OpenZFS 2.3.0 will be released any day now, and it includes the new “Fast Dedup” feature. My team at Klara spent many months in 2023 and 2024 working on it, and we reckon it’s pretty good, a huge step up from the old dedup as well as being a solid base for further improvements. I’ve been watching various forums and…
Lidl is launching sovereign cloud computing in Europe. GDPR and data compliance is driving the EU to look for local alternatives.
I recently passed 100 days of practicing math every single day 💯 I’ve wanted to beef up my math chops for a while, but I needed a good reason that would justify the time investment. Plus…
[UPDATE Since this was posted in 2024 : Major US telcos like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have suffered a months-long breach (the ongoing Salt Typhoon attack). These companies, of course, pass along the unencrypted SMSes vital to countless log in flows, account re-activations, and password resets. They are now known to…
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a revolution took place in American military aircraft design.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Due to UK disclosure requirements, it's possible to examine the P&L of the privately owned/controlled OnlyFans. And the results are shocking.
Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian , who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language. Oh well, we can't…
The story is personal, but I hope readers find something they can relate to in their own life stream.
A metascience post of sorts that argues we should take human capital more seriously
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
Back in the day, centering an element was one of the trickiest things in CSS. As the language has evolved, we’ve been given lots of new tools we can use… But how do we pick the best option? When do we use Flexbox, or CSS Grid, or something else? Let's dig into it.
Software that makes you a better programmer.
I used to be a big fan of Spotify. Today I cancelled my subscription.
Photographic memory comes to Windows, and is the biggest security setback in a decade.
So I’m two months into trying to teach a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to a computer. We already have one interesting story, which I felt was worth sharing.
Welcome to the blog. As a way to kick things off, here’s a single-page version of my thread on the F-35C tailhook.
It’s more than rails!
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …
Introduction to implementing USB devices. Minimal overview of hardware and software with an example with STM32 microcontroller. Also contains an index to very detailed guides for more information.
I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…
Recently, I got a new laptop and had to set it up so I could start using it. But I wasn't really in the mood to go through the same old steps which I had explained in this post earlier . I was complaining about this to my colleague, and there came the suggestion of why not copy the entire disk to the new laptop…
In my teens and early 20s I was obsessed with the history of computing and the internet. I still am, but other obsessions have reduced the relative weight of...
This may be overkill, but it works on my machine
Hello friends, this is the first of two, possibly three (if and when I have time to finish the Windows research) writeups. We will start with targeting GNU/Lin…
Designing a modern pulse compression radar that uses digital signal processing.
This is the first of two posts about a renderer I have been developing, focusing on what I've built and how it works. The second post discusses why I've built it and my plans for the future. I've been developing a custom real-time renderer which uses very small voxels to produce a distinctive visual style that…
