Datasette’s new JSON write API: The first alpha of Datasette 1.0
This week I published the first alpha release of Datasette 1.0, with a significant new feature: Datasette core now includes a JSON API for creating and dropping tables and inserting, …
Booz Allen ticketmastered America’s public lands
An arms dealer makes millions on junk fees from National Parks visitors.
EV adoption in US is happening faster than predicted
How is electric car adoption accelerating in the US?
Shopify Is Illegal in Germany
In einem konkreten Fall hat die Datenschutzbehörde die Nutzung von Shopify, bzw. der verwendeten Dienste für rechtswidrig erklärt.
Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
The death of the PCIe expansion card
With the AM5 platform from AMD on the horizon, five major motherboard manufacturers have annonced their flagship motherboards with the X670E chipset. Some of them are having fun with this generation’s multi-faceted step into “five”: AM5, PCIe Gen 5.0, DDR5, 5nm process, boost clocks over 5GHz, you catch the drift. But…
In Praise of Stacked PRs
Managing sets of small, dependent PRs enables faster review and increased developer velocity
Capsaicin is a psychoactive substance
Capsaicin, the active substance in chili peppers, acts on vanilloid receptors (TRPV1) and alters adrenaline and endorphine levels.
Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Georgia
New research suggests the invasive but relatively harmless Joro spider could colonize the entire East Coast.
Single dependency stacks
Life with Postgres only.
Find You: Building a stealth AirTag clone
We built an AirTag clone capable of silently and continuously tracking someone. The device accomplishes this by sending just one beacon per generated public key, thereby staying invisible to tracking notifications for iOS users and Apple’s Tracker Detect Android app.
How I Built Zig-SQLite
Article explaining how to leverage Zig's compile time metaprogramming to build a SQLite wrapper that can type check SQL queries
Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
This is the second of a three part (I, II, III) series tackling the complicated and still very much debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In the last part, w…
Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…
Parallel Curves of Cubic Béziers
Blog of Raph Levien.
Recreating sci-fi terminals using VHS
I heard about VHS recently. It’s a tool for creating recordings of command-line tools, so you can create little demos and tutorials about how to use them. You can write a script to run comman…
Bitcoin is not a store of value
Before we begin, I’m not just some crypto FUDster.
CNIL makes Google Analytics almost illegal in France
In reaction to the invalidation of the Privacy Shield in July 2020 by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), US President Joe Biden adopted on 7 October 2022 a new legal framework (Executive Order) to strengthen safeguards on the collection and use of personal data by US intelligence agencies.
Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
A little post on why publishing statistics are so confusing
Performance Improvements in .NET 7
.NET 7 is fast. Really fast. This post deep-dives into hundreds of performance improvements that contributed to that reality.
Making Python fast – Adventures with mypyc
Attempting to speed up a library without changing the code using mypyc
Ghost in the ethernet optic
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
Fallacies of distributed systems
Fallacies of distributed systems are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
Porting Rust's Std to Rustix
A blog by sunfishcode
What is the inverse of a circle?
In this post we’ll try to make sense of what we’re seeing, and try to understand what it means to invert a circle!