1591
The Galaga no-fire-cheat mystery (2012)
My personal website and blog
1592
Category Theory Illustrated – Sets
Ready, set , begin… (you don’t know how hard I tried to resist to making that pun). We begin our inquiry with the theory of sets. Set theory and category theory share many similarities. We can view category theory as a generalization of set theory. That is, it’s meant to describe the same thing as set theory…
1593
Create optimal conditions for lucky things to happen to you (2020)
Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can create luck.
1594
Bruce Lee and Me
A reflection on the 50th anniversary of my friend's death.
1595
Symmetry in Chaos
The following is based upon systems of equations found in "Symmetry in Chaos, A Search for Pattern in Mathematics, Art, and Nature" (the second edition) by Michael Field and Martin Golubitsky. They ask the question whether there are aperiodic chaotic attractors that generate symmetric patterns? Can there be order…
1596
Hacking the Nintendo DSi Browser
I managed to exploit the Nintendo DSi browser 15 years after it was released in Japan. This post will go over the journey and the technical details.
1597
Last week's Let's Encrypt downtime
How I detected that Let's Encrypt issued 645 non-compliant certificates
1598
“It works on my machine” turns to “it works in my container” (2019)
You had things running with occasional glitches and there was always an excuse “It works in my machine” as there is rarely identical…
1599
1600
The falling nutritional value of crops
The mineral content of wheat and rice is lower today than sixty years ago. Why is that and what does it mean for how we eat?
1601
1602
Unpredictable black boxes are terrible interfaces
Why generative AI tools can be so difficult to use and how we might improve them
1603
Goodbye, Node.js Buffer
It’s time to move from Buffer to Uint8Array.
1604
ldd arbitrary code execution (2009)
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
1605
Explaining my fast 6502 code generator
To learn how optimizing compilers are made, I built one targeting the 6502 architecture . In a bizarre twist, my compiler generates faster code than GCC, LLVM, and every other compiler I compared it to.
1606
Haiku package management
I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative…
1607
Microsoft is eating the world
If OpenAI was a public company, it's stock would have been down about 38% today in a shocking turn of events.
1608
Cruel optimism and lazy pessimism
Do you remember the avocado toast guy? I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus recently (you should read it, it’s great), and I learned that someone1 has come up with a name for this sort of modern reinterpretation of “let them eat cake”: cruel optimism. Cruel optimism, the way Hari interprets it2, boils down to the folly…
1609
Running one’s own root Certificate Authority in 2023
A tale how running your own x509 root CA – for internal services – changed in the last 20 years.
1610
Call yourself titles
We constantly question ourselves when attempting anything new for the first time, which is daunting. And what’s worse, it prevents us from doing anything new, so we can’t change who we are. If you’ve always been terrible at sports and want to start working out, the natural reaction after a few attempts is to stop and…
1611
More malicious extensions in Chrome Web Store
So far I discovered 18 malicious extensions with 55 million users in total. Most popular ones are: Autoskip for Youtube, Crystal Ad block and Brisk VPN. They have been active for two years, undetected by Google.
1612
Text Editor Data Structures: Rethinking Undo
Undo and redo have been a staple operation of text editors probably since the first typo was ever made, yet there has not been a lot of innovation around refining the idea of what undo and redo could be. Let’s explore what I mean…
1613
GitHub Renamed Me (2014)
Github Renamed Me - We will change your SSH keys and you will like it
1614
Learnings from fine-tuning LLM on my Telegram messages
For most people I interact with, I’m just another text-based program for the most of the time. If input and output are so simple, could I be replaced by the model? For this to work, the model would need to not only understand my writing style but also know a lot about me. The best source for this is my Telegram…
1615
1616
How to train large models on many GPUs? (2021)
[Updated on 2022-03-13: add expert choice routing.] [Updated on 2022-06-10]: Greg and I wrote a shorted and upgraded version of this post, published on OpenAI Blog: “Techniques for Training Large Neural Networks”
1617
Committing Without Git
How does git store different versions of a file? What about a commit? Find out creating your own commit without the help of git.
1618
1619
The Disappearance of the Ashtray
These things used to be pieces of furniture
1620
Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)
I’m beginning to think that the Windows PC that I built in 2015 is ready for retirement (though if Joe Biden can be president at 78, maybe this […]