Recently, the Linux Mint Blog published Monthly News – April 2024, which goes into detail about wanting to fork and maintain older GNOME apps in collaboration with other GTK-based desktop environments. Despite the good intentions of the author, Clem, many readers interpreted this as an attack against GNOME…
We’re developing a blueprint for evaluating the risk that a large language model (LLM) could aid someone in creating a biological threat. In an evaluation involving both biology experts and students, we found that GPT-4 provides at most a mild uplift in biological threat creation accuracy. While this uplift is not…
Discussing the importance of working alongside your emotions and not against them
Every year, around March, a curious social custom occurs in Japanese families. Parents of kids entering elementary school visit the grandparents and gingerly tread the topic of buying the kids a very expensive item: a randoseru. And gingerly they must tread. The randoseru, a Japanese school bag, costs a whopping
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
Dmitrii Kovanikov writes posts about enterprise software development and functional programming, both entertaining and serious. I never used a functional programming language (such as Haskell or OCaml) at work, but several ideas from functional programming have become popular in mainstream general-purpose programming…
Some of the things I've learned over a decade of Git usage, and working on writing good commit messages.
A surprisingly innovative portable ST
Some humans put a ~2.4GHz magnetron on a ventilated metal box with a fancy door.
Power your open source project with Vercel platform credits, exclusive community support, and extra benefits.
With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD “installer” for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it’s been due for an minor rework.
When children turn 13, they age out of the data protections provided by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Then, they become targets for data collection from data brokers that collect their information from social media apps, shopping history, location tracking services, and more.
Why TypeSpec is the best way to write OpenAPI
If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”. It's time to see how any of that carried over through the 16-bit to 64-bit evolution.
I have recently released an open source tool called sotrace . It maps out the .so dependencies for a binary or library, and presents th...
LLM chatbots can be engaged in endless "conversations" by considerably simpler text generation bots. This has some interesting implications.
I built a new plugin for my sqlite-utils CLI tool that lets you ask human-language questions directly of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files on your computer. It’s called sqlite-utils-ask. Here’s …
Taking a look at a Wireless Tank Mouse that I picked up from Sordan.ie and seeing how well it works with my Commodore computers.
A deep dive into evolutionary algorithms through the lens of low-poly image generation. This exploration covers genetic algorithm theory, custom Ruby implementation using the Petri Dish framework, and detailed analysis of genetic operators including roulette wheel selection, random midpoint crossover, and nudge…
William the Conqueror is one of those historical figures who need no introduction. Thanks to his famous victory at Hastings in 1066, he dra...
My currently understanding of types
Learn how to measure the impact of Python GIL contention on application latency using eBPF, with real workload examples.
A deep dive into my home grown cocktail recipe app which speaks Tailscale natively using tsnet, and serves up delicious drinks direct to your tailnet. Libations is built with Go, Nix and Vanilla Framework.
This post guides through decompiling Hyper-V Manager to rebuild it from source, aiming to assess its value for potential open-sourcing. It explores manual and automated decompilation processes, including troubleshooting and enhancing the tool, advocating for community-led improvements to this widely-used but neglected…
Telemedicine (and mobile health generally) accumulated a hunk of public mindshare during the pandemic emergency, but speaking as someone wit...
Low level software usually has lots of .cc or .rs files. Even lower-level software, like your cryptography library, probably has .S containing assembly, my least favorite language for code review.
A deep dive into the Probabilistic B-tree or Prolly Tree data structure including examples. Prolly Trees are used to create version controlled databases.
OpenTofu 1.7.0 is now available with full state encryption, dynamic provider-defined functions, the removed and loopable import blocks, new migration guides, and much more.
