2611
Letting Claude play text adventures
Experiments in cognitive architecture.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,710 posts.
2612
I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip
Colin's things that might be useful or interesting2026154 points49 commentsHardware & Electronics details
I've always had a fascination with simpler and low power computing. This lead me to run Photoshop on a 60 pence computer chip and it amazes me that this is possible.
2613
Synthesis is harder than analysis
Over the years, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists have developed various calculi. If you have a background in computer science, you’ve likely heard of the lambda calculus, a m…
2614
Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
The HP C2089A “PostScript Cartridge Plus”, a 1991 add-on for the LaserJet II/III, adds PostScript Level 2 support through Adobe’s own reference interpreter (version 2010.118) on a 2 MB ROM. Thirty-five years on, that ROM is still a current PostScript implementation: it renders the language correc…
2615
Sourcehut account takeover via build logs (XSS in ansi2html)
A wormable vulnerability allowed anyone able to inject text in a build log on builds.sr.ht (or other instances) to take over accounts who viewed them
2616
Cigarette smoke effect using shaders
Notes about creative coding on the Web.
2617
The safest job from AI may be writing
Today, tech folk are scrambling to change their workflows to meet newly inflated 5X productivity quotas, while getting pummeled under the co...
2618
I changed my license
In the last 28 years of publishing software, I’ve had three distinct eras of software licensing. All of my recent stuff is available under the European Union Public License 1.2, and I thought to explain why.
2619
People Hate AI Art
If your initial reaction to reading that and seeing that is some variation of "ughhh" or rolling your eyes or "fuck this guy" congrats. You are normal.
2620
SFO Quiet Airport (2025)
The airport targeted gate announcements, overlapping PA messages, and tenant music. Instead of blasting departure calls terminal-wide, messages are limited to each gate and their immediate surroundings. In 2020, they worked with airlines to centralize and reduce announcements, cutting 40% of the paging.
2621
Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points
Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test: In this blog post, I'll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I'll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework Desktop cluster and Mac Studio…
2622
Neurons outside the brain
The three brains in our body
2623
The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.
2624
A small collection of text-only websites
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is…
2625
Why is Inkwell stuck in review
I submitted Inkwell for iOS to Apple for review on April 21st. It has gone through numerous rejections, code changes, resubmissions, clarifications, one phone call, and one appeal to the review board, which I’m still waiting to hear back on.
2626
How to choose between Hindley-Milner and bidirectional typing
A false dichotomy that hides the real request
2627
Social Cache Busting
How do you ask questions that people don’t just hippopotamus?
2628
So, you want to chunk really fast?
How we built memchunk - a blazing fast text chunking library using SIMD and memchr for RAG pipelines
2629
H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright typographic mystery
The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.
2630
Wallace the 6 inch f/2.8 telescope, building it, and hiking with it
Hiking with Wallace, my 6" f/2.8 corrected dobsonian.
2631
Dungeon generation in the Gnomish mines of NetHack
Ok, this one is really best explained with a visualiser:
2632
Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools
Test-case reducers are less well known than they should be, and those who are aware of them don’t always realise the variety of ways we can use – perhaps even abuse! – them. In this post, I’m going to explore some of the things I’ve learnt while using these wonderful tools. I’ll start at the basics, because the idea…
2633
The Document Foundation ejects its core developers
Older items: 2026 : ( J F M A ), 2025 , 2024 , 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2021 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 , 2016 , 2015 , 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , 2010 , 2009 , 2009 , 2008 , 2007 , 2006 , 2005 , 2004 , 2003 , 2002 , 2001 , 2000 , 1999 , legacy html
2634
IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake
Run away while you still can, it's not too late for you to avoid the curse of knowledge.
2635
My old job feels distant now
I can hardly remember first experiencing ChatGPT. Its become so infused into my professional life, that going back to that first moment, or moments, is difficult. Instead a blur of a few moments. At some point, I realized it was a better Google. It was very similar to when Stackoverflow took off, and how Google search…
2636
Too much discussion of the XOR swap trick
The following post involves far too much discussion of the XOR swap trick. If XOR itself is unfamiliar, I have written a gentler introduction to it .
2637
The Future of AI
The Parents’ Paradox: AI, Ethics, and the Limits of Machine Morality This post is based on a talk I gave at The AI & Automation Conference in London on February 25, 2026, and my slides. A…
2638
Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 so far
Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone. He’s already written (or at least published to SSRN), six papers today, August 26, 2026.
2639
Just Let Me Write Digits
Digital identities and what they mean for the web have become a hot topic of discussion in the last few years.They have also brought many controversies: age verification laws and what they mean for online anonymity, Wikipedia potentially having to verify the identify of its users in the UK, the reliance on official…
2640
The case of the 9 bit AES key
Several PDF implementations advertise AES-256, but generate the 256-bit key from either a very small state space, or from insecure random sources.