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The Stroad
A stroad is a street/road hybrid. Stroads are dangerous and unproductive, and if we want to build strong towns, we have to eliminate them.
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DuckDuckGo Extension to Block FLoC, Google’s New Tracking Method in Chrome
Google has created a new tracking mechanism called FLoC, put it in Chrome, and automatically turned it on for millions of users. It's bad for privacy, which is why we're now blocking it in the DuckDuckGo extension.
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I
Apple’s latest line of Macs includes their in-house “M1” system-on-chip, featuring a custom GPU. This poses a problem for those of us in the Asahi Linux project who wish to run Linux on our devices, as this custom Apple GPU has neither public documentation nor open source drivers. Some speculate it might descend from…
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Things I learned from building a production database
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). We hit production with a 3-person team in less than a year; and subsequently scaled the team to 30+…
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Pokegb: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 68 lines of C++
POKEGB: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 62 lines of c++. source: https://t.co/AGt7RUTr9H pic.twitter.com/o0BUUmzNOt
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SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases
The name SQLite is a nice name, but the "lite" part is misleading, it sounds like it is only useful for tiny things - which is very wrong. SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is. SQLite is probably the only database you will ever need in most cases.
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Don’t do interviews, do discussions
(5 Min Read) This change guarantees better signals from the interviewing candidates.
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We analyzed 425k favicons
The humble favicon was messily birthed with the pernicious IE5 release. Since that fateful day, browsers have slowly expanded favicon technology to encompass many wildly differing and lightly documented use cases. Here in 2021 favicons are found primarily in browser tabs, home screens, and Google search results, but…
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I mailed an AirTag and tracked its progress
I sent an AirTag by mail to a friend and tracked it across the UK.
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EFF Joins Global Coalition Asking Apple CEO Tim Cook to Stop Phone-Scanning
EFF has joined the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and more than 90 other organizations to send a letter urging Apple CEO Tim Cook to stop the company’s plans to weaken privacy and security on Apple’s iPhones and other products. Have you signed the petition?
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The Untold Story of SQLite
On today's show, I'm talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It's in your web browser, it's in your phone, it's probably in your car, and it's definitely in commercial planes. It's where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored, and if you do a…
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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
Open Source software runs the Internet, and by extension the economy. This is an undisputed fact about reality in 2021. And yet, the role of Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession.
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Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone
I'm a weirdo - I fully admit that. As part of my home working set up, I use a vertical monitor. I read and write a lot of long documents - and this form factor suits me perfectly. I've been doing this for a long time. It is a natural part of my workflow. For anything longer than an email, it's the perfect orientation…
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Elementary OS 6 Odin
It’s finally here, and it’s the biggest update to the platform yet
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Everyone is still terrible at creating software at scale
I have a hunch that once people saw the economic potential of software, they started looking for ways to "scale it up" and we haven't stopped searching yet.
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On incels, dead bedrooms and the hard problems of loneliness
My father’s father was by all accounts a really bitter-hearted sort of person.
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Understanding Python through its builtins
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The open calendar, task and note space is a mess
The last few weeks I’ve been looking into the open calendar, tasks and notes space with the goal of finding or building a privacy-conscious and still practical system. This post is an exploration of the available technology in that space, its problems and how to solve them.
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Open Source Tax Software
Filing taxes in America sucks. Your options are to do it by hand, pay someone like Intuit, or if you are below a certain income threshold get some tax software for free. The kicker is that free tax software is from Intuit who will try very hard to make sure that you either don’t find it in the first place, or try to…
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Many small queries are efficient in SQLite
200 SQL statements per webpage is excessive for client/server database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server.
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Six Palestinian organizations hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware
On 19 October 2021, Israeli Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, announced the designation of six leading Palestinian civil society organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as “terrorist organizations” under Israel’s Anti-Terrorism Law 2016. The groups named are Addameer; Al-Haq; Defense for Children …
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There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
It took a while, but I finally managed to create my own Game Boy cartridge. With WiFi! At this point, it can only demo a simple telnet-style communication and access Wikipedia articles, but I am confident that I will showcase more in the future. For now, the interesting and surprisingly tricky part is how the thing…
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Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California
It’s the first half of 2021 – nearly five years since the “first half of 2016” – but in many ways not much has changed. The United Kingdom is still trying to figure out Brexit, another Justin Bieber song hit #1 on the charts (is it too late now to say sorry?), and Signal still doesn’t really know...
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Please commit more blatant academic fraud
This week, I was thrilled to read about the first well-documented case of explicit academic fraud in the artificial intelligence community. I hope that this is the beginning of a trend, and that other researchers will be inspired by their example and follow up by engaging in even more blatant...
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The ownership and future of Mullvad VPN
This article is by our founders and sole shareholders, Daniel Berntsson and Fredrik Strömberg. Mullvad VPN is here to stay, and we are not interested in ever selling it.