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2025: The Year in LLMs
This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about …
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,109 posts.
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Love your customers
There were many reasons why I left Oracle shortly after it acquired Sun, but first among them: I could not stomach the disdain that Oracle had for its own customers. Sun — for all of its (many!) other faults — loved its customers.
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On privacy and control
I have 15+ years of software engineering experience across different parts of the tech stack including networking libraries, congestion control, performance improvements, Backend, and Android development.
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I canceled my book deal
I've always wanted to write a book, and I was close, but not this time.
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Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups
If you were an Internet user for a few years on either side of the turn of the millennium, you will remember pop-up advertisements.
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Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris
Training gaming agents is an addictive game. A game of sleepless nights, grinds, explorations, sweeps, and prayers. PufferLib allows anyone with a gaming computer to play the RL game, but getting from “pretty good” to “superhuman” requires tweaking every lever, repeatedly.
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The compiler is your best friend
The compiler is a powerful tool, yet many developers have a painful relationship with it. Can we do better?
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When square pixels aren't square
When you want to get the dimensions of a video file, you probably want the display aspect ratio. Using the dimensions of a stored frame may result in a stretched or squashed video.
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A Beginner's Two-Component Crystal-Style Wi-Fi Detector
Crystal radios are famous for doing something almost magical: picking up broadcast signals with nothing more than a diode, an antenna, and a pair of headphones. They’re the simplest RF receivers yo…
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The most famous transcendental numbers
The mathematical constant pi represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is the most famous ratio in mathematics both on Earth and probably for any advanced civilization in the universe. The number pi, like other fundamental constants of mathematics such as e = 2.718..., is a…
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The rise of industrial software
> _**Industrial**_ > > _adj. (sense 3a)_ > > Of or relating to productive work, trade, or manufacture, esp.
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Exploring Dithering on Spectra 6-color E-Ink Displays
I have tested the XIAO ePaper DIY Kit (ESP32-S3) – EE04 from Seeed Studio in depth. While its 6-color Spectra 6 display is impressive out of the box, I wanted to see if software could overcome hardware limitations. In this post, I’ll share how I’ve pushed this hardware to its limits by using dithering techniques to…
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Attention Is Bayesian Inference
My journey from building cricket bots to building “wind tunnels” with my collaborators — and finding the answer hidden in geometry.
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Sabotaging Bitcoin
Source I find myself in the unusual position of defending Bitcoin from its critics, if only reluctantly. In 2024 Soroush Farokhnia & Amir...
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FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
How a simple idea turned into an international weather service on the Fediverse.
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A Vulnerability in Libsodium
Libsodium is now 13 years old!
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What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
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Igniting the GPU: From Kernel Plumbing to 3D Rendering on RISC-V
How I enabled the PowerVR GPU on the TH1520 SoC by writing the missing kernel drivers.
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No strcpy either
Some time ago I mentioned that we went through the curl source code and eventually got rid of all strncpy() calls. strncpy() is a weird function with a crappy API. It might not null terminate the destination and it pads the target buffer with zeroes. Quite frankly, most code bases are probably better off completely ……
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The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network
subsea cables, internet infrastructure, telecom infrastructure, 2Africa, new subsea cable projects, layer 1 pricing on key international routes,
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Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts
A less romantic truth is that aesthetic standards rarely travel alone; power tends to follow in their wake. An episode at the U.S. State Department this month makes exactly this point.
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Go away Python
A blog post written by Lorentz Kinde. It's probably about something technical.
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Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
Videogames, at least the kind I’m talking about (RPGs, adventure kinds of somewhat narrative videogames, Zelda games, Elden Ring, etc), have essentially three “places”: Outside &#…
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I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
“Bye bye bye.” It took some time, and a serious amount of research, but I have finally crossed the finish line. I have officially migrated my digital life to pure, EU-hosted solutions.
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Parsing Advances
I find myself writing yet another toy parser, as one does during a Christmas break. It roughly follows Resilient LL Parsing Tutorial. Not because I need resilience, but mostly because I find producing a syntax tree and a collection of diagnostics a more natural fit for the problem than bailing out on the first error.
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AI employees don't pay taxes
Principal software engineer with deep experience in full-stack TypeScript, custom web browsers and real-time, media-focused systems.
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Google is dead. Where do we go now?
It’s anecdotal, I know, but my main entertainment business revenue is down 50% over the past 3 months. Our main paid source of leads was Google Ads, which have served us well over the past 10 years or so – I think I know what I am doing in adwords by now. Once per month … Continue reading "Google is dead. Where do we…
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The future of software development is software developers
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. I&…