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The Buenos Aires Constant
Generating primes using the Buenos Aires constant.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,220 posts.
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A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate
Yes, probably.
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Kafka at the low end: how bad can it get?
There is oft-quoted advice that Kafka does poorly as a job queue. I’ve experienced this myself, and I wanted to formalize it a bit.
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A vending machine, on the internet
These days, every new business seems to be a SaaS. I remember when software worked differently: you bought it, installed it, and used it without having to create an account, remember a password, or even connect to the internet. Your data lived on your C drive, and you were in control. Software was a tool, like a…
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My LLM codegen workflow
A detailed walkthrough of my current workflow for using LLms to build software, from brainstorming through planning and execution.
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Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration
On 12 February, the CEA’s WEST machine was able to maintain a plasma for more than 22 minutes. In doing so, it smashed the previous record for plasma duration achieved with a tokamak. This leap forward demonstrates how our knowledge of plasmas and technological control of them over longer periods is becoming more…
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Moving on from 18F
I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is still happening.
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Pi-hole v6
We’ve integrated a new REST API and embedded web server directly into the pihole-FTL binary. This eliminates the need for lighttpd and PHP , reducing the installation footprint and boosting performance. The new API also offers server-side pagination for the query log, ensuring a faster and more responsive interface.
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Money lessons without money: The financial literacy fallacy
Financial literacy without real-world money experience is as ineffective as teaching swimming with PowerPoint slides. A critical look at classroom finance education.
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One year after switching from Java to Go
I always told people memory is cheap, black magic is OK and efficiency doesn't matter, but I was wrong.
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These years in Common Lisp: 2023-2024 in review
This is a personal pick of the most interesting projects, tools, libraries and articles that popped-up in Common Lisp land in the last two years.Newcomers might not realize how the Common Lisp ecosystem, though stable in many ways, actually evolves, sharpens, tries new solutions, proposes new tools, ships new…
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The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach
The description suggests that this is some kind of extended metaphor about work. It appears to be written in that _Choose Your Own Adventure_ style second-person voice, yet there are no choices to be found within. Against your better judgment, you follow the link.
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Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal
Last year, I urged furries to stop using Telegram because it doesn’t actually provide them with any of the privacy guarantees they think it gives them. Instead of improving Telegram’s c…
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XOR
Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved.
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The Generative AI Con
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built
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My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation
I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
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Sony FX-300 Jackal: A technological marvel of the late 70s (2021)
I’m a child of the 1970s and I’m glad I never knew about the Sony FX-300 “Jackal 300.” It would have been the ultimate unobtainable machine of my dreams…this, even des…
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Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate
Rune Skovbo Johansen has a really sweet Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering technique, where the dither dots “stick” to 3D surfaces, yet the dot density adapts to the view distance and zoom level.
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Have you ever seen a goth downtown?
Creativity after AI
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Programming with chronic pain
The challenges of programming with chronic pain and what worked for me
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Setting up a trusted, self-signed SSL/TLS certificate authority in Linux
With OpenSSL, it’s pretty easy to generate a simple self-signed TLS certificate . Just run the following command:
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Find Your 2%Ers (2023)
then do life with them.
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Privacy Is Not Dead: Beware the All-or-Nothing Mindset
Privacy is only dead if we let it die. Be careful about the all-or-nothing mindset in data privacy, it can do more damage than good to the cause. While striving for improvements, do not forget to cheer and celebrate each small win.
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Why I'm writing a Scheme implementation in 2025: Async Rust
I really love Rust. I’ve been using it as my language of choice for about ten years now. I believe that it is a remarkably well designed language, and that includes the parts that are often most criticized, most notably async.