3331
When the Dotcom Bubble Burst
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
3332
Building a Personal Archive with Hoarder
How to self-host a personal archive of web content even if stuff get's taken down
3333
The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
After the Graz, Austria February 2025 WG14 Meeting, I am now confident in the final status of the defer TS, and it is now time.
3334
Extracting content from an LCP “protected” ePub
As Cory Doctorow once said "Any time that someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you but won't give you the key, that lock's not there for you." But here's the thing with the LCP DRM scheme; they do give you the key! As I've written about previously, LCP mostly relies on the user entering their password (the…
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Rust on the RP2350 (2024)
Today sees the announcement of the latest additions to Raspberry Pi's microcontroller line-up - the RP2350 family. I've had prototype units for a while, and you can run Rust code on it today. To my knowledge this is the first ever microcontroller launch with Rust support out-of-the-box.
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The good times in tech are over
For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of…
3339
Some notes on Grafana Loki's new "structured metadata"
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
3340
Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a…
3341
Career Advice in 2025
Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of…
3342
ESP32 WiFi Superstitions
The ESP32 is a popular microcontroller to use for do-it-yourself home automation, sensors, and a variety of other bits and bobs that you might want to take care of around the house. It’s the successor to the venerable ESP8266 which has found its way into many of our WiFi connected devices (seriously, open up a device…
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The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet
Don't try to reform science. Not yet. Not in your PhD. In grad school, you'll start complaining about the publishing...
3344
That Time I Recreated Photoshop in C++
As I’m getting older I look back on all the things I’ve done as a creative developer, and I see so many cool projects! But I never wrote down any development
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How many artists' careers did the Beatles kill?
The sinister side of rock 'n' roll
3346
Lemma for the Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory
This post illustrates a key lemma that is used in proving the fundamental theorem of Galois theory (FTGT). Note that FTGT is not covered in this post. The focus of this post is on understanding and proving this lemma only. Here is the lemma from the book Galois Theory , 5th ed. by Stewart (2023):
3347
Milk Kanban
We ten to consider Kanban as (digital) whiteboards with columns and sticky notes, while its original meaning was just (any) visual signal.
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Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web
You’ve got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade. So we’re going to force you sell your car. What’s with the weird redirect? If …
3349
Decrypting encrypted files from Akira ransomware using a bunch of GPUs
I recently helped a company recover their data from the Akira ransomware without paying the ransom. I'm sharing how I did it, along with the full source code. Update: since this article was written, a new version of Akira ransomware has appeared that can't be decrypted with this method The c
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The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment
Your grandpa probably really did walk 5 miles to school in a foot of snow. A look at the changing numbers for how American students get to school.
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A 2FA app that tells you when you get `314159` (2024)
An indie project for early 2010s internet addicts
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Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
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In S3 simplicity is table stakes
From simple object storage to sophisticated table management, builders have always shaped S3's evolution. Andy Warfield discusses why making complex systems simple remains our north star at AWS.
3354
Hidden Messages in Emojis and Hacking the US Treasury
On December 30th, while most of us were preparing for a New Year’s Eve celebration, the US Treasury was prepping a notice to lawmakers to notify them that their systems, which (obviously) contain highly sensitive, confidential data, had been compromised.
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The Church FAQ
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks…
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Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat
libexpat is a fast streaming XML parser. Alongside libxml2, Expat is one of the most widely used software libre XML parsers written in C, specifically C99. It is cross-platform and licensed under the MIT license .
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History of Maths for Beginners
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
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Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?
In the quantum double-slit experiment, did the particle go through the slits or did the wave function? 1920's quantum physics has a simple answer: "NO".
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A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells
My journey making a Sudoku variant that doesn’t have rows or columns
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My teen years: The transputer operating system
History of the evolution of my C compiler and operating system for transputer when I was age 16.