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Willingness to look stupid
Looking foolish is underrated.
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Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
Google today reached the final milestone in a browser-extension transition that has been years in the making, all remaining Manifest V2 extensions were removed from the Chrome Web Store.
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A Decade of Slug
What is now known as the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU was developed in the Fall of 2016, so this year marks a full decade since its inception. I published a paper in JCGT about the technique in the middle of 2017, and my company sold the first license for version 1.0 of the…
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There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
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What happened to nerds?
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends...
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QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight. If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine…
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Fingerprints are the new cookies
Now open it on your phone or some other device and your nickname will be different and just as consistent.
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I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis
I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis . It is an autoimmune disorder where your body’s normally helpful antibodies start acting strangely . This leads to inflammation in the brain. This blog briefly discusses some of my experience and prognosis.
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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.
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We must pace the frontier
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and…
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I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
Hugo Daniel's site about ideas and software experimentations
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Do your own writing
When you write a document or essay, you are posing a question and then answering it. For example, a PRD answers the question, “What should we build?” A technical spec answers, “How should we build it?” Sometimes the question is more difficult to answer—“What are we even trying to accomplish?” And with every attempt at…
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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
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EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors
Civil rights activist Dr. Patrick Breyer warns of an unprecedented "double-attack" on secure messaging ahead of critical Friday and Monday EU meetings. Ahead of a highly critical weekend for digital civil rights in Europe, former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding th
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A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
Or running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon with no GPU, 25 flags, 128 GB of DDR3, and a 25B-parameter MoE.
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Qwen 3.8 27B on my laptop can interpret model weights, too
Yesterday’s hot paper was Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights by Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, and Omar Khattab. The paper (OK, …
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OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
On 15 September 2026, Carter Leffen contacted me to request validation of a break of the German Army Enigma message MVUEH of 10 July 1941. The message, which was sent by a radio station with the tactical callsign 2ny, was received by the radio station of the SS-Totenkopf Quartiermeister, Ib. Ib received the message at…
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DIY Soft Drinks
Cola, orange soda, and almond soda!
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uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
uBlock Origin's volunteer team will no longer chase Facebook's shifting ad-detection tricks, calling it a 'disgusting anti-user site.' Here's what that means for your feed.
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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
I need to make a painful confession: somehow, LinkedIn has become an important social network to me. This isn’t necessarily due to LinkedIn’s sparkling competence, of course. To the contrary, LinkedIn is the Gerald Ford of social networks: the normal one that was left standing as the Richard Nixons and the Spiro…
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What happened to the Snowden archive
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it…
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Most arguments are about ego, not ideas
I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed…
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A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to whi…
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Regressive JPEGs
One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there's the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.
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Programming Still Sucks
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a…
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Men who stare at walls
I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity. The routine was basically: Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work. When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus. I’ve been trying it, and it’s a…
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