The first batches of Quake executables, quake.exe and vquake.exe were programmed on HP 712-60 running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP running on a DEC Alpha server 2100A. In June of 1996, having shipped their title but concerned with NeXT stagnation, id Software switched their development stack.
Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine. What we didn’t notice is that light…
The nice thing about Win32 is that it does not try to talk you out of any of this. It just gives you the messages, the handles, the drawing APIs, and enough rope to ...
In software programming, the product between two integers is often computed to a fixed number of bits with overflow. Consider 8-bit integers. If you multiply 127 by 127, you get back the number 1 as an 8-bit unsigned integer, with an overflow. The actual full product is 16129. To represent 16129, you typically use 16…
At the core of the attention mechanism in LLMs are three matrices: Query, Key, and Value. These matrices are how transformers actually pay attention to different parts of the input. In this write-up, we will go through the construction of these matrices from the ground up.
I benchmarked 15 SBCs released in 2025 across every price point. Here's what stood out, what disappointed, and what the year looked like for single board computers.
I’ve been a lifelong reader, which has proved a fragile habit in our era of endless trivial distraction. While books and e-ink readers solve the problem of competition for attention, they can’t compete with a phone for convenience. That tiny device in my pocket has made reading both easier and more vulnerable to…
Fable’s price ended the free lunch of ever-cheaper frontier models. Now we have to think about which model gets which work.
The economics behind where movies are filmed, why Hollywood left Los Angeles, and whether audiences can tell the difference.
Over the past year, I’ve been working on fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library. It is not a simple wrapper on top of libc; it doesn’t depend on libc except when required to by the platform. To my knowledge, there is nothing like it.
I think behind a lot of the enthusiasm around AI is a dream of being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.
Learning from the automation dreams of the first Machine Age
ICE is using a smartphone app called “Mobile Fortify” to scan faces and capture contactless fingerprints, instantly pulling back names and biographical data — and court filings say the same encounters are being followed by revocations of Global Entry and TSA PreCheck. That turns “trusted traveler” into chilling of…
How Wirewiki's domain-name autocomplete renders suggestions next frame for 99% of keystrokes.
Twenty years ago I got a reward check from Donald Knuth.
“The devil is in the details,” they say.
kind of a blog
This frame of Screamer 2 was rendered not by an original 3dfx card and not by an emulator, but by an FPGA reimplementation of the Voodoo 1 that I wrote in SpinalHDL. Available on GitHub .
The story of CVE-2025-55182 (React2Shell)
The models are good now. But most people still miss the point.
A week ago, I wrote about how Generative and Agentic AI may be amplifying what I’ve been calling cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system’s evolving structure and a team’s shared unders...
I read Ian Whitlock’s article on why he can’t quit Magit and it inspired me to share more about Magit from my perspective. This article will focus on rebasing.
AI-related upgrades like the built-in AI Assistant, extended computation-augmented generation and the Wolfram Agent Tools framework. Advances in TimeSeries & Tabular. New categorical data, ModelFit automated model selection, symbolic music. Efficient handling of gigabyte-sized notebooks. Gains in the already-robust…
“We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper insight than it seems. Young people spend years in school learning the reverse: understanding happens before progress. That is the linear theory of innovation. So Isaac Newton comes up with his three laws of mechanics, and we get…
MinIO’s repo is officially archived and abandoned. And how AI Agents helped bring it back from the dead. This post explains how a community fork restores the admin console and ships binaries via CI/CD pipeline.
AVAILABLE NOW OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chrome ship it. Apple deprecated it. Nobody documented it. Until now. → sandbox-exec: The Miss...
I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them. As far as I can tell …
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use…
As a retro-computer enthusiast, it seems that parts are either insanely expensive or dirt cheap. If the first case has obvious problems, the second can also lead to issues.
