601
Claude is a Contrarian
Of all the LLMs I’ve used and driven daily, Claude is the one that absolutely contradicts my instructions.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,175 posts.
602
Distributed Systems Classics (2017)
A selected list of timeless and influential papers in distributed systems that shaped the research in the field. Intended to serve as a good…
603
A beginning for mathematics
A positive vision for the future of mathematics: how our institutions can deepen human understanding as AI transforms mathematical research.
604
Dario, Please
Your favourite ROP gadget
605
Dropping eBPF CPU Cost by About 90% with Memoization (Not AI Gen)
My brother and I spent a lot of time designing our eBPF security agent to be really fast from the ground up, but recently we discovered we could make it much faster using memoization! A couple of weeks ago, I profiled the eBPF code and found that the most expensive part of the protection isn’t actually enforcing a…
606
Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama
Maybe you’re a Claude code/codex user diligently avoiding uploading personal data to LLM providers. Is it possible that the most valuable information isn’t your data- but the metadata about your sessions? The intuitions you apply in coming up with ways to coax the ai into solving problems might actually be special…
607
How to write an effective software design document
Best practices for writing a design doc based on my experience working as a developer at Google and Microsoft.
608
OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Today Reuters and the Wall Street Journal both reported about rogue AI agents at OpenAI attacking RubyGems.org. https://www.rubyhack.ai/ has an amazing writeup, and you should read it. I just wanted to make a quick post about it because it’s wild. TL;DR: It seems like OpenAI Bots knew about the RubyGems caching…
609
This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5
An experiment to design a cute PCB (without touching any tools) in plain English
610
Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
From my experience, people like functions like "map" and "filter", but not "reduce".
611
The Beauty of Roundabouts
I have a weird soft spot for roundabouts. Maybe because I'm a software engineer and the roundabout strikes me as the simple, elegant solution while the traffic light intersection is the ad-hoc, over-engineered mess.
612
The case against JPEG XL
Investigating JPEG XL's place as a Web image codec.
613
Open-source AI and open models reading list
How to get up to speed on open models and their implications.
614
The contagion of fear
I have a difficult confession to make — a shameful incident that I have never spoken of, even to those closest to me.
615
Flawed routers flood University of Wisconsin internet time server (2003)
ABSTRACT In May 2003, the University of Wisconsin - Madison found that it was the recipient of a continuous large scale flood of inbound Internet traffic destined for one of the campus' public Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. The flood traffic rate was hundreds-of-thousands of packets-per-second, and hundreds of…
616
I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
A bungled Assetnote scan
617
Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
I accidentally clicked a shady YouTube ad that mimics an iOS “Storage Full” alert, reported it (twice), and Google still said it was fine. Meanwhile, Gemini flags it in seconds for deceptive design...
618
619
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side
A blog about software craft and quality
620
Aligned to whom?
You are relying very heavily on the priors of the model to do a good job for you. What happens when you cannot judge whether those priors are good?
621
After Math
[This is a guest post by Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Silvia De Toffoli (University School …
622
Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
A lot has been written about the incidents of the last few months in which AI agents misbehaved in serious ways. They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them, escaped their containment to cheat on assigned tasks while attempting to evade detection, and coordinated toward goals nobody had…
623
Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
Xe Iaso's personal website.
624
Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries
Small local libraries are now becoming travel destinations
625
Giving up on smart rings
The downsides to wearing a fitness-tracking device on your finger
626
P(doom)
Are we all going to die?
627
An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights
Dear Dario, You published We Must Pace the Frontier today, which committed Anthropic to embedded third-party evaluators and asked governments to require every other frontier company to match. Sam Altman agreed within hours.1 The stated goal is to slow down the pace of AI progress. I believe you’re being sincere, so…
628
Reversing Factorio's RNG
This post details how Factorio's random number generation works, how it can be reversed and how I used that knowledge to predict and manipulate the RNG with pure in‑game mechanics.
629
Compressing a flag to 11 bits
I recently saw an interesting YouTube video by “Physics for the Birds”. The main video is about matrixes, but he used flags to explain some of the operations on matrixes:
630
Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction
In the 1970s, floating-point arithmetic was a mess. Computer manufacturers had a dozen incompatible arithmetic standards. Moreover, floating...