1141
The Cold Email
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,699 posts.
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The coolest use for the Vision Pro
One day there will hopefully be a house on this land Over the last year, I admittedly haven’t used my Vision Pro a ton, but fairly recently I discovered a super handy use that it’s absolutely incredible at, provided you have the right tools. After years of apartment life my girlfriend and I have recently begun the…
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A Trampoline
I didn’t want to buy a trampoline. It wasn’t the money.
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Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
TL;DR: DIY home automation is ezpz with nothing more than a stepper motor, an esp32, and a high tolerance for Jank. My rental apartment’s AC unit can only be controlled using these retro-looking analog knob-based controls, mounted right onto the unit. No separate wall-mounted thermostat, no remote…
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Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results
Yesterday Anthropic published two new cryptanalysis results, both outputs of Claude Mythos, their (still) unreleased advanced model. The first of these results attacks a signature scheme called HAW…
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Superlogical
I authored 1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage , which describes the problem statement and what we're building. 2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to my recent work, and what comes next.
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After the AI Crash
Everything I read about the AI industry leads me to think there will be an AI crash. Consider the following: Unsustainable Capital Expenses. It’s hard to imagine there can ever be enough revenue to…
1148
Shipping Godot VR and Porting to PSVR2: A Partial Post Mortem
TLDR: Written version of the talk I gave at Develop Brighton 2026. Yes Godot can ship commercial VR, we paid roughly £80k in early adopter tax to do it. War stories from rebuilding Godot's core, the
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Software for One
Robin Sloan wished for a HyperCard that could build a family app in a day. That world showed up.
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Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word
I would like to thank Microsoft product teams and Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) for collaborating with me on this technical analysis and mitigation of the disclosed vulnerabilities. The editorial opinions reflected below are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations I…
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The mean means nothing: data visualization to debug a latency problem
I was recently trying to validate some performance improvements related to lld at $DAYJOB and it was a little frustrating to see the improvements in our benchmarks but not in the live-production dashboards.
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That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
The year was 2015, halfway through my Computer Science bachelor’s degree. I had spent a few months contributing to open source and my confidence levels were high, so I thought: why not aim for a summer internship at Microsoft? Microsoft, of all places, might sound like a weird company to target in 2026. Back then…
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User Interfaces of the Demo Scene
Ahh, the demo scene - a digital art subculture, a motley gang of creative nerds, and a favourite pastime of mine. So much amazing art, music and code has been produced by sceners, and anyone who comes into contact with the scene might start to wonder exactly how - apart from hours of dedicated grind, of course.
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State of multi-player Wayland
I've been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment!
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The tiny holdout building in the middle of Macy’s is back in view
The enormous faux shopping bag that served as an advertisement for Macy’s is mostly gone, save for a patch of red facing Sixth Avenue. Scaffolding covers the ground floor retail space, and da…
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Substack writers, you need a website
Substack is convenient, but treat it as a distribution tool for your content. Your content should live on an independently owned website, which has a domain name you control and own. This way, you …
1157
How Do I Profile eBPF Code?
If we are running any eBPF workload or writing eBPF code, we want to measure its performance impact, and in this post we will demonstrate an example of how to do it. In this example, our goal is to measure the performance of file open operations, one of the most critical functions in the OS. Our code used file open…
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Kimi K3 Architecture Overview and Notes
Short architecture note on Kimi K3, including LatentMoE, Kimi Delta Attention, Attention Residuals, NoPE, multimodality, and inference-efficiency choices.
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Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals
As a member of the Zig core team, one of the most impactful projects I’ve been involved with is the implementation of incremental compilation into the Zig compiler. This feature allows the compiler to detect which individual functions and declarations have changed since a project was last built, recompile only that…
1160
I'd not buy a LG monitor
There is a video by Gamers Nexus making the rounds that makes me really angry. It reports about LG's latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the *software* application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default…
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Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
Unattributed is a former IT person, discovering life after work.
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Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights
Twenty-five years ago, I made my first donation to an open source project and purchased a CD with an operating system as downloading a few hundred megabytes over a 14.4kbps dial-up wasn't very fun.
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How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
The economics behind where movies are filmed, why Hollywood left Los Angeles, and whether audiences can tell the difference.
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I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
Disability, shame, and the hidden violence of a culture that equates productivity with value
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Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding
On my Introduction to A* page I cover the basics of the A* graph search algorithm for finding shortest paths. Here’s an example from the town of Denerim in Dragon Age Origins. Try moving the start and goal to see A* in action:
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Wolves, sheep, and gypsies
In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as…
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Canceling "Hey"
cancelling-my-hey - Chad Nauseam Home
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Bad Apple but It's Traceroute
This was unavoidable, given my post from the other day about how to make traceroute display (almost) arbitrary strings.
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How JPEG works: Interactively explore JPEG's lossy compression methods
In the world of technology, “forever” means about 5 years. It’s humbling to think that the 1992 JPEG image standard is still going strong despite being more than 5 “forevers” old. Why has it been so successful? This article presents the key ideas behind JPEG in plain language and includes an interactive JPEG…