3331
White space does matter in C23
Usually in C identifiers are not directly followed by strings. But when U prefixed literals were introduced in C. there still were some rare clashes with existing code. This happened were a macro U…
3332
How Chainalysis made their way into popular Monero wallets
An investigation into how malicious nodes run by Chainalysis made their way into defaults of popular Monero wallets.
3333
Understanding Stein's Paradox (2021)
An intuitive explanation of the James-Stein estimator.
3334
3335
Attacks on machine learning models
HN discussion
3336
A Simulated Annealing FPGA Placer
Academic website for Stefan Abi-Karam.
3337
Bringing Faster Exceptions to Rust
Three months ago, I wrote about why you might want to use panics for error handling. Even though it’s a catchy title, panics are hardly suited for this goal, even if you try to hack around with macros and libraries. The real star is the unwinding mechanism, which powers panics. This post is the first in a series…
3338
Why Certificate Lifecycle Automation Matters
If you’ve perused the ActivityPub feed of certificates whose keys are known to be compromised , and clicked on the “Show More” button to see the name of the certificate issuer, you may have noticed that some issuers seem to come up again and again. This might make sense – after all, if a CA is issuing a large volume…
3339
Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS
In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines - such as the A1200 - may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part…
3340
How to Get or Create in PostgreSQL
And why it is so easy to get wrong...
3341
TLA from First Principles
Building an intuition for the mathematics behind the "TLA" in "TLA+"
3342
Bump Allocation: Up or Down?
Back in 2019, Nick Fitzgerald published always bump downwards, an article making the case that for bump allocators, bumping “down” (towards lower addresses) is better than bumping up. The biggest reasons for this are bumping up requires 3 branches vs 2 for bumping down and rounding down requires fewer instructions…
3343
Pwned Certificates on the Fediverse
As well as the collection and distribution of compromised keys , the pwnedkeys project also matches those pwned keys against issued SSL certificates. I’m excited to announce that, as of the beginning of 2024, all matched certificates are now being published on the Fediverse , thanks to the botsin.space Mastodon server.
3344
3345
The marvelous disappearing capacitor
The performance of photodiode amplifiers can be improved in a clever way.
3346
Thinking about high-quality human data
[Special thank you to Ian Kivlichan for many useful pointers (E.g. the 100+ year old Nature paper “Vox populi”) and nice feedback. 🙏 ] High-quality data is the fuel for modern data deep learning model training. Most of the task-specific labeled data comes from human annotation, such as classification task or RLHF…
3347
From Datalog to SVG
Exporting graph data to text file and SVG with Datalog
3348
3349
What docs-as-code means
I’ve recently started a new job as a documentation engineer. While my work is largely the same as that of a technical writer, …
3350
All the existential risk, none of the economic impact
I offer "no economic boost," you receive "P(doom)"
3351
"My boss says we don't need any engineering managers"
"I'm a VP Engineering at a 40-person startup. My CEO (former engineer) won't let me hire engineering managers. He says we can't afford such luxuries, all hands should write code. How do I make the case for managers?"
3352
The Subprime AI Crisis
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
3353
Do we need to store all that telemetry?
In my last post I talked about why modern observability has become so expensive. At the end of the post I posit a question: What if by default we never send any telemetry at all? In this post I’m goin
3354
Pelicans on a bicycle
I decided to roll out my own LLM benchmark: how well can different models render an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle? I chose that because a) I like …
3355
A smooth and sharp image interpolation you probably haven't heard of
An image interpolation that gives us a continuous and smooth image, where every interpolated value only depends on the four neighboring pixel values. The image becomes smooth, but sharp features remain sharp.
3356
A small Rust binary indeed (2022)
Can we make a Rust program that's as small as it's assembler equivalent?
3357
Linux for UX Designers: What I learn after a year of doing design work on Linux
My experience with moving from Mac to Linux for professional UX and UI design work and how to make the switch yourself.
3358
Node.js, Pipes, and Disappearing Bytes
Someone in one of my online communities recently asked about why their Node command was dropping output when piped to another command:
3359
Does anybody know this fractal? (2012)
Experimenting with the "divisibility" of complex numbers, I stumbled across this thingy. It looks like a fractal. Although the formula does not do any iterations. It reminds me of something. But I dont know what. Doing a Google image search brings up a couple of galaxies :) This image shows the region from (-1/-1) to…
3360
Displaying Content as a Graph
Most web content is displayed as a strict hierarchy, tree-based or otherwise. What if it wasn't?An exploration into the advantages of graph-based content design, the numerous pitfalls, and a few case studies along the way.