4771
How video games inspire great UX (2019)
This quote is meaningful to me as I’ve often struggled with a problem until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”.
4772
Continuous Diffusion Language Models (CDLM's)
Fully discrete methods dominated for a few years, but language models based on continuous diffusion are making a comeback.
4773
Boards of Casio
While working away on the CZP-1 , which was at least initially an effort to create a Casio CZ-101 on a web page I happened to see this YouTube video by oliveoil22:
4774
SIMD for Collision
In a previous post SIMD Matters I discussed the big wins I got from graph coloring to make the contact solver faster. That same approach exists in Box3D. I like to call this approach “wide SIMD”. The idea is to process multiple work units at the same time. In the contact solver this means solving four contact points…
4775
2025 Turing award given for quantum information science
Bennett, an American physicist at IBM Research, and Brassard, a Canadian computer scientist at the Université de Montréal, are widely recognized as founders of quantum information science, a field at the intersection of physics and computer science that treats quantum mechanical phenomena not merely as properties of…
4776
z386: An Open-Source 80386 Built Around Original Microcode
This is the fifth installment of the 80386 series . The FPGA CPU is now far enough along to run real software, and this post is about how it works. z386 is a 386-class CPU built around the original Intel microcode, in the same spirit as z8086 .
4777
You are falling behind because you haven't fed the insincerity machine
I was lucky enough to witness the beginnings of social media, working on the platforms that made it happen. I’ve also seen the decline of its first iterations and products. Currently I am witnessing the idea of a social web being perverted, weaponised and automated out of any trace of human or social aspect…
4778
Guide to data tools landscape for developers
Found yourself on a data project and have no idea what they all are talking about? Feel excluded from all the fun discussions in the office kitchen? If only there were a humongous guide going over all the concepts and buzzwords...
4779
Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think
I am talking about the I/O operations as used in computing here. A typical example of how this kind of thing is exposed are the POSIX syscalls read(2) and write(2), which have the following C funct…
4780
Static Allocation, Constant Work
In reply to this email:
4781
Retrofitting JIT Compilers into C Interpreters
C interpreters are a common language implementation technique and the basis for the reference implementations of languages such as Lua, Ruby, and Python. Unfortunately, C interpreters are slow, especially compared to language implementations powered by JIT compilers. In this post I’m going to show that it is possible…
4782
I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and watched my Nginx logs
What nginx logs actually prove about AI traffic from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, plus why Google's AI crawlers leave a different signal than the others.
4783
Visualizing Binary Files
It's all black and white, basically. A while ago, Vim's xxd gained the ability to color the output (this is not included in Vim Classic , which I use):
4784
3D Gaussian Splatting in a Weekend
Introduction 3D Gaussian splatting is a technique that answers this question: given a dataset of pictures of a scene, how can I reconstruct it in 3D? This is achieved using a machine learning algorithm that, for many different camera angles, does the following: render the scene, compare it to the picture taken at the…
4785
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 was awarded jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"
4786
The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
Have you heard? There's map news!
4787
Memory safety absolutists
When seeing the title of this post, I bet in some people's minds, the first thought was "Rust devs!". This connection is not unfounded. Rust devs tend to be passionate about memory safety. Some of it, I'm sure, may have been caused by a classic language wars attitude: my language is better than yours, and here is why…
4788
Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones
Over the last several months I have been tracking AI guys trying to create vibe coded clones of popular apps, especially Adobe’s apps which have always been the most pirated apps since the 90s. There are now about a dozen vibe coded attempts to clone Photoshop and some other Adobe apps, not incl
4789
PHP's Oddities
flow2 | Blog post: 'PHP's Oddities' in Tech
4790
I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook
Documenting my journey switching away from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14
4791
Claude is a Contrarian
Of all the LLMs I’ve used and driven daily, Claude is the one that absolutely contradicts my instructions.
4792
Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
Math as cultural institution.
4793
AI optimism is a class privilege
I think I have an idea why we're so extremely divided on AI: it's because we have an intuitive sense of who it stands to benefit, and who stands to pay the costs. I think whether you see reason for optimism has a lot to do with which group you see yourself in.
4794
Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot
Enjoy Emacs and its built-in language server (LSP) superpowers, for JVM languages. Let's walk through basic language setups, specialized workspace configuration handling, and dive deep into some advanced JSON-RPC and advice-based workarounds for Scala (Metals) and Kotlin that make development truly seamless from Emacs…
4795
What I love about Django
The best parts of Django are the ones you stop noticing — a tour of the abstractions that have given Buttondown the most leverage over the years.
4796
Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8)
Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) is a managed network protocol suite that transforms how networks of every scale -- from home networks to the global internet -- are operated, secured, and monitored. Every manageable element in an IPv8 network is authorised via OAuth2 JWT tokens served from a local cache. Every…
4797
When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Late in the night of Valentine’s Day 2014, air monitors at an underground nuclear waste repository outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, detected the release of radioactive elements, including americium and plutonium, into the environme
4798
Can we replace a $150k Looker with a bucket of HTML files?
(BI) Software is dead, apparently
4799
All your agents are going async
Agents used to be a thing you talked to synchronously. Now they’re a thing that runs in the background while you work. When you make that change, the …
4800
Kona EV Hacking
Header page for hacks and investigations of the Hyundai Kona electric vehicle