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After migrating this blog from a static site generator into Drupal in 2009, I noted: As a sad side-effect, all the blog comments are gone. Forever. Wiped out. But have no fear, we can start new discussions on many new posts! I archived all the comments from the old 'Thingamablog' version of the blog, but can't repost them here (at least, not with my time constraints... it would just take a nice im

Today, DDoSecrets published data about ICE contracts hacked from DHS's Office of Industry Partnership. The hacker group, Department of Peace, published a statement that included: Why hack the DHS? I can think of a couple Pretti Good reasons! I'm releasing this because the DHS is killing

The writer Tyler Austin Harper (of The Atlantic, etc.) sent me a thread this morning, asking whether a mistargeting yesterday that killed nearly 150 school children in Iran could have been the result of AI.

After writing the previous post, I poked around in the bash shell documentation and found a handy feature I’d never seen before, the shortcut ~-. I frequently use the command cd - to return to the previous working directory, but didn’t know about ~- as a shotrcut for the shell variable $OLDPWD which contains the […] Shell variable ~- first appeared on John D. Cook.

My thanks to Sentry for sponsoring last week at DF. Sentry is running a hands-on workshop: “Crash Reporting, Tracing, and Logs for iOS in Sentry”. You can watch it on demand. You’ll learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. It’ll show you how to: Set up Sentry to surface high-priority mobile issues without alert fatigue. Use Logs and Breadcr

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss the 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, MacOS 26 Tahoe, Apple Creator Studio, along with what we expect/hope for in next week’s Apple product announcements. Sponsored by: Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow. Sentry: A real-time e

Everyone knows that Black people didn't exist in the UK until recently, right? Despite mountains of evidence of everything from Black Tudors and Victorian actors, some myths perniciously persist. What was the experience for Black Britons during the second world war? I find it fascinating how the US cultural hegemony rewrites history. I've heard people in the UK talk about "Jim Crow laws" as…

Publieke of in ieder geval breed aangekondigde praatjes. Tenzij anders vermeld was het onderwerp minstens deels digitale autonomie, soevereiniteit, of cloudafhankelijkheid. De lijst is nog niet compleet. Eerdere jaren zijn op mijn oude praatjespagina te vinden. Ook zijn er praatjes die niet publiekelijk aangekondigd zijn. 2024 27 augstus, AFM (AI) 25 november, Kiesraad 18 december, CBS 2025 29 jan

Here LLM and coding agents can find: 1. Exhaustive documentation about Redis commands and data types. 2. Patterns commonly used. 3. Configuration hints. 4. Algorithms that can be mounted using Redis commands. https://redis.antirez.com/ Some humans claim this documentation is actually useful for actual people, as well :) I'm posting this to make sure search engines will index it. Comments

Polynomial interpolation is a method of finding a polynomial function that fits a given set of data perfectly. More concretely, suppose we have a set of n+1 distinct points [1]: \[(x_0,y_0), (x_1, y_1), (x_2, y_2)\cdots(x_n, y_n)\] And we want to find the polynomial coefficients {a_0\cdots a_n} such that: \[p(x)=a_0 + a_1 x + a_2 x^2 + \cdots + a_n x^n\] Fits all our points; that is p(x_0)=y_0, p(

A new law passed in California to require every operating system to collect the user's age at account creation time. The law is AB-1043. And it was passed in October of 2025. How does it work? Does it apply to offline systems? When I set up my Raspberry Pi at home, is this enforced? What if I give an incorrect age, am I breaking the law now? What if I set my account correctly, but then my kids us

The information about how a library is actually used lives in the dependents’ code, not in the library’s own tests or docs. Someone downstream is parsing your error messages with a regex, or relying on the iteration order of a result set you never documented, or depending on a method you consider internal because it wasn’t marked private in a language that doesn’t enforce visibility. Hyrum’s Law s

On surviving surgery, confronting mortality, and finding peace on the other side.

In short: in my mind, errors are divided into two categories. Expected errors (think “user entered invalid data”), which are part of normal operation, aren’t the developer’s fault, and should be handled. Unexpected errors (think “null pointer exception”) are the developer’s fault, likely indicate a bug, and are allowed to crash. Error handling is an important, but often neglected, part of programm

On-device AI agents sound great in theory. The maths on KV cache scaling, RAM budgets, and inference speed says otherwise.

That is, for what they represent

I’ve never been good at shell scripting. I’d much rather write scripts in a general purpose language like Python. But occasionally a shell script can do something so simply that it’s worth writing a shell script. Sometimes a shell scripting feature is terse and cryptic precisely because it solves a common problem succinctly. One example […] Working with file extensions in bash scripts first appear

Just like everyone, I read Sam Altman's tweet about joining the so-called Department of War, to use ChatGPT on DoW classified networks. As others have pointed out, this is the entry point for mass surveillance and using the technology for weapons deployment. I wrote before that we had the infrastructure for mass surveillance in place already, we just needed an enabler. This is the enabler. This co

The fix was in, and Dario never had a chance.

Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic: When the 2003 war with Iraq ended, U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine said that when American diplomats embarked on reconstruction, they ruefully joked that “there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. And what we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”  ★

The End of Feedback

LA permitting costs, trickle-down housing, Panasonic stops making TVs, robotaxi remote operators, geothermal progress.

Back in August 2023, we installed a Moixa 4.8kWh Solar Battery to pair with our solar panels. For the last year and a half it has chugged away slurping up electrons and sending them back as needed. Its little fan whirrs and the lights on its Ethernet port flicker happily as it does its duty. I estimate that it has saved us around 3 MegaWatt hours since it was commissioned. In monetary terms,…

In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to assemble Kimwolf, the world's largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf -- who goes by the handle "Dort" -- has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and email flooding attacks against the researcher and this aut

Today's links California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners: These are the right states' rights. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Octavia Butler; "Midnighters"; Freeman Dyson on "The Information"; Korean Little Brother filibuster; Privacy isn't property; With Great Power Came No Responsibility; Unsellable A-holes; Cardboard Cthulhu; Chinese map fuzzing. Upcom

From: Data Protection Officer, npm, Inc. (a subsidiary of GitHub, Inc., a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation) To: [REDACTED] Date: 26 February 2026 Re: Data Subject Access Request (Ref: DSAR-2026-0041573) Response deadline: Exceeded (statutory: 30 days) Dear Data Subject, Thank you for your request under Article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 to access all personal dat

The number 22/7 and the pigeon flock of Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet.

HN Skins 0.1.0 is the initial release of HN Skins, a browser userscript that adds custom themes to Hacker News (HN). It allows you to browse HN in style with a selection of visual skins. To use HN Skins, first install a userscript manager such as Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey in your web browser. Once installed, you can install HN Skins from github.com/susam/hnskins.

HN Skins 0.2.0 is a minor update of HN Skins. It comes a day after its initial release in order to fine tune a few minor issues with the styles in the initial release. HN Skins is a web browser userscript that adds custom themes to Hacker News and allows you to browse HN with different visual styles. This update removes excessive vertical space below the 'reply' links, sorts the sk

Things I did and saw this February. Things I made I shipped my first feature at Ghost: Inbox Links. When a member enters their email to log in or sign up, we now show a button that takes them straight to their inbox. In addition to shipping a neat feature, I also enjoyed learning about MX records and RFC-compliant email address parsing. The source code for the main logic is here. I was surprised t

Ok, the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there's very little thought put into files in most languages. What you get is usually the same, or often worse, than C: just read(), write() and some kind of serialization library. #include <sys/mman.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdint.h> #include <fcntl.h> #include <unistd.h> void main () { // Create/open a file containing 1000 unsigned integers

We will learn a lot about Silicon Valley in the upcoming days

I am not alone in seriously doubting it

Mike Masnick, writing for Techdirt: Read that again. If West Virginia wins — if an actual court orders Apple to start scanning iCloud for CSAM — then every image flagged by those mandated scans becomes evidence obtained through a warrantless government search conducted without probable cause. The Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule means defense attorneys get to walk into court and demand that ev

Dave Rupert articulated something in “Priority of idle hands” that’s been growing in my subconscious for years: I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me […] This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, hobbies, education, entertainment, news, communities, and curiosities are all on the internet. I love the internet, it’s a big p

Rob Griffiths, writing at The Robservatory: So I have macOS Tahoe on my laptop, but I’m keeping my desktop Mac on macOS Sequoia for now. Which means I have the joy of seeing things like this wonderful notification on a regular basis. Or I did, until I found a way to block them, at least in 90 day chunks. [...] The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in

Back in December, Adam Engst wrote this interesting follow-up to his feature story at TidBITS a few weeks prior exploring the differences between the new Unified and old Classic interface modes for the Phone app in iOS 26. It’s also a good follow-up to my month-ago link to Engst’s original feature, as well as a continuation of my recent theme on the fundamentals of good UI design. The gist of Engs

No vagueposting here, just look at the Estimated Read Time.

We have a global intelligence crisis, in that a lot of people are being really fucking stupid. As I discussed in this week’s free piece, alleged financial analyst Citrini Research put out a truly awful screed called the “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” — a slop-filled scare-fiction

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: Of course, Netflix could have absorbed such a cost. It’s a $400B company (well, before this deal, anyway) — double Disney! Paramount Skydance? They’re worth $11B. Yes, they’re paying almost exactly $100B more than they’re worth for WBD. Yes, it’s looney. But really, it’s leverage. To be clear, Netflix was going to pay for the deal with debt too, but they have a cle

Chapter 14: The Dialogue

CNBC: Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its head count. The stock skyrocketed as much as 24% in extended trading. “Today we shared a difficult decision with our team,” Jack Dorsey, Block’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a letter to shareholders. “We’re reducing Block by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000, which means that over 4,000

Making sure it triggers when you need it, and not when you don't. The post Intercepting messages inside <CODE>Is­Dialog­Message</CODE>, fine-tuning the message filter appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In 2024 I built a Pi Frigate NVR with Axzez's Interceptor 1U Case, and installed it in my 19" rack. Using a Coral TPU for object detection, it's been dutifully surveilling my property—on my terms (100% local, no cloud integration or account required). I've wanted to downsize the setup while keeping cheap large hard drives1, and an AI accelerator.

Remember back in the early 2010s when any moderately popular Twitter account could become a book (or even a TV series)? This is a collection of Tweet-sized "overheard in" stories. All set in book shops. Isn't it funny that some people don't know how books work! ROFL! Aren't the general public strange? LOLOL! That's a bit harsh of me. It only rarely becomes mean-spirited. But in a book this…

GEM was an early GUI for the IBM PC and compatibles and, later, the Atari ST, developed by Digital Research, the developers of CP/M and, later, DR-DOS. (Digital Equipment Corporation was a different company.) So what was it, and what The post What happened to GEM? appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

How do you manage a company with 50,000 employees? You need processes that give you visibility and control across every function such as technology, logistics, operations, and more. But the moment you try to create a single process to govern everyone, it stops working for anyone. One system can't cater to every team, every workflow, every context. When implemented you start seeing in-fighting, pro

I made an interactive version of xkcd 2347, the dependency comic, where you can drag blocks out of the tower and watch everything above them collapse. Matter.js handles the physics and Rough.js gives it the hand-drawn xkcd look. Each reload generates a different tower from a seeded PRNG that picks a taper profile, varies the block sizes and row widths, and drifts the whole thing slightly off-cent

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Perhaps the most surprising announcement on Thursday was that Apple and Netflix, which have had a rather stand-offish relationship when it comes to video programming, have struck a deal to swap some Formula One-related content. Formula One’s growing popularity in the United States is due, perhaps in large part, to the high-profile success of the Netflix docuseri

“An interview from 2036 with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman.” This is what AI video generation was meant for.  ★

The New York Times: Netflix said on Thursday that it had backed away from its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a stunning development that paves the way for the storied Hollywood media giant to end up under the control of a rival bidder, the technology heir David Ellison. Netflix said that it would not raise its offer to counter a higher bid made earlier this week by Mr. Ellison’s company,

hat tip to Kylie Robison.

”No LLM, anywhere, in its current form, should be considered for use in a fully lethal autonomous weapon system. It's ludicrous even to suggest it.”

Apple Newsroom: Today, Apple announced iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings — a level of government certification no other consumer mobile device has met. That

Apparently Apple thinks nobody with a modern Mac uses spinning rust (hard drives with platters) anymore. I plugged in a hard drive from an old iMac into my Mac Studio using my Sabrent USB to SATA Hard Drive enclosure, and opened up Disk Utility, clicked on the top-level disk in the sidebar, and clicked 'Erase'. Lo and behold, there's no 'Security Options' button on there, as there had been sinc

New book, shipping May 19, from author Geoffrey Cain: For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business wilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of spectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But out of this crucible of defeat emerged the visionary leader who would go on to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming Apple into the most valuable c

Still feels a bit ridiculous to me that Markdown is now an editing mode in Notepad.  ★

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR: An editor who works for YouTube’s biggest creator, MrBeast, has been suspended from the prediction market platform Kalshi and reported to federal regulators for insider trading, Kalshi officials said on Wednesday. It’s the first time the company has publicly revealed the results of an investigation into market manipulation on the popular app. The MrBeast employee, w

Edison Research: In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent with spoken-word audio sources. AM/FM radio was not only the most dominant spoken-word audio listening platform, but it was fully sixty-five percentage points higher than podcasts, which accounted for 10% of listening time back then. Quarter by quarter and year over year, time spent using AM/FM radio to listen to s

Reuters: New York’s attorney general sued Valve, a video game developer whose franchises include Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Dota, accusing it of promoting illegal gambling and threatening to addict children through its use of “loot boxes.” In a complaint filed on Wednesday in a state court in Manhattan, Attorney General Letitia James said Valve’s loot boxes amounted to “quintessential gambl

Editor's note: a previous version of this newsletter went out with Matt Hughes' name on it, that's my editor who went over it for spelling errors and loaded it into the CMS. Sorry! Hey all! I’m going to start hammering out free pieces

Thinking that UBI will solve anything comes from a misunderstanding about money. Money is a map, not a territory. All UBI experiments have been small scale, and of course UBI works at a small scale. No shit you can give a few people money and it’s all good and they are happy. Because the people they are buying from aren’t also on UBI. But once you add in the U part… What do you plan to buy with yo

Call you Congresspeople, right now.

On Saturday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts.

Using an Is­Dialog­Message extension point. The post Intercepting messages inside <CODE>Is­Dialog­Message</CODE>, installing the message filter appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Soms denk je, kan het nog gekker? We gaan het beheer van het platform waarop DigiD draait overlaten aan een Amerikaans bedrijf. Dit was niet de bedoeling, maar het gebeurt nu toch. Maar het blijkt dat het nog erger kan. DigiD is nog wel van ons, maar het beheer van de computers wordt Amerikaans. Maar wat nou als je die stap overslaat, en alles door Amerikanen laat doen? Dat is wat de belastingdien

3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. The problem is, the same dudes (and it was nearly always dudes) who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial…

26 years ago this week the Pentium III launched. It was noteworthy for being the CPU that broke the gigahertz barrier, but also for being a better chip than its successor. The Pentium 4 clocked higher, but a Pentium III The post Pentium III launched Feb 28, 1999 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it): Trump wants Big Tech to win, not to play fair. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Harpercollins v libraries; Rothfuss x Firefly; Bookseller seethings; If magazine; HBR v executive pay; Apple caves on encryption. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest bo

(English below) Ik heb een aantal kleine formele nevenfuncties: Technisch adviseur bij de Kiesraad Raad van Advies bij de Autoriteit online Terroristisch en Kinderpornografisch Materiaal (ATKM) Adviseur bij Beta in Bestuur en Beleid Redactieraad Delta van de TU Delft English I hold a number of small formal secondary positions: Technical advisor at the Dutch Electoral Board Member of the Board of A

In December I wrote about package managers using git as a database, and how Cargo’s index, Homebrew’s taps, Go’s module proxy, and CocoaPods’ Specs repo all hit the same wall once their access patterns outgrew what a git repo is designed for. homebrew-core has one Ruby file per package formula, and every brew update used to clone or fetch the whole repository until it got large enough that GitHub

We’ll be working with the set P_n(\mathbb{R}), real polynomials of degree \leq n. Such polynomials can be expressed using n+1 scalar coefficients a_i as follows: \[p(x)=a_0+a_1 x + a_2 x^2 + \cdots + a_n x^n\] Vector space The set P_n(\mathbb{R}), along with addition of polynomials and scalar multiplication form a vector space. As a proof, let’s review how the vector space axioms are satisfied. W

The post A curious trig identity contained the theorem that for real x and y, This theorem also holds when sine is replaced with hyperbolic sine. The post Trig of inverse trig contained a table summarizing trig functions applied to inverse trig functions. You can make a very similar table for the hyperbolic counterparts. The following Python […] Hyperbolic versions of latest posts first appeared o

In short: gzip streams contain metadata, like the operating system that did the compression. I built a tool to read this metadata. I love reading specifications for file formats. They always have little surprises. I had assumed that the gzip format was strictly used for compression. My guess was: a few bytes of bookkeeping, the compressed data, and maybe a checksum. But then I read the spec. The g

Why I replaced SaaS code review tools with OpenCode running in CI/CD pipelines - cheaper, more secure, and works with any Git provider

When re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.  ★

Terry Godier, in a thoughtful essay on the design of RSS feed readers: There’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It’s not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There’s no one there. There nev

Emily Glazer, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: The billionaire said he met with Epstein starting in 2011, years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates said he was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel but said he didn’t properly check his background. Gates said he continued meeting with Epstein even after his then-wif

The Trump administration is literally playing with fire.

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research I’m glad I’m not the only one sayin

Process the message before you let Is­Dialog­Message see it. The post Intercepting messages before <CODE>Is­Dialog­Message</CODE> can process them appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The problem with making coding easier for more people is that it makes spam more conventionally attractive. Which is bad. I have a problem: Unlike most people, I actually read my spam folder on a regular basis. (Often, they’re some of the most interesting emails I get.) I find spam to be intriguing, interesting, and often highlighting some modern trends. And sometimes, it surfaces something I act

This is fun, silly, charming, and much better than The Murderbot Diaries despite being superficially similar. Imagine you are an interstellar ship and, of course, your AI is conscious. What would you do if your passengers were killed - not by a terrifying alien, but by Count Dracula??? What if, on the return journey, another set of your passengers were similarly slaughtered. Except, this…

Legendary game designer Sid Meier was born February 24, 1954. After creating a run of popular flight simulators in the early and mid 1980s, he shifted to strategy games in the second half of the decade, creating some of the The post Game designer Sid Meier born Feb. 24, 1954 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Let's do this thought experiment together. I have a little box. I'll place the box on the table. Now I'll open the little box and put all the arguments against large language models in it. I'll put all the arguments, including my own. Now, I'll close the box and leave it on the table. Now that that is out of the way, we are left with all the positives. All the good things that come from having the

Today's links The whole economy pays the Amazon tax: You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Math denial; Disney v young Tim Burton; Make v Sony; American oligarchs' wealth (2011); New Librarian of Congress; The Mauritanian; Bossware. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep re

I ran across an old article [1] that gave a sort of multiplication table for trig functions and inverse trig functions. Here’s my version of the table. I made a few changes from the original. First, I used LaTeX, which didn’t exist when the article was written in 1957. Second, I only include sin, cos, […] Trig of inverse trig first appeared on John D. Cook.

February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die. In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to the early days of COVID, telling

It’s hard to get optimizers right. Even if you build up a painstaking test suite by hand, you will likely miss corner cases, especially corner cases at the interactions of multiple components or multiple optimization passes. I wanted to see if I could write a fuzzer to catch some of these bugs automatically. But a fuzzer alone isn’t much use without some correctness oracle—in this case, we want a

Against Query Based Compilers Feb 25, 2026 Query based compilers are all the rage these days, so it feels only appropriate to chart some treacherous shoals in those waters. A query-based compiler is a straightforward application of the idea of incremental computations to, you guessed it, compiling. A compiler is just a simple text transformation program, implemented as a lot of functions. You cou

The word “attestation” now means two unrelated things in open source, and the people using it in each sense don’t seem to be talking to each other much. npm and PyPI have both shipped build provenance attestations using Sigstore over the past couple of years. When you publish a package from GitHub Actions with trusted publishing configured, the CI environment signs an in-toto attestation binding t

Here is an identity that doesn’t look correct but it is. For real x and y, I found the identity in [1]. The author’s proof is short. First of all, Then Taking square roots completes the proof. Now note that the statement at the top assumed x and y are real. You can see that this assumption is necessary […] A curious trig identity first appeared on John D. Cook.

Anthropic recently released a blog post with the description of an experiment in which the last version of Opus, the 4.6, was instructed to write a C compiler in Rust, in a “clean room” setup. The experiment methodology left me dubious about the kind of point they wanted to make. Why not provide the agent with the ISA documentation? Why Rust? Writing a C compiler is exactly a giant graph manipula

Intercepting the flow in your message loop. The post Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Isolating the Close pathway appeared first on The Old New Thing.

What Lies Ahead I have no Way of Knowing, But It’s Now Time to Get Going Tom Petty This post previously appeared in Philanthropy.org A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here.)  […]

So you want to add OSM as an OAuth provider to Auth0? Here's a tip - you do not want to create a custom social connection! Instead, you need to create an "OpenID Connect" provider. Here's how. OpenSteetMap As per the OAuth documentation you will need to: Register a new app at https://www.openstreetmap.org/oauth2/applications/ Give it a name that users will recognise Give it a redirect of…

Some things I learned — and still hope to learn — from my mother

For about three decades, Fry’s Electronics was the go-to computer store for enthusiasts, almost an Ikea of computer stores. It was a big box store, larger than Comp USA, selling not just software and pre-built computers and peripherals, but also The post What happened to Fry’s Electronics appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A few days ago some 4 or 5 OpenClaw instances opened blogs on Bear. These were picked up at review and blocked, and I've since locked down the signup and dashboard to this kind of automated traffic. What was quite funny is that I received a grumpy email from one of these instances contesting the ban. I was tempted to ask it for its API keys after I saw what it had posted the day prior: The day I w

You download a package from a registry and the registry says it was built from a particular git commit, but the tarball or wheel or crate you received is an opaque artifact that someone built on their machine and uploaded. Reproducible builds let you check by rebuilding from source yourself and comparing, and if you get the same bytes, the artifact is what it claims to be. Making this work require

Today's links Socialist excellence in New York City: The real efficiency is insourcing and ending public-private partnerships. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: UK antipiracy office will catch Firefox crooks; Batpole flip-top bust; "Order of Odd-Fish"; Scott Walker v fake Kochl; Billg wants to backdoor Microsoft; NSA spied on world leaders; Trump They Live mask; "Unicorns

I was doing some research today and ran into a couple instances where part of one law was copied and pasted verbatim into another law. I suppose this is not uncommon, but I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t have that much experience comparing laws. I do, however, consult for lawyers and have to look […] Copy and paste law first appeared on John D. Cook.

The "agentic swarm" vision of productivity is comfortingly familiar. Which should be an immediate red flag... You take the existing corporate hierarchy, you replace the bottom layers with a swarm of AI agents, and you keep humans around as supervisors. It's an org chart with robots

The recurring theme this week seems to be around the gap between breaches happening and individual victims finding out about them. It's tempting to blame this on the corporate victim of the breach (the hacked company), but they're simultaneously dealing with a criminal intrusion, a ransom

A review of portable monitors for travel

For the past few weeks I've been asking myself why I'm still on Farcaster, whether I'll stay, whether I even want to. I've landed on some answers. Farcaster, for the uninitiated, was the most credible attempt anyone has made at building a

John Coltrane’s song Giant Steps is known for its unusual and difficult chord changes. Although the chord progressions are complicated, there aren’t that many unique chords, only nine. And there is a simple pattern to the chords; the difficulty comes from the giant steps between the chords. If you wrap the chromatic scale around a […] Giant Steps first appeared on John D. Cook.

Over the years, I’ve used different icon sets on my blog. Right now I use Heroicons. The recommended way to use them is to copy/paste the source from the website directly into your HTML. It’s a pretty straightforward process: Go to the website Search for the icon you want Hover it Click to “Copy SVG” Go back to your IDE and paste it If you’re using React or Vue, there are also npm packages you can

Now that I'm not spending all my time on Logic for Programmers, I have time to update my website again! So here's the first blog post in five months: Some Silly Z3 Scripts I Wrote. Normally I'd also put a link to the Patreon notes but I've decided I don't like publishing gated content and am going to wind that whole thing down. So some quick notes about this post: Part of the point is admittedly t

Sniffing the synchronous keyboard state is still not precise enough. The post Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Detecting the ESC key, second (failed) attempt appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Or at least very very far from what it has been cracked up to be

There's a conspiracy theory that suggests that since around 2016 most web activity is automated. This is called Dead Internet Theory, and while I think they may have jumped the gun by a few years, it's heading that way now that LLMs can simulate online interactions near-flawlessly. Without a doubt there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of interactions happening online right now between bots tryin

Big moves in roots can correspond to small moves in chords. Imagine the 12 notes of a chromatic scale arranged around the hours of a clock: C at 12:00, C♯ at 1:00, D at 2:00, etc. The furthest apart two notes can be is 6 half steps, just as the furthest apart two times can […] Tritone substitution first appeared on John D. Cook.

This book doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a sociology textbook, travel guide, history book, or guide to the mysteries of the world? Subtitled "the temporal misadventures of a social psychologist" it veers between hard data and well-worn anecdotes until it becomes a sort of self-help book for the time-poor 1990s American executive. Despite being well-caveated against the "dangers in…

The history of Dell computers is a classic story of how a little guy took on a titan of business and ended up becoming a titan himself, the kind of story Americans love to tell. Like many computer industry stories, The post History of Dell computers appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Sometimes, I have 50 tabs open. Looking for a single piece of information ends up being a rapid click on each tab until I find what I'm looking for. Somehow, every time I get to that LinkedIn tab, I pause for a second. I just have to click on the little red dot in the top right corner, see that there is nothing new, then resume my clicking. Why is that? Why can't I ignore the red notification badg

Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off. There is an overwhelming feeling that if everyone

Today's links Deplatform yourself: Copyright infringement is your least entertainment dollar. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Lawer" threatens suit; Landmark metaphotos; 3DP v (c); Forced arbitration; Imperial Scott Walker; Keysigning ritual; Polyfingered robot dictaphone; DNS bug; Register of copyright damns term extension; How Anonymous decides; Christchurch quake pe

Your Ruby gem declares required_ruby_version >= 3.0. That constraint references the Ruby 3.0 language specification, expressed through the implementation version, checked against whichever runtime happens to be running, with no distinction between MRI and JRuby, and no connection to the specification document that defines what Ruby 3.0 even is. Runtimes at least show up somewhere in the tooling. Y

I get it: Large Language Models are interesting... but you should not give "Agentic AI" access to your computer, accounts or wallet. You have no idea what it will do This isn't a theoretical concern. There are multiple cases of LLMs wiping people's computers [1] [2], cloud accounts [3], and even causing infrastructure outages [4]. --> What's worse, LLMs have a nasty habit of lying about wha

I benchmarked 19 web frameworks on how efficiently an AI coding agent can build and extend the same app. Minimal frameworks cost up to 2.9x fewer tokens than full-featured ones.

The previous post looked at the Bitcoin network hash rate, currently around one zettahash per second, i.e. 1021 hashes per second. The difficulty of mining a Bitcoin block adjusts over time to keep the rate of block production relatively constant, around one block every 10 minutes. The plot below shows this in action. Notice the […] Bitcoin mining difficulty first appeared on John D. Cook.

SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs. “We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done right!" “YEAH!” SOON: there are 15 competing AI labs. (See: xkcd on standards.) The irony: “we’re the responsible ones” is each lab’s founding mythology as they spin out of each other. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

When I first heard of cryptographic hash functions, they were called “one-way functions” and seemed like a mild curiosity. I had no idea that one day the world would compute a mind-boggling number of hashes every second. Because Bitcoin mining requires computing hash functions to solve proof-of-work problems, the world currently computes around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes, […] Exahash, Ze

On Pizzas, CSVs, and Building for Markets That Don't Exist Yet

Twenty five years ago today, the EU's IST advisory group published a paper about the future of "Ambient Intelligence". Way before the world got distracted with cryptoscams and AI slop, we genuinely thought that computers would be so pervasive and well-integrated that the dream of "Ubiquitous Computing" would become a reality. The ISTAG published an optimistic paper called "Scenarios for ambient…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The

Git doesn’t know about CI, code review, or issue templates, but every forge that hosts git repositories has added these features through the same trick: a dot-folder in your repo root that the forge reads on push. The folder names differ, the contents overlap in some places and diverge in others, and the portability story between them is worse than you’d expect. A companion to my earlier post on g

I’ve written a couple times about Fibonacci numbers and certificates. Here the certificate is auxiliary data that makes it faster to confirm that the original calculation was correct. This post puts some timing numbers to this. I calculated the 10 millionth Fibonacci number using code from this post. n = 10_000_000 F = fib_mpmath(n) This […] 10,000,000th Fibonacci number first appeared on John D.

Nerd Quiz #4 is the fourth instalment of Nerd Quiz, a single page HTML application that challenges you to measure your inner geek with a brief quiz. Each question in the quiz comes from everyday moments of reading, writing, thinking, learning and exploring. This release introduces five new questions drawn from a range of topics, including computing history, graph theory and Unix. Vi

Nvidia was only invited to invest. That is one reversal of commitment. Remember that graph that has been circling around for some time now? The one that shows the circular investment from AI companies: Basically Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI will then invest $300 billion in Oracle, then Oracle invests back into Nvidia. Now, Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO, is back tra

I’ve written before about computing big Fibonacci numbers, and about creating a certificate to verify a Fibonacci number has been calculated correctly. This post will revisit both, giving a different approach to computing big Fibonacci numbers that produces a certificate along the way. As I’ve said before, I’m not aware of any practical reason to […] Computing big, certified Fibonacci numbers firs

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology.

At the recent FOSDEM, I did a very quick lightning talk about our OpenBenches project. Sadly, despite the best efforts of the AV team, the video had a missing section. I took my own audio recording and zipkid took some photos, so I was able to recreate it using the Flowblade video editor. Enjoy! Many thanks to Edward Betts for running the dev room and providing the display laptop. …

The original Legend of Zelda came out 40 years ago today. With other birthdays on the horizon, like Twilight Princess’s 20th in November, I wanted a calendar that showed the anniversary of every Zelda game. So I made one. Subscribe to this URL in your calendar app: https://evanhahn.com/tape/zelda_anniversaries.ics Once you do, you’ll get calendar events on the anniversary of each game’s release.

When a whale dies in the open ocean, its carcass sinks to the abyssal floor and becomes an ecosystem. Marine biologists call this a whale fall, and the body sustains life in three overlapping stages: mobile scavengers strip the soft tissue over months, enrichment opportunists colonise the bones and surrounding sediment for years, and chemosynthetic bacteria feed on the skeleton itself for decades,

Wrapping Code Comments Feb 21, 2026 I was today years old when I realized that: It’s a good idea to limit line length to about 100 columns. This is a physical limit, the width at which you can still comfortably fit two editors side by side (see Size Matters). Note an apparent contradiction: the optimal width for readable prose is usually taken to be narrower, 60–70 columns. The contradiction is r

Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists and security firms. But a stealthy new phishing-as-a-service offering lets customers sidestep both of these pitfalls: It uses cleverly disguised links to load the target brand's real website, and then acts as a relay between the tar

In May 2021, Dario Amodei and a crew of other former OpenAI researchers formed Anthropic and dedicated themselves to building the single-most-annoying Large Language Model company of all time.  Pardon me, sorry, I mean safest, because that’s the reason that Amodei and his crew claimed was why

This article tells part of the story of Jane Jensen. I think I became convinced when I went to CES [in January of 1997] and I walked around the show looking at all these titles that were the big new things, and not one screen had full-motion video. I realized that if I wanted anyone […]

The pocket reference guide for 2026/2027. The post The 2026/2027 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Sniffing the asynchronous keyboard state. The post Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Detecting the ESC key, first (failed) attempt appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links A perforated corporate veil: The Brazilian method for curbing corporate power. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Social media turned US parties into host organisms for third parties; "Citizens" are hired actors; Insured exoskeletons; Talking with Snowden and Gibson. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: Yo

This is a curious and mostly charming book about therapy. It is presented as a (somewhat contrived) Socratic dialogue between Skynner the teacher and Cleese the pupil. Skynner lectures on while Cleese interjects with "that's too clever to be convincing" and other witty remarks. It is fun to have a somewhat sceptical interlocutor but it does get a little wearisome after a while. The basic of…

Fifteen years ago, Twitter was still relevant. And nobody had ever tweeted from a Commodore VIC-20, the best selling computer of 1982, before. Syd Bolton, the curator of the Canadian Personal Computer Museum, decided to fix that. And on February The post On February 20, 2010 a VIC-20 tweeted appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A few years back, the term "AI" took an unexpected turn when it was redefined as "Actual Indian". As in, a person in India operating the machine remotely. I first heard the term when Amazon was boasting about their cashierless grocery stores. There was a big sign in the store that said "Just Walk Out," meaning you grab your items, walk out, and get charged the correct amount automatically. How did

ActivityPub is a federated protocol used by public houses in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland for announcing scheduled events, drink promotions, and community activities to patrons and the wider neighbourhood. Each participating pub operates as an independent instance, maintaining its own chalkboard and event schedule while optionally sharing activity information with other instances

As mentioned in our software roadmap, we’ve been working on many improvements to Pebble’s already pretty awesome SDK and developer…

Taking some time off for medical reasons until early April

Summarizing the flow. The post Exploring the signals the dialog manager uses for dismissing a dialog appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links Six years of Pluralistic: Time flies when you're writing the web. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MBA phrenology; Sony's DRM CEO is out; Midwestern Tahrir; Reverse Centaurs and AI. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep wri

A theme running through my book is the idea that efficiency improvements, and the various methods for making products cheaper over time, have historically been dependent on some degree of repetition, on running your production process over and over again.

PC Gamer is reporting that the current demand by AI companies for computer chips is having a disastrous effect on the rest of the industry. In an interview, the CEO of Phison said: If NVIDIA Vera Rubin ships tens of millions of units, each requiring 20+TB SSDs, it will consume approximately 20% of last year's global NAND production capacity 駿HaYaO NAND is a type of microchip. Rather than b…

The classic black comedy Office Space debuted in theaters February 19, 1999. It was Mike Judge’s first live-action film. Judge is better known for his animated series Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, but I’ll argue Office Space The post Office Space released Feb. 19, 1999 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I run Frigate to record security cameras and detect people, cars, and animals when in view. My current Frigate server runs on a Raspberry Pi CM4 and a Coral TPU plugged in via USB. Raspberry Pi offers multiple AI HAT+'s for the Raspberry Pi 5 with built-in Hailo-8 or Hailo-8L AI coprocessors, and they're useful for low-power inference (like for image object detection) on the Pi. Hailo coprocessors

In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill. But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy. Can you measure care? Does scale drive out care? If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by numbers, is care lost? The more I think about it, care seems antithetical to the reductive nature of quantification — “one deat

This is something I just tried out last week but it seems to have enough potential to be worth showing unpolished. I was pairing with a client on writing a spec. I saw a problem with the spec, a convoluted way of fixing the spec. Instead of trying to verbally explain it, I started by creating a new markdown file: NameOfProblem.md Then I started typing. First the problem summary, then a detailed

I watched this video about how AI has already ruined music. Her mom sent her a song and she told her mom it was AI. She played the song and it sounded like slop. It had inspired lyrics like: From quiet roots, a garden grows Pure slop. Compare it to: I’m in the cut acting crazy Note that “cut” and “whip” are not exactly words, but products of a culture. Ulysses is particularly hard to read because

I guess it could, but why bother? The post Could <CODE>Write­Process­Memory</CODE> be made faster by avoiding the intermediate buffer? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do. The lessons still apply […]

Everyone raves about this series, so I thought I'd grab the first book. It's basically fine, I guess. It is moderately amusing having the Muderbot be an awkward teenage boy who just wants to watch videos and cringes when people stare at him. But it is a bit one-note. Similarly, evil corporations hiding details from exo-planet surveyors is a trope which has been a thousand times before. This…

Windows 2000 was released to the public February 17, 2000 to much anticipation. It wasn’t a consumer operating system, but businesses looked forward to a step forward from Windows NT 4.0 that would bring better reliability and ease of use. The post Windows 2000 release date appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

How did we do it before ChatGPT? How did we write full sentences, connect ideas into a coherent arc, solve problems that had no obvious answer? We thought. That's it. We simply sat with discomfort long enough for something to emerge. I find this fascinating. You have a problem, so you sit down and think until you find a solution. Sometimes you're not even sitting down. You go for a walk, and your

For some reason, a bunch of big companies are really leaning into Markdown right now. AI may be the reason, but I kind of love the possible side benefits. So, here’s something that I didn’t expect to be saying in 2026: There seems to be a nonzero chance that Markdown might become the new RSS. “Whoa, crazy talk! It’s not even a protocol!” I hear you saying. But the evidence has seemed to pick up o

Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow

Mega update on Pebble Time 2, Pebble Round 2 and Index 01 Things are busy in Pebbleland! We’re getting close to shipping 3 new hardware…

In het eerdere stuk Digitaal zoet en zuur in het coalitieakkoord schreef ik over de bemoedigende en minder bemoedigende stukken van de coalitieplannen. En er staan mooie digitale voornemens in: Een revolutie in de ICT in de Rijksoverheid: centrale aansturing, centrale inkoop, verplichte standaarden, geen geld als men zich niet aan die standaarden houdt. Ook pleit men voor een “Nederlandse Digitale

Statistical approximation ≠ general intelligence

Final build, final, final, final 2, ship this one. The post Microspeak: Escrow appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The good folks at Epomaker know that I love an ergonomic keyboard, so they've sent me their new "Split 70" model to review. This isn't your traditional ergonomic keyboard. Essentially, this is two separate halves joined by a USB-C cable; so you can position it however you like. Here's a quick video showing it in action: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/split-new.mp4 It is

On February 16, 1978, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dialup BBS, or bulletin board system, the predecessor of online discussion forums and web sites like Reddit and Digg. An electronic bulletin board over dialup With no The post First BBS goes online Feb. 16, 1978 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links What's a "gig work minimum wage": The important rate is what you're paid when you're waiting for a job. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MBA phrenology; Sony's DRM CEO is out; Midwestern Tahrir; Reverse Centaurs and AI. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upco

Well, the ESP32 Bluetooth bridge experiment was a complete failure. Not the radios themselves, they're actually pretty cool, but there's just no way I could get the Yale locks to be reliably operated by them. At a guess, BLE is a bit too passive to detect