prove a calculation at the bottom of this post, six lines of calculus. I started with this prompt This page contains a mathematical proof that a Fourier coefficient, a_n, is given in terms of a Bessel function. The LaTeX source […] Formally proving a calculation with Claude and Lean first appeared on John D. Cook.

This is a rant. It didn't start today, but I think I've reached the end of the line. The straw that broke the camel's back, so to say. I used an internal tool for the first time. I logged in and navigated through the web app, making some updates here and there. All was well. But then I made the mistake of wanting to go back to the initial dashboard. I clicked the back button, and instead of return

Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?” It’s a leading question because the phrasing implicitly frames a number as the answer for a qualitative measurement, but I digress. All the pros give their answers. Some say you gotta shoot a numb

Sorry to bother your mailbox again but this legal decision is potentially huge, especially if it spreads and other countries make similar decisions.

A flashback to my most recent interview with Steve Eisman, and some potentially critical news

A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group.

There is no such feature, but you can just exclude it virtually. The post What’s the opposite of <CODE>Clip­Cursor</CODE> that lets me <I>exclude</I> the cursor from a region? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Often there’s a thread running through a sequence of my posts. Sometimes I make this explicit and sometimes I don’t. The latest thread started with this post commenting on a tweet that observed that exp(−x²) ≈ (1 + cos(sin(x) + x))/2. Some people said online that that the approximation is simply due to the first […] Pulling on a thread first appeared on John D. Cook.

This is valid JSON: { "a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3 } This is invalid JSON: { "a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3, } The difference is the last comma. The JSON grammar specifies that a comma can separate two members of an object but not postcede ("trail") a member. I think this was a design mistake. Say we want to add two new keys to the struct, one before the "a" member and one after th

Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute. This isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of Volume or Sliding Doors became The Names, instead this is a new and twisty concept rendered…

My first experience with a computer wasn’t with a desktop machine or a game console. It was with an orange handheld device called a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell. Many Gen Xers born in the early 70s can probably say The post Texas Instruments Speak and Spell appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

1,000 breaches is one hell of a milestone. It's not just the process of getting data, verifying it, loading it, sending notifications etc, it's all the other stuff that goes into keeping the whole thing afloat. Legal docs. Trademarks. Accounting. Agreements. The most mind-numbingly

I have been a staunch supporter of Open Source for a long time, including experiments in funding it. I’m a true believer in the idea that Open Source always wins in the long run, but not automatically and not quickly. Right now it is being stressed by AI slop, shifting contributor dynamics, the falling cost of producing code, and large companies learning to close doors behind them. A lot of that

Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company's monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoft's most dire "critical" rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available.

Rishi Ó: My favorite Apple updates are not the flashy new features, but the quiet little touches: annoyances fixed, workflows made smoother, rough edges sanded down, and longstanding flaws thoughtfully reworked. To me, they’re the clearest sign of a company that cares about its craft. Here’s a collection from a WWDC26 screen-grab, organized for easier reading, on improvements coming later this yea

If you can make it in person, you should come. The California Theater is a beautiful big theater and tickets are still available. You can also watch tonight’s show in live stereoscopic immersive in the Theater app from Sandwich Vision on Vision Pro. A purchase of the ticket to the live show, the Theater app for $12.99, is also good for replay forever — with surprise bonus features included. It’s a

🙄

A brisk 76 minutes, including the post-credits Easter egg music video. The past few years ran about a half hour longer.  ★

Julie Bort, TechCrunch: But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while another camera showed off the phone’s response. These weren’t live onstage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they were pre-taped. But t

Apple Newsroom yesterday: This new version of Siri is built on Apple Intelligence, allowing Siri to draw on personal context understanding and help users find what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and more. For example, users can ask Siri to find a restaurant recommendation a friend messaged them about, surface a hotel confirmation number from an old email, or pull up photo

Apple Newsroom: These new capabilities are powered by the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models for deeply integrated Apple Intelligence experiences. These latest models run on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute. Every facet of the new Apple Intelligence architecture is built privacy-first, from the latest Apple F

Quick aside: My sister has a Bear blog called Notes on Making where she writes about knitting, wool dying, pattern design, and shows off what she's created. If you're into wool and crafting, take a look. It's really cool! I'm currently reading What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami (thanks for the recommendation, Rishi) and a line stuck out to me: Perhaps I'm just too pain

Even the boss got into the festivities. The post The Microsoft Company Party where everybody played name tag swap appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix": When forced birth cultists become forced obstetrics militants. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: DD-WRT; iTunes DRM is illegal; Fingertip magnet; Sony passwords v Gawker passwords; RIAA recants on 3 strikes; Parachute wedding dress; Roald Dahl (jerk); "Level Up"; The rent's too damned high; RIAA v "Search by artist"; "Robopocalyp

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great, by Eric Ries. Every once in a while a book comes along that doesn’t just change your tactical thinking, but makes you see the world in a different way. Reading this book is like taking the red pill in the Matrix.  Some will […]

On June 10, 1977, Apple launched the Apple II, one of the first pre-built desktop computers. It went on to sell about 6 million units over the course of the next 17 years, making it the longest lived and most The post Apple II: Launched June 10, 1977 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Benevolent dictator for life. The founder keeps final say over project direction in perpetuity, by convention rather than written rule. Python ran this way until Guido stepped down in 2018, and Linux, Ruby, Rails, and Laravel still do. The unspoken upper bound on “in perpetuity” is one human lifespan, which none of the famous projects in the category have had to test yet. Malevolent dictator for l

Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? Enter auth.md. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly. With native support in WorkOS AuthKit, you can now implement this protoco

Mark Gurman, reporting (?) for Bloomberg two short months ago: Apple Inc. plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence assistants, a major move aimed at bolstering the iPhone as an AI platform. The company is preparing to make the change as part of a Siri overhaul in its upcoming iOS 27 operating system update, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The assistant can already ta

TL;DR: My new prior is that top-of-the-line LLMs working on easy tasks generate code that is maybe 10 % more complicated than necessary. I also think we accept this complexity too easily, because it comes from code that is right here, right now, solving an immediate problem. This may have consequences for maintenance in the long term. The background to this discovery was that I needed to do s

ppclp.ai, North America's third-largest AI-native manufacturer of premium wire-formed office fasteners, formerly known as Paper Clip Company, announced a landmark 100x improvement in its proprietary Organizational Productivity Index (OPI™), cementing what leadership is calling "a new era of operational excellence" and "a little bit of a miracle." The breakthrough follows an 18-month company-wi

Welcome to fantasy land

"We see these AIs as a galaxy glittering with capabilities, but at their center, invisible to the naked eye, holding all the constellations together, is an unimaginably massive black hole of data."

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

This article tells part of the story of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop and on computers. Usually if you choose the longest dialog option, that’s the best option. — Chris Avellone Quite some years ago now, I briefly interviewed Brian Fargo about Interplay’s 1988 adaptation of the William Gibson novel Neuromancer. He was plainly busy […]

Generalizing the shuffle to arbitrary numbers of blocks. The post Rotation revisited: Shuffling more than three blocks, and other small notes appeared first on The Old New Thing.

We just wrapped up our Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. This was the 11th year we’ve taught Hacking for Defense, and the impact of asymmetric warfare, (drones, off-the-shelf technologies, etc.,) disruptive technologies (AI, commercial access to space) and a startup friendly DoW acquisition system – make it feel like a much different class than […]

A seemingly simple question which sent me down into the murky depths of standards. How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name? It probably isn't sensible to name your online presence a----------hyphen.com - but is there anything technically stopping you? Table of ContentsHistoryTLD RestrictionsAnomaliesSo What? History Let's do some history! This is 1978's "HOST NAMES…

When it comes to 80s computer brands, few flew as high as Eagle Computer flew in 1983. The aptly named company was selling 12,000 computers a month and had been doubling sales every quarter under the leadership of a talented The post Eagle Computer: The rise and fall of an early PC clone appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Al een jaar of tien koken we thuis op gietijzeren pannen. Inmiddels voelt koken op een anti-aanbakpan voor mij als koken op plastic. De voordelen zijn verder evident. Ik heb in die tien jaar tijd nog geen pan hoeven vervangen, bijvoorbeeld. Teflon- en vergelijkbare pannen verliezen na verloop van tijd altijd een deel van hun anti-aanbak laag, en ik heb het idee dat je dan behoorlijk wat van die la

Patents and applications relevant to package manager design, grouped by area. Mostly US filings, found through Google Patents searches on the obvious terms. Each entry lists the assignee, filing and grant dates, and current status, followed by a short summary of the core claim and a prior-art note where open-source predecessors are well-documented. Manifests and dependency resolution US6381742B2 -

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Mux is what developers reach for when they need to do more with video. Video files are packed with data and context waiting to be unlocked. Mux Robots are AI workflows that unlock that data inside your video for summarization, caption translation, moderation, and more. Configure once and your workflows run automatically on new uploads. Mux is video

Paulo Andrade, last month, “Using SwiftUI to Build a Mac-Assed App in 2026”: I recently launched the macOS version of Shopie, an app I first released on the iOS App Store late last year. Shopie helps you keep track of products you’re interested in by letting you create wishlists and notifying you whenever a product’s price, availability, and other details change. Unlike my other apps, where I typi

xAI is renting huge amounts of GPU capacity to Anthropic and Google. Financial engineering ahead of the SpaceX IPO, a real compute shortage, or a genuine datacentre advantage? Probably all three.

Kepler solved his eponymous equation M = E − e sin(E) by finding a fixed point of E = M + e sin(E). So guess a value of E and stick it into the right hand side. Then plug that value into the right hand side again. Kepler said a couple iterations should be enough. And a couple […] Aitken acceleration before Aitken first appeared on John D. Cook.

An earlier post discussed how to solve Kepler’s equation M = E − e sin(E) using a sine series. You could also solve Kepler’s equation using a power series, which Lagrange did in 1771. Both approaches express E as a function of e and M, but from different perspectives. Bessel thought of his solution as a sum of sines in […] The Laplace limit first appeared on John D. Cook.

Code isn’t just a way to implement a design, it’s a way to find one. With an interface, you have to use it, feel it, interact with it, and poke at it to see the relationships between things. Change X, see Y react. If it doesn’t feel right, tweak it. Change X again, now Y reacts differently. Better. Keep tweaking — this here, that there, until the relationships of all the disparate elements fall in

1948 was an interesting time for computing. For decades, businesses had used punch card equipment that added and sorted electromechanically. Now these electromechanical relays and counting wheels were being used to build room-filling general-purpose computers such as Harvard Mark I (1944) and IBM's SSEC (1948). But slow electromechanical mechanisms were already becoming obsolete. World War II had

I ran across a cranky formula for π based on physical constants here and decided to play around with it. The source describes λ as “wavelength (chosen in the microwave region)” and I thought perhaps you could chose a value of λ to make the equation work. But as a comment pointed out, the bracketed […] A crank formula for π first appeared on John D. Cook.

Just saw a graph at the FT from John Burn-Murdoch that really distills something I have been trying to articulate.

Ik ben een heel tevreden klant van KPN Internet. Om diverse redenen gebruik ik de Experia Box niet, maar ik wil wel graag TV kunnen kijken met de KPN Interactieve TV Set Top Box (“5202”). Vroeger ging dat “vanzelf goed”, tegenwoordig is daar wat werk voor nodig. UPDATE Juni 2026 (na 5 jaar!): de instructies werken weer, er is een update geweest in het igmpproxy.conf bestand. Ook heb ik een tip toe

Automatic programming dramatically speeds up writing software in certain use cases and in the right hands. In my experience the output does not reach the structural quality and economy of complexity of the best hand-written software. However, not all the software is stellar, and my feeling is that automatic programming surpasses most of the times (and if well managed) the quality of decently devel

They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model. The Eternal Sloptember 5 years ago, I would have laughed that idea out of the room. I fully understand what’s dumb about it. I don’t bel

Can you legally protect an artistic style? Not currently, but an Adobe-backed bill, a seeming reaction to AI, is pitching the idea. Personally, I see a bunch of blurred lines. Two companies that have enabled literal decades of creativity have both landed on the same question around the same time: Who owns a vibe? One makes $5,000 guitars. The other makes software that they’d charge $5,000 a year

A few months ago I wrote about using LLM agents to help restructuring one of my Python projects. It's worth beginning by saying that the rewrite has been successful by all reasonable measures; I've been able to continue maintaining that project since then without an issue. In this post, I want to discuss another project I've recently completed with significant help from agents: watgo. In this proj

North is left. (mirrored). 13.5x8.5 arcmin (0.35 arcsec/pixel) dt {color: var(--em-color)} Total exposure time:410 * 30 seconds = 3.4 hours. (across 2 nights) Exposure used in stack: 329 * 30 seconds = 2.7 hours. Telescope: C9.25 (230mm, f/10, fl=2300mm) Camera: IMX533 (16mm diagonal, square, color) Processing: (no software sharpening used) Callibration (dark + flat) Stacking (average w/

The previous post very briefly said that the integral representation for Bessel functions was motived by solving Kepler’s equation. This post will go into more detail. Kepler’s equation There are multiple ways to describe the position of a planet in an elliptical orbit around a star. For historical reasons, these descriptions have arcane names such […] From Kepler to Bessel first appeared on John

Today's links Criticizing the everything machine: It slices, it dices, it even makes paperclips! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Parliament v DRM; Colbert's commencement; Counterfeiting x luxury goods; Joule thief; Lean-back media. Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: Y

Some thoughts on what just happened

Chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more

Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to …

Third week of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Five new project blog feeds and the NixOS announcements feed landed in the OPML this week. Security Bundler 4.0.13 ships Cooldown, a configurable time window that holds back resolution to gem versions younger than N days, so a freshly published malicious release ages past

I often come back to the question of why this is happening. Why do people want the centralized world? Why do people want the administered reality? Why do people want to be managed? Why do people not want root? The answer is that those people prioritize convenience, safety, and comfort. But in the coming world, if these are your priorities, you will die. There used to be natural checks on these th

Read on to uplevel your coding SKILLS.md.

Not really

There is a strange thing that happens in communities that gather around abstinence from something: identity from opposition. At their best these communities are not just negative: childfree spaces can be about autonomy, choice and acceptance, anti-car spaces about safer streets and transit, and LLM-skeptical developer spaces about the future of labor, code quality and slop1. But the thing being

It's a signal. People want better jobs. That's why we get AI-generated PRs. We told everyone, in order to get your resume taken seriously, you need to show your work. When I was getting started in my career, that meant having your own website that you contribute to regularly. So I did that. I built websites, I maintained them. I kept maintaining them even after I got the jobs because that's h

Today's links Refining humanity: What our technology is shows us what we're not. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: GNU Radio; France v "follow us on Twitter"; Aaronsw vindicated; Capitalism's crooked refs. Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll kee

There's nothing like writing your own code with a framework to clarify how things fit together! Continuing with my port of my PyTorch LLM code to JAX, I wanted to load up a large dataset: the 10,248,871,837 16-bit unsigned integers in the train split of gpjt/fineweb-gpt2-tokens. That's just over 19GiB of data. from safetensors.flax import load_file ... full_dataset = load_file(dataset_dir / f"tra

Last year I wrote one of my favourite pieces ever — The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble — and followed it up with The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble Volume 2 several months later. Sadly, I’ve realized “volume” is a

Two AI Timelines

Not doing the reading. The post The back cover of <I>C++: The Programming Language</I> also raises questions not answered by the front cover appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one. But what are they good for? You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC, Raspberry Pi Connect, or wire up Tailscale or Pangolin for fully remote access. Those solutions are great,

Math is hard. Let's go counting! The post Rotation revisited: Avoiding having to calculate the gcd when doing cycle decomposition appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Yesterday I wrote a post showing that the trapezoid rule evaluates the integral very efficiently. But how do we know what the exact integral is for comparison? If you ask Mathematica, it will tell you the integral equals −2π J1(1) where J1 is a Bessel function. This may seem like rabbit out of a hat, […] Mr. Bessel’s eponymous functions first appeared on John D. Cook.

In most package managers a dependency’s install-time code runs by default the moment you install it: an npm postinstall, a Setuptools setup.py, a CPAN Makefile.PL, an RPM scriptlet, a Conda post-link, a Debian postinst. A handful require explicit per-package opt-in before any of that code runs, usually called an allowlist or a trusted-dependencies list depending on the tool. Per-package opt-in lis

On June 5, 1977, at the summer Consumer Electronics Show, Commodore had its PET 2001 personal computer on display after showing a prototype at the January 1977 show. Chuck Peddle said Commodore took its first distributor order on that day, The post First Commodore PET sold, June 5, 1977 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I have written before about putting a cache in front of snac, and more recently about the HAProxy layer in front of FediMeteo. The general idea is always the same: the reverse proxy should absorb the repetitive, public work that has no business reaching the application server. This post is the same idea applied to a much louder neighbour: a Mastodon instance. The instance is mastodon.bsd.cafe,

I recently completed my first long trail race, set in the Southern Drakensberg mountains with Emma, my siblings and their partners. It spanned 2 days with 30km on the first, and 15km on the second, winding through valleys and around mountains. It was spectacular. I love coming to the Drakensberg, which is a beautiful and unique mountain range, and I'm glad to have the excuse to be here. While I'm

The twitterverse is all verklempt with Anthropic’s latest blog.

Run away while you still can, it's not too late for you to avoid the curse of knowledge.

I'm porting my PyTorch LLM code to JAX, using Flax as the neural network layer. For various reasons I wanted to use Safetensors to store checkpoints of the model. It took a little while to get it working; here's the trick I learned. If you look at the Safetensors docs, you'll see that it doesn't mention a JAX implementation -- indeed, searching for "safetensors jax" at the time I'm writing this g

One reason people study Latin is that it is the ancestor of many modern languages. English derives from West Germanic languages, not from Latin, but much of English vocabulary, perhaps as much as 60%, derives from Latin, either directly or indirectly through French. Knowing a bit of Latin makes sense of many things that would […] The Latin of Linux first appeared on John D. Cook.

Several posts lately have looked at the function f(x) = cos(sin(x) + x). This post will look at the function from a different angle. It’s a smooth function with period 2π. For reasons I wrote about here, this means that the trapezoid rule should find its integral very efficiently. In general, the error in the trapezoid […] Integrating smooth periodic functions first appeared on John D. Cook.

“One robot now turns into many robots next year, but the number of ballerinas is the same.”

Many folks, including me, have observed that it seems to take much longer to build infrastructure in the US than it used to.

Rotating in the minimum number of steps by performing cycle decomposition. The post Rotation revisited: Cycle decomposition in clang’s libcxx appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I was thinking more about the cosine approximation to the Gaussian exp(−z²) ≈ (1 + cos(sin(z) + z))/2 that I wrote about last week. The two expressions above are close along the real axis but not along the imaginary axis. If z = iy, the right side grows much faster than the left, behaving like exp(exp(y)). This led to […] Partitions over permutations first appeared on John D. Cook.

My mate Lisa has written a book! Along with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases. Once it is done convincing you of the necessity of the work, it begins to explain how to actually create useful…

On June 4, 1995, AMD released its DX4 CPU, about six months after Intel released its DX4 CPUs. The AMD CPUs weren’t quite as fast as Intel’s DX4s, but they proved very popular because of their value for money. While The post AMD 486DX4 released June 4, 1995 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Commit signatures are part of git. Branch protection isn’t. It’s a row in a database run by the forge, checked by the forge’s API before accepting a push. Most of the interesting source-repository attacks have landed in the gap between the two. What the forge enforces Branch protection, required reviews, CODEOWNERS, merge queues, status checks, required signatures: every one is administered by the

Today's links Delusion as a service: Destructive diagnostics. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Gay Days at Disney World; Parametric 3D printable key; Fine against sculpture for "storing bike on public property"; TPP is a wash; Reagan was Trump; Steampunk roadster; "Every Heart a Doorway"; Shoplifters x Tumblr; Amazon v mass arbitration; Driver-owned Uber alternative; Cen

CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts Jun 4, 2026 An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren’t web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither the time, nor experience. I’d much rather read a book about this. Alas, I had to learn all this stuff from trawling MDN, so perhaps it is valuable to document what I have so far. CSS, HTML and Web APIs

How text can outcompete the screen.

The UK is obsessed with building AI datacentres at home. But the arguments for sovereignty - latency, tax, control - mostly don't hold up.

I've remained subscribed to some newsletters for over 20 years. The authors managed to keep my attention all that time. But then, one day, they decided to switch to an AI-generated newsletter without making any announcement. After a couple of weeks of blue high-tech image thumbnails, I simply hit unsubscribe. Here's what happened: a person earned my trust. He maintained that trust for all thos

Suppose you run across the power series for the exponential function and decide to code it up. Good idea: you’ll probably learn something, though maybe not what you expect. Maybe you decide a tolerance of 10−12 is good enough, and so you sum the terms until the next term to add is below the tolerance. […] Naively summing an alternating series first appeared on John D. Cook.

Agent skills bundle prompts, scripts, dependencies, and tool permissions for AI agents to load on demand. A skills registry is the distribution channel for them: a hosted marketplace, an indexed hub, or in many cases just a curated list of GitHub repos. ClawHub, Tessl, and skills.sh have all launched in the past year, mostly modelled on existing package registries. Because a skill can declare depe

We've seen this before. The post Rotation revisited: A shocking discovery about gcc’s unidirectional rotation algorithm appeared first on The Old New Thing.

It has been sixteen years since the launch of data.london.gov.uk. Back then, it was a trailblazer as one of the first major cities to release Open Data in this way. Now, over a decade later, it is more than a mere repository; it is a celebration of Open Data and the way it can improve Londoners' lives. So, time for a refresh front and back. As well as a bunch of back-end updates, the front-end…

The GE Widescreen 1000 was a big time TV for big time budgets in an era of excess, with the tagline “This is GE Performance Television.” Introduced in June 1978, it cost about 3/4 as much as a family sedan The post GE Widescreen 1000: Big time TV for big budgets appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today, we welcome the 46th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: the Philippines. The Philippines’ National CERT, working with the Department of Information and Communications Technology, now has access to monitor official government domains against the data in HIBP. This gives their Cyber

As I write this, we’re about 7 sixteenths through 2026, and it’s about 14 sixteenths through the day. For the sixteenth issue of the Taper online magazine, I split time into sixteenths to think about its passage in a different way. The code, which had to be under 2048 bytes, isn’t terribly complex. It does some date math and uses a Go server for minification. If you want, here’s the unminified sou

Compilers, especially method just-in-time compilers, operate on one function at a time. It is a natural code unit size, especially for a dynamic language JIT: at a given point in time, what more information can you gather about other parts of a running, changing system? I don’t have any data to back this up—maybe I should go gather some—but on average, methods are small. Especially in languages su

A true life moment for your correspondent

The very first computer programming class I ever took introduced me to the idea of there being different kinds of numbers, like integers, floats, and doubles (it was a C++ course). “You mean, when I assign a variable, I have to say up front what kind of number this is?” It was such an odd concept to me. A number is a number. Why do I have to say it’s this kind of number or that kind of number? I d

The math, and the psychology

So I said there wasn’t a proper newsletter this week, since I’m in Budapest prepping for a conference. But I still got a thing for y’all. There’s a lot of interesting topics I wanted to cover for Logic for Programmers, but the book is dense enough as it is and many of these were too tangential or technical to fit in well. So I’ve been writing some supplements and uploading them here. I’ve got four

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

Moving in a straight line, in a different way. The post Rotation revisited: Another unidirectional algorithm appeared first on The Old New Thing.

What is this, 2016? I like sharing my location with my pocket friends sometimes. If I'm in a cool bar that they know, perhaps they can recommend a drink. If they live nearby, maybe they want to come for dinner. Not everyone has FourSquare's SwarmApp, so it is handy to automatically share its updates with other people. Of course, Swarm doesn't cross-post to social media because walled-gardens…

In the first week of June 1992, Cyrix debuted its 486DLC CPU. Cyrix didn’t have its own fabrication plants so they made arrangements with Texas Instruments to manufacture the chips in May 1992. Part of the agreement allowed TI to The post Cyrix 486DLC CPU: Introduced June 1992 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links The tedious power of storytelling: "Excitement" is to art as "falsifiablilty" is to science. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Lost Marx Bros musical; USPTO v Drumpf trademark; 3D scans v copyright; Giving worse internet to people with bad credit ratings; Class action over royalty theft; Trusbusting Prime; Trustbusting Google. Upcoming appearances: London, K

I joined Radical's Built for Turbulence podcast to talk about what AI agents are doing to the economics of software, the Figma Trap, and why running human-written code without AI audit is going to start looking reckless.

A Formula One driver triggered my fact-checkitis. They claimed that Winning the Monaco Grand Prix in Monte Carlo is determined nine out of ten times by which position one starts in. That makes intuitive sense, because the Monte Carlo track is a narrow street track with few opportunities for overtakes. But … really? Is that an off-the-cuff remark or an accurate statistical prediction of

Whenever I saw someone type a natural language query into Google, it made me cringe. "It's not a person," I would say. "Type like you're talking to a machine." This was especially true for programmers and it was before AI took over everything. Instead of "how do I write a function that reads a file?", I would suggest they use specific keywords, something that sounded more like machine language

The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta's "AI support assistant" bot into resetting account passwords.

There is still active discussion on X about the approximation exp(−x²) ≈ (1 + cos(sin(x) + x))/2 and some are saying this can just be explained by Taylor series: the series for the two sides differ for the first time at the x6 term, so that’s why you get a good approximation. As I wrote […] It’s not just Taylor series first appeared on John D. Cook.

Readers have subscribed to this blog via email almost from its beginning in 2008, but how they have subscribed has changed several times. I’ve used several services to provide email subscription that have come and gone. For the past two years I’ve been using Substack to send out emails announcing new blog posts. That has […] Subscribe by email first appeared on John D. Cook.

The Intel 8088 CPU made its debut June 1, 1978. It rose to fame as the CPU powering the IBM PC, PC/XT, and tens of millions of PC and XT clones from the 1980s. But did you know Intel wasn’t The post Intel 8088s and non-Intel non-clones appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Spend enough time around security people and you pick up a second vocabulary. It has a faintly military air and a noticeable per-syllable markup on vendor invoices. Defense in depth: coding. Zero trust: auth. Least privilege: the permissions you forgot to grant. Attack surface: your code. Blast radius: everyone else’s code. Hardening: turning things off. Air gap: a USB stick. Shift left: make it t

Today's links Molly Crabapple's 'Here Where We Live Is Our Country': An essential book for this moment and for the moments that led to it. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Home chemistry sets in danger; Every pirate wants to be an admiral; Painful computer workarounds; JPEG patent invalidated; UBS whistleblower v USA (x USA); David Foster Wallace x tennis; Who cares abou

Today, I loaded the 1,000th data breach into Have I Been Pwned. Reflecting on that milestone number, I pondered how to mark the occasion in writing, and what immediately came to mind was a very simple question: why is it still needed? Especially considering the emergence of privacy regulations

I'm finding it quite fascinating to watch the current spate of ShinyHunters breaches and dumps. There's the obvious criminality of it all, but then there's also the response from organisations (or lack thereof, as it relates to disclosure to victims), the appearance and disappearance

The underappreciated gem of /proc/ /mem

Rockets, calculators, and personal computers at MITS

Short post today. New ZJIT contributor dak2 submitted a PR to fix an overflow bug in fixnum division in ZJIT. We did the division fine, but lied about the type of the result in the case of dividing FIXNUM_MIN by -1. You can see how this is special-cased in CRuby: static inline void rb_fix_divmod_fix(VALUE a, VALUE b, VALUE *divp, VALUE *modp) { // ... if (x == FIXNUM_MIN && y == -1) {