Reversible computing with mechanical links and pivots
With the concern that “Moore’s Law is dead,” new interest has grown for unconventional forms of computing. This includes:
Deleting multiplayer from the Unreal engine can save memory
Although the title of this article might suggest otherwise, I don’t dislike Unreal’s multiplayer features. As someone who has worked on two different multiplayer games in Unreal, I enjo…
A couple CSS tricks for HTML Dialog elements
You can use CSS to add some simple functionality to HTML <dialog> elements!
Building a high-performance ticketing system with TigerBeetle
Rene Schallner (@renerocksai): software engineer turned AI researcher and engineer, in Vienna.
Putting a dumb weather station on the internet
After all, why not? Why shouldn't I put a dumb Temu weather station on the Internet?
Who got arrested in the raid on the XSS crime forum?
On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered an ongoing frenzy of speculation and panic among XSS…
After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
Some argue that even if the current AI boom leads to an overbuild, it might not be a bad thing - just as the dotcom bubble left behind the internet infrastructure that powered later decades of growth. It’s a tempting comparison, but the parallels only go so far. The dotcom era’s overbuild crea
The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024)
Why are developers so hesitant to bring anti-cheat solutions to Linux?
Why do we keep gravitating toward complexity?
The Great Pyramids took decades to build. It was a monumental feat of human ingenuity and collaboration. Today, we software developers erect our own pyramids each day - not from stone, but from code. Yet despite far more advanced tools, these systems don’t always make the experience better. So why, when KISS (Keep It…
All clothing is handmade (2022)
Writing about an art quilt I made with reused textiles and what I hope it reminds us about the clothing that we wear and the people who created it.
The kind of company I want to be a part of
'aight, hear me out guy(s) (👀 👀 👀)
Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat
libexpat is a fast streaming XML parser. Alongside libxml2, Expat is one of the most widely used software libre XML parsers written in C, specifically C99. It is cross-platform and licensed under the MIT license .
Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
OOXML is less an act of sabotage than the continuation of a flawed, inelegant lineage.
The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" (2021)
About the fatal perils and traps of many modern tools that handle "shell commands" as passed through `system(3)` or `sh -c`. Or, how by the end of 2020, we still haven't given up on shell's equivalent "SQL building", or how shell's equivalent "SQL injection" still thrives in our engineering world... Plus a `glibc`…
DSM Disorders Disappear in Statistical Clustering of Psychiatric Symptoms (2024)
Whither Major Depression?
Amiga 600: From the Amiga No One Wanted to Retro Favorite
Maybe putting the designer of the IBM PCjr in charge of this wasn't the best idea
Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008)
Alright, I’ve got another conspiracy theory misconception to dispel. :) After reading through the Chrome Terms of Service, some people are worried that Google is trying to assert rights on ev…
IP addresses through 2024
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.
I conditioned myself to fail
Over the years I've literally built hundreds of projects. Some with a lof of potential. Others just batshit crazy ideas. I started noticing a pattern. I'd...
How to tame a user interface using a spreadsheet
Many years ago, while working at Apple and running a lab at WWDC, I met a guy who was using a piece of Apple software designed for creating interactive ads t...
An engineering history of the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped…
Bullfrog in the Dungeon
In January of 1995, Electronic Arts bought the prestigious British games studio Bullfrog Productions for an undisclosed sum that was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $45 million. The lives of the 35 or so people who worked at Bullfrog were transformed overnight. Peter Molyneux, the man who had built the studio’s…
An Interactive Guide to Rate Limiting
Learn about rate limiting algorithms with interactive apps, including Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, Fixed Window, and Sliding Window methods
Mapping the off-target effects of every FDA-approved drug in existence
6.2k words, 29 minutes reading time
Defragging my old Dell's UEFI NVRAM
I’m setting up an old Dell box (2011-era tech). I was migrating to some new boot drives and setting up grub on them again. Got to the point of deleting the old boot entries and adding new ones, and got an error like Could not prepare boot variable: No space left on device. Weird, because there weren’t that many EFI…
Implementing Forth in Go and C
I first ran into Forth about 20 years ago when reading a book about designing embedded hardware . The reason I got the book back then was to actually learn more about the HW aspects, so having skimmed the Forth chapter I just registered an "oh, this is neat" mental note and moved on with my life. Over the last two…
From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon
Implementing the famous donut.c animation in actual silicon using CORDIC and ray marching
Reverse Engineering Yaesu FT-70D Firmware Encryption
This article dives into my full methodology for reverse engineering the tool mentioned in this article. It's a bit longer but is intended to be accessible to folks who aren't necessarily advanced reverse-engineers.
Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020)
When I was a little kid whenever we drove by mosques, I would be intrigued by the complex motifs they’re decorated by. I always tried to figure out the pattern; to me it was just a pattern, I never…