The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,065 posts.
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…
What do concern trolls and privileged people without visible or invisible disabilities who share or make content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to projects have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’…
I recently spent a few weeks running a conference for a community of researchers and writers in a historic chateau in the French…
Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model — a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take
Check project's website: https://www.brainonllm.comWith today's wide adoption of LLM products like ChatGPT from OpenAI, humans and businesses engage and u…
There has been rather a lot of doomsaying (and perhaps astroturfing) lately about LLMs as the end of computer programming. Much of the discussion has been lacking nuance, so I’d like to add mine. I see claims from one side that “I used $LLM_SERVICE_PROVIDER to make a small throwaway tool, so all programmers will be…
Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it…
Previously I have covered a relatively obscure now-removed placeholder string in Android that doubles as an easter egg, the fictitious carrier by the name of El Telco Loco. But this time it is about methods and other parts of the publicly facing Android API that may generally be more humourous than they are useful…
Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would quickly die from it. Now, most children in rich countries are cured.
A post on Decision Science about a problem of Uri Wilensky’s has been making the rounds: Imagine a room full of 100 people with 100 dollars each. With every tick of the clock, every person wi…
From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.
Casey Handmer June 2025 Download a printable PDF. NASA was founded in 1958 in response to Sputnik and the emerging necessity of a robust, government supported space exploration and technology devel…
The Universal Postal Union's S10 standard, in all its glory
The first public passenger locomotive, Locomotion No. 1, began service in September 1825. The first mass-casualty railway disaster happened seventeen years…
Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.
I clearly remember, but can't date it. I was working for Mozilla messaging at the time ( momo ), being the QA lead for Thunderbird. It was at the end of one of the Mozilla All-hands, maybe in 2011 or 2012. At one of the ending keynotes, we were introduced to Boot 2 Gecko. A hack that would let US - Mozilla own the…
Why age is crucial in Korea, affecting language, respect, and social relationships. What is Korean & international age?
We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots...
Somehow I forgot to blog my site: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/ . I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources t...
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
In the EU, digital sovereignty is trending. Businesses and authorities are starting to adopt sovereign solutions from Europe.
My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this…
In this day and age, celebrities have a lot of influence over our politics. Garthwaite and Moore estimated that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 netted him an extra 1 milli…
I have for you a bizarre tale of scrapers, feds, data poisoning, Torswats, and everyone's favorite fedi instance. It veers technical, because I suspect it will be of interest to other people running servers with UGC (i.e., every fedi instance), and also because the mechanics of how I figured out what I figured out…
The shameless spin around Stargate UAE
Re: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts There was a post recently that was dissing AI Skeptics. While the post is funny at times, I feel like it’s absolutely and completely missing the point of the skepticism. Or at least I feel that it is glossing over some massive pain points of said skepticism. Let’s go over some of…
Imagine entering the biggest library in the world. You peer down an incredibly long aisle with wooden bookshelves brimming with books. You can see multiple such corridors, all lit with a comfortable warm light. There’s a rich smell of old paper. You can hear some muted voices, perhaps arguing in a whisper. It’s…
Anti-Tutsi articles and graphic cartoons began appearing in the Kangura newspaper from around 1990. In June 1993 a new radio station called Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC) began broadcasting in Rwanda…
Windows 10 spies on your use of System Settings
There are a lot of assumptions one could make when designing data types and schemas for aviation data that turn out to be inaccurate. In the spirit of Patrick McKenzie’s classic piece on names, here are some false assumptions one might make about aviation.
