4651
Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python
I spend a lot of time developing and teaching people about Clojure's open source tools for working with data. Almost everybody who wants to use Clojure…
4652
Bypassing Gemma and Qwen safety with raw strings
How a Single Function Call Gates Safety Alignment in Gemma, Qwen, and Other Open-Source LLMs
4653
NanoGPT Speedrun Frontier
Compare 153 autonomous runs from 18 frontier models on the nanoGPT optimizer speedrun.
4654
Can guitar frets perform multiplication?
I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement. Such was the case with the cover of a book I recently bought entitled Calculating with Tones: The Logarithmic Logic of Music:
4655
NUMA: Cores, memory, and the distance between them
Why two identical VMs on the same host can perform 20% differently — and what NUMA topology in Xen-based virtualization actually costs you.
4656
Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
4657
Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by the author) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get…
4658
The adder at the heart of Intel's 8087 floating-point chip
In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic...
4659
Memory layout in Zig with formulas
I was recently encouraged to watch A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD) by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig1. Just 10 minutes into the talk, I was confronted with a skill I had never formally learned… the arithmetic behind memory layout of types. Zig is a modern, C-like programming language which…
4660
Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes
Raft is a consensus protocol for managing a replicated log across a cluster of nodes. Its key goals are: (1) maintain a consistent replicated log of state transitions, (2) tolerate node failures, and (3) ensure a single leader coordinates all changes while multiple followers replicate. Raft is designed to be…
4661
Super Mario Derivations
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
4662
Reverse engineering the Creative Katana soundbar to control it from Linux
Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity Blog
4663
An Apology
We launched an AirTag silencing tool recently. We have always made products we want for ourselves, and this was no different - we wanted it for AirTags on our bikes. (Some of us here have bikes more valuable than our cars.) In retrospect though, this also has the side effect of aiding someone with bad intentions to tra
4664
A look under our trunk: what's in our compute
Compute is the brain of the Waymo Driver, translating raw sensor data into real-time driving commands. Operating demonstrably safe, physical AI on the road demands a fundamental shift towards a system engineered for deterministic, low-latency performance. Over the past decade, we have co-designed our hardware…
4665
Evolving programming languages in the AI era
What happens to programming languages when humans are no longer writing most of the code?
4666
Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)
In mid-December last year I started making my own programming language. It's waaay far from any production quality yet (though I did manage to write a working 1k LOC Monte-Carlo path tracer in it), but the project is on pause right now, so I figured it's a good time to write something about it.
4667
Perlisisms (1982)
2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
4668
Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
4669
Roku LT Operating System open source distribution
Roku provides the simplest way to stream entertainment to your TV. On your terms. With thousands of available channels to choose from.
4670
Automating AI Away
A. Karpathy once said that OpenAI researchers are effectively "automating themselves away" by improving their AI. Right now I develop Beagle SCM with Anthropic's Fable and it is of course a brilliant model able to spot nits in a mountain of code, file tickets, make fixes. Still, yesterday it managed to commit the…
4671
We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
Could we get more cache space with the same hardware? We prototyped compression inside Cloudflare's cache to find out.
4672
Remarkable Pro Colors
I was happy with the Remarkable 2 and when the Remarkable Pro came out I decided to go with a second one in order to be able to see two pages at once : one as a reference for reading and one for writing, as one would normally do with paper. Expensive approach, I know.
4673
Rules of good social skills (2025)
Yesterday, I timeboxed 45 minutes to write down every single rule of good social skills I could come up with, wrote a tweet thread, then it went somewhat viral !
4674
Sort branches by last commit date
I have too many git branches and like many people I developed a convoluted script to show me the most recent ones. I ran this command many times a day for years:
4675
The way CTRL-C in Postgres CLI cancels queries is incredibly hack-y
There are a few different reasons to hit the brakes on a Postgres query. Maybe it’s taking too long to finish. Maybe you realised you forgot to create an index that will make it orders of magnitude quicker. Maybe there’s some reason the results are no longer needed. Or maybe you, or your LLM buddy, […]
4676
A 3D Body from Eight Questions – No Photo, No GPU
We trained an MLP that predicts 58 body shape parameters from 8 questionnaire inputs. The trick: a differentiable physics loss. Mass accuracy: 0.3 kg mean vs 3.9 kg for Ridge. No GPU at inference.
4677
Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite
Friends, this post has been in the making for maybe, 20 years.
4678
The Grid That Doubles the Strength of the Ground
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The Port of Long Beach in Southern California is the second-busiest container seaport in the United States, a major gateway for goods flowing to and from the west coast. Together with its next door neighbor, the Port of Los Ange
4679
Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
A solo developer watched his community lose a fight because they didn't have the right tools at the right time. So he started building.
4680
Alpine Linux 3.24.0 Released
Alpine Linux