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"Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything"
A blog about software craft and quality
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,964 posts.
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Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements
The latest update of Firefox, version 148, introduces a much-anticipated "AI kill switch" feature, allowing users to disable AI functionalities such as chatbot prompts…
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Reading English from 1000 AD
The past was not as foreign as we think.
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I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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Understanding the Go Runtime: The Memory Allocator
In the previous article we explored how the Go runtime bootstraps itself — how a Go binary goes from the operating system handing it control to your func main() running. During that bootstrap, one of the first things the runtime sets up is the memory allocator. And that’s what we’re going to explore today. Think of…
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Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
Wolfram's Foundation Tool supplements LLM foundation models with deep computation and precise knowledge. CAG (computation-augmented generation) underlies multiple access methods.
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The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph
Weight limits, speed limits, fuel consumption at scale, and why trucks do the things that annoy you on the motorway.
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FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
My old 2016 MacBook Pro has been collecting dust in a cabinet for some time now. The laptop suffers from a “flexgate” problem, and I don’t have any practical use for it. For quite some time, I’ve been thinking about repurposing it as a guinea pig, to play with FreeBSD — an OS that I’d aspired to play with for a long…
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“Car Wash” test with 53 models
The car wash test is the simplest AI reasoning benchmark that nearly every model fails. We tested 53 models through Opper, first once each, then 10 times. Only 5 passed consistently.
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Detecting and Preventing Distillation Attacks
We identified coordinated distillation attacks using ~24,000 fraudulent accounts to extract Claude's capabilities.
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Writing code is cheap now
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
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What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust
Righty-ho, I’m back from Rust Nation, and busily horrifying my teenage daughter with my (admittedly atrocious) attempts at doing an English accent 1 . It was a great trip with a lot of good conversations and some interesting observations. I am going to try to blog about some of them, starting with some thoughts…
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The First Fully General Computer Action Model
We trained a model on our 11-million-hour video dataset. Our model can explore complex websites, complete multi-action CAD modeling sequences, and drive a car in the real world, all at 30 FPS.
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A simple web we own
Today, the Web and Internet are owned and controlled by large for-profit corporations and a few governments 1 . Corporate ownership combined with government policies has left us as tenant and product. It has given us a surveillance economy and enshittification 2 .
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Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
We're adopting Rust as our C++ successor language, and using AI agents to accelerate the transition.
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Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel
12 papers retracted, 7 editor positions removed, and the "open secret" of Elsevier’s elite paper mill exposed.
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Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours, in 2025
For some reason, nobody's written about what it takes to crawl a big chunk of the web in a while: the last point of reference I saw was Michael Nielsen's post from 2012 .
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Using the new bridges of FreeBSD 15
FreeBSD 15 comes with a new bridging implementation which has native support for VLANs. They have also soft-deprecated the ability to have any layer 3 addresses on member interfaces which makes it behave like a real hardware switch. The net.link.bridge.member_ifaddrs sysctl controls this behavior and it will …
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We installed a single turnstile to feel secure
After the acquisition by a much larger company, security became a top priority. Our company occupied three tall buildings, each at least 13 stories high. Key card readers were installed next to every
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Global Intelligence Crisis
A Thought Exercise in Financial History, from the Future
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Japanese Death Poems
by haiku poets
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Six Math Essentials
Just a brief announcement that I have been working with Quanta Books to publish a short book in popular mathematics entitled “Six Math Essentials”, which will cover six of the fundament…
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I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
Over the past decade, I've worked to build the perfect family dashboard system for our home, called Timeframe:
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Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic
Most linux software just work on FreeBSD
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Fix your tools
Last week I had to diagnose a bug in an open source library I maintain. The issue was gnarly enough that I couldn’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a breakpoint here and fire up the debugger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then proceed to mercilessly destroy it! So I rolled up my…
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We hid backdoors in ~40MB binaries and asked AI + Ghidra to find them
BinaryAudit benchmarks AI agents using Ghidra to find backdoors in compiled binaries of real open-source servers, proxies, and network infrastructure.
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Git's Magic Files
Magic files and where to find them: .gitignore, .gitattributes, .mailmap, .git-blame-ignore-revs, .lfsconfig, and more.
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Attention Media ≠ Social Networks
When web-based social networks started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social networks. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would receive your updates as well. Notifications were genuine…
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What is a database transaction?
What are database transactions and how do SQL databases isolate one transaction from another?