1621
Adding a USB port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano (the hard way)
I wanted to add an internal USB port to my ThinkPad X1 Nano which should have been a fairly easy thing to do, but it wasn't.
1622
The 1/8th Sleep
The eight sleep bed is a popular self-cooling bed. Sleeping on a colder surface not only feels great but often improves sleep as well. This post discusses a cheaper homemade option that I use instead.
1623
Everything I Know About the XZ Backdoor
Please note: This is being updated in real-time. The intent is to make sense of lots of simultaneous discoveries
1624
Qlock – A JavaScript Quine Clock
Displays the current time in a seven-segment style, embedded within its own JavaScript source code. (321 bytes)
1625
The search for easier safe systems programming
I've been involved in the Rust project in some form or another since 2016, and it's a language I'm very comfortable using. Many Rust programmers could say the same . But, if we take a step back and are honest with ourselves, we'd admit that the road to getting to that level of comfort was difficult.
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Other People’s Problems
It’s surprisingly easy to be generous and find solutions to our friend’s problems. Much easier than it is to do it for ourselves. Why? There are two useful reasons, I think. FIRST, beca…
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We created a fake delivery company to get a job
/imagine one day randomly finding yourself in a foreign country thousands of kilometres away from home. Your own country is suddenly at war, and all you have is a backpack hanging off your back. That’s a weird situation to be in. But you have to figure something out. So starting a fake delivery company sounds like the…
1630
A peculiarity of the X Window System: Windows all the way down
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
1631
Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm
Searching Google Scholar for "certainly, here is" turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently written by ChatGPT - sections that start with "Certainly, …
1632
On the new Dutch intelligence and security law
13th of June UPDATE: The Dutch government has failed to hire and house the promised new 10 oversight staff. Yet, the new law will be enacted July 1st, passing oversight to people that don’t exist. I surely enjoyed living under the rule of law, but it appears it was a passing thing. “The Netherlands hosts some of the…
1633
Can GPT optimize my taxes? An experiment in letting the LLM be the UX
TL;DR Yes, albeit with patience.
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XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta
This is one of several papers I’ll be reading from 2023’s Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). If you’d like to receive regular updates as soon as they’re published, check out my newsletter or follow me on the site formerly known as Twitter . Enjoy!
1636
SPI Flash
SPI Flash reader built from a Teensy or Arduino
1637
Implementing Natural Conversational Agents with Elixir
In my last post , I discussed some work I had done building Nero, the assistant of the future that I’ve always wanted. I ended up creating an end-to-end example which used Nx, OpenAI APIs, and ElevenLabs to create an in-browser home automation assistant. For a first product, it’s decent. Nero is a neat little party…
1638
Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?
I recently built a website that breaks down the cost of a UK electricity bill. It's interactive, and I'd recommend visiting it before reading this post. Check it out here: electricitybills.uk Here are three interesting things about the data. #1: The wholesale power cost is only one third of
1639
The expected value of the game is positive regardless of Ballmer’s strategy
A few days ago John Graham-Cumming posted about “Steve Ballmer’s incorrect binary search interview question” which drew a lot of attention on Hacker News. The Ballmer’s favorite brain teaser goes like this:
1640
Hidden Changes in GPT-4, Uncovered
The tool instructions in this article are not up to date as of 2024-01-12, see this post to learn more about the new tool OpenAI added to block conversations about U.S. elections using function calls.
1641
Leveraging Zig's Allocators
How Zig's allocators can help manage memory and improve performance
1642
The new APT 3.0 solver
APT 2.9.3 introduces the first iteration of the new solver codenamed solver3, and now available with the –solver 3.0 option. The new solver works fundamentally different from the old one. How does it work? Solver3 is a fully backtracking dependency solving algorithm that defers choices to as late as possible. It…
1643
LLMs aren't "trained on the internet" anymore
A path to continued model improvement.
1644
Exploring Gleam, a type-safe language on the BEAM
Le site où je raconte comment faire du logiciel de qualité2024193 points92 commentsProgramming Languages details
From Erlang, to Elixir and now, GLEAM!?
1645
Playing guitar tablatures in Rust
Introducing Ruxguitar, a guitar tablature player written in Rust
1646
Librebooting the ThinkPad T480
Muh freedumbs on muh hardware!
1647
My solar-powered and self-hosted website
How I built a solar-powered, self-hosted website with a Raspberry Pi to explore sustainable, local-first web hosting.
1648
Stacking triangles for fun and profit
One thing you may have noticed about the trigonometric functions sine and cosine is that they seem to have no agreed upon definition. Or rather, different authors choose different definitions as the starting point, mainly based on convenience. This isn’t problematic or even particularly unusual in mathematics: as long…
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The Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight (2023)
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigati...
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Personal computing paves the way for personal library science
How the past of Personal Computing gives us a hint into the future of Personal Library Science