4681
Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a new one
Having a home server and a few smart plugs leads to interesting data points like this one. Well, interesting to me, at least.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,194 posts.
4682
Copy-and-Patch: A Copy-and-Patch Tutorial
If you can ctrl-c and ctrl-v, you can build a JIT.
4683
DDoS Botnet Aisuru Blankets US ISPs in Record DDoS
The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T , Comcast and Verizon , new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is…
4684
Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy
Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy - retrohax.net I once wrote a blog post about Nintendo Wii controllers. That post was already based on ...
4685
LLMs are getting better at character-level text manipulation
Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding and ciphers. Surprisingly, the newest models were able to solve these kinds of…
4686
My trick for getting consistent classification from LLMs
A technique for deterministic labeling from stochastic models, with benchmarked Golang implementation.
4687
America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
If the economy's single pillar goes down, Trump's presidency will be seen as a disaster.
4688
Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them
Programming languages have rapidly evolved in recent years. But in software development, the new often meets the old, and the scaffolding that OS gives for running new processes hasn’t changed much since Unix.
4689
AI and the Future of American Politics
Two years ago, Americans anxious about the forthcoming 2024 presidential election were considering the malevolent force of an election influencer: artificial intelligence. Over the past several years, we have seen plenty of warning signs from elections worldwide demonstrating how AI can be used to propagate…
4690
Smartphones and being present
Living intentionally in a world of distraction.
4691
No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What d…
4692
Why did containers happen?
Autumn update This is what it is looking like around here at the moment. DevOpsDays London I gave a talk at DevOpsDays London recently. It was a nice...
4693
Who invented deep residual learning?
Who invented residual neural networks?
4694
Wasp Blower
Departing wasps always take flight from the small crack under the door sill
4695
4696
American solar farms
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
4697
Modern Linux tools
Programming notes for Unreal Engine, Houdini, Game Development, Math, & Graphics
4698
Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial
As all developers, I’ve been using git since the dawn of time, since its commands were an inscrutable jumble of ill-fitting incantations, and it has remained this way until today. Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve…
4699
Abstraction, not syntax
Alternative configuration formats solve superficial problems. Configuration languages solve the deeper problem: the need for abstraction.
4700
Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files
Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What can …
4701
Go subtleties
Some of my favorite tidbits from the past year of working with Go.
4702
The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a text about the effects of CRT screens on pixel art . It surprised me by becoming one of the most controversial pieces I've published here. In it, I propose the following:
4703
Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
4704
Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
4705
Free software hasn't won
This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form.
4706
Emacs agent-shell (powered by ACP)
Not long ago, I introduced acp.el, an Emacs lisp implementation of ACP (Agent Client Protocol), the agent protocol developed between Zed and Google fo...
4707
After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
Some argue that even if the current AI boom leads to an overbuild, it might not be a bad thing - just as the dotcom bubble left behind the internet infrastructure that powered later decades of growth. It’s a tempting comparison, but the parallels only go so far. The dotcom era’s overbuild crea
4708
Completing a BASIC language interpreter in 2025
Completing a BASIC language interpreter in 2025 for replacing the very slow Mattel ECS BASIC for Intellivision.
4709
JIT: So you want to be faster than an interpreter on modern CPUs
Since my previous blog entry about JIT compiler for PostgreSQL, sadly not much happened due to a lack of time, but still some things were done (biggest improvement was the port to ARM64, a few optimizations, implementing more opcodes…). But I am often asking myself how to really beat the interpreter… And on “modern”…
4710
A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler
Logic vs language: how a Turkish alphabet bug played a years-long game of hide-and-seek inside the Kotlin compiler