631
Hacking the Apple Webcam (Again)
$100,500 Apple Bug Bounty for hacking the webcam via a Safari Universal Cross-Site Scripting (UXSS) bug. CVE-2021-30861, CVE-2021-30975
632
633
634
Many indoor air quality sensor products are a scam
I have not posted for a very long time. Writeups on this site often take dozens of hours. Time for something lower effort!
635
The first RISC-V portable computer is now available
The DevTerm R-01 is a RISC-V based "slabtop" computer.
636
Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around WiFi restrictions
In-flight messaging I was on a Delta flight the other day, and I was thinking about how they offer free messaging from your smartphone. How do they limit the wifi? Maybe they have some basic filter that says “deny everything except the urls for these 3 messaging apps”, which makes sense conceptually. What if we don’t…
637
The painfully shy developer's guide to networking for a better job (2017)
Sam Julien is the Director of Product at CopilotKit, building open-source infrastructure for AI agents and generative UI. He writes about product strategy, developer experience, and the practical microskills that help you grow as a builder and leader.
638
Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)
We’ve all sat in those presentations. A speaker with a stream of slides full of text, monotonously reading them off as we read along. We’re so used to it we expect it. We accept it. We even consider it ‘learning’. As an educator I push against ‘death by PowerPoint’ and I'm fascinated with how we
639
Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?
Why do the black keys on the piano each have two different names? If the posts on r/musictheory are any indication, this is a persistent point of confusion, especially when music theory teachers ge…
640
Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
thinking about scary things • examples from Wave • examples from elsewhere • finding a buddy • getting the timing right • a list of abyss questions
641
Google Broke Image Search for Creative Commons
Except me. As of one minute ago I confirmed what I noticed last Wednesday. According to the all seeing Google, on the entire world wide web there are but three Creative Commons licensed images of a…
642
Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards
AWM #91: I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??) 🪞
643
Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply better against populations than people. In the case of…
644
LaMDA is not sentient
No, LaMDA is not sentient. Not even slightly.
645
We will never have enough software developers (2020)
Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers despite efforts to grow the number of computer science graduates and software engineers.
646
There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code
Everyone seems to be striving for ‘clean’ code at the moment. You can’t read a blog post without the author telling you how clean their approach is. Engineering teams get together and discuss which of the possible solutions is the cleanest. Other developers assure you that they practice ‘clean code’.
647
Hard to work with
Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled…
648
I made an AI write a story about AI then I made another AI illustrate it
I was walking home from school by myself when I saw it. A robot, just standing in the middle of the street.
649
Self Hosting a Google Maps Alternative with OpenStreetMap
Self hosting a software stack to replace Google Maps on an unused gaming PC.
650
A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die's silicon
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
651
I assure you, medieval people bathed (2019)
I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly. Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true. In fact, medieval people loved a bath a…
652
Simplicity of IRC
During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of…
653
TOTP tokens on my wrist with the smartest dumb watch
I recently took delivery of a new replacement logic board for the ubiquitous classic Casio F-91W from Sensor Watch. The F-91W needs no introduction. It’s probably the most popular quartz watch in the world with something like 90 million total units sold.
654
Forty percent of the world’s shipping consists of fossil fuels to be burned
Doing the right thing makes other right things happen
655
A neat XOR trick
Looking over the solutions mega-thread , it seems like not many people discovered this trick; when I posted about it , people found it to be noteworthy.
656
Ten Years of ThinkPadding
I’m the author of the title picture, and these are my ThinkPads. I’ve been very loyal to the ThinkPad brand for more than a decade. Until Lenovo sold me a lemon — ThinkPad X13 AMD. That event encouraged me to reflect on my loyalty. Which I did, and now I’m happy to share the results.
657
YouTube cancelled my Nextcloud installation how-to
Chris McCormick - News
658
Aspect-ratio is great
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like a lot of the time learning new CSS features doesn’t involve just learning a what a single property does, more like getting to grips with a collection of properties and how they work together — even learning a whole specification. That’s certainly not a complaint from me: it makes…
659
Visual Sum of Cubes
This article discusses a ‘visual’ derivation of the formula for 1³+2³+…+n³.
660
Watching an acquirer ruin your company
What happens on the other side of the acquisition doesn't get much startup press