3931
Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system
Announcing my latest open-source project.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,191 posts.
3932
Zmij: Faster floating point double-to-string conversion
There comes a time in every software engineer’s life when they come up with a new binary-to-decimal floating-point conversion method. I guess my time has come. I just wrote one, mostly over a weekend: https://github.com/vitaut/zmij .
3933
AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2
Some (well-known) consequences of AI automating work
3934
The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?
In 1950, while discussing the recent wave of flying saucer reports over lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a simple question. There …
3935
Bye, Mom
I get a text that my mom’s in the ICU.
3936
Compiler Engineering in Practice
“Compiler Engineering in Practice” is a blog series intended to pass on wisdom that seemingly every seasoned compiler developer knows, but is not systematically written down in any textbook or online resource. Some (but not much) prior experience with compilers is needed.
3937
My Gift to the Rustdoc Team
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
3938
If a Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why wouldn't the brain?
In 2023, Meta researchers were able to decode images in thoughts from the brain's magnetic fields. What if that's how the brain coordinates it's own global state?
3939
From Zero to QED: An informal introduction to formality with Lean 4
An informal introduction to formality in Lean 4
3940
Closures as Win32 Window Procedures
Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator…
3941
Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo
We have hundreds of easter-egg logos (featuring our friendly mascot Dax Brown) that surface when you make certain queries on our search engine. Our subreddit is trying to catch ‘em all. They’ve certainly caught a lot, currently 504, but we keep adding more so it’s a moving target. The total as of this post is 594. I’m…
3942
Recovering Anthony Bourdain's Li.st's
Loved reading through GReg TeChnoLogY Anthony Bourdain’s Lost Li.st’s and seeing the list of los...
3943
I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model
Yesterday I shared a little program called Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs . It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user that posted messages to various newsgroups using text…
3944
The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and final…
3945
I tried Gleam for Advent of Code
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
3946
30 years of <br> tags
Three decades of making things on the internet
3947
Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison20251,750 points1,049 commentscited by 16Society, Policy & Culture details
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple …
3948
OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just …
3949
50 years of proof assistants
Crackpots ranging from billionaire Peter Thiel to random YouTube influencers claim that science has been stagnating for the past 50 years. They admit that computing is an exception: they don’t pretend that my personal 32GB laptop is not an advance over the 16MB mainframe that served the whole Caltech community when I…
3950
3951
CM0 – A new Raspberry Pi you can't buy
This little postage stamp is actually a full Raspberry Pi Zero 2, complete with eMMC storage and WiFi. But you can't get one. Well, not unless you buy the CM0NANO development board from EDAtec, or you live in China. This little guy doesn't have an HDMI port, Ethernet, or even USB. It's a special version of the…
3952
Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers
A summary of the techniques in place to protect my git forge
3953
The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere
3954
“Are you the one?” is free money
One of my wife's guilty pleasures is reality TV, usually ones centred around dating - the more American, the better. By extension, I absorb some of this noise and I'm happy to admit I can sometimes get invested.
3955
Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud
Thoughts, stories and ideas about of a code poet, bit juggler & logic wizard.
3956
Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why
Preamble: The whole affair is Google’s fault and not Bear Blog’s. Huge thanks to Herman—Bear Blog’s founder and dev—for his patience and help. A month afte...
3957
Nokia N900 Necromancy
Building a fake battery, adding a USB-C port, booting from SD card, and giving a new life to a classic Linux smartphone.
3958
UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16
This is deranged, each nation’s boomers and reactionaries attempting to outdo the others: “Action to prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the United Kingdom” … th…
3959
What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?
One of the things I do when I'm feeling blue is to make a mental list of the nice things people have done for me over the years, including perfect strangers.
3960
An SVG is all you need
SVGs are pretty cool - vector graphics in a simple XML format. They are supported on just about every device and platform, are crisp on every display, and can have embedded scripts in to make them interactive. They're way more capable than many people realise, and I think we can capitalise on some of that unrealised…