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Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU?
A new change in Iceland’s government means that joining the EU is back on the cards for Iceland.
Why I don't do Domain Driven Design (2018)
Why I don't do Domain Driven Design
Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
Some quick thoughts on moving from Twitter/X to BlueSky and how I'll try to use social media after being burned once by Twitter.
How I run LLMs locally
I document how I run Large Language Models locally.
Can LLMs accurately recall the Bible?
I've often found myself uneasy when LLMs (Large Language Models) are asked to quote the Bible. While they can provide insightful discussions about faith, their tendency to hallucinate responses raises concerns when dealing with scripture, which we regard as the inspired Word of God. To explore these concerns, I
Personal Mail Server on OpenBSD (2019)
I will use this place to relate my geeky adventures in the world of gnu/linux, bsd, the internets, and other important things like windows managers and pretty colors. Basically, it's a place to expose and share with the world things I do on my computer.
All You Need Is 4x 4090 GPUs to Train Your Own Model
How I built an ML rig for training LLMs locally, exploring hardware choices, setup tricks, and lessons learned along the way.
Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator (2018)
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it…
Intel's $475M error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvement...
Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway
My long-time collaborator Richard Barnes [1] used to say that "in security, trust is a four letter word" , and yet the dominant experience of using any software-based system—which is, you know, pretty much anything electronic—is trusting the manufacturer. Not only is there no meaningful way to determine what software…
Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
This morning while perusing the settings of a bunch of apps on my iPhone, I discovered a new setting for Photos that was enabled by default: Enhanced Visual Search. (I manually disabled it before taking the screenshot below.)
Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s
Google search results are becoming annoying to use and Open AI is about to eat Google's lunch.
I automated my job application process
A developer automated job applications, sending 250 in 20 minutes using Python scripts and GPT
EmacsConf 2024 Notes
The videos have been uploaded , thank-you notes have been sent, and the kiddo has decided to play a little Minecraft on her own, so now I get to write some quick notes on EmacsConf 2024 .
So you want to write Java in Neovim
I have been doing Java in Neovim for quite a while at work, and it’s been a very pleasant experience. As Neovim usage grows (especially amongst the younger crowd), I want to share how I do it.
Revisiting the NetBSD Build System
I recently picked up an embedded project in which I needed to build a highly customized full system image with minimal boot times and NetBSD was the best choice for it. Let's look at why its build system helps.
Penrose Mazes (2020)
Mazes are typically constructed on regular grids: square, triangular, hexagonal, etc. But what if you generate a maze on top of a Penrose tiling, which is guaranteed to be irregular? (It is an aperiodic tiling .) The resulting mazes have a very characteristic appearance: they are filled with circles and stars, but the…
The Nvidia Way
Tae Kim's terrific new book on the story of Nvidia and Jensen Huang
Ada's dependent types, and its types as a whole
So I like to joke occasionally on the Fediverse that when looking at Wikipedia's list of programming languages supporting dependent types :
How to Create HTML/ZIP/PNG Polyglot Files
Learn How to Create HTML/ZIP/PNG Polyglot Files!
Learning Solver Design: Automating Factorio Balancers
I built a Factorio belt balancer solver. From tiny 2x2 grids to a massive 16x16 monster, every step revealed new solver tricks, numeric hiccups, and devious debugging puzzles.
Building AI Products–Part I: Back-End Architecture
In 2023, we launched an AI-powered Chief of Staff for engineering leaders—an assistant that unified information across team tools and tracked critical project developments. Within a year, we attrac...
Homebrew Batteries
I am a simple enthusiast attempting to convey my love and enjoyment of radio, electronics, and computing and perhaps to inspire YOU to build something too.
Execution units are often pipelined
In the context of out-of-order microarchitectures, I was under the impression that execution units remain occupied until the µop they’re processing is complete. This is often not the case.
Implementing SM-2 in Rust
An implemenation of the SuperMemo-2 algorithm.
Coding Font Selection 'Tournament'
Link to: https://www.codingfont.com/
The CAP theorem of Clustering: Why Every Algorithm Must Sacrifice Something
No clustering algorithm is perfect and you must make a trade-off.
Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+
Sniffing USB HID traffic from the Stream Deck Plus to map its dial encoder and touchscreen events, building on the original Stream Deck reverse engineering.