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We shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size
We really did this! We work in a very large Javascript monorepo at Microsoft we colloquially call 1JS. Using some new changes to the git client it went from 178GB to 5GB.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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Debugging my wife's alarm clock
My wife's alarm clock has been acting up lately. Sporadic at first but then every day, it wouldn't blare in the morning at the set time. Instead, when it was supposed to go off it would... reset itself. The time would start flashing in that "I'm confused because the power went out" sort of way.
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ZombAIs: From Prompt Injection to C2 with Claude Computer Use
A few days ago, Anthropic released Claude Computer Use, which is a model + code that allows Claude to control a computer. It takes screenshots to make …
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Fundamentals of Radiance Cascades
A deep-dive into the fundamental concepts/ideas behind Radiance Cascades.
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Goodhart’s law isn’t as useful as you might think (2023)
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
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Understanding Round Robin DNS
In which I try to understand how browsers and Cloudflare choose which server to use
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Fruits (2020)
Fruits - Graph All The Things, a math blog by Martin Loncaric
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Deep dive: the instability of op-amps
A closer look at op-amp feedback loops and the stability criteria for circuits that use them.
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Do hard things carefully
Leaning in without falling over.
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NixOS is not reproducible
Okay, sorry for the clickbait. NixOS is not reproducible according to the Reproducible Builds definition. I keep reading people making this claim repeatedly on orange-site, even LWN.net made a similar claim when writing about Nix and Guix earlier this week.1 Along with their recently launched wiki. So, what is the…
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Adventures in algorithmic trading on the Runescape Grand Exchange
Runescape has been a game near and dear to my heart since I was a child. Though I do not actively play anymore, it still functions as an interesting programming project substrate. Most recently, I created a bot that automatically executes trades on the Grand Exchange in order to conduct market making via common…
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We Can Terraform the American West
Why is there almost nothing on the left hand side of the USA? Water scarcity! We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing 30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We shoul…
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Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
In mid-2022 I bought a new domain name.
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Detecting when LLMs are uncertain
A deep dive into a new reasoning technique called Entropix.
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SELinux bypasses
This post aims at giving an overview of what SELinux is, how it is implemented, and how to bypass it, from the point of view of Android kernel exploitation.
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Care Doesn't Scale
I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…
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Category Theory Illustrated: Logic (2021)
Now let’s talk about one more seemingly unrelated topic just so we can “surprise” ourselves when we realize it’s category theory. By the way, in this chapter there will be another surprise in addition to that, so don’t fall asleep.
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Unsafe Rust is harder than C
Or: The Most Expensive Linked List I’ve Ever Written
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Notes on the new Claude analysis JavaScript code execution tool
Anthropic released a new feature for their Claude.ai consumer-facing chat bot interface today which they’re calling “the analysis tool”. It’s their answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode: Claude can …
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Smarter Than 'Ctrl+F': Linking Directly to Web Page Content
Discover how text fragments revolutionize web navigation. Learn to link directly to specific text on any web page, surpassing traditional 'Ctrl+F' searches. Explore this powerful, user-friendly feature for precise content sharing and improved web experiences.
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Law Enforcement Undermines Tor
Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am…
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Becoming physically immune to brute-force attacks (2021)
Using thermal physics, cosmology, and computer science to calculate password vulnerability to the biggest possible brute-force attack.
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ST Book, the Notebook Atari ST
A surprisingly innovative portable ST
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Quit Social Media (2016)
Anti-Social Grumblings I recently gave a deliberatively provocative TEDx talk titled “quit social media” (see the video above). The theme of the event was “visions ... Read more
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Claude Computer Use – Is Vision the Ultimate API?
A deep dive into Anthropic’s new Computer Use API.
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Zero or Sign Extend
A while back I had to deal with a bit-packed format that contained a list of integer values encoded in one of a pre-defined sets of bit widths, where both the allowed bit widths and the signed-ness…