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Making a game on a custom bytecode VM in 7 days and 3kB
Laurent Le Brun's blog
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
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8-bit Boléro
I hope you'll enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it! There are many little details that I'll let you discover on your own.
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Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming schemes
Don't you love misleading documentation?
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Rust's Block Pattern
Here’s a little idiom that I haven’t really seen discussed anywhere, that I think makes Rust code much cleaner and more robust.
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1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. The stack of…
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AI vending machine was tricked into giving away everything
Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesa
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Two kinds of vibe coding
Back in 2009 I posted a simple Mandelbrot fractal viewer on the web: a single HTML file with inline Javascript. Just 329 lines of code, each pixel a tiny table cell. Click to zoom. Watch it iterate. That was about it!
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The port I couldn't ship
Porting a venerable library on vibes. What started as a quick WebPerl success spiraled into weeks of failed attempts, mangled ASCII diagrams, and a hard lesson about respecting the craft embedded in battle-tested code.
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Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing…
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Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse
How a video game company built an empire by inverting the playbook
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Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates
Using TypeScript and some DMV API digging, I chased down and claimed one of the rarest available license plate combinations.
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Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
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Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
Link to: https://tidbits.com/2025/12/17/compromised-apple-gift-card-leads-to-apple-account-lockout/
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Most parked domains now serving malicious content
Direct navigation — the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser — has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of “parked” domains — mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites — are now configured to redirect visitors to sites…
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Slowness is a virtue
... at least when you're doing research, not development
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What is an elliptic curve? (2019)
The informal definition of an elliptic curve is simple. The formal definition is more involved.
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Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025
Recently, I made a free game . It's a little mystery investigation game which I was inspired to write after enjoying games like Case of the Golden Idol , Roottrees are Dead , and Return of the Obra Dinn . I thought my UX ideas were pretty simple, so I decided to implement it in HTML5 .
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I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero
I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning.
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Inside PostHog: SSRF, ClickHouse SQL Escape and Default Postgres Creds to RCE
It was yet another day at the office. Our team was internally discussing moving to a different platform analytics solution. Our team was really leaning more towards Posthog. It’s one of the brilliant -I personally believe it’s the best- products on the market. And that’s where the story has begun… We have a somewhat…
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Yep, Passkeys Still Have Problems
Firstyear's blog
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Log level 'error' should mean that something needs to be fixed
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…
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Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers
The Linux kernel has a feature where you can tune the behavior of memory allocations: the vm.overcommit_memory sysctl. When overcommit is enabled (sadly, this is the default), the kernel will typically return a mapping when brk(2) or mmap(2) is called to increase a program’s heap size, regardless of whether or not…
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AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating
Everyone's using AI wrong. Its superpower isn't writing for you. It's reading everything you've ever written and finding patterns you missed.
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TLA+ Modeling Tips
Model minimalistically Start from a tiny core, and always keep a working model as you extend. Your default should be omission. Add a compone...
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Introduction to Software Development Tooling (2024)
Learn the command line, version control, build systems, and correctness in NEU’s CS 4973: ISDT.
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I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
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I program on the subway
Ever since moving to New York City, I've found my time to be in more demand than ever. Between work, meetups, and social events, I have noticeably less time for side projects than I had before moving here. At the same time, my commute is a massive time suck. It's 30 minutes each way, which doesn't sound that bad, but…