This post covers the design and creation of the Floppy8, a microcomputer and cartridge system which fits inside a floppy drive. To see it in action, checkout this video! The Floppy8 plays 4K movies and games on custom cartridges, features wireless controllers, status lights, motorized cartridge ejection and more! Simil
The Microsoft Azure Core Upstream team is excited to announce the Hyperlight project, an open-source Rust library you can use to create very small VMs for embedded functions. Learn more.
Embeddings encourage engineers to go full YOLO because it’s actually rewarding to do so!
1 sites already link to thisisalot.com, after 2 years online. Listed at $195 — keep the equity.
Phishing attacks increased nearly 40 percent in the year ending August 2024, with much of that growth concentrated at a small number of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) — such as .shop , .top , .xyz — that attract scammers with rock-bottom prices and no meaningful registration requirements, new research finds…
I once worked at a company that priced everything with a .95 ending. The bestselling software package was $999.95. Add-on products were $9.95, or $19.95, or $49.95. Everything ended with a .95. It had been this way for more than twenty years. One day, one of the VPs suggested we change all prices to end […]
To avoid catastrophic climate impacts, excessive carbon emissions must be addressed. At this point, cutting emissions isn’t enough. Direct air capture, a technology that pulls carbon dioxide out of ambient air, has great potential to help solve the problem.
a.k.a. Richard Hamming vs. Richard Feynman
Blog post: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs
This is a follow-up to my blog post macOS Sonoma silently enabled iCloud Keychain despite my precautions from five months ago. The TL;DR of that blog post is that when you have iCloud enabled but not iCloud Keychain, updating from Ventura to Sonoma causes iCloud Keychain to be silently enabled. (I don't know yet…
The story of a geeky twist on "Party like it's 1999".
Genius is fragile. Success, even more so. What does it mean then for an artist to fail?
Two years ago I was elected to the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation—the PSF. I recently returned from the annual PSF board retreat (this one was in …
Cloudflare's customers can now take advantage of Zstandard (zstd) compression, offering 42% faster compression than Brotli and 11.3% more efficiency than GZIP. We're further optimizing performance for our customers with HTTP/3 prioritization and BBR congestion control, and enhancing privacy through Encrypted Client…
Ever since I visited my first web site (via a slow modem to a library BBS running a text-based web browser), I have been ceaselessly pondering the nature of ...
Welcome to Waqas' blog
You might remember him from such roles as Troy McClure or Lionel Hutz, but in the years before legendary comic Phil Hartman shaved the second ‘n’ from his name, he was designing album art for some West Coast rock bands.
The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week, but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like.
Backpropagation is the key algorithm that makes training deep models computationally tractable. For modern neural networks, it can make training with gradient descent as much as ten million times faster, relative to a naive implementation. That’s the difference between a model taking a week to train and taking 200,000…
Four lines of code … it was four lines of code
Do fun projects
With their quadruple personalities, those little brown birds at your feeder are a lot more interesting than they might appear.
I created a new intermediate language, called Bril, for teaching my funky open-source, hands-on compilers course. Because it’s for education, Bril prioritizes simplicity and regularity over more typical compiler priorities like performance and concision. This is an overview of Bril’s design, its quirks, and the…
I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated. I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper […]
GE Vernova announces 2.4 GW order for Pattern Energy’s SunZia wind project
I had a plumber over the other day. I was worried that my water service line might be leaking. There was a wet patch in the yard and I noticed that one of my sink’s water pressure seemed to be lowe…
There’s been a lot of excitement lately about single-machine compute engines like DuckDB and Polars. With the recent release of pure Python Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, the excitement about these lightweight native engines has risen to a new high. Out with Spark and in with the new and cool animal-themed engines— is…
