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Boxie – an always offline audio player for my 3 year old
How I built a simple portable audio player for my boy, summoning the spirit of the Gameboy
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,204 posts.
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We need more optimistic science fiction
We cannot create a better world if we cannot imagine it.
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My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025
Here are some of the most interesting things I learned at DjangoCon EU 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, partially written with the help of AI: link to talks
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I just want to code (2023)
I have an angel and a devil sitting atop each shoulder. The angel says, "Just code for fun! What you make can be just for your enjoyment and that's --" the devil interjects, "not enough to get ahead, loser. If you're not coding your next startup then how're you gunna get rich? Coding for fun? Pfft, sounds like the…
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Business co-founders in tech startups are less valuable than they think
This is Verdi's personal website. He writes about interesting ideas or projects.
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How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
Gui Rambo writes about his coding and reverse engineering adventures.
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Watching o3 model sweat over a Paul Morphy mate-in-2
A breakdown of how an AI model attempts to solve a complex chess puzzle, showcasing its human-like reasoning, problem-solving attempts, and eventual reliance on external information.
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The coming knowledge-work supply-chain crisis
"Humans. Here they are. Bottleneck, bottleneck. Hi, good to see you. And some of you are terrified. You're going to be even bigger bottlenecks." - Tyler Cowen
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Reverse geocoding is hard
My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a…
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Shardines: SQLite3 Database-per-Tenant with ActiveRecord
There is a pattern I am very fond of - “one database per tenant” in web applications with multiple, isolated users. Recently, I needed to fix an application I had for a long time where this database-per-tenant multitenancy utterly broke down, because I was doing connection management wrong. Which begat the question…
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ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
6642
Running Clojure in WASM with GraalVM
Now that Java can be compiled to WebAssembly with GraalVM, how well Clojure can run in Wasm?
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How to program a text adventure in C
This is not a C tutorial; there are plenty of those on the web. The reader is assumed to have some basic knowledge of programming in general, and preferrably the C programming language in particular. Maybe you just finished reading a tutorial somewhere, and you would like to learn some more about programming by…
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Bare metal printf – C standard library without OS
Guide to implementing a C standard library for bare metal hardware using Newlib, enabling powerful functions like printf and malloc without relying on an operating system. This step-by-step guide demonstrates how to configure and integrate Newlib on RISC-V architecture, showing you how to redirect standard I/O through…
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Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
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Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining
Watching OpenAI’s new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life. It’s a cross between the …
6647
Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case
It's damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn't have to fear competitors.
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I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
In 2003, I wrote a book called Crap Towns. It seemed funny at the time. But plenty of people say it would not be possible to publish it today. Is that a problem?
6649
Reading RSS content is a skilled activity
I've long had a fraught relationship with ToDo lists, because they're very much a double edged sword, but I'm convinced that much of the problem is t ...
6650
Parallel ./configure
I paid good money for my 24 CPU cores, but ./configure can only manage to use 69% of one of them. As a result, this random project takes about 13.5× longer to configure the build than it does to actually do the build.
6651
World Emulation via Neural Network
I turned a forest trail near my apartment into a playable neural world. You can explore that world in your web browser by clicking right here :
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Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI
How to use AI coding assistants without letting your hard-earned engineering skills wither away.
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What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?
The last few days I spent some time digging into the recently announced KIP-1150 ("Diskless Kafka"), as well AutoMQ’s Kafka fork, tightly integrating Apache Kafka and object storage, such as S3. …
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Street address errors in Google Maps
(or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively)Update, April 26, 2025: the address fix for W 6th Ave is live, mostly. Going forward I wish that Google Maps would make it harder…
6656
A Love Letter to People Who Believe in People
Tina on the transformative power of enthusiasm When I was eight, I made a big, hand-drawn poster that said, “Do you want to join my fan club?” and put it up in the small Swiss town where I grew up.…
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You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
Design greatness is defined not by fame or recognition, but by how invisibly and effectively it serves human needs.
6658
Manufactured consensus on x.com
How algorithm-driven influence quietly replaces genuine discourse with engineered popularity.
6659
Fundamental flaws of SIMD ISAs (2021)
According to Flynn’s taxonomy SIMD refers to a computer architecture that can process multiple data streams with a single instruction (i.e. “Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data streams”). There are different taxonomies, and within those several different sub-categories and architectures that classify as “SIMD”.
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I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
I was curious about the 51 Franklin Street address in the GPLv2 license notice so I wrote to them as they said