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Systems Thinking
A blog about software development and programming.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,713 posts.
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It's all a blur
Designing a slightly sneaky blur filter and then poking holes in it.
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I reversed Tower of Fantasy's anti-cheat driver: a BYOVD toolkit never loaded
How four layers of authentication in a production anti-cheat driver still hand you a complete BYOVD toolkit
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GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
Why GitHub Actions is the Internet Explorer of CI, and why Buildkite offers a better path forward for teams that care about developer experience.
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The RCE that AMD won't fix
After reporting a RCE in AMD's auto-update software, they decided to not patch it due to it requiring a man-in-the-middle attack to perform.
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The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and …
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My AI Adoption Journey
My experience adopting any meaningful tool is that I've necessarily gone through three phases: (1) a period of inefficiency (2) a period of adequacy, then finally (3) a period of workflow and life-altering discovery.
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Stop using icons in data tables
We have been sold a lie that icons are the universal language of the modern interface.
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CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook
Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided …
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Company as Code
Reimagining organisational structure for the digital age.
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A few CPU hardware bugs
Catherine (Whitequark)’s recent observations on poorly-engineered firmware reminded me of a few mistakes I’ve seen in vendors’ CPUs; some unimportant and others surprisingly bad. Since I’ve never seen these widely discussed, here’s some discussion and links to supporting evidence to make them more widely known, since…
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Wirth's Revenge
Are LLMs the final blow in the war against Wirth's law?
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OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been
Something strange is happening with Mac Minis. They’re selling out everywhere, and it’s not because people suddenly need more coffee table computers. If you browse Reddit or HN, you’ll see the same pattern: people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use. They’re setting up headless…
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Claude Composer
What happens when you ask Claude Code to compose music? Five experiments later: original songs, music videos, and a full album, all built from scratch.
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Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
Like many Unix users, I long ago created a ~/bin/ directory in my home directory and added it to my PATH so that I could supplement the wonderfully rich set of basic Unix commands with some conveniences and shell scripts of my own devising.
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Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch
In November, my friend and fellow Recurser, Frank , picked up an arcade machine for the Recurse Center . We call it the RCade. He wanted to leave the original CRT in - which I think is a great choice! - and drove it off of a Raspberry Pi. Eventually we wanted to move to a more powerful computer, but we needed a way to…
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AI is killing B2B SaaS
SaaS is the most profitable business model on Earth.1 It’s easy to understand why: build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffer any marginal costs on more sales. I have been writing software for more than half my life. In the last year itself, I’ve talked to hundreds of founders and operators…
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The F Word
Back in 2005, when I first joined the SUNY Buffalo CSE department, the department secretary was a wonderful lady named Joann, who was over 6...
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I miss thinking hard
AI has changed the experience of being an engineer, starving my Thinker side while satisfying the Builder ...
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How I've run major projects (2025)
focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit
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Tractor
The electric tractor is finished! I have been working on this on and off for about 6 months. It is a toy for children (and me) to drive around the garden.
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I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
I made 20 GDPR data deletion requests in the past year. 2 complied immediately. 6 complied after I filed complaints with data protection offices. 12 still haven't. The regulation exists, the enforcement doesn't.
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Sandboxing AI Agents in Linux
Like many developers, I find myself more and more using AI agents to help with software development. I currently use Claude Code, the co...
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221 Cannon is Not For Sale
Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life. It’s annoying, but thankfully I’ve avoided some of the more catastrophic outcomes when criminals begin impe…
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1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
We usually learn that 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, 1 MB is 1024 kilobytes, etc. But is this true or a kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
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AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was
How generative AI exposes the gap between copyright law and everyday enforcement, from fan art and private creation to commercial competition.
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A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
over the past week the discourse around openclaw (fka clawdbot) has absolutely exploded. it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible. some are running openclaw with unlimited permissions on their main computers. others are running it in the cloud and blowing…
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Understanding Neural Network, Visually
An interactive visualization to understand how neural networks work
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LLMs as the new high level language
[UPDATE 2026-06-09]: a few months on, I have more misgivings than certainties about this.