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Threads.net is the new app.net but with ads and interoperable
Meta's Threads.net sure looks a lot like App.net. Is Meta due for a pivot? The legislation the company supports suggests yes.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
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Interesting double-poly latches inside AMD's vintage LANCE Ethernet chip
I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect. But an Ethernet chip from 1982 had something new: a ...
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Ambient Co-Presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
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Email addresses are not good 'permanent' identifiers for accounts
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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Bun, JavaScript, and TCO
Bun is a JavaScript runtime that just released version 1.0! Now you have three choices for running JavaScript outside of the browser: Node, Deno, and Bun. One of Bun's selling points is speed! It makes some interesting decisions to achieve this.
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7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel 12th/13th gen
Maybe a poem will help remember complicated power-saving settings for SSDs. Here goes. "ALPM for SATA, not N-V-M-e. The latter needs ASPM, and A-P-S-T"....
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I forked SteamOS for my living room PC
SteamOS 3 (“Holo”) is the Arch-based Linux distribution built for the Steam Deck, Valve Software’s portable PC gaming device. It’s a very interesting Linux distribution even when you only focus on how it updates itself: updates are performed atomically by downloading a new read-only root filesystem to an inactive…
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Getting things done in small increments (2022)
Many programmers subscribe to the belief that they need large blocks of uninterrupted time to get anything done. Paul Graham wrote about this in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule :
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Ottopot, a sophisticated DIY MIDI controller
This is the ottopot. It's a MIDI controller I made with nothing but 8 dials. However, the dials I made in the highest quality that I possibly could. There are 2 things in particular that I haven't seen in any other similar devices: High resolution with 14bit MIDI CCs (12bit effective resolution) and a quasi-1:1…
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Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool…
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High Precision Mapping from Scratch
The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB ). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of…
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More fun with Apple's internal tools: creating a PDS card
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
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EU Cyber Resilience Act: What does it mean for open source?
The final compromise text of the EU Cyber Resilience Act is now officially available, and various open source voices are currently opining on it. This is a complex act and other parts of the open source world (like the Eclipse Foundation and NLNet Labs) have been hard at work to advocate with the EU and member states…
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Amazon's Silent Sacking
Companies are fighting back for quiet quitting and it's having a big impact.
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I'm skeptical of low-code
Low-code can be a great tool but it often fails to live up to its marketing
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Fake Trees: Using Indents for Simpler UIs
This is a technique I’ve used in actual for-pay software, but most recently in my text adventure game editor, Hiss .
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Hidden gems of moreutils
It seems no matter how long I work with the command line, every once in a while I find handy utilities I've never encountered before. Most people have heard about the bird coreutils , that's where utilities such as echo , cat , and others come from. But did you know about moreutils ?
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Committing Without Git
How does git store different versions of a file? What about a commit? Find out creating your own commit without the help of git.
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Asking your customers what they want doesn't work
And how can you figure it out what they really need
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Things are about to get worse for generative AI
A full of spectrum of infringment
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Android developers no longer need Windows USB drivers
In the early days of the platform, Android developers working from Linux and Mac OS X connected their device via an USB cable and were good to go. Windows users had to find and then install drivers. That was super-annoying.
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LuaX: A Lua Dialect with JSX
This site now runs on a custom dialect of Lua.
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What I learned using private LLMs to write an undergraduate history essay
I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:
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Understanding Parquet, Iceberg and Data Lakehouses
In the past few years, I've heard a lot about Avro, Parquet, ORC, Arrow and Feather, but I also keep hearing about Iceberg and Delta Lake. As a "database person", I’ve been struggling to understand all of these different things, and how they relate to Data Lakes and
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48x32: A 1536 LED Game Computer
My children are hopelessly addicted to their gaming devices. This is a problem, but not one that I can directly solve because the school mandates that they have both an Android smartphone and a Windows laptop. Rather than to meet the problem head on I figured the better way to address it is to replace consumption with…
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Parsing an Undocumented File Format
A year or two ago, I wrote a parser for an undocumented file format as part of a larger project. This was somewhat challenging and I wanted to share my approach because I thought it was a neat idea that worked well.
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"No inventions; no innovations" A History of US Steel
Last week, US Steel announced it was being acquired by Japanese steel company Nippon Steel.
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Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting
The new normal in tech recruiting
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In 2024, please switch to Firefox
This December, if there's one tech New Year's resolution I'd encourage you to have, it's switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox. According to recent posts on social media, Firefox's market share is slipping. We should not let that happen. There are two main reasons why switching is important…