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Politics is any discussion where the truth doesn't steer the course of action. Most of us like to think we are above it. We believe that in our daily jobs, we are rational actors exchanging facts. We assume that if we simply present the truth, the right decisions will naturally follow. But this is a naive fantasy. We are not machines that go to work to process data. We are political animals trying

In ancient times, floating point numbers were stored in 32 bits. Then somewhere along the way 64 bits became standard. The C programming language retains the ancient lore, using float to refer to a 32-bit floating point number and double to refer to a floating point number with double the number of bits. Python simply […] 4-bit floating point FP4 first appeared on John D. Cook.

Apple Design: Avoid pestering people. Repeated rating requests can be irritating, and may even negatively influence people’s opinion of your app. Consider allowing at least a week or two between requests, prompting again after people demonstrate additional engagement with your experience. Prefer the system-provided prompt. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer a consistent, nonintrusive way for apps and ga

I wrote yesterday: And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized. On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded: Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. I would never recommend to a developer to not implement the APIs. It’s App Store Editori

I remember finding it interesting when, back in 2015, Andrej Karpathy posted about RNNs and gave an example of how their output improves over the course of a training run. What might that look like for a (relatively) modern transformers-based LLM? I recently trained a GPT-2-small-style LLM, with 163 million parameters, on about 3.2 billion tokens (that's about 12.8 GiB of text) from the Hugging Fa

A few years ago, I made the mistake of filling out a form to look into a business loan, one that I never ended up getting. Since then I receive no less than three texts a day offering me lines of credit ranging from $150,000 to as much as

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published by Jonathan Cape in Britain on January 18, 1982. Delacorte released an American edition five weeks later, under the punchier title of simply […]

What does it mean if a country is winning? I read an article a while back about how, basically because labor unions became too much of a pain to deal with, they were just cut out of the conversation. Everything was outsourced, and now after whining about a $25/hr job not having health insurance, there’s just no more $25 an hour job and nobody to try and bargain with anymore. The chips are made in

Preallocating memory to avoid quadratic behavior. The post Forgotten message from the past: <CODE>LB_<WBR>INIT­STORAGE</CODE> appeared first on The Old New Thing.

After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events? This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - with brief forays into England and abroad. It examines the central tension of whether witchcraft was real to the…

Medieval Europeans believed that the divine right of sovereignty transferred instantly from one monarch to the next upon the death of the previous one. This led to a saying, first used in 1422 in France, that translates to “The king The post The last MP3 patent appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Tiktokification shall set us free: Zuck keeps accidentally freeing his hostages. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: B2B Trotsky; Public service games; NZ 3 strikes rule; Snowden, vocalist; Obama says money compromised him; Bullshit treescrapers; Tesla's odometer heist. Upcoming appearances: Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Barcelona, NYC, Hay-on-Wy

Terry Godier: For example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4 star review is going to decrease that average. In other words, leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative review. [...] You will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things like, “This is my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to have these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the st

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: If you’ve been on TikTok this year, you’ve more than likely encountered ads for Freecash. The app has been marketed as a way to make money just by scrolling TikTok — and jumped to the top of the app stores in recent months, peaking at the No. 2 position in the U.S. App Store. In truth, Freecash pays users to play mobile games — all the while collecting a heapin

If you have multiple computers, you'll quickly run into the problem of having data on one but needing it on the other. Because of this, people have been connecting them together since the beginning. To automatically route data between networks, we had to agree on a universal numbering scheme for computers. During the 1980, people settled on the 32-bit "IPv4" address. 65.109.172.162 Back then

I love cutting-edge tech, but I hate hyperbole, so I find AI to be a real paradox. Somewhere in that whole mess of overnight influencers, disinformation and ludicrous claims is some real "gold" - AI stuff that's genuinely useful and makes a meaningful difference. This blog

Anton Troianovski, reporting for The New York Times under the headline “Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality”: President Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a done-and-dusted success. But after years of trying to impose his own reality on the world, he has now run into a crisis that is not bending to his narrative. On the one hand, I’m loath to complain abou

Many of you follow this blog because of the regular features about electronic circuit design.

The Associated Press Stylebook, on Threads: We updated our style for telephone numbers in 2024 to drop parentheses. We now recommend the form: 212-621-1500. For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country code, the city code and the telephone number: 011-44-20-7535-1515. Use hyphens, not periods. No parentheses. The form for toll-free numbers: 800-111-1000. If extension num

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: The change began rolling out a few weeks ago, and user frustration is mounting. On Reddit, there’s a growing thread of Netflix subscribers saying they are canceling their subscription because of this change to the Apple TV app. [...] The change also means you lose access to full payback controls using the Apple TV Remote app on your iPhone. You can’t enable Enhance Dialogue

Juli Clover, MacRumors: The process requires the victim to have Express Transit Mode enabled for payments, and a Visa card linked for those payments, among other steps. As it turns out, it’s a Visa-related security loophole rather than an iPhone issue, and it doesn’t work with a Mastercard or an American Express card because other cards use different security methods. It also doesn’t work with Sam

If you know about my professional background, the most puzzling aspect of this Substack must be that I don’t use it to talk about my primary field of expertise: information security.

One more thought re: the item I posted this week speculating on what Apple will name their much-rumored two-screen folding iPhone this year. If they do name it “iPhone Ultra”, I think Apple using that name for the folding iPhone will imply that they have no plans whatsoever to ever make a “rugged” iPhone — a model akin to Apple Watch Ultra. I suspect Apple has no plans for a dedicated rugged iPhon

Feature story and short film, well worth watching, from Apple: One winter day in January 2024, 16‑year‑old Rory Goss experienced something jarring while in construction class at Abbey Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Newry, Northern Ireland. He could no longer see the whiteboard at the front of the room. As a straight‑A student in 11th grade, Rory was in the midst of studying for his A‑levels

Trespassing on system messages. The post What’s up with window message <CODE>0x0091</CODE>? We’re getting it with unexpected parameters appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Let f(x, y) be an nth degree polynomial in x and y. In general, a straight line will cross the zero set of f in n locations [1]. Newton defined a diameter to be any line that crosses the zero set of f exactly n times. If f(x, y) = x² + y² − 1 then the zero set of f is a circle and diameters of the […] Newton diameters first appeared on John D. Cook.

What if I told you there was a secret social network, hidden in plain sight? If you're reading this message, you're now a member of RSS Club! RSS Club is a series of posts which are only visible to RSS / Atom subscribers. Like you 😃 If you want this for your own WordPress site, here's what you'll need: A blog post which is only visible in RSS / Atom. Which has no HTML rendering on your site.

Today's links A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers: We're already being turned into paperclips. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Every pirate ebook on the internet; Sun's "Open DRM"; Untranslatable words; Let's encrypt is encrypting; Boots ruined by hedge fund; Brussels terrorists' opsec; Copyrighted Klingon; Murder Offsets. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, Londo

On April 16, 1977, Apple launched the Apple II, one of the first pre-built desktop computers, although it wouldn’t ship until June of that year. It went on to sell about 6 million units over the course of the next The post Apple II announced April 16, 1977 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The proof of work is the wrong analogy: finding hash collisions, while exponentially harder with N, is guaranteed to find, with enough work, some S so that H(S) satisfies N, so an asymmetry of resources used will see the side with more "work ability" eventually winning. But bugs are different: 1. Different LLMs executions take different branches, but eventually the possible branches based on the

For most of the time GitHub has owned npm, the public-facing website at npmjs.com has been effectively frozen, with the issue tracker accumulating years of requests that nobody on the inside seemed to be reading. In January Daniel Roe started npmx.dev as an alternative web frontend over the same registry data, posted about it on Bluesky, and within a fortnight years of pent-up demand had turned in

In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck... "The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence." That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a

David Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang): Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read, play, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was mostly just movies and shows, but now I think

Shawn Hickman: A show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game you keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy. Remembering where you left off is the hard part. Sofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up on covers throughout the app so you can see where you stand at a glance. Your home screen shows what’s next with one-tap checkboxes to keep t

You can’t make this up

I've been working on a GPT-2-small-style LLM based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". I've trained various versions of it in the cloud to work out which interventions to the model and training code had the best effects on the loss it gets on a specific test dataset, and now I wanted to do a training run locally to match the best of those. For that, I wanted

Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs: When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you just said that you didn’t know. But then you told him when you’d have an answer. Again, this was just good advice to anyone “managing up,” as they say. This is A+ advice for dea

Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it. Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence). Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience: An opinion dismantled by reality. An artifact torn apart by the real world. An idea destroyed by its own shortsightedness. Experiencing these can be slow and uncomfortable, but if you

Sorry for missing last week! Was sick and then busy. This week I want to cover a pet peeve of mine, best seen in this comic: A "comprehensive and precise spec" is not necessarily code. A specification corresponds to a set of possible implementations, and code is a single implementation in that set. As long as the set has more than one element, there is a separation between the spec and the code.

“If our next several years are a trillion dollars in scale, we have the supply chain to do it"

David Pierce, writing at The Verge (gift link): The Pixel 10 Pro solidified a feeling I’d been having through all of my tests: Android is a better operating system than iOS. [...] If all you got from your phone was the out-of-the-box experience, I’d have picked the Pixel. But unfortunately for Android, app stores exist. And the App Store absolutely wipes the floor with the Play Store. Lots of the

Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end x86 option (a Ryzen AI 5 340 Mainboard), the fastest RISC-V option (DC-ROMA II), and today I'm publishing results from the only Arm Mainboard, the MetaComputing AI PC, which has a 12-core Arm SoC and up to 32 GB of soldered-on RAM. My Framework 13 has run on x86, RISC-V, and now Arm, making it something of a 'Ship of

Steven Troughton-Smith: If you want to pixel-peep on iOS or iPadOS, it also has the Zoom accessibility setting, and can be controlled via touch, keyboard, or trackpad. It works for display mirroring too, and has other options like a minimap and HUD (‘Zoom Controller’). These settings are in Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. I prefer switching the Zoom Region from the default Window Zoom (which give

April 15, 2025

Maybe it didn't really exit. The post Why is there a long delay between a thread exiting and the <CODE>Wait­For­Single­Object</CODE> returning? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an old acquaintance at a conference, we both tend to say "If only I'd known you were here, we could have had dinner together last night!" I do enjoy the serendipity of events like FOSDEM - randomly…

On April 15, 1998, Intel introduced its Celeron 266 processor. It was the first Celeron in a product line that lasted 25 years, but it wasn’t one of Intel’s finest moments. The Celeron was a cut-down Pentium II, designed in The post Intel Celeron 266 introduced April 15, 1998 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Yesterday I wrote about the fast Homebrew rewrites and ended on the line that the bottleneck for that whole class of project is not Rust or Ruby, it is the absence of a stable declarative package schema. Someone on Mastodon picked up that thread and asked the obvious follow-on: which package managers actually have one? Going through the list, the honest answer is hardly any of them, and there is a

Today's links Rights for robots: Not everything deserves moral consideration. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 7 years under the DMCA; NOLA mayoral candidate x New Orleans Square; Kettling is illegal; AOL won't deliver critical emails; Chris Ware x Charlie Brown; Mossack Fonseca raided; Corporate lobbying budget is greater than Senate and House; Corbyn overpays taxes; Wh

I bought a USB fingerprint reader for my Linux laptop from Temu because it was the only one I could find that I knew would work. As you may or may not know, I’m somewhat obsessed with tech on the edges, gadgets that do a thing comparable to a more expensive thing, and making the most of the things I have. (See my Colmi R02 smart ring, which I’m wearing now.) And I kind of hate typing in my passwo

Molly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great: After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained. One victim, a musician who goe

Microsoft today pushed software updates to fix a staggering 167 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a SharePoint Server zero-day and a publicly disclosed weakness in Windows Defender dubbed "BlueHammer." Separately, Google Chrome fixed its fourth zero-day of 2026, and an emergency update for Adobe Reader nixes an actively exploited flaw that ca

Tim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors: Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow App

The Houston Chronicle: Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...] Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Fun

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases. On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more.

Google, on their Search Central Blog: Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions. What is back button hijacking? Why are we taking action? Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they b

If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not 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

Soon, AI will be good enough to interact with the Internet in an indistinguishable way from a human. This can be an amazing opportunity for liberation from all the people who are targeting your attention. I vibe coded this zappa proxy, it is not quite there yet, but I think it points the way forward. Why should I browse the Internet or use apps when machines can do it for me? Suckers getting bille

If you know the distance d to a satellite, you can compute a circle of points that passes through your location. That’s because you’re at the intersection of two spheres—the earth’s surface and a sphere of radius d centered on the satellite—and the intersection of two spheres is a circle. Said another way, one observation […] Intersecting spheres and GPS first appeared on John D. Cook.

Not a direct line to Bill Gates's office. The post Why was there a red telephone at every receptionist desk? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The Wikipedia article on modern triangle geometry has an image labeled “Artzt parabolas” with no explanation. A quick search didn’t turn up anything about Artzt parabolas [1], but apparently the parabolas go through pairs of vertices with tangents parallel to the sides. The general form of a conic section is ax² + bxy + cy² […] Finding a parabola through two points with given slopes first appeared

When websites are blatantly hostile, users close them to never come back. Have you ever downloaded an app, realized it was deceptive, and deleted it immediately? It's a common occurrence for me. But there is truly hostile software that we still end up using daily. We don't just delete those apps because the hostility is far more subtle. It's like the boiling frog, the heat turns up so slowly that

On April 13, 2007, Google agreed to acquire DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion in cash. Google had already been in the advertising business since 2000, with its Adwords product. Buying Doubleclick further sent Google down the road of funding itself through The post Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

zerobrew and nanobrew have been doing the rounds as fast alternatives to Homebrew, one written in Rust with the tagline “uv-style architecture for Homebrew packages” and the other in Zig with a 1.2 MB static binary and a benchmark table comparing itself favourably against the first. Both are upfront, once you scroll past the speedup numbers, that they resolve dependencies against homebrew-core, do

Today's links In praise of (some) compartmentalization: Go with the flow (mostly). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Multitasking teens; Copyrighted dirt; NZ internet disconnection x CHCH quake; Hubble cake; Churchill's booze Rx; Fraud-resistant election tech. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where

I'm starting to become pretty fond of Bruce. Actually, I've had a bit of an epiphany: an AI assistant like Bruce isn't just about auto-responding to tickets in an entirely autonomous manner; it's also pretty awesome at responding with just a little

How afraid should we be?

Andrzej Odrzywolek recently posted an article on arXiv showing that you can obtain all the elementary functions from just the function and the constant 1. The following equations, taken from the paper’s supplement, show how to bootstrap addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division from the eml function. See the paper and supplement for how to obtain […] Mathematical minimalism first appeare

Taking advantage of special characteristics of the array. The post Finding a duplicated item in an array of <VAR>N</VAR> integers in the range 1 to <VAR>N</VAR> − 1 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

A friend of mine bought a Tesla Roadster back in the early 2010s. At the time, spotting a Tesla on the road was a rare event. Maybe even occasion enough to stop and take a picture. I never got the chance to photograph one, let alone drive one, until I met this new friend recently. This was my chance to experience the car firsthand. We walked to the parking structure to see it. As soon as he opened

My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map. Google's Android has now broken that. On the web, we used to use: <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg"> That opened the phone's photo picker…

On April 13,  1992, Cyrix debuted its 486SLC CPU. Cyrix didn’t have its own fabrication plants so they relied on other chipmakers, such as SGS Thomson and Texas Instruments, to manufacture the chips. Part of the agreement allowed TI to The post Cyrix 486SLC CPU: Introduced April 13,1992 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The Common Package Specification went stable in CMake 4.3 last year and the name caught my attention because it sounds like it might be addressing the cross-ecosystem dependency problem I’ve written about before. Reading the spec, the “common” turns out to mean common across build systems rather than common across language ecosystems: it’s a JSON format that CMake and Meson and autotools can all r

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

Today's links Austerity creates fascism: We can't afford to not afford nice things. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: The Server of Amontillado; Flapper's Dictionary; Mastercard v rec.humor.funny; Philippines electoral data breach; A front page from the Trump presidency; Spike Lee x Bernie Sanders; France v password hashing; Algorithms as Central European folk-dances; Sav

I built a small tool to visualise how Mixture of Experts models route tokens through different experts. It's genuinely fascinating to watch.

The date of Easter The church fixed Easter to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox. They were choosing a date in the Roman (Julian) calendar to commemorate an event whose date was known according to the Jewish lunisolar calendar, hence the reference to equinoxes and full moons. The […] Lunar period approximations first appeared on John D. Cook.

I quipped on BlueSky: It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects. Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the people who made this" This is top of mind because I’ve been working with Jan Miksovsky on his project Web Origami and he exemplified this to me recently. I was wor

I must have been the last developer still confused by the AWS interface. I knew how to access DynamoDB, that was the only tool I needed for my daily work. But everything else was a mystery. How do I access web hosting? If I needed a small server to host a static website, what service would I use? Searching for "web hosting" inside the AWS console yielded nothing. After digging through the web, I f

I heard that while this blog is good at diagnosing the problem, it falls short when proposing solutions. Today I’m proposing a solution that everyone (except the haters and losers) can get behind. We have a real problem in America, and it’s billionaires. I mean, it’s actually fiat money that the state can print arbitrary amounts of, but that’s a complicated idea, so we’ll just say it’s billionaire

And vindication for Apple’s unfairly maligned 2025 reasoning paper

Today is Orthodox Easter. Western churches celebrated Easter last week. Why are the Eastern and Western dates of Easter different? Is Eastern Easter always later than Western Easter? How far apart can the two dates be? Why the dates differ Easter is on the first Sunday after the first full moon in Spring [1]. East […] The gap between Eastern and Western Easter first appeared on John D. Cook.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

Why Claude Code changes everything

Today's links Don't Be Evil: Evil genius is just a lack of shame. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: FBI x Trotsky; Jakob Nielsen x headlines; Floppy disk stained glass; Zero tolerance for mismatched socks; EFF v DOGE. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' e

Is the Strait of Hormuz open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more.

I have an old mobile phone number that I'd like to keep. I think it is registered with a bunch of services for 2FA by SMS, but I can't be sure. So I want to keep it for a couple of years just in case I need it to log on to something. I don't want to faff around with physical SIMs, so I went looking for the cheapest way to keep my number for the longest time. There are a whole bunch of providers…

Back in college, the final project in our JavaScript class was to build a website. We were a group of four, and we built the best website in class. It was for a restaurant called the Coral Reef. We found pictures online, created a menu, and settled on a solid theme. I was taking a digital art class in parallel, so I used my Photoshop skills to place our logo inside pictures of our fake restaurant.

Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no topic has been more polarising than AI coding agents. What I keep noticing is that a lot of the criticism directed at these tools is perfectly legitimate, but it often come

Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan — Setting Fire To Sleeping Giants In what The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow called a “tense call” after his brief ouster from OpenAI in 2023, Sam Altman seemed unable to reckon with a “pattern of deception”

This is a response to this Sam Altman’s blog post. Sam Altman is not the bad guy. History comes from two places, great men and causes and forces. We have way too little of the former and way too much of the latter right now. I hear that in America people fear the government taking away their freedom, and in China people fear the lack of government taking away their freedom. Maybe it’s just becaus

There’s a lot of mathematics just off the beaten path. You can spend a career in math and yet not know all there is to know about even the most basic areas of math. For example, this post will demonstrate something you may not have seen about decimal forms of fractions. Let p > 5 […] Distribution of digits in fractions first appeared on John D. Cook.

Waiting for the waiting thread to acknowledge the change. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>Wait­For­Multiple­Objects</CODE>?, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

This post is exclusive to feed subscribers. Enjoy! This whole experiment is called RSS Club - but perhaps it should be called "XML-based distributed feed club"? I've been playing about with local-only and privacy-conscious view tracking. I can see how many people click on my stories from HN or Google or anywhere else. I also decided to add the number of times a story is viewed by someone…

Intel announced the 486 CPU at Comdex on April 10, 1989. It was an expensive chip, priced at $950 each in quantities of 1,000. I thought it would be fun to look back at what the magazines at the time The post Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Package registries return every version a package has ever published in a single response, with no way to ask for less. The API formats were designed ten to twenty years ago when packages had tens of versions, not thousands, and they haven’t changed even as the ecosystems grew by orders of magnitude around them. npm’s registry API dates to 2010 when there were a few hundred packages on the registr

Today's links Canny Valley and Creative Commons: Another bite at the apple. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bidenomics needs to be bigger; Al Franken's balanced war budget; Bernie x The Pope; Art is a money-laundry; UK government condemns copyright trolls; Howard Dean's genocidal pharma sellout. Upcoming appearances: Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC

A meditation on the game of Solitaire and its endless variations, which go well beyond what you can find in Windows 3.1. Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from David Buck, who has been obsessed with a certain single-player game lately. See if you can figure out which one. Today in Tedium: Who doesn’t love card games, especially the ones you can play on your own? Solitaire is quiet. It’s slow. It w

I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the WebAssembly Toolkit for Go. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go. watgo comes with a CLI and a Go API to parse WAT (WebAssembly Text), validate it, and encode it into WASM binaries; it also supports decoding WASM from its binary format. At the center of it all is wasmir - a semantic

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

What Anthropic's Mythos research preview tells us about the trajectory of frontier models, sandbox escapes, and the cybersecurity risk ahead.

In short: GitHub’s downtime is bad, but uptime numbers can be misleading. It’s not as bad as it looks; more like a D than an F. “Zero nines uptime”? 99.99% uptime, or “four nines”, is a common industry standard. Four nines of uptime is equivalent to 1.008 minutes of downtime per week. GitHub is not meeting that, and it’s frustrating. Even though they’re owned by Microsoft’s, one of the richest com

Since early February, I've been trying various interventions on a 163M-parameter GPT-2-style model that I trained from scratch on my local RTX 3090, using code based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". My original model got a loss of 3.944 on my test set, while the original GPT-2 weights got 3.500 on the same dataset. I wanted to see if I could close that ga

No need to panic just yet

Me, in 2025, on Mastodon: I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer. I'm sick of devops'ing stupid stuff because builds work on my machine and I have to spend that extra bit of time to ensure they also work on remote linux computers. Not

Saw a post on X saying that the latitude of the Pyramid of Giza is the same as the speed of light. I looked into this, expecting it to be approximately true. It’s exactly true in the sense that the speed of light in vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s and the line of latitude 29.9792458° N […] The Great Pyramid of Giza and the Speed of Light first appeared on John D. Cook.

I recently ran across a post on X describing a process for creating a random fractal. First, pick a random point c inside a hexagon. Then at each subsequent step, pick a random side of the hexagon and create the triangle formed by that side and c. Update c to be the center of the new triangle […] Random hexagon fractal first appeared on John D. Cook.

You can't, but you can cooperate with the other thread. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>Wait­For­Multiple­Objects</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and missiles is insufficient against asymmetric attacks of thousands of drones. And that […]

The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.

Sometimes, I find myself talking while my audience has a puzzled look on their face. It doesn't matter how much I prepared my speech, the message is just not getting through. But then they ask: What are you trying to say? Somehow, this shifts the conversation entirely. Instead of trying to sound smart and interesting, I start telling them exactly what I'm trying to say. The fluff disappears, the j

I was left somewhat unconvinced by this book. I liked the concept - a series of interrelated stories all told in different styles. Much like the film "Lola RenntRun Lola Run" there's a briefcase full of cash, a cast of morally ambiguous characters, and a meandering philosophical discussion about the nature of economic salvation. It slams together the naïve and the cynical into a bunch of …

40 years ago today, on April 9, 1986, Osborne Computer Corporation, one of the early makers of CP/M computers and a pioneer in portable computing, liquidated after three years of financial hardship. Its demise is generally blamed on its founder, The post Osborne Computer liquidated April 9, 1986 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender": The history of digital rights, from the very beginning to this very moment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Tariffs and monopolies; Paperclip dodecahedron; Class war comix; Glenn Beck's brain; Iceland v Pirates; Dashers v apps; Leaked NYPD goon squad manual. Upcoming appearances: Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London,

I write stuff here. Sometimes the stuff is good. Sometimes it reads like I wrote it at 2 AM after an argument with a YAML file, which is because I did. But one decision I made early on was that I didn't want to offer an email newsletter.

Yesterday I wrote about the package security problems AI agents face: typosquatting, registry poisoning, lockfile manipulation, install-time code execution, credential theft, and cascading failures through the dependency graph. Agents inherit all the old package security problems but resolve, install, and propagate faster than any human can review. There’s no silver bullet for securing agent codin

Vandaag verscheen het rapport “Digitale autonomie binnen de energie-intensieve industrie”, wat ik schreef in opdracht van Energy Innovation NL, voorheen bekend als de Topsector Energie. Het rapport is hier te lezen. Dit was ontzettend leuk om te doen, en ik ben erg blij dat men me gevraagd heeft om dit rapport te schrijven. Samen met Energy Innovation NL (de nieuwe naam van de Topsector Energie) h

I recently found out about Andrica’s conjecture: the square roots of consecutive primes are less than 1 apart. In symbols, Andrica’s conjecture says that if pn and pn+1 are consecutive prime numbers, then √pn+1 − √pn < 1. This has been empirically verified for primes up to 2 × 1019. If the conjecture is true, […] Root prime gap first appeared on John D. Cook.

In early January 2025, a family friend was over for lunch. One of my many guilty midwit pleasures is a love of New Year’s resolutions, so I asked her if she had made any. She said no, but mentioned that she had some relatives that were doing “damp January”. In case you’re not aware, Dry January is a challenge many people do to quit drinking alcohol during the month of January. These folks were doi

Last week I wrote about the orbit of Artemis II. The orbit of Artemis I was much more interesting. Because Artemis I was unmanned, it could spend a lot more time in orbit. The Artemis I mission took 25 days while Artemis II will take 10 days. Artemis I took an unusual path, orbiting the […] A Three- and a Four- Body Problem first appeared on John D. Cook.

Not many facts are on the ground, but here are some starting points for sober thinking

Most people go to Disneyland and spend way more time waiting in line than riding rides. HK Disneyland is simpler than many of the other Disney parks, but proper pathing is key for avoiding lines. Done correctly, you should be able to ride every ride in half a day. This guide assumes you are more athletic and motivated than 99% of Disney guests. First off, buy the Early Park Entry Pass, it gets yo

If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not 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

You can't, but you can arrange for the waiter to do it for you. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>Msg­Wait­For­Multiple­Objects</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links Process knowledge: We also serve who stand and wash. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Chicken Little; "Anya's Ghost"; Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming

I'll admit, I was a little sceptical about returning to Avenue Q. I saw it on its original West End run back in… OH MY GOD I AM SO OLD! FUCK! Where did the time go? It's always hard to know how much to update a show. Does it need constant reinvention to stay in the zeitgeist or can it be pickled forever as a classic? "I wish I had taken more pictures" was something that utterly resonated with …

It is hard for me to be objective about the Atari ST, because I was a dyed in the wool Amiga fanboy in the early ’90s. But the Atari ST was released April 8, 1985 and quickly sold 50,000 units. The post Atari ST introduced April 8, 1985 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I went through the recent OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications and pulled out the scenarios related to package management, which turn up in all ten categories and don’t sort neatly into any one of them, since a typosquatted MCP server is simultaneously a name attack, a registry attack, and a metadata poisoning vector. Package name attacks Typosquatting and namespace confusion are some of the olde

What inspired the semi-viral fake GIMP trailer that recently fluttered around FOSS circles? The creator and puppeteer behind Pork Johnson explains. Look, I haven’t necessarily changed my mind about GIMP, the image editor that has something of a love-hate relationship in the open-source community. It’s not quite Photoshop or Affinity. But I do think it makes for very funny comedic fodder. Which is

Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil. First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post. This is his news more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I want to do here is add a more personal note about why this matters so much to me, how the last months led us here, and why I am so excited to have him on board. Last year chan

Towards the end of last year, I trained a 163M-parameter GPT-2-style model from scratch on my local RTX 3090, using code based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". The result was a pretty decent little model, but it wasn't as good as the original GPT-2-small, despite having more parameters (because it wasn't using weight-tying). Specifically: on a particular t

Hackers linked to Russia's military intelligence units are using known flaws in older Internet routers to mass harvest authentication tokens from Microsoft Office users, security experts warned today. The spying campaign allowed state-backed Russian hackers to quietly siphon authentication tokens from users on more than 18,000 networks without deploying any malicious software or code.

Send me to fall, send me to fall Every time they train a new frontier model, they do a calculation. What’s the most efficient way to make money off of this model? For a while now, it’s been selling access to it like a SaaS subscription. You buy access to the model, you use it to make money, some percent of the money you make pays the API bill, etc… In a growth economy, this calculus works. The eco

The true story of Einstein, Newton, and Darwin

The permanently ineligible list. The post Were there any Windows 3.1 programs that were so incompatible with Windows 95 that there was no point trying to patch them? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

As discussed in my last blog post, the scumsuckers at Apollo.io have been giving out my personal details. Not only did they have my email address, they also had a copy of one of my phone numbers. I asked them where they got it from and they said: Your phone number came from Parsely, Inc (wpvip.com) one of our customers who participates in our customer contributor network by sharing their…

A lot of software advertises itself as working with a Hayes modem or Hayes compatible modem. What does that mean? And what’s Hayes? It’s a de facto standard named after a defunct maker of modems. Let’s talk about why Hayes The post Hayes compatible modem: What it means appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Michael Stapelberg wrote last week about Go’s automatic VCS stamping: since Go 1.18, every binary built from a git checkout embeds the commit hash, timestamp, and dirty flag, queryable with go version -m or runtime/debug.ReadBuildInfo() at runtime. His argument is that every program should do this, so you can always answer “what version is running in production?” without guessing. Go is unusual in

Today's links Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber: Public provision is a layered question. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: EU appoints henhouse fox (copyright); Emacs x Tron: Legacy; Spammer v dead man's AOL account; Scott Walker's pork fountain; "No toilets, try Amazon"; Iceland falls (x Panama Papers); Rooms in Milanese sewers; China bans Panama Papers; "Parent Hacks"; "Th

This week, more time than I'd have liked to spend went on talking about the trials of chasing invoices. This is off the back of a customer (who, for now, will remain unnamed), who had invoices stacking back more than 6 months overdue and despite payment terms of

Landauer’s principle gives a lower bound on the amount of energy it takes to erase one bit of information: E ≥ log(2) kB T where kB is the Boltzmann constant and T is the ambient temperature in Kelvin. The lower bound applies no matter how the bit is physically stored. There is no theoretical lower […] Toffoli gates are all you need first appeared on John D. Cook.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

Did you know that Jesus gave advice about prototyping with an LLM? Here’s Luke 14:28-30: Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ That pre

New reporting from the New Yorker vindicates concerns that were first raised here

Executive Summary OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has, per The Information, said that OpenAI is not ready to go public in 2026, in part because of the "risks from its spending commitments" and not being sure whether the company's revenue growth would support its spending commitments. Friar

If the compiler is complaining about things you didn't write, find out who wrote them. The post Learning to read C++ compiler errors: Illegal use of <TT>-></TT> when there is no <TT>-></TT> in sight appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I've been working on personal projects since the 2000s. One thing I've always been adamant about is understanding the code I write. Even when Stack Overflow came along, I was that annoying guy who told people not to copy and paste code into their repos. Instead, they should read it and adapt it to their specific case. On personal projects, I've applied this to a fault. Projects never get done beca

This post is exclusive to RSS feed subscribers. Enjoy! I've had this idea stuck in my head for a while, so I decided to make it. This is "Scan Slowly And See". The code is made by cloning some of the banana's spots. Do let me know if the QR code works for you 🍌 …

Released April 6, 1992, Windows 3.1 was the successor to the very successful Windows 3.0. It wasn’t great, just like Windows 3.0 wasn’t great. But it was a graphical user interface that ran on very inexpensive ordinary PCs, and enough The post Windows 3.1 released April 6, 1992 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar is almost thirty years old and people are still finding new ways to extend the metaphor. Drew Breunig recently described a third mode, the Winchester Mystery House, for the sprawling codebases that agentic AI produces: rooms that lead nowhere, staircases into ceilings, a single builder with no plan. That piece got me thinking, though it shares a blind sp

An elusive hacker who went by the handle "UNKN" and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021.

AI compute demand is growing exponentially while supply constraints bite hard. The next 18-24 months are going to be defined by shortages, rationing and price discovery.

The best way to run AI and remain HIPAA compliant is to run it locally on your own hardware, instead of transferring protected health information (PHI) to a remote server by using a cloud-hosted service like ChatGPT or Claude. [1]. There are HIPAA-compliant cloud options, but they’re both restrictive and expensive. Even enterprise options are […] HIPAA compliant AI first appeared on John D. Cook.

Simon Willison wrote about how he vibe coded his dream presentation app for macOS. I also took a stab at vibe coding my dream app: an RSS reader. To clarify: Reeder is my dream RSS app and it already exists, so I guess you could say my dreams have already come true? But I’ve kind of always wanted to try an app where my RSS feed is just a list of unread articles and clicking any one opens it in the

AI isn’t the only thing behind Medvi

Like all good nerds, I generate a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This has several advantages - it allows me to see if a message is legitimately from a service, if a service is hacked the hackers can't go credential stuffing, and I instantly know who leaked my address. A few weeks ago I signed up for BrowserStack as I wanted to join their Open Source programme. I had a few…

I have these Sunday evenings where I find myself sitting alone at the kitchen table, thinking about my life and how I got here. Usually, these sessions end with an inspiring idea that makes me want to get up and build something. I remember the old days where I couldn't even sleep because I had all these ideas bubbling in my head, and I could just get up and do it because I had no familial responsi

This post will look at the problem of updating an average grade as a very simple special case of Bayesian statistics and of Kalman filtering. Suppose you’re keeping up with your average grade in a class, and you know your average after n tests, all weighted equally. m = (x1 + x2 + x3 + […] Kalman and Bayes average grades first appeared on John D. Cook.

Aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more

Alexandre Dumas ran what was essentially a content production house in 19th century Paris. His most famous collaborator was Auguste Maquet, who wrote substantial portions of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would produce drafts and outlines, and Dumas would rewrite and polish them, but the

What if I told you there was a secret social network, hidden in plain sight? If you're reading this message, you're now a member of RSS Club! RSS Club is a series of posts which are only visible to RSS / Atom subscribers. Like you 😃 If I've done everything right, this page isn't visible on the web. It can't be found by a search engine. It doesn't share to Mastodon or appear syndicated to Ac…

Every few months someone declares that “X will kill open source” or that “open source is not sustainable” or that “open source won”, and every time the responses split into factions that seem to be having completely different conversations. People have been pointing this out for at least a decade. Replacement terms like “post-open source” never stuck, because the problem isn’t the label. The phras

About five months ago I wrote about Absurd, a durable execution system we built for our own use at Earendil, sitting entirely on top of Postgres and Postgres alone. The pitch was simple: you don’t need a separate service, a compiler plugin, or an entire runtime to get durable workflows. You need a SQL file and a thin SDK. Since then we’ve been running it in production, and I figured it’s worth s

Welcome back to compiler land. Today we’re going to talk about value numbering, which is like SSA, but more. Static single assignment (SSA) gives names to values: every expression has a name, and each name corresponds to exactly one expression. It transforms programs like this: x = 0 x = x + 1 x = x + 1 where the variable x is assigned more than once in the program text, into programs like this

Wander Console 0.4.0 is the fourth release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website explore interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent website owners. To try it, go to susam.net/wander/. A screenshot of Wander Console 0.4.0 This release brings a few small additions as well as a few minor fixes.

This is the last of the interventions I'm trying out to see if I can improve the test loss for a from-scratch GPT-2 small base model, trained on code based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". Back when I did my first training run for a base model, on my local RTX 3090, I used two optimisations: Setting the 32-bit floating point matrix multiplication precision

Soundtrack — Soundgarden — Blow Up The Outside World A lot of people try to rationalize the AI bubble by digging up the past. Billions of dollars of waste are justified by saying “OpenAI just like Uber” (it isn’t) and “the data center buildout is

I used the term perilune in yesterday’s post about the flight path of Artemis II. When Artemis is closest to the moon it will be furthest from earth because its closest approach to the moon, its perilune, is on the side of the moon opposite earth. Perilune is sometimes called periselene. The two terms come from […] Roman moon, Greek moon first appeared on John D. Cook.

Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11 wireless network.

Last year, I wrote about my server setup and how I use zipbombs to mitigate attacks from rogue bots. It was an effective method that helped my blog survive for 10 years. I usually hesitate to write these types of articles, especially since it means revealing the inner workings of my own servers. This blog runs on a basic DigitalOcean droplet, a modest setup that can handle the usual traffic spike

When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in place before it is created. It opens with The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows: Which, frankly, should be the end of …

I had coffee last year with a guy - I won't use his real name - who told me he was "building a business." I asked what it did. Dropshipping jade face rollers. I made him say it twice. Jade face rollers. He'd found

Cloudflare’s new attempt to win over the hearts of developers could help keep a few ancient WordPress sites from falling off the internet. That‘s a good thing. Cloudflare started its life nearly 20 years ago, and I found out about it basically because I was running a blog—and obsessed with keeping it online. ShortFormBlog was many things, but the most important was that it was barely held togethe

Shifting goal posts and new efforts at redefining the narrative

I was looking through an old geometry book [1] and saw a hyperbolic analog of Napier’s mnemonic for spherical trigonometry. In hindsight of course there’s a hyperbolic analog: there’s a hyperbolic analog of everything. But I was surprised because I’d never thought of this before. I suppose the spherical version is famous because of its […] Hyperbolic version of Napier’s mnemonic first appeared on