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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: A regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has appeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further details or images available yet. While the PDF file does not contain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on Apple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes. My money was on just plain “MacBook”, but I like “MacBook Neo”.  ★

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max, bringing game-changing performance and AI capabilities to the world’s best pro laptop. With M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro features a new CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, and higher unified memory bandwidth, altogether

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

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

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced M5 Pro and M5 Max, the world’s most advanced chips for pro laptops, powering the new MacBook Pro. The chips are built using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture. This innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip (SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt

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

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

LLMs are an epistemic nightmare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

npx workos launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It’s not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits. The WorkOS agent then typechecks and builds, feeding any errors back to itself to fix. See how it works →  ★

This is a small javascript snippet that removes most annoying website elements: /* HTML tags, keywords, commands */ h-n {color: #F27;} /* Values */ h-v {color: #B8F;} /* CSS selectors, attribute/varable names, file names */ h-s {color: #AEE;} /* Comments */ h-c {color: #777;} function cleanup (node) { var style = getComputedStyle (node ); // Bad styles var bad = ( a) =>

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

Back in December I linked to a sort-of stunt project from Tyler Hall called Alan.app — a simple Mac utility that draws a bold rectangle around the current active window. Alan.app lets you set the thickness and color of the frame. I used it for an hour or so before calling it quits. It really does solve the severe (and worsening) problem of being able to instantly identify the active window in rece

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

Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung (which is just an incredibly good and fun weblog): Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this: flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904 flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834 flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834/in/set-7

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

During the most recent episode of The Talk Show, Jason Snell brought up a weird issue that I started running into last year. On my Mac, sometimes I’d drag an image out of a web page in Safari, and I’d get an image in WebP format. Sometimes I wouldn’t care. But usually when I download an image like that, it’s because I want to publish (or merely host my own copy of) that image on Daring Fireball. A

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

Jesper, writing at Take: My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival. My hope is that there remains a primordial spark, a glimpse of genius, to rediscover, to recon

Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi: Google thinks it owns the internet. That’s the subtext of its lawsuit against SerpApi, the quiet part that it’s suddenly decided to shout out loud. The problem is, no one owns the internet. And the law makes that clear. In January, we promised that we would fight this lawsuit to protect our business model and the researchers and innovators who depend on our technol

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery: In fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company. The reason goes back to the question of international law, North Korea, and the rest: International law is ultimately a f

Amrith Ramkumar, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Trump’s announcement came shortly before the Pentagon’s Friday afternoon deadline for Anthropic to agree to let the military use its models in all lawful-use cases, a concession the company had refused to make. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said on Thursday. The comp

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: A seasonal color refresh arrived today for a variety of Apple accessories, including iPhone cases, Apple Watch bands, and the Crossbody Strap. All of the accessories in the latest colors are available to order on Apple.com starting today.  ★

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more memory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same starting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks like editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a faster Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more unified system memory than the previous generation. With M4, iPad Ai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publieke of in ieder geval breed aangekondigde praatjes. Tenzij anders vermeld was het onderwerp minstens deels digitale autonomie, soevereiniteit, of cloudafhankelijkheid. De lijst is nog niet compleet. Eerdere jaren zijn op mijn oude praatjespagina te vinden. Ook zijn er praatjes die niet publiekelijk aangekondigd zijn. 2024 27 augstus, AFM (AI) 25 november, Kiesraad 18 december, CBS 2025 29 jan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is, for what they represent

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

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

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

The End of Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not alone in seriously doubting it

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

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

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

Chapter 14: The Dialogue

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

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

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

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

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

I made an interactive version of xkcd 2347, the dependency comic, where you can drag blocks out of the tower and watch everything above them collapse. Matter.js handles the physics and Rough.js gives it the hand-drawn xkcd look. Each reload generates a different tower from a seeded PRNG that picks a taper profile, varies the block sizes and row widths, and drifts the whole thing slightly off-cent

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

hat tip to Kylie Robison.

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

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

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

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

Call you Congresspeople, right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In December I wrote about package managers using git as a database, and how Cargo’s index, Homebrew’s taps, Go’s module proxy, and CocoaPods’ Specs repo all hit the same wall once their access patterns outgrew what a git repo is designed for. homebrew-core has one Ruby file per package formula, and every brew update used to clone or fetch the whole repository until it got large enough that GitHub

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

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

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

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

The Trump administration is literally playing with fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The word “attestation” now means two unrelated things in open source, and the people using it in each sense don’t seem to be talking to each other much. npm and PyPI have both shipped build provenance attestations using Sigstore over the past couple of years. When you publish a package from GitHub Actions with trusted publishing configured, the CI environment signs an in-toto attestation binding t

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

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

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

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

So you want to add OSM as an OAuth provider to Auth0? Here's a tip - you do not want to create a custom social connection! Instead, you need to create an "OpenID Connect" provider. Here's how. OpenSteetMap As per the OAuth documentation you will need to: Register a new app at https://www.openstreetmap.org/oauth2/applications/ Give it a name that users will recognise Give it a redirect of…

Some things I learned — and still hope to learn — from my mother

For about three decades, Fry’s Electronics was the go-to computer store for enthusiasts, almost an Ikea of computer stores. It was a big box store, larger than Comp USA, selling not just software and pre-built computers and peripherals, but also The post What happened to Fry’s Electronics appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A few days ago some 4 or 5 OpenClaw instances opened blogs on Bear. These were picked up at review and blocked, and I've since locked down the signup and dashboard to this kind of automated traffic. What was quite funny is that I received a grumpy email from one of these instances contesting the ban. I was tempted to ask it for its API keys after I saw what it had posted the day prior: The day I w

You download a package from a registry and the registry says it was built from a particular git commit, but the tarball or wheel or crate you received is an opaque artifact that someone built on their machine and uploaded. Reproducible builds let you check by rebuilding from source yourself and comparing, and if you get the same bytes, the artifact is what it claims to be. Making this work require

Today's links Socialist excellence in New York City: The real efficiency is insourcing and ending public-private partnerships. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: UK antipiracy office will catch Firefox crooks; Batpole flip-top bust; "Order of Odd-Fish"; Scott Walker v fake Kochl; Billg wants to backdoor Microsoft; NSA spied on world leaders; Trump They Live mask; "Unicorns

I was doing some research today and ran into a couple instances where part of one law was copied and pasted verbatim into another law. I suppose this is not uncommon, but I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t have that much experience comparing laws. I do, however, consult for lawyers and have to look […] Copy and paste law first appeared on John D. Cook.

The "agentic swarm" vision of productivity is comfortingly familiar. Which should be an immediate red flag... You take the existing corporate hierarchy, you replace the bottom layers with a swarm of AI agents, and you keep humans around as supervisors. It's an org chart with robots

The recurring theme this week seems to be around the gap between breaches happening and individual victims finding out about them. It's tempting to blame this on the corporate victim of the breach (the hacked company), but they're simultaneously dealing with a criminal intrusion, a ransom

A review of portable monitors for travel

For the past few weeks I've been asking myself why I'm still on Farcaster, whether I'll stay, whether I even want to. I've landed on some answers. Farcaster, for the uninitiated, was the most credible attempt anyone has made at building a

John Coltrane’s song Giant Steps is known for its unusual and difficult chord changes. Although the chord progressions are complicated, there aren’t that many unique chords, only nine. And there is a simple pattern to the chords; the difficulty comes from the giant steps between the chords. If you wrap the chromatic scale around a […] Giant Steps first appeared on John D. Cook.

Over the years, I’ve used different icon sets on my blog. Right now I use Heroicons. The recommended way to use them is to copy/paste the source from the website directly into your HTML. It’s a pretty straightforward process: Go to the website Search for the icon you want Hover it Click to “Copy SVG” Go back to your IDE and paste it If you’re using React or Vue, there are also npm packages you can

Now that I'm not spending all my time on Logic for Programmers, I have time to update my website again! So here's the first blog post in five months: Some Silly Z3 Scripts I Wrote. Normally I'd also put a link to the Patreon notes but I've decided I don't like publishing gated content and am going to wind that whole thing down. So some quick notes about this post: Part of the point is admittedly t

Sniffing the synchronous keyboard state is still not precise enough. The post Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Detecting the ESC key, second (failed) attempt appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Or at least very very far from what it has been cracked up to be

There's a conspiracy theory that suggests that since around 2016 most web activity is automated. This is called Dead Internet Theory, and while I think they may have jumped the gun by a few years, it's heading that way now that LLMs can simulate online interactions near-flawlessly. Without a doubt there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of interactions happening online right now between bots tryin

Big moves in roots can correspond to small moves in chords. Imagine the 12 notes of a chromatic scale arranged around the hours of a clock: C at 12:00, C♯ at 1:00, D at 2:00, etc. The furthest apart two notes can be is 6 half steps, just as the furthest apart two times can […] Tritone substitution first appeared on John D. Cook.

This book doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a sociology textbook, travel guide, history book, or guide to the mysteries of the world? Subtitled "the temporal misadventures of a social psychologist" it veers between hard data and well-worn anecdotes until it becomes a sort of self-help book for the time-poor 1990s American executive. Despite being well-caveated against the "dangers in…

The history of Dell computers is a classic story of how a little guy took on a titan of business and ended up becoming a titan himself, the kind of story Americans love to tell. Like many computer industry stories, The post History of Dell computers appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Sometimes, I have 50 tabs open. Looking for a single piece of information ends up being a rapid click on each tab until I find what I'm looking for. Somehow, every time I get to that LinkedIn tab, I pause for a second. I just have to click on the little red dot in the top right corner, see that there is nothing new, then resume my clicking. Why is that? Why can't I ignore the red notification badg

Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off. There is an overwhelming feeling that if everyone

Today's links Deplatform yourself: Copyright infringement is your least entertainment dollar. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Lawer" threatens suit; Landmark metaphotos; 3DP v (c); Forced arbitration; Imperial Scott Walker; Keysigning ritual; Polyfingered robot dictaphone; DNS bug; Register of copyright damns term extension; How Anonymous decides; Christchurch quake pe

I get it: Large Language Models are interesting... but you should not give "Agentic AI" access to your computer, accounts or wallet. You have no idea what it will do This isn't a theoretical concern. There are multiple cases of LLMs wiping people's computers [1] [2], cloud accounts [3], and even causing infrastructure outages [4]. --> What's worse, LLMs have a nasty habit of lying about wha

I benchmarked 19 web frameworks on how efficiently an AI coding agent can build and extend the same app. Minimal frameworks cost up to 2.9x fewer tokens than full-featured ones.

The previous post looked at the Bitcoin network hash rate, currently around one zettahash per second, i.e. 1021 hashes per second. The difficulty of mining a Bitcoin block adjusts over time to keep the rate of block production relatively constant, around one block every 10 minutes. The plot below shows this in action. Notice the […] Bitcoin mining difficulty first appeared on John D. Cook.

SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs. “We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done right!" “YEAH!” SOON: there are 15 competing AI labs. (See: xkcd on standards.) The irony: “we’re the responsible ones” is each lab’s founding mythology as they spin out of each other. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

When I first heard of cryptographic hash functions, they were called “one-way functions” and seemed like a mild curiosity. I had no idea that one day the world would compute a mind-boggling number of hashes every second. Because Bitcoin mining requires computing hash functions to solve proof-of-work problems, the world currently computes around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes, […] Exahash, Ze

On Pizzas, CSVs, and Building for Markets That Don't Exist Yet

Twenty five years ago today, the EU's IST advisory group published a paper about the future of "Ambient Intelligence". Way before the world got distracted with cryptoscams and AI slop, we genuinely thought that computers would be so pervasive and well-integrated that the dream of "Ubiquitous Computing" would become a reality. The ISTAG published an optimistic paper called "Scenarios for ambient…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The

I’ve written a couple times about Fibonacci numbers and certificates. Here the certificate is auxiliary data that makes it faster to confirm that the original calculation was correct. This post puts some timing numbers to this. I calculated the 10 millionth Fibonacci number using code from this post. n = 10_000_000 F = fib_mpmath(n) This […] 10,000,000th Fibonacci number first appeared on John D.

Nerd Quiz #4 is the fourth instalment of Nerd Quiz, a single page HTML application that challenges you to measure your inner geek with a brief quiz. Each question in the quiz comes from everyday moments of reading, writing, thinking, learning and exploring. This release introduces five new questions drawn from a range of topics, including computing history, graph theory and Unix. Vi

Nvidia was only invited to invest. That is one reversal of commitment. Remember that graph that has been circling around for some time now? The one that shows the circular investment from AI companies: Basically Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI will then invest $300 billion in Oracle, then Oracle invests back into Nvidia. Now, Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO, is back tra

I’ve written before about computing big Fibonacci numbers, and about creating a certificate to verify a Fibonacci number has been calculated correctly. This post will revisit both, giving a different approach to computing big Fibonacci numbers that produces a certificate along the way. As I’ve said before, I’m not aware of any practical reason to […] Computing big, certified Fibonacci numbers firs