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Robot Dad
See discussion of this post on Hacker News Tired of Alexa's feeble "here's what I found on wikianswerspam.com" responses to my eight-year-old son's science questions, I whipped up Robot Dad during...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
1382
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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The white furnace test
What;s up with those empty renders in rendering research papers? The white furnace test, one of my favourite rendering debug tools. It can be used to check several levels of implementation, not just the BRDF, but also the sampling and the Monte Carlo integration loop, Continue reading →
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A developer's view of Vision Pro
Last week at WWDC I was extraordinarily fortunate to be one of the very few people in the world to try out Vision Pro for myself. The 30 minute session I had with it has been described in tremendous depth in lots of places (the best likely being Myke’s discussion on Cortex ), so I won’t go into the content of that…
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Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
Researcher interested in usable security and privacy.
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Beware of AI pseudoscience and snake oil
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
1389
How does macOS manage virtual cores on Apple Silicon?
Code run in a lightweight Virtual Machine can’t take advantage of the Efficiency cores of the host Apple silicon Mac. How then does Sonoma handle its threads?
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Unauthenticated RCE on a RIGOL oscilloscope
I work in a company that uses custom electronic boards, so there are plenty of instruments floating around that electrical engineers employ to debug faulty connections and solderings. One kind of tools used are the oscilloscopes, tools that measure signals and plot them in a graphically understandable way. We have a…
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The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person
There is again a pull-request submitted to the curl project to bring support for the Gemini protocol. It seems like a worthwhile effort that I support, even if it is also a lot of work involved and it might take some time before it reaches the state in which it can be merged. A previous … Continue reading The Gemini…
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Let's write a setjmp
Yesterday I wrote that setjmp is handy and that it would be nice to have without linking the C standard library. It’s conceptually simple, after all. Today let’s explore some differently-portable implementation possibilities with distinct trade-offs. At the very least it should illuminate why setjmp sometimes requires…
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Making my own bed sensor
I recently created some “bed sensors” for my smart home that detect if one of us, or both of us, is in bed. I use a couple of pressure mats that detect when weight is applied to them, and stuck then under our mattress at around hip level and these tell my Home Assistant home automation platform if
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Why the original transformer figure is wrong, and some other tidbits about LLMs
A few months ago, I shared the article, Understanding Large Language Models: A Cross-Section of the Most Relevant Literature To Get Up to Speed, and the positive feedback was very motivating!
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Problems of C, and how Zig addresses them
What are the problems of C, and how Zig addresses them?
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Passkeys: A Loss of User Control?
This blog post doesn't have the answers. I'm trying to learn about passkeys, but I don't claim to be an expert. I do have a lot of questions, especially for Apple, because I'm an Apple user and developer. According to Betteridge's law of headlines , "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the…
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What's new in Emacs 29.1
What's new in Emacs 29.1? I go through every change and annotate the ones I feel are interesting or worth knowing more about.
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World Building with GPT
I’ve been doing lots of experiments with GPT , though I’ve only written about one until now… the more serious something is the harder it is to call it finished or identify the outcomes. Here I’ll describe something a bit lighter: world building, or specifically city building, with GPT .
1403
The web’s most important decision
I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […]
1404
You don't need a CRDT to build a collaborative experience
You don’t need CRDTs You don’t need CRDTs for collaborative experiences. First lets get the ‘what-about-ery’ out the way… Things you do need CRDTs for …
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Sierra’s Macintosh Timebomb (2021)
On Saturday, September 18 1993, Sierra's Macintosh games stopped working. Franchises froze as King's Quests, Space Quests, and even the Leisurely Suited Larries locked up. Practically every Mac SCI game had broken overnight. Sierra developed a patch within nine days, released it on their BBS, and announced it in their…
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Evading JavaScript anti-debugging techniques
Debuggers serve as invaluable tools that empower developers to halt code execution and thoroughly analyze its behavior at any given moment. By utilizing debuggers, developers can efficiently identify and resolve issues within their code, making it an indispensable part of their toolkit.
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Unpopular Opinion: Don’t Use a Raspberry Pi for That
A Raspberry Pi is great if you have a need for which it excels. GPIO, extremely low power requirements, tight space constraints. But the Pi should not be the first thing you reach for when “U…
1408
Some personal news
An update about me, FiveThirtyEight and the future after the Disney layoffs
1409
Circles do not exist
Many logos, drawings and other graphical designs have the following shape in it. What is this shape? If you thought: "Ah-ha! I'm smart and r...
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TODO apps are meant for robots
What if I'm a left-handed person in the world of right-handed tools?