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Obscure audio codec is a perfect fit for the N64
Sorry for the clickbait title. I promise this post delivers: 44100 Hz stereo with near-Opus bitrates using about 4% of the N64’s CPU time.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,934 posts.
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Kitty 0.50
kitty is a feature-rich, cross-platform, fast, GPU based terminal. To update kitty, follow the instructions. Recent major new features: Docked windows [0.50]: kitty windows can now be docked to an ...
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The lost malloc()
Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…
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macOS 27 does not support CoreStorage volumes
macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage – and thus encrypted HFS+ volumes – since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. While I’d often – but not always – have to manually unlock one of my HFS+ volumes – but…
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Ubuntu still has not released patch for Linux 0day RCE in almost 3 weeks
No patched kernels are available yet for 22.04, 24.04, or 26.04 despite a CVSS 9.8 rating.
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WTF Ubuntu?
In case you missed it: CVE-2026-98432 is a critical (CVSS 9.8) bug in the Linux kernel's TCP code. It's been there since 2016, so virtually every Linux server on the planet has it, and it can be hit remotely. Anthropic says it built a working exploit that gets root on a server. A total takeover.
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We halved DNS build delay and cut memory use by 85%
Zone setting changes used to rebuild entire DNS zones, even ones with tens of millions of records. Here is how we built a planner that picks the smallest safe build, cutting full builds by 40%, peak memory by 85%, and halving build delay.
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TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8
CVE-2026-98432 is a CVSS 9.8 remote use-after-free in Linux's IPv4 TCP handshake, fixed upstream Oct 15. RHEL has fixes; Ubuntu's are still in testing.
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It's the memory latency, stupid
When your database CPU is at 100%, what is it actually doing? Memory stalls, CPU caches, and how radix partitioning makes GROUP BY faster.
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Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4
Modern applications often spread state across a variety of systems: databases, caches, queues, data warehouses, search indices, and so on. Coordinating these systems is challenging: caches are often stale, the analytics platform might lag days behind the primary database, the search index might lose data, and…
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Switch Lowering in GCC
We have seen in a previous post that switch statements are more complex than they seem. The compiler is able to implement them as a decision tree (even though maybe it shouldn't). Is that everything it can do?
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Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think
I am talking about the I/O operations as used in computing here. A typical example of how this kind of thing is exposed are the POSIX syscalls read(2) and write(2), which have the following C funct…
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Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
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MacOS Extensions Pack for the Apple Network Server v1.0
By now regular readers of this blog are quite familiar with my affection for the 1996 Apple Network Server , Apple's Unix-through-and-thro...
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Bbtree: Fastest Ordered Map
How bbtree, a drop-in replacement for std's BTreeMap, cuts cache misses, instructions and cache coherence traffic, and how it is kept correct.
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Twelve years of distributed SQLite
In September 2014 I published a short post announcing rqlite. The idea was simple: take SQLite, put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data. The source went on GitHub that same weekend. As…
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How to run a city builder on 16 MHz
Do you feel spoiled by modern hardware? I know I do. Even the cheapest CPUs have at least 4 cores nowadays, running billions of operations per second. The idea that you could run any software on le…
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C vs. C#: racing VLC's Gaussian blur
A real VLC video filter, ported line by line to C# and raced against the original C inside VLC 4, then optimized on both sides, with byte-identical output throughout.
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Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
Arch Linux ARM on the ASUS ProArt P16, with a bootable installer, published Windows comparisons, and local Qwen inference.
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Big Fish: Exploiting a 37-Year-Old Kernel Bug in OpenBSD
Big fish. Small counter. Root shell.
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Libreboot 26.10 "Ominous Olive" released with UEFI, Chromebook support
Libreboot – Libreboot 26.10 “Ominous Olive” released! With full UEFI support.
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Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide's approach to emulation, simulation, and tiny versions of big things.
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Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
My TP-Link EAP770 v1 corrupts downloads over Wi-Fi and TP-Link EOL'd it before I unboxed it. The fix is two zeros in sysfs. TP-Link's shell won't let me write them, so I wrote a kernel exploit for my own fucking access point.
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Who is vfmaddrnd231pd?
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
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Postgres isn't slow, your storage is
A recap of Sai Srirampur's POSETTE 2026 talk on storage performance in Postgres, with a local NVMe vs. EBS benchmark and the production setup behind it.
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How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect
Measuring a commercial spatial audio processor, extracting its stereo impulse responses, and rebuilding the effect as a convolution filter on Linux.
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The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME
I was playing with the nono agent sandboxing tool and it greeted me with a warning: PATH entries the sandbox can write to: ~/.local/bin/ which looked suspicious.
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LineageOS 24
You know what's funnier than 24?
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Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster
DuckDB 2.0 alpha vs 1.5.5 on one laptop: recursive CTEs up to 90x, VARIANT 6x faster than JSON text, async I/O 2.4x on S3. What changes, and how to model data to get the speedup. | Reading time: 15 min read