From my last blog post , I am now using KDE as the desktop environment for my gaming rig. The reason is because I want a reasonably easy to use Linux desktop for when my wife needs to use the PC for something other than gaming, and this was the reason why my "traditional" Sway setup was a no-go.
Another of the announcements from Google I/O yesterday was Gemini Diffusion, Google's first LLM to use diffusion (similar to image models like Imagen and Stable Diffusion) in place of transformers. …
https://slopevader.com/ A search tool and browser extension for avoiding AI slop. Available for Chrome or Firefox. The tool filters web...
Nano Banana allows 32,768 input tokens and I’m going to try to use them all dammit.
Brick your Steam Deck - one way or another…
This has been a very long time coming, but finally, after a marathon effort, the brand new Have I Been Pwned website is now live! Feb last year is when I made the first commit to the public repo for the rebranded service, and we soft-launched the new brand
Text is a universal medium. And yet we try to prevent users of our UIs from using it. Let’s not.
Software development topics I've changed my mind on over the course of a decade
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You have TWO DAYS LEFT to pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter , which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
Node.js has undergone a remarkable transformation since its early days. If you’ve been writing Node.js for several years, you’ve likely witnessed this evolution firsthand—from the callback-heavy, CommonJS-dominated landscape to today’s clean, standards-based development experience.
Picture Tom Nook greeting you with a sentence nobody at Nintendo wrote. That is what “animal crossing llm” usually points to: an experimental fan…
A Rust port of tmux
An essay about bad AI app design
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
You don’t want to have a conversation with your computer, you want to build.
A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.
I installed Claude Code in June. I'd tried Cursor and Cline and Zed and a few others, but all of them felt clunky to me because I'm used to doing nearly everything in vanilla vim and my terminal. Claude Code was the first tool I tried that felt like it fit into my workflows perfectly rather than needing me to adapt to…
Principal AI Architect. Creator of open-strix, a harness for building agent teams. Writing about AI architecture, stateful agents, and what happens when you give AI memory.
The difference can be subtle
My interest in file systems started when I discovered how type and creator codes 1 and resource forks contributed to the fantastic user interface on my original Macintosh in 1984. In the late 1990s, when it looked like Apple might buy Be Inc. to solve its operating system problems, the Be File System was the part I…
Exploring the brilliant design of UTF-8 encoding system that represents millions of characters while being backward compatible with ASCII
I complained about this on the socials , but I didn’t get it all out of my system. So now I write a blog post. I’ve never liked the philosophy of “put an icon…
Last week, I started working on a new side-project. It’s a standard React app partly made up of run-of-the-mill CRUD views—a perfect fit for LLM-assisted programming. I reasoned that if I could get an LLM to quickly write the boring code for me, I’d have more time to focus on the interesting problems I wanted to solve.
In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration.
A deep dive into graphics APIs, shader languages and GPU architecture, exploring a simpler design for modern hardware. By Sebastian Aaltonen.
Any unpublished manuscript mentioning certain topics, including gender and "LGBT," must be pulled or revised.
On April 2nd, 2025, our president announced major new taxes on imports from foreign countries (“tariffs”), ranging from 10% to 49%. The stated goal is to bring manufacturing back to the United States and to “make America wealthy again”. These tariffs will not work. In fact, they may even do the opp
In this project, I started to reverse engineer payment card terminals because they seemed to be an interesting target for security research, given the high stakes involved. Although I initially didn’t know much about this industry, I did expect a ton of security features and a very security-hardened device. And to…
