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My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
My 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS built with twenty-four 4 TB drives is over 10 years old and still going strong.
The Lego Great Ball Contraption
The Great Ball Contraption is a class of machines built with Lego that transport small balls from place to place in many different ways. The otherwise pointless
Modular Monoliths Are a Good Idea
Microservices aren't the only way to get high cohesion and low coupling.
I won't be renewing my Pinboard subscription
A personal blog of diverse opinions.
I Added SVG Maps to My Travel Posts
Quick overview of a new blog feature.
Zero-Click Calendar invite vulnerability chain in macOS
Critical zero-click vulnerability chain in macOS (patched)
Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
For the past two years Charles Zhang and I have been working on getting my game engine, Trial, running on the Nintendo Switch. The primary challenge in doing this is porting the underlying Common Lisp runtime to work on this platform. We knew going into this that it was going to be hard, but it has proven to be quite…
Speech Dictation Mode for Emacs
T here is a wide range of input mechanisms for computers, starting with keyboards (which are relatively mature) and extending to various types of neural interfaces (currently under research). Speech lies somewhere on this spectrum with a lot of promises but still not much to show for. Keeping accessibility aspects…
Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?
Notes about startups, AI, health-care and overall engineering
Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models
OpenAI released two major new preview models today: o1-preview and o1-mini (that mini one is not a preview)—previously rumored as having the codename “strawberry”. There’s a lot to understand about …
If I could dissect a sauropod
Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’v…
I give you feedback on your blog post draft but you don't send it to me (2021)
I say to you the same things I say to everyone, but it's good.
Why Haskell?
Haskell is a great programming language with many features that make it easier to write robust software, and yet it is rarely taken up by software engineering teams. This essay aims to explain my views as to why Haskell is a great choice for programmers.
We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in ear…
Be a thermostat, not a thermometer (2023)
As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of thos...
A MiniGolf game for Palm OS
This summer, I embarked on a side project to create a brand-new Palm OS game, and after less than two months of intermittent coding, I'm excited to announce that it's ready to be released to the public!
SQLite on Rails: The how and why of optimal performance
This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.
Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts
6 Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Shell Scripts
The First HTML LSP That Reports Syntax Errors
The story of how I gained two world-firsts, somehow.
David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way
I recently came across a great quote from David Chang, “Just because we’re a casual restaurant, doesn’t mean we don’t hold ourselves to fine dining standards. We try to do things the right way. That usually means doing things the long, hard, stupid way.” David has elaborated on this quote: When your back is turned […]
OpenSSH Keystroke Obfuscation Bypass
A disclosure for an OpenSSH keystroke obfuscation bypass affecting current OpenSSH versions after 9.4.
Possibly all the ways to get loop-finding in graphs wrong
In my puzzle collection , there are many games in which you have to connect points together by edges, making a graph, and the puzzle rules say you must avoid making any loop in the graph. Examples are Net , Slant , and some configurations of Bridges (although not the default one). Loopy and Pearl also care about…
I wish I didn't miss the '90s-00s internet
about me I am 18, born in 2006. This is generally a good thing as I am in the prime of life currently. I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”, I think I was born at the perfect time to take advantage of superlinearly growing technological advancements. the internet today I…
The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion (2023)
Resistor-based dividers, linear regulators, buck converters, and other ways to adjust voltages.
Building the same app using various web frameworks
FastAPI, FastHTML, Next.js, SvelteKit, and thoughts on how coding assistants influence builders' choices.
Rust in illumos
Systems engineering, Rust development, and Unix infrastructure by Till Wegmüller (@toasterson)
The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
A substantial philosophical literature explores the " unity of consciousness ": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately…