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Replacing Mapbox with open source solutions
I rebuilt our interactive mapping stack with open source technology
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OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models
LLMs have become privately-controlled research infrastructure
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CAN Injection: Keyless car theft
This is a detective story about how a car was stolen - and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft. It begins with a tweet. In April 2022, my friend Ian Tabor tweeted that vandals had been at his car, pulling apart the headlight and unplugging the cables.
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At this company, we are family
As I shared at our last family meeting, current economic conditions have forced family leadership to make many difficult decisions. I myself have reduced my golf outings to every other week, and you, undoubtedly, noticed that your mother’s car is no longer the current model year. Unfortunately, even these deep cuts…
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Just normal web things
A plea for us to get back to building websites that can do normal website things.
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I skipped to the ending
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…
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How to learn chess as an adult (2021)
Becoming the worst best chess player in the world
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Seeing like a bank
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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Most data work seems fundamentally worthless
After going viral, there is one comment I'd like to address. One guy pointed out how comfortable this work seemed, how high the pay was, and said I am out-of-touch and privileged. To that I say, yes, obviously . I moved to the first-world to have first-world problems. Mission accomplished.
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Native JSON Output from GPT-4
When integrating LLMs in your products, you often want to generate structured data, like JSONs. With the help of function calling (released June 13th 2023), this process has become much simpler! In this post I will explore the new API. Thanks for reading Simon’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and…
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Reptar
We have a CPU mystery! We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?
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Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide
I have set up an electronics lab bench for all my hobby and product development projects. In this article, I will dive deep into every part of the setup and guide you through the structure, organiz…
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Google no longer automatically indexes websites?
Can you please take a few minutes today, go to Google, and search for your website using the site search filter? (EX: site:mysite.com) Do you have about the right number of pages showing up, or just a few pages, or worse yet – none? The reason I am asking you to do this is that […]
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Voice.ai: GPL Violations with a Side of DRM
the one good use of copyright is prying things open
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The Windows 11 Trash Party
Thomas Bandt was setting up a new computer for his kid, and it gave him the opportunity to really look at what Windows has become over the years. Here's what was showing by default in the Start menu: First, there was news about a mass shooting that had occurred
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Fast machines, slow machines
Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I’ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and… nothing, almost-zero interest. Now that…
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JavaScript Gom Jabbar
What's inside that package.json? Pain.
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Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash and hyphen
It's easy to use the hyphen, em dash and en dash to make your writing flow better. Let's look at some examples of the en dash...
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You are never taught how to build quality software
Learning how to build quality software is not part of computer science education. How do we learn it?
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“Exit traps” can make your Bash scripts more robust and reliable (2013)
There is a simple, useful idiom to make your bash scripts more robust - ensuring they always perform necessary cleanup operations, even when something unexpected goes wrong. The secret sauce is a pseudo-signal provided by bash, called EXIT, that you can trap ; commands or functions trapped on it will execute when the…
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My Overkill Home Network
In this post I will hopefully detail my entire home network. Some of this has been in separate posts explaining single items, but nowhere do I have all of the network in one post with all the changes since last year. Here is a full shot of the rack in
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Modern iOS Navigation Patterns
An unofficial bonus chapter for the iOS Human Interface Guidelines: Learn how to structure iPhone apps with drill-downs, modals, pyramids, sequences, and more.
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The ReMarkable Streaming Tool v2: Elevating Remote Work Efficiency
In this article, I expose the new version of the streaming tool for my reMarkable tablet. Originally crafted in 2021, this tool allowed me to stream sketches during video calls. Aiming for more user-friendliness, I revamped the design to a clientless implementation. This articles describes the implementation with some…
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Infinite AI Array
making new string and list classes that call gpt3 under the hood so you can access elements beyond the final one. no more index errors!
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Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
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Bypassing YouTube video download throttling
Have you ever tried to download videos from YouTube? I mean manually without relying on software like youtube-dl, yt-dlp or one of “these” websites. It’s much more complicated than you might think.