17491
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,903 posts.
17492
Using a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense with 20 lines of Python
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
17493
Nim on a Real-Time Operating System: Apache NuttX RTOS and Ox64 BL808 SBC
Let's blink an LED on Pine64 Ox64 BL808 64-bit RISC-V Single-Board Computer... With Nim Programming Language and Apache NuttX Real-Time Operating System
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Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023
2023 was the breakthrough year for Large Language Models (LLMs). I think it’s OK to call these AI—they’re the latest and (currently) most interesting development in the academic field of …
17495
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.
17496
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 ...
17497
Ambient Co-Presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
17498
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…
17499
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.
17500
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…
17504
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…
17506
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…
17507
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…
17508
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…
17509
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…
17510
Amazon's Silent Sacking
Companies are fighting back for quiet quitting and it's having a big impact.
17511
I'm skeptical of low-code
Low-code can be a great tool but it often fails to live up to its marketing
17512
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 .
17513
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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37C3: Fuzzing the TCP/IP Stack
Our exploration begins with an honest appraisal of traditional fuzzing methodologies that have been applied to TCP/IP stacks before, like ISIC, revealing their inherent limitations, e.g., they can't reach beyond the TCP initial state. Recognizing the need for a more evolved approach, we take a different approach…
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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.
17520
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: