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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,212 posts.
The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux
Note: If you're here because you just want to watch Netflix on Asahi, install this (Edit: for Arch users, grab this . Fedora users can install the widevine-installer package), and then scroll down to the "Netflix-Specific Annoyances" section.
The 24 Hour “Do Nothing” Challenge
There’s not too much to say on this one, so I’ll keep it short. My goal was to do nothing for 24 hours. Like everyone in the modern world, I’m hopelessly addicted to little dopamine bur…
There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)
Dendronization – Evolving into a tree-like morphology. (In the style of “carcinization”.) From ‘dendro’, the ancient Greek root for tree.
Physical Knobs and Elixir
I like production gear. Audio, video and .. miscellaneous. I like things that seem like they'll make me oh-so-very productive. I'm a sucker prosumer as a hobby. Let's talk about Elgato, Elixir and why I never actually get anything done. This is unfortunately not sponsored by a prosumer brand, or anyone, that'd have…
The Basics of Arm64 Assembly
Just one instruction at a time!
The False Promise of Chomskyism
Important Update (March 10): On deeper reflection, I probably don’t need to spend emotional energy refuting people like Chomsky, who believe that Large Language Models are just a laughable fa…
Stylized Water Shader
💦 A huge, step-by-step tutorial on how to create a beautiful stylized water shader in Unity using Shader Graph. This works with Unity's Universal Render Pipeline (URP). Includes colors, foam, refraction, reflections, caustics and Gerstner waves.
JavaScript and TypeScript features of the last 3 years
This article goes through almost all of the changes of the last 3 years (and some from earlier) in JavaScript / ECMAScript and TypeScript.
Full screen triangle optimization
So here’s a well-known optimization trick that also tells you a bit about how GPUs work.
The Registers of Rust
It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of…
Google Groups has been left to die
Where should the formal methods community move?
AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is good search
We use Notion for the bulk of our knowledge management at CodePen. I have no use for an AI that can write for me.
How secure is merely discarding (TRIMing) all of a SSD's blocks?
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Infra-Red, in Situ (Iris) Inspection of Silicon
Cryptography tells us how to make a chain of trust rooted in special-purpose chips known as secure elements. But how do we come to trust our secure elements? I have been searching for solutions to this thorny supply chain problem . Ideally, one can directly inspect the construction of a chip, but any viable inspection…
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
Lessons learned from 15 years of writing SumatraPDF, a great open-source PDF, eBook, and comic book reader for Windows
Come Break My Compiler
Don’t worry … it’s super easy 🙃
The decline of net neutrality activism
For many years, telecom and Net Neutrality-related policies have been a hot-button political issue for me, to the extent that I, an ordinary software engineer at Microsoft have been blocked on Twitter by former FCC chairman Ajit Pai because I tweeted support for Net Neutrality publicly. I also noticed that Net…
Sued by Meta, Freenom halts domain registrations
The domain name registrar Freenom , whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. The move comes after the Dutch registrar was sued by Meta , which alleges the company ignores abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing…
ChatGPT Explained: A normie's guide to how it works
Once you understand a few core concepts, modern chatbots are less mysterious.
React is holding me hostage
A love & hate relationship
ChatGPT has trouble giving an answer before explaining its reasoning
ChatGPT is a fancy auto-complete : what it does is finding the most likely continuation of text for the text it has already printed out (or as a reply for the prompt, when it is starting printing stuff out), according to the large corpus of text it has been trained with.
Globally Distributed Elixir over Tailscale
The result of my exploration of Elixir clustering and automating global network discovery and connection over Tailscale.
Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust
There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don't think is mentioned enough.
No Lodash
The copy-paste library, containing various Lodash replacement functions, a copy-paste framework, and more.
Show HN: NESFab – Programming language for making NES games
NESFab is a new programming language for creating NES games. Designed with 8-bit limitations in mind, the language is more ergonomic to use than C, while also producing faster assembly code. It's easy to get started with, and has a useful set of libraries for making your first — or hundredth — NES game.
Possible reasons for 8-bit bytes
Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes
Stochastic gradient descent written in SQL
Edit – this post generated a few insightful comments on Hacker News. I’ve also put the code in a notebook for ease of use. Introduction Modern MLOps is complex because it involves too many components. …
Dividing a Square into 7 Similar Rectangles
This is a continuation of my post Dividing a square into similar rectangles, in which I discussed this puzzle: if you partition a square into n similar rectangles, what proportions can these rectan…