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Docs Deserve More Respect
A plea for more respect for documentation and technical writing in the software development industry.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,903 posts.
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No new iPhone? No secure iOS: Looking at an unfixed iOS vulnerability
A look at the messy reality of iOS vulnerabilities: which bugs get patched, which quietly linger, and the challenges of tracking real device risk over time.
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HyperRogue, a open-source non-Euclidean roguelike: new weapons
HyperRogue version 13.0 is released on Steam and itch.io ! Again, it was quite a long time since the last major update (12.0, from 2021)....
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Operation Triangulation: What you get when attack iPhones of researchers
Recent iPhone models have additional hardware-based security protection for sensitive regions of the kernel memory. We discovered that to bypass this hardware-based security protection, the attackers used another hardware feature of Apple-designed SoCs.
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Pushing ChatGPT's Structured Data Support to Its Limits
“Function calling” with ChatGPT is ChatGPT’s best feature since ChatGPT.
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Will scaling work?
Data bottlenecks, generalization benchmarks, primate evolution, intelligence as compression, world modelers, and other considerations
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PostgreSQL internals: Things to know about update statements
I recently finished reading PostgreSQL 14 Internals by Egor Rogov. It is one of the great books that teach applied computer science without watering down the difficult parts. One particularly interesting topic is PostgreSQL’s execution of UPDATE statements. Updates in relational databases are inherently complex. They…
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Rep and Ren: A new approach to CLI find, replace, and renaming
This post is about two new command-line utilities: rep and ren. Both are available on GitHub.
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2023: Focusing on a single product pays off
The first year where I managed to keep my focus entirely on a single project.
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Poor Man's Web
The Small Web Renaissance, Finger, Gopher and Gemini. How they work and what makes them different from the modern Big Web.
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CSS Is Fun Again
CSS has been undergoing a quiet renaissance lately. Lots of big features which previously required an external tool to use, are now native parts of the language, and its growing more and more all the time…
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How to (and how not to) fix color banding
Discovering color banding solutions & Smooth gradients with a clever Noise one-liner by SLEDGEHAMMER Games
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Light-induced whole-molecule vibration can rupture melanoma cells’ membrane
Rice scientists and collaborators at Texas A&M University and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have found a new way to kill cancer cells by using near-infrared light to make a small dye molecule attached to their membrane vibrate strongly. It is the first time this kind of mechanical molecular action has…
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Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.
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BASIC was not just a programming language
BASIC is often dismissed as an inferior language compared to its successors. Common complaints are its use of line numbers, its heavy reliance on GOTO for execution flow, and its lack of a stack for local variables. What many critics overlook is that at the time of its use (during the first wave of home computers)…
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Game Boy / Color Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Positive news from 2023
Many bad things happened in 2023. You already know them. Many tragic events were so terrible we will never forget them and we shouldn’t. You can easily find them all over the news. But the good things that happened are much harder to encounter, and it is easy to get the impression nothing good happened at all. In…
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Text Editor: Data Structures
The first step in building my text editor is to implement the core API. If you’re wondering why I want to do this, the original article is here.
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Obsidian 1.5 Desktop (Public)
Shiny new things Introducing a brand new editor for Markdown tables. Table rows and columns are now easier to create, edit, sort, reorder, select, copy, and pas...
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Website search hurts my feelings
Searching and displaying results isn't hard, why do so many websites suck at it?
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A data corruption bug in OpenZFS?
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
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Black Triangles (2014)
One of my most popular posts was also my very first… which has since been lost to the Great Blog Devouring of ’14. So… here’s the post from over ten years ago (has it been that long?!?!?!) about an event from almost twenty years ago. Still stuff I have to remind myself about some days.
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Lab Notebooks (2020)
What wet-lab chemistry can teach software engineers
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The life and death of open source companies
More thoughts on Open Source licensing and companies.
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Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)
Challenging projects every programmer should try
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Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.