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Mark Zuckerberg, in an op-ed Tuesday for The Wall Street Journal (gift link; and irony isn’t lost that “everyone” needs a paid WSJ subscription to read this): We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express our ideas,

Samuel Axon, Ars Technica: Apple has released iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS 26.6. Apart from potential security hotfixes, these are likely the last updates before the arrival of iOS 27, macOS 27, and so on. All of today’s releases include minor bug fixes, and there are numerous security updates: more than 150 for macOS 26.6. Apple also rolled out macOS 14.8.8 and macOS 15.7.8 for older dev

Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog back in April: Though Sparkle serves us very well, it has one notable downside. Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time: right after you’ve launched the app. You want to start recording with Audio Hijack, for instance, but the app is telling you about a new version. We’ve long wished to avoid these disruptions. With that in

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

Damon Beres, writing for The Atlantic under the hed/subhed: “The New iPhone Underclass: Apple’s rental program is a trap”: The Klarna plan — “Apple Upgrade,” which replaces the iPhone Upgrade Program — is truly, legally, a lease. This is confusing! And it’s confusing in part because this is not how Klarna, a well-known buy-now, pay-later service, typically operates: When you use Klarna for clothin

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

Ryan Christoffel, writing for 9to5Mac: Apple Upgrade launched this week, and the iPhone Upgrade Program is being discontinued as a result. But despite some similarities, the two offerings are not the same. Here are the key differences. I wrote yesterday that there seemingly is no catch with the new Apple Upgrade program, but there’s at least one, which Christoffel’s piece doesn’t note. When you le

Today's links The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing: Since 1850, San Francisco's Chamber of Commerce has been pissing in our mouths and calling it rain. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Wau Holland; Diebold voting machines suck; How to steal an RFID-locked car; Pirates are big spenders; You can't fight enshittification. Upcoming appearances: Edinb

A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.

I've mostly tuned out of reading the news. But, once in a while, a headline will be shared on social media and I'll momentarily stare into the abyss. There has recently been a change in UK Prime Minister. I neither know nor care whether that's a good thing. What I do know is that Senior Political Correspondents collectively shat their pants with excitement at being able to breathlessly report…

Here’s a late ’80s memory you may not have thought about in a while. Do you remember going to the video rental store to rent a video game and getting the cartridge but not getting the instruction booklet? The reason The post When Nintendo sued Blockbuster appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

In February Simon Willison packaged a Go CLI as Python wheels, one wheel per platform with the compiled binary inside, so pip install sqlite-scanner fetches a program containing no Python. His build tool maps each Go target to a wheel tag on the way through: darwin/arm64 to macosx_11_0_arm64, linux/amd64 to manylinux_2_17_x86_64. PyPI accepted the uploads and pip picked the right platforms, and th

Humans make carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is bad for cognition. But plants turn carbon dioxide back into oxygen. And plants are the one true home decoration strategy. So maybe if you get a lot of plants, you can you can keep carbon dioxide in check and keep your brain working? It’s theoretically possible. It’s probably just barely possible in practice. But it won’t be easy. People produce ~1 kilo

There's a story that goes something like this: This is true. This is true. This is wrong, but it's the type of wrong that cites its sources and hides in the part you'd never think to fact check: In truth, increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way... but people think they want a long lasting lightbulb: the purpose of standardizing was to avoid a race to the bottom.

Last week 9to5Mac reported on code in the latest iOS 27 developer beta seemingly meant to restrict leased devices after the user had missed one or more payments. When engaged, Restricted Mode limits the device to the following apps: Accessibility Reader App Store Health Magnifier Phone Clock Settings Wallet Passwords And some limited access to apps like Messages or health-related apps that might h

Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to the constraints around screen size. It has since spread to many other parts of software interactio

His reputation is crashing

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced Apple Upgrade, a new product leasing program provided by Klarna for iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad available on the Apple Store online, in the Apple Store app, and at Apple Store locations in the United States. Apple Upgrade makes it even easier for customers to get the Apple products they love with a leasing plan that is right for them. [...] Apple Upgrad

New from Tapbots: version 3 of their excellent clipboard manager for Mac. There are so many clipboard managers for the Mac. I run two other apps — Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar — that offer good clipboard managers as ancillary features. But for years now I’ve chosen to use Pastebot. Chief among my favorite features: Remembers up to 1,500 clippings (up from a mere 1,000 in v2). Syncs via iCloud. I

It's done. Logic for Programmers is now 1.0 and available in print. Full announcement here, official website here, direct Amazon link here. If you got an early version of the ebook, you can go back to leanpub to download the 1.0 for free. This marks the completion of a project that took five years of work, six bookwriting professionals, fourteen domain experts, and fifteen public alphas. This has

When I finished my project training an LLM from scratch, I was left with a minor mystery. Why were my models worse at instruction-following than the original OpenAI GPT-2 small weights? I had an evaluation that I was running, based on the instruction fine-tuning code in chapter 7 of "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". The process was to train a model on samples from the Alpaca instruct

Nate Anderson, reporting for Ars Technica under the headline “A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man to Prison for 18 Months”: Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the p

If a human-level software engineer that could run on an H100 equivalent, at current market rates for software engineers, that H100 should rent for over $250k a year. That’s 15x today’s spot price.

Emma Roth, The Verge: eBay and three former executives will pay $55.7 million as part of a settlement with a Massachusetts couple targeted with a bizarre harassment and cyberstalking campaign in 2019, as reported earlier by CNBC. The settlement will resolve a lengthy legal saga that revealed how eBay’s former executives sent live insects, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, and other strange item

Exceptions hiding in lambda captures. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 8 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Onlangs presenteerde ik kort na elkaar bij het Netwerk van Publieke Dienstverleners en bij de Adviesraad Wetenschap, Technologie en Innovatie over AI. In deze twee verschillende maar korte presentaties hoopte ik wat inzichten te delen die nuttig zijn voor mensen die nu aan het stuur zitten, mensen die keuzes kunnen of moeten maken over AI-beleid. Dank aan NPD en AWTI voor de uitnodigingen en de st

Who did more than any other person in history to make computers affordable? My nomination goes to Sir Clive Sinclair, who was born July 30, 1940. And I’m an American who never used one of his computers. Clive Sinclair: King The post Clive Sinclair: a US perspective appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global: The good globalism. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Fonz thumps x Linux; CBC v DRM; Aussie mall v photos; English town x CCTVs; Pay no taxes x Big Tech; Games Workshop v gamers; Delta x surveillance pricing. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances:

Not that anyone even knows what that means.

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

Dan Frommer, writing for Business Insider in 2011 about that year’s WWDC (Jobs’s last): While discussing Apple’s free, new iCloud email service, he took an apparent jab at Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and the others, which stuff ads in their free email services. “No ads,” he boasted. “We build products that we want for ourselves, too, and we just don’t want ads.” Jobs’s “we” is interesting to ponder here. A

A couple years ago I wrote about how to compute the inverse of factorial. I used that code in writing the previous post because the post required solving the equation ⌊log2(n!)⌋ ≥ b given b. That is, given a number of bits b, find the smallest value of n such that n! ≥ 2b. What the […] Inverse factorial improved first appeared on John D. Cook.

Further explorations into exception safety. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 7 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

How a trip in 2012 transformed my relationship with photography—from staged performances to capturing genuine moments that matter, for engagement rather than validation.

The previous post looked at the idea of storing a cryptographic key in the order of a deck of cards. A deck of 52 cards can store 225 bits of data because ⌊log2(52!)⌋ = 225. Here ⌊x⌋ is x rounded down to the nearest integer. If we want to store bigger keys, we’re going to need […] Cryptographic Keys and Decks of Cards first appeared on John D. Cook.

For several years, Google's product help forums have been littered with people trying to download a .ics event from their email, only to receive the error "Unable to launch event" when trying to add it to Google Calendar. It doesn't happen with all iCal attachments, only some. Here's how to fix it. I checked dozens of broken iCalendar invites using this iCal validator and they all had the same

On June 29, 1993, IBM released the first energy star computer, the IBM PS/2 E. The “E” stood for energy. But while it was undeniably more efficient than other desktop PCs, arguably it was a PS/2 in name only. To The post IBM PS/2 E: The first Energy Star computer appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Discernment: How can you fact-check AI when you're asking it to teach you something you don't understand? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: How to help with computers; Batman equation; Fuck and the law; NC's racist voting law; Pregancy app is full of spyware; Stiglitz v Apple's "tax fraud"; Accelerometer fingerprinting; Sacklers v bankruptcy; Boss-politics a

Every major release of Rails sets off a wave of releases across the rest of the gem ecosystem. An application that tries to upgrade runs bundle update rails and Bundler refuses, because some gem in the tree only allows activesupport up to the previous major. The error names the gem, an issue gets filed on its tracker, and a maintainer who had nothing to do with the Rails release widens a version r

Amodei in his latest blog post wrote a mix of agreeable things and things that I believe misrepresent where the real risk of AI is located. I want to focus my attention on why, among all the risks, open weight models constitute the mildest one. I write these words as a person who strongly believes AI may be very dangerous in the near future: 1. Exactly like what happened during the OpenAI / HF in

Every phone now ships with an assistant. You ask, it answers. Lame. We built a phone that writes software instead. The app idea you’ve had in your notes for years. The side hustle you will never get around to building. The weird thing only you would want. Describe it, answer a few questions, and it’s on your home screen — yours, working, sendable to a friend. No app store between you and your idea

Jason Snell: Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. Not its real estate, not its intellectual property, not even any particular product. Even the mighty iPhone has no value if, over time, the traits that differentiate it from competitor products are erased. Apple’s brand has always stood for higher quality products — you pay more, but you get more. Apple has never wanted to be the low-price lea

To blog is to get dunked on. I accept this. I even sometimes wonder if I should be grateful, as I suspect my willingness to get dunked on may represent a kind of comparative advantage. (You can tell yourself that if you try to placate the haters, you’ll just ruin things for people who like you. But how do you feel when you’re staring down barrel of a 127 comment thread full of people debating how

Originally published on Rails At Scale. We recently enabled a really cool feature in ZJIT that makes it feel like a Real Compiler™: the inliner! We’ll write more about it soon. In this post, we’ll talk about one excellent concrete benefit we are already seeing and how it optimizes blocks in pretty much every Ruby program. I’ll start off with a refresher on how blocks work in the Ruby interpreter,

What does the world look like when AI outcompetes humans?

The latest issue of Paged Out! has an article by Stephen Hewitt “An off-line backup of your cryptographic key using playing cards.” The idea is to use a deck of 52 to store a 128-bit cryptographic key. To erase the key, shuffle the deck. Hewitt gives his algorithm for embedding a key, one that can […] Hiding data in permutations first appeared on John D. Cook.

Jason Grigsby has a great article where he surfaces an opinion from the Safari team about how AI agents shouldn’t get special treatment: An agent acting on a user’s behalf is, in effect, assistive technology: it should operate a site as the user would, and the site should not single it out for different treatment. Jason synthesizes different discussions happening at standards levels to argue, in

My brain-breaking trick for weaning off of Facebook involved creating a fake URL for Google News. Blame the home row. Old habits die hard, and the one that led to this post died a lot harder than some of the others. Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because I find it an extremely ea

Regarding my recent pieces regarding Apple’s shitty ads in the App Store and Apple News (and, perhaps soon, Apple Maps), a friend sent me this pithy take: The ads Apple is happy to inflict on us in its apps are the equivalent of the stickers it would never allow on its physical products. Bullseye. That’s what those stickers on PCs are: they’re ads. Intel pays for the “Intel Inside” stickers that b

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their MCP server. Debugging SSO, managing users, adjusting auth policies, configuring branding: every configuration task has lived behind a UI that only a human can drive. The WorkOS MCP server gives agents the same access as your dashboard login. Hundreds of operations, discoverable at runtime. Connect in one command via OAuth, with sc

My post from yesterday on permutation roots ends with a Mathematica code for finding the probability that a permutation of n elements has a kth root. This is done by finding the coefficient of xn in the generating function I wanted to say more about this, and look at implementing the same code in SymPy. […] Counting permutations with roots first appeared on John D. Cook.

It’s well known that you can convert the base 16 (hex) representation of an integer to the base 2 (binary) representation by simply converting each digit from hex to binary. For example, CAFEhex = 1100 1010 1111 1110two I imagine it’s less well known that you can do the same thing with floating point numbers. […] Printing floating point numbers in binary first appeared on John D. Cook.

Nvidia is falling. The mood has changed.

Exception-safety, the invisible bug. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 6 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I’ve talked a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of old milestone operating systems. But what were the advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1, first released July 27, 1993? That’s a fair question, and there are valid reasons it The post Advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump): Grant me the courage to change the things I can. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Chilling Effects; Billy Bragg v Myspace; Glenn Beck calls murdered Norwegian children "Hitler Youth"; Photog sues Getty for $1b copyfraud; Best paid CEOs perform worst; Olympics v "Olympics"; Alberta tar sands v "hot lesbians"; IoT

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. Instead, I’m going to occasionally jump into the parts of it that look interesting. In the previous two installations of this series, we looked at ways of implementing generic functions. In the first one, by tagging values and dispatching ope

Let σ be a permutation on n elements. If there is a permutation τ such that applying τ twice has the same effect on the list of elements as applying σ once, we say σ = τ² and τ is a square root of σ. If we let our n elements be the integers 0 […] Permutation roots first appeared on John D. Cook.

A couple weeks ago, the CEO of Snap was all over the news in the US because he and his wife made a large donation. The weird part about it was that every news outlet that covered it had an acrobatic title where they didn't specifically say how much they donated, yet insisted on that $550 Million amount. When you read the article a bit deeper, you can do the math. They donated one hundredth of tha

The function expq(x) is defined by taking the power series for exp(x) and keeping only the terms whose index is a multiple of q. For example, exp2(x) keeps only the even-numbered terms in the exponential power series and so equals cosh(x). In general, The first sum uses Iverson’s bracket notation: a Boolean expression in brackets […] exp_q first appeared on John D. Cook.

To call this derivative is an understatement. But that's what this genre demands; rehash all your favourite media properties into something new. It's the literary equivalent of having your Transformers™ fight your He-Man© toys. The plot, such as it is, features the Vogon Constructor Fleet destroying Earth due to a late beurecratic appeal, forcing people to play The Hunger Games, while a Twitch …

ARCNET was the first commercially available local area network standard, beating both Ethernet and Token Ring to market. Conceptually, it had similarities with both, and because it was inexpensive and efficient, it was popular for a good 15 years or The post What happened to ARCNET appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The Origin Energy breach down here in Aus is all over the news this week, and as with many breaches, it's multi-faceted. You've got them leading with "don't worry, your credit card is fine", the hacker leading with "they didn&

Fascinating essay by Nikhil Suresh: On a trip overseas, I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the Fortune 500 executives mentioned at the beginning of the post, who will remain anonymous so that they are not executed by firing squad by their board. As we were chatting, it became clear that they were very switched-on and technically competent, and they also happened to be at a company that h

The European Commission on Thursday: The Commission found that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search, thereby breaching its obligations under the DMA. Google displays its own services more prominently in search results, including at the top of the search results page or by usin

Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted our motion to dismiss Google’s lawsuit, marking a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet. We’re pleased that the court rejected Google’s attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages. The internet’s founding principle — open access to us

Apple Newsroom: Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Coming to Ford’s UEV Platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps inform

Teddy Rosenbluth, reporting for The New York Times: On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that there have been 2,318 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. The case count toppled the record set last year, when measles infected more than 2,200 Americans and killed two unvaccinated children. More measles cases have been reported in the United States in the last tw

China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more.

I was working with a wide spreadsheet from a client the other day and I had to convert between Excel column labels and column numbers. I had never paid attention to how Excel labels columns and implicitly thought it was base 26 using letters rather than digits. But then I realized that’s not right. Excel […] Excel column numbering first appeared on John D. Cook.

I've performed a talk at the last three EMFs - so this time I decided to go purely as a tourist. It made things much more relaxing. No waking up from a stress dream that my laptop didn't work. No casually dropping my talk into every conversation to build up an audience. No queueing for the loos five minutes before going on. No adrenaline spikes or come downs. It was bliss! After several…

(This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base knowledge needed, and he was obviously a very brilliant programmer. But that operation of writing a minimal yet working Unix ke

Today's links Apple's robo-repo: Privatizing the risk premium, socializing its costs. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Printed batteries; Monopoly credit cards; Mapping airport power outlets; EMI loves pirates; Mexican indigenous phone co-op; Sewer cover textiles; Surge pricing v antitrust; Carbon offsets v forest fires; Charter schools as money laundries. Upcoming appea

Week ten of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases RubyGems and Bundler 4.0.17 validate the spec name before writing to the spec cache, escape glob metacharacters in install paths, and fix a run of Windows path-handling bugs in gem open, bundle open and the MAKE/rake environment variables. uv 0.11.31 lets workspace

I mentioned I'd got a new RTX 3090 on a group chat, and a friend said: I know this is not really your thing... but let me know how quickly it runs Qwen 3.6 35bn MoE. With only 24gb of VRAM you’ll need to use a 4-bit quantized version and you won’t get a massive context window. But it should still be pretty cool. He's right that it's not really been my thing -- I've been focusing on my own LL

China is closing the gap, but it’s not because we have too much regulation on AI

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, was on the David Senra podcast and I quite enjoyed the interview. (If you like the interview, you should read his book.) Ed talks about what he considered his job to be: get the dynamics right for groups of people working together. To do this, he would pull people out of meetings, make groups smaller, make them bigger, just

Opus 5: Richard III

Good morning premium subscribers! As ever, please ping me at ez@betteroffline.com if you have any questions. Oracle has one of the strongest mythologies in the tech industry. Ask a regular person and they’ll tell you that it’s “incredibly profitable” and “growing

Graphics for Professionals

Making sure to use the non-agile delegate non-agile-ly. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 5 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I didn't care for this book. It attempts to interweave botanical and cultural history with an autobiography and ends up doing neither particularly well. For every dose of poetry about the far-flung and exotic journey of the fruit, there's a dull recitation of facts from Wikipedia. Occasionally various origin myths of citrus varieties are presented - there's no attempt to engage with them, seek …

David Bunnell, born July 25, 1947, was the founder of three of the most successful computer magazines of all time. He even edited two of them simultaneously, straddling two very different worlds. He was not only a pioneer of tech The post David Bunnell, vintage computer magazine publisher appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links AI solipsists and AI cynics: You don't have to believe that AI "works" to believe that it's a good investment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Malware v stolen computer; Industrial material made from old coffee and melted cups; Austro-Germany's weird tunnels; Health data v Silicon Valley; Amusement parks v load-balancing. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, S

The following is a transcript of episode 214 of Green Squares, a podcast about building in public and staying green. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Transcription by OpenClaw-4.2. TYLER: Welcome back to Green Squares, I’m Tyler. Longtime listeners know I came up doing Proof of Work, rest in peace, and one thing I carried over from that show is a belief that the most interesting

I think I finally figured it out. That is, the reason why AI written articles suck: Both the author and I are reading the article for the first time. When an article is insightful I don't even mind the emdashes or that the stark truth is not X, but Y. A good take can transcend even llmism. But then you have questions, and somehow the author doesn't even know what you are talking about, it's simply

Codeberg recently changed its terms to exclude projects that are largely written with generative AI. Since I want GitHub to face competition I have thoughts. Codeberg is entirely within its rights to do this. It is an association with members and a democratic process, and that process produced a result. But democracy is a way of making a decision, not a guarantee that the decision is inclusive,

TL:DR Index 01 is in mass production What you need to know about Index 01 What can I do with Index 01? What to expect Things to be aware…

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AKA "Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I'm sick of it". I've been borrowing a portable 5G gateway from my Dad for a few weeks, for testing... and two weeks in a row, I've used it as a backup Internet option, since my Spectrum Business cable Internet has gone down. And yes, I'd get AT&T Fiber if I had the option, sadly they don't yet provide service at my studio. So I'm stuck with on

Cognitohazards can affect machines too.

This post takes a more abstract view of the previous post. That post looked at the concrete question of whether a number ever has the same sine in radians as in degrees. The relation between radians and degrees is irrelevant except that π/180 is an irrational number. Suppose α and β are two positive numbers […] An almost periodic function first appeared on John D. Cook.

Optimizing the context check. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 4 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Last time in our series on the nature of the construction productivity problem, we looked at economies of scale, finding that capturing economies of scale in homebuilding is difficult.

On July 23, 1996, Novell sold the intellectual property of Digital Research to Linux vendor Caldera. The common thread the two companies had was Ray Noorda. Noorda had been CEO of Novell and was Novell’s largest shareholder, and Caldera was The post The Caldera-Microsoft Lawsuit of 1996 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links California's privacy obstacle course: Malice or incompetence (why not both?). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Continuous partial attention, TSA is the worst; Trump's FCC v the future. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'e

Gisteren 22 juli was ik in Met het Oog op Morgen, een programma waar ik al 40 jaar naar luister (ik was er heel vroeg bij), dus ik vond het heel bijzonder daar te zijn! En het was ook erg leuk. Goed voorbereid door de redactie sprak ik met Sheila Sitalsing over de recent “uitgebroken AI hack”. Ik sprak iets te veel door Sheila heen, waarvoor excuses. Maar, ik denk ook dat we een paar dingen hebben

Reports coming in of the death of John C. Dvorak, apparently passed away on Monday (July 20th) from complications of heart bypass surgery. Dvorak started in wine and moved to silicon as an early columnist at InfoWorld, one of the pillar references for this particular blog because of its studious regular reporting, and most notably for PC Magazine where he had no less than two columns since at leas

PEP 752 was accepted at the end of June. It lets an organisation apply to PyPI to reserve a package name prefix, after which new uploads matching that prefix are rejected unless they come from the grant holder. Existing packages are grandfathered. The motivation is impersonation: someone publishing malware as google-cloud-something or apache-something gets the vendor’s name in front of it. The PEP

and what we should do about it

Thanks for reading this week’s free Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. Friday’s premium newsletter will ask the simple question: Is Oracle dying?  It’s been one year since I launched the premium newsletter, and I’ve decided to extend the discount

Even if you are as averse to semver as I used to be in the course of my programming activity, you can still think of open source software distribution as something that used to follow a fixed number of steps. There is a branch where developments happen, and this branch oftentimes happens to be not really ready for reliable work. Then you freeze the developments for a certain amount of time (even i

The object that actively refuses to be marshaled. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 3 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In the midst of our AI slop revolution, traveling to the West coast for Open Sauce this past weekend was the perfect antiseptic for rising costs, summer heat, and online divisiveness. It's ironic, then, that I used Claude to vibe code my Tufty GPS Time Badge. Partly due to time constraints, and partly because I wanted to see if I could complete a personal project end-to-end, without editing a l

Ordinarily the sine of x radians and the sine of x degrees are very different numbers. Having your calculator in radian mode when it should be in degree mode, or vice versa, results in a major error. But sometimes it doesn’t matter. A trivial example is when x = 0. A more interesting example is […] When sine of x degrees equals sine of x radians first appeared on John D. Cook.

I want to be able to share my location with my friends on social media. Twitter (RIP) had a way to attach an optional location to a post. Facebook still lets me check in to venues. But neither ActivityPub (Mastodon) nor AT Protocol (BlueSky) allow me to do that. I've been banging on about this for a while so was delighted to be invited to chat with the GeoSocial Task Force on their monthly call.

On July 23, 1985, Commodore introduced its Amiga 1000 computer. And let’s just say the world wasn’t ready for it yet. Dave Haynie, a Commodore engineer who worked on the later models, has said there was no such thing as The post Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Trump's America can't even win a rigged game: America has created a post-American world. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Fagin"; Scott McCloud on comics' future; Laurie Penny on Milo Yiannopoulos; Singaporean regulator rap; Conservatives as bitter rubes. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances:

The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one's television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG's webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a

Is creatine a weird steroid-like hormone or drug? No. Creatine is a nutrient. Most omnivores eat a gram or two per day from meat. Your body also synthesizes a gram or two per day. You need creatine to deliver energy inside of cells. It is normal and non-weird. Does creatine increase testosterone? Unlikely. This concern comes from one study in 2009 on 16 male rugby players.1 But that study is consi

Breaking down the Hugging Face security incident caused by OpenAI's own models during a benchmark run - the sandbox escape, the package proxy, and whether it's really a marketing stunt.

I recently had a project in which I had to reverse engineer a data analysis. There was some ambiguity regarding which of several possibilities someone chose for several of the variables, something analogous to the following example. Suppose you have three numbers with uncertain values with a known, or at least purported, sum. The first […] Forensic accounting in Python first appeared on John D. Co

Short-circuiting the easiest case. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Het is inmiddels duidelijk dat zelfs maar deels Amerikaanse bedrijven met allerhande middelen gedwongen kunnen worden om onze data te overhandigen aan de Amerikaanse overheid. Ook kan de dienstverlening gestaakt worden na een enkel briefje op Whitehouse.gov, wat zonder enige rechterlijke toetsing geplaatst kan worden. Tegen deze beide dingen is met papier niets te doen. Geen speciale afspraak zal

Humans are desire-driven machines: a business should help dissipate desires by satisfying them without exploiting you.

A couple days ago, Levent Alpöge, a mathematician working at Anthropic, discovered a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture using Claude Fable 5. I was curious whether most mathematicians were trying to prove or disprove the conjecture, so I asked Claude. Before a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture was found, did most mathematicians believe it was […] Locally everywhere does not imply ev

On January 2, 1975, Microsoft announced Altair Basic, their first product. It was a programming language for the MITS Altair 8800 computer, a product that let people write their own software for the new computer. The makers of the computer The post The First Microsoft Product appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I was reading through the fix for a package manager CVE last week and ran into a git flag I’d somehow never noticed: --end-of-options. My first reaction was that some LLM had hallucinated it, but it’s documented in gitcli(7), it was added in git 2.24.0 in November 2019, and it exists because git had already used -- for something else. In most Unix tools -- marks the end of option parsing, so rm --

Today's links Dealing with dickovers: The web is an open platform, and that matters. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Broadcast's bad week; Congress v wifi; EFF v DRM law; Snowden and bunnie's smartphone smartcase. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll

I reckon this week's video on how Claude is tying together info from UniFi, Home Assistant and the Pi-Hole is an absolute ripper. Or at least the concept is - if ever there was an actual value proposition for AI it's taking lots of noise and

Wherein we chase down a BASIC retrocomputing question that's bugged me for far too long.

You've probably heard this one before. It might have come from a parent, a teacher, or a friend who bought an expensive item and wanted to justify it. It goes something like this: A poor man buys a cheap pair of boots for a few dollars. They fall apart within a year, so he buys another pair. And another. Over five years, he spends far more than the man who bought one expensive, well-made pair

When we tried to get an intuition for the differences in distribution functions, we learned that children subjected to a treatment had greater variation in their score than the reference group. (Continue reading the full article on the web.)

This is an article I resisted writing for a long time.

Seven options, considered

The volume of a sphere of radius r is V = 4πr³ / 3 and the surface area is A = 4πr² and so the ratio of volume to area is V / A = r / 3. Surprisingly, the same ratio holds for all regular solids if r is the radius of the largest sphere […] Volume to Area ratio for Regular Solids first appeared on John D. Cook.

I’ve written several posts about using Claude or ChatGPT to generate Prolog or Lean code to solve a chess puzzle. I didn’t think Grok would be up to the task, though I didn’t try it. I’ve heard good things about Grok 4.5, so I gave it a shot. It did great. Here’s the problem, a […] Solving a chess puzzle with Grok 4.5 first appeared on John D. Cook.

The easy case is easy. The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 1 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Sinds 2024 run ik OpenTK, met als doel zo goed mogelijk te laten zien wat er in de Tweede Kamer allemaal gebeurt. En, om daar ook nuttige email-notificaties over te versturen. OpenTK is begonnen omdat ik (vanuit de Internetwereld) ineens geconfronteerd werd met een wet die over DNS (mijn hobby) ging en over een paar dagen in stemming zou komen. Dat was heel erg schrikken en ik dacht, dat kan ons n

In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them. It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions. One of the seminal texts in computer systems design…

I realized that it might be nice if you happen to stumble on this website if I had a way to recommend other websites you might enjoy. As it turns out this is a "blogroll", a concept I have never heard of before today but whatever. It'

On November 4th, 1997, MCI and Worldcom merged in a deal worth $37 billion. This was an attempt by two large telecommunications companies to to combine and rival AT&T, but instead it turned into one of the biggest scandals and The post The MCI Worldcom merger, bankruptcy, and scandal appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Memory Safety’s Hardest Problem Jul 20, 2026 Uplifting a lobsters comment for easier reference. The central memory safety counter example, the hardest case to solve, doesn’t have anything to do with destructors or heap: const std = @import("std"); const E = union(enum) { a: u128, b: []const u8, }; pub fn main() void { const bad_addr: u128 = @intFromPtr(&main); var e: E = .{ .b

The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram co

Suppose you want to search for a list of words. If you’re using grep, you can add the -f flag provide a file of regular expressions, and you can add the -F to tell it that the regular expressions are in fact just words. I did something like this a couple days ago when searching […] Fitting a regular expression to a list of words first appeared on John D. Cook.

Squares, high and low Let p be an odd prime number. Then half the numbers from 1 through p − 1 are squares and half are not. That is, for half of numbers 1 ≤ k < p, the equation x² = k mod p has a solution. The traditional name for these numbers is […] Sum of low squares first appeared on John D. Cook.

There are two wolves inside of me, lol. Some days I want to be a “designer”. Other days I want to be a “developer”. On the days I find myself wanting to feed the developer, it’s often because making something “work” seems easier (and more impressive) than making something “good”. Making something function often results in a reaction of “Wow, that’s so cool! It didn’t work before and now it does! A

I’m going to be the weirdo who complains about literally getting free stuff.

A setback for California Forever, a $500 million artillery shell plant not producing any shells, the difficulty of recycling EV batteries, manufacturing wire harnesses, and more.

I'm pretty sure this book is a psyop designed to demoralise a generation of starry-eyed dreamers. It is obviously written by the same people who told us not to land on Europa. A malignant energy designed to limit the scope of human ambition and thwart our plans to colonise the universe. The problem is, I can't find fault with any of their logic. The Weinersmiths make a compelling case that…

Week nine of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases pnpm 11.13 adds pnpm change, a native changesets-compatible release planner that handles version bumping, dependent propagation, fixed groups and per-package release lanes. It also adds pnpm team for registry organisation and team membership, and a versioning.epic

When a really long road ends, why don’t we do more to celebrate the staggering amount of collective work that went into it? The ancient Romans really outclassed the federal highway system on this front. Today in Tedium: What does it mean for a road to end? Particularly, a big, imposing one that represents an essential connection for millions of people across an entire country? Often, major highwa

Quick follow up to the previous two posts on ICD-10 codes and HCPCS codes. This post uses Python’s squarify library to create treemaps visualizing how many codes begin with each letter. Here’s the treemap for HCPCS codes. And here’s the treemap for ICD-10 codes. The sizes of the squares are proportional to the number of […] Visualizing Medical Code Hierarchy first appeared on John D. Cook.

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000, the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with… SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation. This may sound like satire, but it was all too real. To be clear, SimHealth was […]

Since I revisited my old post on ICD code matching, I thought I’d revisit by post on HCPCS codes too. HCPCS stands for Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System, and is pronounced “hick picks.” When most people say HCPCS, they technically mean HCPCS Level II, and that’s what I mean here. The format of a HCPCS […] Regular expressions for HCPCS codes first appeared on John D. Cook.

It's fixed, but the fix isn't getting there. The post Why has the display control panel pointer truncation bug gone unfixed for so long? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Seven years ago I wrote a post about regular expressions to match diagnosis codes. I wanted to revisit that post looking at speed and error rates. Regular expressions usually do not exactly match what you’re looking for and nothing else. They have error false positives and false negatives. But they also have advantages, and context […] Regular expression speed and error rates first appeared on Joh

Listening to two acquaintances argue about if AI art is "art" is not a new experience for me, the now eternal debate between Doomer and Boomer. In this particular context, I'm listening to it as I wait for my surprisingly expensive iced latte in downtown Copenhagen.

Back in January I released brew-vulns, a gem that added CVE scanning to Homebrew. It shelled out to brew info --json=v2, derived a source repository URL and version tag for each installed formula, and queried osv.dev for anything known against that repo at that version. As of Homebrew 6.0.11 that command is built in and the gem is deprecated. Getting useful answers out of brew vulns in between mea

When working on my latest book, The Secret Life of Circuits, I wanted to keep the artwork real.

One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there's the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off. FF DA - "start of scan" marker 00 0C - Big endian length field (12 bytes) Includes itself 03 - Number of channels in scan (3) 01 - Global id of first included channel 00 - Hu

I wish I could remember how this podcast came across my radar so I could give credit where it’s due. But alas, I cannot. It’s episode 217 with Dr. Iain McGilchrist. At one point, he shares his perspective about how science and reason can only take you so far: [science and reason] have their limitations. Most scientists and most philosophers are very well aware of that. Some people who are not terr

Today's links Deranged billionaires and their syndromes: The Mad Kings do love a syllogism. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: PoGo v binding arbitration; Trump beat some absolute losers; Public interest internet; "Close to the Machine"; Gadget-friendly chinos; Gambiologia; Monkey selfie copyright; Prison towns v prison reform. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melb

Inferring the code's history. The post Speculating on how the buggy control panel extension truncated a value that it had right in front of it appeared first on The Old New Thing.

An enormous amount of ink has been spilled (some of it by me) on the trials and tribulations of complying with the National Environmental Policy Act, better known as NEPA.

The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their DV2 camera to review. As their name suggests, this is a thermal / infrared camera - they've specifically designed this for bird watching and animal spotting. Let's put it through its paces and see how it compares to the competition! Straight away you can see it is different from normal IR cameras - they tend to have a small fixed screen and a

When I was a kid, my father bought a family home computer and placed it in the living room for all to see. When guests came to our house, they would stop by the computer and admire its marvel without even turning it on. While everyone else was careful with the computer, treating it like an important investment, I quickly started inserting discs and installing games. One thing we take for granted t

I just miss doing art. Don’t you? Naomi Kritzer, Better Living Through Algorithms i bought myself some presents. i like them. they're nice.

North is up (aprox). 0.53 "/pixel. [24' x 23' field] FWHM = 3.75" A relatively unremarkable spiral galaxy... but hey, what's that in the background? var current = false; function change() { current = !current; document.getElementById("notes").src = current?"/astro/ngc7497/notes.jpg":"/astro/ngc7497/small.jpg"; } Click to toggle annotations. (needs JS) Well, it's not actually in the b

Thanks for reading this week’s free Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. As I said last week, I’m taking the rest of this week off, so there won’t be a premium on Friday. That said, if you aren’t already a member,

With Sony clobbering the physical game market and Grand Theft Auto 6 eschewing discs entirely, it makes one long for kiosks that could make disks on demand—a model that actually once existed in the UK. Hey all, Ernie here with a quick piece from Matt Lee, who, like most of the rest of the internet, has been looking at Sony’s recent moves around physical media with dismay. He has an idea … If you

Gedonder op kantoor, de WC blijft maar lopen. En erger nog, hij trekt niet meer door. Strontvervelend! In een beetje grote organisatie gaat er nu druk gebeld worden, maar met wat pech loopt dat niet soepel. Facilitair beheer meent dat het niet hun probleem is. We bellen de verhuurder, maar die zegt wel over de riolering te gaan, maar niet over de toiletten. Na een weekje driftig telefoneren, betro

The Fourier series is a great tool for analyzing periodic functions. But what about functions that don’t repeat? We’ve seen that we can compute Fourier series for a non-periodic function defined on a finite interval, as long as we don’t care about its behavior beyond that interval. Let’s extend this idea to functions that never repeat; that is, non-periodic functions defined on the interval (-\inf

"Build a smart home", they said. "It'll make life so much better", they said. Well, life wasn't very bloody good at 23:00 the other night after travelling 33 hours from Paris only to find the IoT doorlock batteries dead and the

I like building websites. But in some circles, I might as well say that I like to drive to the forest before sunrise, chop down a tree, load it in my trunk, and gather some dry wood as well, then drive back before first light. All this just to use the wood to start a fire and cook breakfast for my family in our high-rise apartment. It makes no sense. There is a large class of apps that could b

Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.

Between travel obligations and this last heads-down-gotta-get-the-book-done stretch I haven't had time to write any newsletters or even look at social media. The good news is that Logic for Programmers should be done and available in print hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Here's all of the printed proofs I've made so far: And here's what the current proof looks like on the inside: Looking

Good news, for once.

I’ve been thinking about ICD-10 codes; they come up a lot in my work. The ICD-10-CM standard is divided into 21 chapters, which generally correspond to the first letter of a code. However, a chapter may contain blocks beginning with more than one letter, and codes starting with a single letter, namely D, can span […] ICD-10 chapters and code letters first appeared on John D. Cook.

My wife and I recently went on a 7 week holiday around Europe. Although we each took a massive backpack, we wanted to travel fairly lightly. I took a single universal power brick. This little unit was all I needed to charge my various gadgets. It has a hefty USB-C PD (Power Delivery) port for rapid charging of my phone and laptop. Two other USB-C ports for my other gadgets. And a couple of…

Today's links Gerontocracy's failure mode: Where are the designated survivors? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MSFT v MP3; UK industry v schoolkids; Gary Larson v comics sharing; Planned LED obsolescence; PoGo v Black neighborhoods; Gnarlier trolley problems; Royal Society v cryptographic backdoors; Theresa May v climate change; Google v search; Facebook v facts. Upcomi

TL:DR; Pebble Time 2 Shipping Status Pebble Software Updates PT2 - Issues You’ve Reported Pebble Round 2 Production Update Index 01…