The fastest passenger liner ever built, the SS United States was a joint undertaking by a civilian shipping line and the US Navy. SS United States, rusting away in Philadelphia photo from WikiCommo…
Over the last few years I’ve gradually given up on Twitter. This has been a long term process because of how deeply my professional and intellectual life was embedded into the service. Not on…
Thanks to a discovery in a Dal lab, manufacturers of laptops and other tech devices now have an explanation for why the batteries that power their gadgets tend to lose some of their charge over time and a path forward to fixing the problem..
Originally, the domain part of a web address was all ASCII (so no accents, no emojis, no Chinese characters). This was extended a long time ago thanks to something called internationalized domain name (IDN). Today, in theory, you can use any Unicode character you like as part of a domain name, including emojis…
This is a fun one. I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit staring at LLM output. And there’s something that I’ve noticed: LLM-generated prose has a kind of… vibe. It’s difficult to describe,…
A function that computes to the first color if the used color scheme is light or unknown, or to the second color if the used color scheme is dark.
Two-phase commit for humans
Slow, unreliable CI/CD? Learn how to use SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets to maintain focus, prioritize effort, and rebuild developer trust in CI/CD.
A recent UK Channel 4 TV programme talked about the recent decline in quality of food: YouTube Channel 4
UPDATE: this post unexpectedly ended up on Hacker News and I received a lot of comments. The two most important points being made are (1) that Secure Boot on the RPi as …
If you enjoy this article, I have published a book explaining the internals of Git through implementation: Building Git .
Introduction In this blog, we'll be going over some more advanced topics new in Postgres 16. Having some experience with Linux, Postgres, and SQL is necessary as we'll not only be going over these new features but also how to implement them. This blog was written using PostgreSQL 16 (Development Version) running on…
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from your normal stuff.1 For example, last year I talked about owning a microscope. This year I debated doing another hobby but settled on a much dumber topic. Have you ever seen those lists of weird…
Learn how Earthly Compute, a remote code execution as a service, was built to handle bursty workloads and provide secure and fast remote execution ...
The groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor was introduced by Intel in 1978 and led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and se...
The mathematical field of information theory attempts to mathematically describe the concept of “information”. In the first two posts, we discussed the concepts of self-information and information entropy. In this post, we step through Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem to see how the information entropy of a probability…
On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…
Prompt is a terminal that marries the best of GNOME Builder’s seamless container support, the beauty of GNOME Text Editor, and the robustness of VTE. I like to think of it as a companion terminal to Builder. Though it's also useful for immutable/container-oriented desktops like Fedora Silverblue or Project Bluefin…
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small p...
Finding RCE during deobfuscation in JEB decompiler running on Java 18.
The new Swift 5.9 release contains a number of helpful, new features for debugging code, including an out-of-process, interactive crash handler to inspect crashes in real time, the ability to trigger the debugger for just-in-time debugging, along with concurrency-aware backtracing to make it easier to understand…
First a round of thanks for the many people in industry and government who provided valuable links, background and insights! I could not have done this without your help! If you spot any mistakes, or have suggestions, please do contact me on bert@hubertnet.nl The EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act is admirable in its goal…
When I’m learning a new language, I tend to take a very dumb approach (and I don’t mean that in some enlightened way). I’ll usually try out a tutorial or two, but if the language is similar to another language that I know, I’ll basically just start coding without investing a lot of time learning the language features…
Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea – known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water – changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such…
I started working on Flyaway with the intention of becoming familiar with Wayland, its protocols and extensions, and the wlroots library. Instead, I ended up genuinely liking all three.
Dive into the inner workings of TikTok’s awesome real-time recommendation system and learn what makes it one of the best in the field!
The tech giant is not blinking: after the unprecedented pushback on its 3-day return to office policy last month, Amazon just made it clear that the policy is going ahead.
