I have been aware of tarsnap for a long time, but only recently did I actually get around to using it for anything, as a result of my big personal digital resiliency audit for 2025. For those of you not in the know, tarsnap is “online backups for the truly paranoid”, and tarsnap the command-line program is the…
How continuous learning shapes effective software development with LLMs
I have been using FreeBSD on the desktops/laptops since about 20 years now and I have described all that I configured in the FreeBSD Desktop series. About 1 year ago I shared a video on YouTube and…
The most interesting keyboards I ever acquired
I’ve just uploaded to the arXiv the paper “Decomposing a factorial into large factors”. This paper studies the quantity $latex {t(N)}&fg=000000$, defined as the largest quanti…
We used to use software; now software started to use us
9 months ago, I took a gander at PG’s guide to Bel . If you haven’t read it, here’s the premise:
The informal definition of an elliptic curve is simple. The formal definition is more involved.
Article explaining simulation algorithms that produce complex organic behaviours, starting with the classic physarum algorithm from Jeff Jones.
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
My experience working across timezones for Americans
TLDR: man pages support links, but man page readers neither display nor allow allow following them.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to do away with my Netflix subscription. I simply was barely using it, and whenever I did it was more ou...
A first-time visitor from Hamburg reflects on Munich's royal roots, museums, and surprising contrasts between two of Germany's most iconic cities.
We are in the middle of the biggest red ocean I have ever seen in software development.
Computers are starting to have opinions on how our APIs should look like
Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding and ciphers. Surprisingly, the newest models were able to solve these kinds of…
Last week I had the pleasure of attending RustForge in Wellington, New Zealand. I gave a talk titled “Wild performance tricks”. You can watch a recording of my talk . If you’d prefer to read rather than watch, the rest of this post will cover more or less the same material. The talk shows some linker benchmarks, which…
Note there is a RP2040 version of this now available Das Blinkenlights (mit RP2040!)
A year ago, Mihail Eric wrote a blog post detailing his experiences working on AI inside Amazon: How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet. It’s a great …
There’s a bushy tree in my backyard with these dark red fruit — the kind that makes some primal instinct scream at you across millennia, but you can’t tell if it wants you to eat them or not.
I’m a child of the 1970s and I’m glad I never knew about the Sony FX-300 “Jackal 300.” It would have been the ultimate unobtainable machine of my dreams…this, even des…
Marko Elez , a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans with a deep sense of…
© 2025 Peter N. M. Hansteen Long rumored and eagerly anticipated by some, the fourth edition of The Book of PF is now available for ...
Thomas Ptacek, a friend and expert witness in this lawsuit summed it up best in the court's hallway while walking within three feet of opposing counsel: "This is fucking stupid" .
This story is about concurrent data structures in the context of Ruby. The goal here is to demonstrate how true parallelism can be achieved with global mutable state (which at the time of writing, is not supported by built-in Ruby primitives).
At this summer's HOPE conference, Joshua Aaron spoke about ICEBlock, his iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5 mile radius, and to get notifications when others report ICE sightings near them. You can see the full talk, and the lively/infuriating Q&A,
While the German economy is stagnating, Digital-Mittelstand may offer a solution.
We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups. We of course spent a lot of time discussing this before...
From magical to frustrating in months. Why AI coding agents feel like dial-up internet and what ultra-fast inference could unlock for developer productivity.
