1921
Programming peaked
It helps, of course, that I still consider many of the people I worked with friends, and I know some of them even still read this blog. (Hi!)
1922
How to install TrueNAS on a Raspberry Pi
Now that Joel0 in the TrueNAS community has created a fork of TrueNAS that runs on Arm, I thought I'd give it a spin—on a Raspberry Pi. I currently run an Ampere Arm server in my rack with Linux and ZFS as my primary storage server, and a Raspberry Pi with four SATA SSDs and ZFS as backup replica in my studio. My…
1923
Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
It has been 0 days since the last change to my home server.
1924
LLM Daydreaming
Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.
1925
Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs
All web developers know, at some level, that accessibility is important. But when push comes to shove, it can be hard to prioritize it above a bazillion other…
1926
"Good engineering management" is a fad
As I get older, I increasingly think about whether I’m spending my time the right way to advance my career and my life. This is also a question that your company asks about you every performance cycle: is this engineering manager spending their time effectively to advance the company or their organization?…
1927
Rust's Block Pattern
Here’s a little idiom that I haven’t really seen discussed anywhere, that I think makes Rust code much cleaner and more robust.
1928
State Terror, American Style
Forget about “soft autocracy”
1929
A fast, growable array with stable pointers in C
My last article about generic data structures in C was written to set the stage for today’s topic: A data structure with constant time indexing, stable pointers, and works well with arena allocators. Its been independently discovered by multiple programmers over the years and so goes by different names. A 2001 paper…
1930
Microsoft 365 Copilot – Arbitrary Data Exfiltration via Mermaid Diagrams
When Microsoft 365 Copilot (M365 Copilot) was asked to summarize a specially crafted Microsoft Office document, an indirect prompt injection payload triggered the execution of arbitrary instructions to fetch sensitive tenant data, such as “recent emails” and hex encode the fetched output. M365 Copilot then generated a…
1931
Epanet-JS
Celebrating a little bit of legacy from Placemark and a new product for hydraulic simulation
1932
Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a new one
Having a home server and a few smart plugs leads to interesting data points like this one. Well, interesting to me, at least.
1933
Why and How I use “Org Mode” for my writing and more (2022)
I find myself telling people that they will have to pry org-mode from my cold dead hands. Which befuddles me. Why, as an ingrate software nerd who has soured on software technology — talk about biting the hand that feeds — do I evince such strong sentiment about a software program?!
1934
Lead is still bad for your brain
Wait, wasn't this solved by the Romans? Anyway, my grandma ate lead paint and she was totally fine.
1935
1936
What I've learned from jj
How Jujutsu's flexibility and safety changed my approach to version control.
1937
Static Allocation with Zig
Introducing kv, a statically allocated key/value server.
1938
Category Theory Illustrated – Natural Transformations
I didn’t invent categories to study functors; I invented them to study natural transformations. — Saunders Mac Lane
1939
Full Unicode Search at 50× ICU Speed with AVX‑512
ICU gets Unicode right and pays for it. This post shows a different approach: fold-safe windows, SIMD probes, and verifiers for fast UTF‑8 search.
1940
Implementing Logic Programming
I just think it's neat!
1941
Sierpiński Triangle? In My Bitwise and?
Exploring a peculiar bit-twiddling hack at the intersection of 1980s geek sensibilities.
1942
Ratfactor's illustrated guide to folding fitted sheets
Note to the impatient: You can just scroll down to the drawings of fitted sheets being folded. You won’t hurt my feelings. (I’ll never even know.) But you may want to bookmark this page for later instead. You can get fast at folding fitted sheets. But to learn how to fold fitted sheets is going to take some patience…
1943
Lost Chapter of Automate the Boring Stuff: Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python
The third edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is now available for purchase or to read for free online . It has updated content and several new chapters, but one chapter that was left on the cutting room floor was "Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams" . I present the 26-page rough draft chapter in this…
1944
LLMs Are Not Fun
I got into programming because it let me turn thought into reality. If I could reason precisely, then a computer could carry out my thoughts unerringly. I could step away from tiring, ambiguous human interaction for a while.
1945
Getting syntax highlighting wrong
Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
1946
Huge Binaries
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…
1947
Coarse is better
Make AI weird again.
1948
How I'm using Helix editor
My Helix editor config and how I am using it
1949
Thoughts on Cloudflare
Thoughts on its role and impact on the web’s landscape.
1950
Build your own SQLite in Rust, Part 5: Evaluating queries
In the previous posts, we've explored the SQLite file format and built a simple SQL parser. It's time to put these pieces together and implement a query…