The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27
I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book . The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS…
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,713 posts.
I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book . The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS…
Allison Sheridan is right when she says TextEdit can usually do the job. But I'm sticking with Pages anyway.
I've recently tasted AMD Zen 5 CPUs (AWS' m8a instances) and... Whooaaa. Even before talking about GPUs and NPUs, the next 5 years of CPUs will be very exciting! For
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
My fourth month of unemployment. I'm fresh off an interview with a senior technical role advertised with a decent compensation range whose upper end would let me make median rent, and whose lower range would not. At the end of an excellent interview, I am informed that said compensation
2026 legacy lab summer camp plan
Learn what a unikernel is and how it compares to a Linux container. Build and run your first unikernel inside a playground box.
He is young – twenty four – sitting at the black computer table by the wall of his living room. I’m looking at him side-on. He’s silhouetted by the huge window with a gorgeous view of the neighbourhood church. Green trees outside. The sun is shining brightly. It’s summer. Probably “The Hot Summer”, when our friends G…
Who is it? What is it? Is it friend or foe? Has it arrived in peace, or is it plotting to corrupt our SSDs and fray our USB-C cables?
Let's suppose I wanted to answer a question: is the tool X useful for the task Y. If I were scientific about this, I would analyze the properties of tool X and develop a model, and the task Y and the requirements for it and develop a model, and I would us...
How good is the random_page_cost default, and should you lower it on modern flash storage?
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Wo...
A stiff drink is recommended
AES-256 Cross Platform Device Control.
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
A bit more than a year ago, we did something a bit weird. We took a few cans of spray paint and we went out on the street. Not to pain...
Yes, for a supported subset of SQL. To establish a baseline, I integrated the SQLLogicTest suite.
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
I’m tired of this phrase and this simple way of thinking about tools. This blog post is a wandering train of thought on the topic of what tools are and why it matters to be even slightly more mature in how we think about them.
“Many of us are grappling with OpenAI’s announcement on 6 October. We feel that it is useful to have an updating snapshot of the community’s gut feeling.”
Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read…
At first, I thought I was addicted to internet forums. Then Facebook appeared and soon after I discovered Reddit, Hacker News, 9GAG, Instagram and other form...
I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago 1 1 Well, this was true when I started drafting this article. I have since adopted robots to do much more of the actual typing of code, unless it’s a project where (a) I care about code quality, or (b) I try to learn something. : I make edits in my text editor, I…
Goodbye dangling Dupont pins, hello Julet E-Bike connector. I have them now everywhere, from my router to my servers.
It is far too easy to create software these days, but what is the difference between a side project and a real product?
While I’m taking a short break from low-level programming, here’s a story by a friend of mine, Sonya, about debugging a seemingly impossible bug in ARM code. This bug hunting saga started several months ago. While developing a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM64 for postmarketOS, I hit a strange bug: if I enabled the…
I built a 10-inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions and I had a lot of fun doing it. I want to share my build in this post.
Fun things to do with big computers
almost all interactions are repeat games