Internet ads are horrible: They waste your time, and the industry behind them is actively making the internet a worse place. Payouts are so small that the only way to survive is to turn your site into an ad-filled hellhole with no real substance. (see: Modern social media )
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. The stack of…
I ‘ve done such a thorough job of de-Googling that I forgot to show up for a meeting with someone, because I hadn’t checked my Google calendar in ages. (No, they were not amused.) In my defense, I proceeded to explain to them that having de-Googled, I was also in the process of de-Appling, which is a special bonus…
A quick refresher on the maths behind LLMs: vectors, matrices, projections, embeddings, logits and softmax.
Designing a cheap synthetic aperture radar mounted on FPV drone.
This is the second part of my ongoing self-education in how to adapt my programming experience to a world with computers that talk. The first part, How I program with LLMs , covered ways LLMs can be adapted into our existing tools (basically, autocomplete) and how careful prompting can replace traditional web search…
From rate limits to no limits: How IPv6's massive address space and a crafty botguard bypass left every Google user's phone number vulnerable
I've always wanted to write a book, and I was close, but not this time.
Here in the northern hemisphere the vernal equinox just passed and the days arequickly getting longer. One of my col...
The story behind writing The BEAM Book-ten years, three publishers, and an open‑source sprint.
One of the most harmful pieces of advice is to …
A blog on technology, Star Wars, and other random thoughts. Plus some half way decent photography!
Date: 2025-01-26 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00016-wayland-input-latency.md
AI, science, education, & ethics
I was about to post about how nice the last 10 months of OpenFreeMap have been. The architecture has really proven itself to be great, Cloudflare has agreed to sponsor the bandwidth, Hetzner servers are super stable as always, serving tiles
This site is hosted with Cloudflare Pages and I'm really happy with it. When I explored how to create a site like mine in 2025, I wondered why there's an abundance of good, free hosting these days. Years ago, you'd have to pay for hosting,…
What you need to know about local model tooling and the steps for setting one up yourself
Please, just stop.
A deep dive into the performance of Python 3.14's tail-call interpreter: How the performance results were confounded by an LLVM regression, the surprising complexity of compiling interpreter loops, and some reflections on performance work, software engineering, and optimizing compilers.
I got hacked, my server started mining Monero this morning.
Software bloggers can make the same mistakes for years that prevent readers from discovering their writing. I know because I'm one of them. Over time, I've learned techniques that help some blog posts succeed and the pitfalls that cause others to languish in obscurity.
All the same privacy harms with online tracking are also present with AI, but worse.
Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved.
This is a story that started back in 2022, but I think its a perfect time to reflect on the impact that it has had on my friend group still to this day. Update (2/7/2025): I'm genuinely blown away by the response to this post. This hit the
The Trump FTC tried to hide a complaint showing Pepsi forced shoppers to pay higher prices everywhere but Walmart. But now it's unsealed. And the politics of affordability are explosive.
“Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me!”
The Mario franchise has two distinct logo styles. The first began with the Mario Bros. arcade game and is mostly used for side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games, though not all of those games use that style. The second is a multicolor polygonal style, and though it’s primarily used for 3D Mario adventures now, it was…
The Missing Middle Path: What VCs Don’t Tell You
