1561
The day Return became Enter (2023)
A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard
1562
The first time I was almost fired from Apple
I was hired on at Apple in October of 1995. This was what I refer to as Apple’s circling the drain period. Maybe you remember all the doomsaying — speculation that Apple was going to be shuttering soon. It’s a little odd perhaps then that they were hiring at all but apparently Apple reasoned that they nonetheless…
1563
Spotting base64 encoded JSON, certificates, and private keys
A colleague spotted base64-encoded JSON in a long string of gibberish without any tools. I was amazed, until he explained how anyone can do it.
1564
Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference
Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from…
1565
Debugging Hetzner: Uncovering failures with powerstat, sensors, and dmidecode
About a year ago, Hetzner launched the AX162 server line. It offered better price / performance than its predecessor, AX161. We were very excited to adopt it, but we soon encountered serious reliability issues. We observed that the new servers had 16 times higher annual failure rates.
1566
8-bit Boléro
I hope you'll enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it! There are many little details that I'll let you discover on your own.
1567
LLMs are cheap
A lot of people think LLMs are expensive to operate. That was true a couple of years ago, but these people haven't updated their views after an approximately 1000x reduction in prices over two years.
1568
Rails for everything
After spending part of my holiday building and deploying a new Rails 8 application, It's clearer than ever that Rails is awesome, and it's especially great f...
1569
Craft software that makes people feel something
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
1570
Basic Facts about GPUs
Making sure I don’t forget what I read.
1571
My Struggle with Doom Scrolling
Reading, writing, cooking, and maybe some other random explorations.
1572
BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)
Silent changes in payment methods on big creator funding platforms raise some unpleasant questions.
1573
Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short
Also: another paper that seals the deal
1574
Open Sauce is a confoundingly brilliant Bay Area event
This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube…
1575
Linux Sandboxes and Fil-C
Memory safety and sandboxing are two different things. It's reasonable to think of them as orthogonal: you could have memory safety but not be sandboxed, or you could be sandboxed but not memory safe.
1576
Litestar is worth a look
A few years ago at work, I had a project which offered an opportunity to look at the new generation …
1577
O2 VoLTE: locating any customer with a phone call
Privacy is dead: For multiple months, any O2 customer has had their location exposed to call initiators without their knowledge.
1578
Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo
It’s A Race Between Building Up and Burning Down
1579
What is “good taste” in software engineering?
Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general…
1580
Get the location of the ISS using DNS
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability…
1581
How many video games include a marriage proposal? At least one
Also: World League Basketball
1582
Zlib-rs is faster than C
We've released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs , featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too.
1583
The hidden cost of AI coding
AI coding tools boost productivity but may sacrifice the flow state and deep satisfaction developers experience when writing code by hand. What are we losing?
1584
Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)
A word to the wise: Do not set any cron jobs for 2:00 am or 3:00 am on Sunday morning! Or to be safe, on other mornings besides Sunday as well, since jobs originally set to run on some particular day may eventually be changed to run on another day, or every day.
1585
Fossil fuels fall below 50% of US electricity for the first month on record
Record-high solar and wind bring the US to a clean power tipping point.
1586
The RSS feed reader landscape
More than a feed reader, a content curation system to find the top articles of all sources
1587
Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology
Today, we open sourced our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries, fulfilling a promise and building on our partnership with Sparkasse to support EU age assurance.
1588
What's OAuth2, anyway?
Why the OAuth2 protocol was designed the way it is and how it works.
1589
Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected
Caltrain announced at its monthly Board of Directors meeting that regenerative braking on the new trains is generating and sending back to the electric grid approximately 23% of the energy consumed by the system.
1590
I hate screenshots of text
Why do people take screenshots of text?