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Isn't WSL2 just a VM?
My take on Windows NT subsystems and the thin line between VMs and subsystems.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,191 posts.
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Pebble Watch software is now open source
Pebble Watch Software Is Now 100% Open Source + Tick Talk #4 - PT2 Demos!
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The Bitter Lesson of LLM Extensions
From ChatGPT Plugins to Agent Skills, a look at how we've been trying (and failing) to extend LLMs for the last three years.
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X Just Accidentally Exposed a Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans
How a new X feature led to the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since 2016.
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NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand
Normal practice in deploying post-quantum cryptography is to deploy ECC+PQ. IETF's TLS working group is standardizing ECC+PQ. But IETF management is also non-consensually ramming a particular NSA-driven document through the IETF process, a "non-hybrid" document that adds just PQ as another TLS option.
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Fifty Shades of OOP
This post talks about the many different aspects under the umbrella term OOP
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Quake Engine Indicators
I was working on a bug in Chocolate Quake netcode. The issue was an edge case where starting two clients on the same machine resulted in the second one zombifying the first one. When the bug occurred there was no disconnection but the client could no longer move. Instead the screen would show an "indicator" looking…
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Build a Compiler in Five Projects
Class website here: https://kmicinski.com/cis531-f25
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RuBee
I have at least a few readers for which the sound of a man's voice saying "government cell phone detected" will elicit a palpable reaction. In Department of Energy facilities across the country, incidences of employees accidentally carrying phones into secure areas are reduced through a sort of automated nagging. A…
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Ego, empathy, and humility at work
In our daily lives empathy and humility are obvious virtues we aspire to. They keep our egos in check. Less obvious is that they're practical skills in the workplace, too. I think, for developers and technical leaders in particular, that the absence of ego is the best way to further our careers and do great work.
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Several core problems with Rust
I used to call myself a Rust hater, but really I was doing it just to compensate for the perceivable fanboyism e.g. Rust tops on stackoverflow surveys as most-loved language. There are many reasons to hate C++, and I hate C++ too. Lots of people were waiting for a better programming language, but got Rust instead.
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"Good engineering management" is a fad
As I get older, I increasingly think about whether I’m spending my time the right way to advance my career and my life. This is also a question that your company asks about you every performance cycle: is this engineering manager spending their time effectively to advance the company or their organization?…
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Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?
I’m not saying this will definitely happen, but I think we could be on the cusp of a significant shift in Windows market share for consumer computers. It is not going to drop to 2% in a year or anything, but I feel like a few pieces are coming
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We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
How quarterly fixit weeks help teams tackle small annoyances that never bubble up to the priority list.
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Indie, alone, and figuring it out
Going indie looks like freedom from the outside. But once you’re in it, you face loneliness, pressure, constant decisions, user feedback, and all the invisible work no one warns you about. This is what the journey feels like, and why it’s still worth it.
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Editing Code in Emacs
When you write code, you want to focus on the code, not on the text of the code. This means a) you have to have a good text editing setup, and b) you need to have a muscle-memory level instinct for using that setup. The second comes with practice and with consistency (i.e. not changing your config too much too…
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Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates
How to draw high fidelity graphics when all you have is an x and y coordinate.
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Signal knows who you're talking to (2023)
Recently I got a friend to finally join me on Signal. He asked something about whether or not Signal is truly secure and private, like if it was safe from US government surveillance. I told him: “Well, it’s end-to-end encrypted, so they don’t know what we’re talking about, but they definitely know that we’re talking…
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After my dad died, we found the love letters
a few days after dad died, we found the love letters, hidden away among his things. one of them said, i love dota and i love peaches, but i love you more. i ...
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Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic
I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel's most complex pr...
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A Fast 64-Bit Date Algorithm (30–40% faster by counting dates backwards)
Counting years backwards unlocks faster speed. The first date algorithm to use only 4 multiplications, instead of 7+
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Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
From chatbots to agents
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A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
The issues described in this article were resolved after this article was posted.
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A Reverse Engineer's Anatomy of the macOS Boot Chain and Security Architecture
1.0 The Silicon Root of Trust: Pre-Boot & Hardware Primitives The security of the macOS platform on Apple Silicon is not defined by the kernel; it is d...
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The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy
Mozilla's new strategy document confirms their position, and the end of their stewardship of the open web.
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Markdown is holding you back
Explore why Markdown, despite its ubiquity, might not be the best fit for technical content.