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Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format
Why frontier AI has broken the open CTF format, hollowed out the scoreboard, and made competitive CTF performance a weaker signal than it used to be.
Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)
How to switch inputs between desktop and laptop on one monitor using built-in KVM and DDC
'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens
Kevin Patel - Application Security Engineer @ NISC
NYT and vaping: How to lie by saying only true things (2022)
An exercise in spotting agenda journalism: dissecting a 2022 𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝑌𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 article on teen vaping sentence by sentence to show how it pins an EVALI hospitalization on legal nicotine vapes while never quite saying so—since the actual cause was illegal THC products. Every misleading sentence is technically true.
SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud
The actual queries I run when I'm hunting fraud in transaction data. Velocity, impossible distances, suspicious amounts, merchant clusters, off-hours buys, and window functions.
We don't know why Malawi is poor
And that’s a problem for economic development
I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows
I've been distro-hopping for probably twenty years. Every time I install Linux I feel a small swell of optimism, like this time it'll stick. Linux never sticks with me.
Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64
Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?
Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does
A bit more than a year ago, we did something a bit weird. We took a few cans of spray paint and we went out on the street. Not to pain...
The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Prolog Basics Explained with Pokémon
Demonstrating the basics of logic programming with data from the Pokémon games.
O(x)Caml in Space
On 23 April, Borealis booted in orbit on DPhi Space's ClusterGate-2: a pure-OCaml CCSDS protocol stack with end-to-end-encrypted command and control and post-quantum key rotation. OxCaml is what comes next.
C++26 Shipped a SIMD Library Nobody Asked For
std::simd Can't Express 90% of Real SIMD Code
Solar-based sleep patterns compared to modern norms
ex program, en farm
Mullvad exit IPs are surprisingly identifying
Update 5/29: Mullvad has begun rolling out a mitigation feature on their servers that scrambles exit IP positions, thereby fixing this issue. IPs are still deterministically selected based on the pubkey. Mullvad is one of the few VPN providers that offers multiple exit IPs for its servers. If two people connect to the…
Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints
Soon, access to frontier AI will be scarce and selective
Amazonbot is finally respecting robots.txt
Thanks for giving me a viable business model Amazon!
Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
Yes, there really was a smoking room on the Hindenburg… even though the zeppelin was inflated with 7 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen...
AI is making me dumb
It's so god damn tempting to use AI to write. Whether it is articles, code, or documents. I feel like using AI is diminishing my ability to write myself.
Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid
Modern cars are computers on wheels that send home nonstop telemetry about you. In this post I remove my 2024 RAV4 Hybrid's modem and GPS to prevent that :)
Building ML framework with Rust and Category Theory
A modular, compile-checked tutorial for learning category-theory ideas through a tiny Rust ML pipeline.
HDD Firmware Hacking
Do you know how a hard drive works? Come find out with me as I dump, reverse engineer, and modify the firmware on various HDDs and SSDs.
RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
What if you could strap a full desktop GPU to your MacBook Air? Turns out, you can.
Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals
I love quasicrystals—like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they’ve very rare in nature. They’re created only by the most exotic and violent e…