3991
What it's like working for American companies as an Australian
My experience working across timezones for Americans
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
3992
Homomorphic encryption in iOS 18
A mathematical miracle enables Apple's servers to process your photos while never knowing anything about them
3993
Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts
thoughts, talks, docs and unpopular opinions
3994
De-smarting the Marshall Uxbridge
This is the story of a commercially unavailable stereo pair of thebi-amped Marshall Uxbridge, with custom-built replacement electronics:active filters feedin...
3995
The Chaos (1922)
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
3996
Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
Update 2024-01-12 : Ken Shirriff has an an excellent blog post on why “cargo cult” is a poor term of art.
3997
FreeBSD Suspend/Resume
I have been using FreeBSD on the desktops/laptops since about 20 years now and I have described all that I configured in the FreeBSD Desktop series. About 1 year ago I shared a video on YouTube and…
3998
A couple CSS tricks for HTML Dialog elements
You can use CSS to add some simple functionality to HTML <dialog> elements!
3999
Very Wrong Math
The difference between misinformation and disinformation is the difference between ignorance and malice. Trolling is somewhat different, incorporating an element of provocation and narcissism. But what the hell is this?
4000
Portals and Quake
Ever wanted to know how exactly did Quake’s precomputed visibility work? I did, so I wrote vis.py , a reimplementation of their algorithm in Python. This guide has all the information you need to understand vis , the tool used by Quake, Half-Life and Source Engine games.
4001
Building Bauble
I made something that I think is pretty neat, and I want to tell you about it. This is a little hot air balloon made out of alternating layers of brass and bronze that stack together with these angled facets: It’s 3D printed, sort of, but it really is solid metal – it’s not a metallic filament. It’s made by “lost wax…
4002
How we used GPT-4o for image detection with 350 similar illustrations
The Attic is a running catalog of Olup's side projects, sketches, and weekend rabbit holes.
4003
Getting silly with C, part (void*)2
They won't be able to find bugs in your code if they can't figure out how it works.
4004
Railroad Tycoon II
Like a lot of boys, I grew up loving trains. And like a lot of men, I retain my fascination for them today.
4005
Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice? (2024)
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
4006
I've acquired a new superpower
Yesterday, I was browsing Reddit. Midway through my feed, I stumbled upon a video from a German TV show, where a 9-year-old girl demonstrated her ability to…
4007
Who Can Understand the Proof? A Window on Formalized Mathematics
Stephen Wolfram discusses understanding proofs discovered using automated theorem proving. Based on Wolfram’s proof of the simplest axioms of logic of Boolean algebra.
4008
Decentralized Syndication – The Missing Internet Protocol
The Internet is decentralized by design. It came into being not at once, but in parts. New protocols were added on top of previous ones, but one crucial protocol is still missing.
4009
How outdated information hides in LLM token generation probabilities
Random tech notes
4010
Narcolepsy is weird but I didn't notice
There are certain kinds of experiences that most human beings know very little about because a) they are rare, b) they can only be felt from the "inside", i.e., by the people who have them, and c) not all of those people choose to, or are good at, writing
4011
A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)
There's a new web search in town! I spent the start of 2024 kicking the tires on Kagi's paid search and their Orion web browser.
4012
Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
4013
Celebrating the timeless allure of Tintin's aesthetics
The Adventures of Tintin officially entered the public domain in 2025. We now all own the alluring aesthetics of this timeless classic.
4014
4015
Why is my CPU usage always 100%?
If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 . At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I…
4016
Entropy of a Large Language Model output
Large language models like ChatGPT & Claude have become ubiquitous in today’s world. I visited a friend for the New years eve and was impressed by how ChatGPT was being extensively used within the family. The friend’s little kid is going to grow up in a world, where turning to large language models (LLM) for quick…
4017
Why Rust nextest is process-per-test
Why nextest runs each test in its own process: a game-theoretic view.
4018
4019
WorstFit: Unveiling Hidden Transformers in Windows ANSI
📌 This is a cross-post from DEVCORE. The research was first published at Black Hat Europe 2024. Personally, I would like to thank splitline, the co-author of this research & article, whose help
4020
The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
That's the problem with deploying play-acting as "solutions:" play-acting doesn't actually fix the problems at the source, it simply lets th...