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How afraid should we be?

Marcin Wichary, at Unsung: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.” Then, at any moment, you can hold Control and swipe with two fingers (or use a scroll wheel) up or down to zoom the entire screen. I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see individual pixels better. This is one of the very best MacOS

Hannah Murphy, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, alas): The company recently began prioritising a Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said. The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to employees, according to one person. They added that the character is being trained on the billionaire’s mannerism

Andrzej Odrzywolek recently posted an article on arXiv showing that you can obtain all the elementary functions from just the function and the constant 1. The following equations, taken from the paper’s supplement, show how to bootstrap addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division from the elm function. See the paper and supplement for how to obtain […] Mathematical minimalism first appeare

A friend of mine bought a Tesla Roadster back in the early 2010s. At the time, spotting a Tesla on the road was a rare event. Maybe even occasion enough to stop and take a picture. I never got the chance to photograph one, let alone drive one, until I met this new friend recently. This was my chance to experience the car firsthand. We walked to the parking structure to see it. As soon as he opened

My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map. Google's Android has now broken that. On the web, we used to use: <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg"> That opened the phone's photo picker…

On April 13,  1992, Cyrix debuted its 486SLC CPU. Cyrix didn’t have its own fabrication plants so they relied on other chipmakers, such as SGS Thomson and Texas Instruments, to manufacture the chips. Part of the agreement allowed TI to The post Cyrix 486SLC CPU: Introduced April 13,1992 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The Common Package Specification went stable in CMake 4.3 last year and the name caught my attention because it sounds like it might be addressing the cross-ecosystem dependency problem I’ve written about before. Reading the spec, the “common” turns out to mean common across build systems rather than common across language ecosystems: it’s a JSON format that CMake and Meson and autotools can all r

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

Today's links Austerity creates fascism: We can't afford to not afford nice things. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: The Server of Amontillado; Flapper's Dictionary; Mastercard v rec.humor.funny; Philippines electoral data breach; A front page from the Trump presidency; Spike Lee x Bernie Sanders; France v password hashing; Algorithms as Central European folk-dances; Sav

I built a small tool to visualise how Mixture of Experts models route tokens through different experts. It's genuinely fascinating to watch.

The date of Easter The church fixed Easter to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox. They were choosing a date in the Roman (Julian) calendar to commemorate an event whose date was known according to the Jewish lunisolar calendar, hence the reference to equinoxes and full moons. The […] Lunar period approximations first appeared on John D. Cook.

My thanks to Typotheque for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Zed, their incredible new font superfamily. Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. Typotheque tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and fo

The New York Times: In a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in Budapest, Mr. Orban congratulated the opposition saying, “The responsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to us.” But, he also made a vow: “We are not giving up. Never, never, never.” His defeat paves the way for Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist and the leader of the main opposition party, to take over a

I quipped on BlueSky: It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects. Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the people who made this" This is top of mind because I’ve been working with Jan Miksovsky on his project Web Origami and he exemplified this to me recently. I was wor

More vintage graphic-design weekend fun — this time, a collection of Milwaukee bus tickets from the late 1940s to early 1950s, collected on the Present & Correct blog. So much variety in the colors and typography, but yet they all feel branded together. Think about the care and thought here. Whoever was making these was designing one for each week, every week — and it’s so clear they loved making

I must have been the last developer still confused by the AWS interface. I knew how to access DynamoDB, that was the only tool I needed for my daily work. But everything else was a mystery. How do I access web hosting? If I needed a small server to host a static website, what service would I use? Searching for "web hosting" inside the AWS console yielded nothing. After digging through the web, I f

I heard that while this blog is good at diagnosing the problem, it falls short when proposing solutions. Today I’m proposing a solution that everyone (except the haters and losers) can get behind. We have a real problem in America, and it’s billionaires. I mean, it’s actually fiat money that the state can print arbitrary amounts of, but that’s a complicated idea, so we’ll just say it’s billionaire

And vindication for Apple’s unfairly maligned 2025 reasoning paper

Today is Orthodox Easter. Western churches celebrated Easter last week. Why are the Eastern and Western dates of Easter different? Is Eastern Easter always later than Western Easter? How far apart can the two dates be? Why the dates differ Easter is on the first Sunday after the first full moon in Spring [1]. East […] The gap between Eastern and Western Easter first appeared on John D. Cook.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

Some graphic design fun for the weekend: achingly gorgeous art pieces recreating vintage Pan Am luggage tags, by Ella Freire. I love them all. The colors, the type, the shapes — sublime. (Via Dan Cederholm’s Studio Notes.)  ★

Why Claude Code changes everything

Today's links Don't Be Evil: Evil genius is just a lack of shame. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: FBI x Trotsky; Jakob Nielsen x headlines; Floppy disk stained glass; Zero tolerance for mismatched socks; EFF v DOGE. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' e

Is the Strait of Hormuz open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more.

I have an old mobile phone number that I'd like to keep. I think it is registered with a bunch of services for 2FA by SMS, but I can't be sure. So I want to keep it for a couple of years just in case I need it to log on to something. I don't want to faff around with physical SIMs, so I went looking for the cheapest way to keep my number for the longest time. There are a whole bunch of providers…

Back in college, the final project in our JavaScript class was to build a website. We were a group of four, and we built the best website in class. It was for a restaurant called the Coral Reef. We found pictures online, created a menu, and settled on a solid theme. I was taking a digital art class in parallel, so I used my Photoshop skills to place our logo inside pictures of our fake restaurant.

Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no topic has been more polarising than AI coding agents. What I keep noticing is that a lot of the criticism directed at these tools is perfectly legitimate, but it often come

For The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz go deep profiling Sam Altman under the mince-no-words headline “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?” 16,000+ words — roughly one-third the length of The Great Gatsby — very specifically investigating Altman’s trustworthiness, particularly the details surrounding his still-hard-to-believe ouster by the OpenAI board in late 2023,

Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan — Setting Fire To Sleeping Giants In what The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow called a “tense call” after his brief ouster from OpenAI in 2023, Sam Altman seemed unable to reckon with a “pattern of deception”

This new museum in Utrecht (about 30–40 minutes south of Amsterdam) seems just astonishing. The rainbow wall of iMacs alone is incredible. (Via Juli Clover.)  ★

This is a response to this Sam Altman’s blog post. Sam Altman is not the bad guy. History comes from two places, great men and causes and forces. We have way too little of the former and way too much of the latter right now. I hear that in America people fear the government taking away their freedom, and in China people fear the lack of government taking away their freedom. Maybe it’s just becaus

There’s a lot of mathematics just off the beaten path. You can spend a career in math and yet not know all there is to know about even the most basic areas of math. For example, this post will demonstrate something you may not have seen about decimal forms of fractions. Let p > 5 […] Distribution of digits in fractions first appeared on John D. Cook.

Waiting for the waiting thread to acknowledge the change. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>Wait­For­Multiple­Objects</CODE>?, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

This post is exclusive to feed subscribers. Enjoy! This whole experiment is called RSS Club - but perhaps it should be called "XML-based distributed feed club"? I've been playing about with local-only and privacy-conscious view tracking. I can see how many people click on my stories from HN or Google or anywhere else. I also decided to add the number of times a story is viewed by someone…

Intel announced the 486 CPU at Comdex on April 10, 1989. It was an expensive chip, priced at $950 each in quantities of 1,000. I thought it would be fun to look back at what the magazines at the time The post Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Package registries return every version a package has ever published in a single response, with no way to ask for less. The API formats were designed ten to twenty years ago when packages had tens of versions, not thousands, and they haven’t changed even as the ecosystems grew by orders of magnitude around them. npm’s registry API dates to 2010 when there were a few hundred packages on the registr

Today's links Canny Valley and Creative Commons: Another bite at the apple. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bidenomics needs to be bigger; Al Franken's balanced war budget; Bernie x The Pope; Art is a money-laundry; UK government condemns copyright trolls; Howard Dean's genocidal pharma sellout. Upcoming appearances: Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC

A meditation on the game of Solitaire and its endless variations, which go well beyond what you can find in Windows 3.1. Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from David Buck, who has been obsessed with a certain single-player game lately. See if you can figure out which one. Today in Tedium: Who doesn’t love card games, especially the ones you can play on your own? Solitaire is quiet. It’s slow. It w

I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the WebAssembly Toolkit for Go. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go. watgo comes with a CLI and a Go API to parse WAT (WebAssembly Text), validate it, and encode it into WASM binaries; it also supports decoding WASM from its binary format. At the center of it all is wasmir - a semantic

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

What Anthropic's Mythos research preview tells us about the trajectory of frontier models, sandbox escapes, and the cybersecurity risk ahead.

In short: GitHub’s downtime is bad, but uptime numbers can be misleading. It’s not as bad as it looks; more like a D than an F. “Zero nines uptime”? 99.99% uptime, or “four nines”, is a common industry standard. Four nines of uptime is equivalent to 1.008 minutes of downtime per week. GitHub is not meeting that, and it’s frustrating. Even though they’re owned by Microsoft’s, one of the richest com

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug: Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) kee

“thenickdude”, on Reddit: They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website. When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Clo

Since early February, I've been trying various interventions on a 163M-parameter GPT-2-style model that I trained from scratch on my local RTX 3090, using code based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". My original model got a loss of 3.944 on my test set, while the original GPT-2 weights got 3.500 on the same dataset. I wanted to see if I could close that ga

No need to panic just yet

Me, in 2025, on Mastodon: I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer. I'm sick of devops'ing stupid stuff because builds work on my machine and I have to spend that extra bit of time to ensure they also work on remote linux computers. Not

Saw a post on X saying that the latitude of the Pyramid of Giza is the same as the speed of light. I looked into this, expecting it to be approximately true. It’s exactly true in the sense that the speed of light in vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s and the line of latitude 29.9792458° N […] The Great Pyramid of Giza and the Speed of Light first appeared on John D. Cook.

I recently ran across a post on X describing a process for creating a random fractal. First, pick a random point c inside a hexagon. Then at each subsequent step, pick a random side of the hexagon and create the triangle formed by that side and c. Update c to be the center of the new triangle […] Random hexagon fractal first appeared on John D. Cook.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking of the president of the United States in a totally normal way: I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, “Thank you very much, I love you, sir.” The phrase Blanche was looking for is “Thank you sir, may I have anothe

You can't, but you can cooperate with the other thread. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>Wait­For­Multiple­Objects</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Drones in Ukraine and in the War with Iran have made the surface of the earth a contested space. The U.S. has discovered that 1) air superiority and missile defense systems (THAAD, Patriot batteries) designed to counter tens or hundreds of aircraft and missiles is insufficient against asymmetric attacks of thousands of drones. And that […]

The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.

Sometimes, I find myself talking while my audience has a puzzled look on their face. It doesn't matter how much I prepared my speech, the message is just not getting through. But then they ask: What are you trying to say? Somehow, this shifts the conversation entirely. Instead of trying to sound smart and interesting, I start telling them exactly what I'm trying to say. The fluff disappears, the j

I was left somewhat unconvinced by this book. I liked the concept - a series of interrelated stories all told in different styles. Much like the film "Lola RenntRun Lola Run" there's a briefcase full of cash, a cast of morally ambiguous characters, and a meandering philosophical discussion about the nature of economic salvation. It slams together the naïve and the cynical into a bunch of …

40 years ago today, on April 9, 1986, Osborne Computer Corporation, one of the early makers of CP/M computers and a pioneer in portable computing, liquidated after three years of financial hardship. Its demise is generally blamed on its founder, The post Osborne Computer liquidated April 9, 1986 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Cindy Cohn's "Privacy's Defender": The history of digital rights, from the very beginning to this very moment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Tariffs and monopolies; Paperclip dodecahedron; Class war comix; Glenn Beck's brain; Iceland v Pirates; Dashers v apps; Leaked NYPD goon squad manual. Upcoming appearances: Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London,

I write stuff here. Sometimes the stuff is good. Sometimes it reads like I wrote it at 2 AM after an argument with a YAML file, which is because I did. But one decision I made early on was that I didn't want to offer an email newsletter.

Yesterday I wrote about the package security problems AI agents face: typosquatting, registry poisoning, lockfile manipulation, install-time code execution, credential theft, and cascading failures through the dependency graph. Agents inherit all the old package security problems but resolve, install, and propagate faster than any human can review. There’s no silver bullet for securing agent codin

Vandaag verscheen het rapport “Digitale autonomie binnen de energie-intensieve industrie”, wat ik schreef in opdracht van Energy Innovation NL, voorheen bekend als de Topsector Energie. Het rapport is hier te lezen. Dit was ontzettend leuk om te doen, en ik ben erg blij dat men me gevraagd heeft om dit rapport te schrijven. Samen met Energy Innovation NL (de nieuwe naam van de Topsector Energie) h

I recently found out about Andrica’s conjecture: the square roots of consecutive primes are less than 1 apart. In symbols, Andrica’s conjecture says that if pn and pn+1 are consecutive prime numbers, then √pn+1 − √pn < 1. This has been empirically verified for primes up to 2 × 1019. If the conjecture is true, […] Root prime gap first appeared on John D. Cook.

In early January 2025, a family friend was over for lunch. One of my many guilty midwit pleasures is a love of New Year’s resolutions, so I asked her if she had made any. She said no, but mentioned that she had some relatives that were doing “damp January”. In case you’re not aware, Dry January is a challenge many people do to quit drinking alcohol during the month of January. These folks were doi

Last week I wrote about the orbit of Artemis II. The orbit of Artemis I was much more interesting. Because Artemis I was unmanned, it could spend a lot more time in orbit. The Artemis I mission took 25 days while Artemis II will take 10 days. Artemis I took an unusual path, orbiting the […] A Three- and a Four- Body Problem first appeared on John D. Cook.

Not many facts are on the ground, but here are some starting points for sober thinking

Most people go to Disneyland and spend way more time waiting in line than riding rides. HK Disneyland is simpler than many of the other Disney parks, but proper pathing is key for avoiding lines. Done correctly, you should be able to ride every ride in half a day. This guide assumes you are more athletic and motivated than 99% of Disney guests. First off, buy the Early Park Entry Pass, it gets yo

Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team: Earlier today we announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new general-purpose language model. This model performs strongly across the board, but it is strikingly capable at computer security tasks. In response, we have launched Project Glasswing, an effort to use Mythos Preview to help secure the world’s most critical software, and to prepare the industry for the practices

If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not subscribe to my premium newsletter? It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000

You can't, but you can arrange for the waiter to do it for you. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>Msg­Wait­For­Multiple­Objects</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links Process knowledge: We also serve who stand and wash. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Chicken Little; "Anya's Ghost"; Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming

I'll admit, I was a little sceptical about returning to Avenue Q. I saw it on its original West End run back in… OH MY GOD I AM SO OLD! FUCK! Where did the time go? It's always hard to know how much to update a show. Does it need constant reinvention to stay in the zeitgeist or can it be pickled forever as a classic? "I wish I had taken more pictures" was something that utterly resonated with …

It is hard for me to be objective about the Atari ST, because I was a dyed in the wool Amiga fanboy in the early ’90s. But the Atari ST was released April 8, 1985 and quickly sold 50,000 units. The post Atari ST introduced April 8, 1985 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I went through the recent OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications and pulled out the scenarios related to package management, which turn up in all ten categories and don’t sort neatly into any one of them, since a typosquatted MCP server is simultaneously a name attack, a registry attack, and a metadata poisoning vector. Package name attacks Typosquatting and namespace confusion are some of the olde

What inspired the semi-viral fake GIMP trailer that recently fluttered around FOSS circles? The creator and puppeteer behind Pork Johnson explains. Look, I haven’t necessarily changed my mind about GIMP, the image editor that has something of a love-hate relationship in the open-source community. It’s not quite Photoshop or Affinity. But I do think it makes for very funny comedic fodder. Which is

Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil. First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post. This is his news more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I want to do here is add a more personal note about why this matters so much to me, how the last months led us here, and why I am so excited to have him on board. Last year chan

Kottke: This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit. Follow NASA on Flickr for more. Update: In a follow-up post, Kottke has assembled a slew of great iPhone wallpapers from Artemis II photos, along with links to other collections, like Basic Apple Guy’s. Also, The Iconfactory has added a bunch of these image

Not sure why they think this comparison is reassuring rather than terrifying. I also have to say that Altman’s claims, today, that OpenAI employees were obsessed with COVID weeks ahead of the rest of the world feels more than a little like Donald Trump’s repeated false claim that he predicted, pre-9/11, that Osama bin Laden would attack the U.S.  ★

OpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog: Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for public companies in that valuation range: .table-6BC6F0DB-597A-48A9-8793-B6C02805510C th:nth-child(1) { text-align: left } .table-6BC

Towards the end of last year, I trained a 163M-parameter GPT-2-style model from scratch on my local RTX 3090, using code based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". The result was a pretty decent little model, but it wasn't as good as the original GPT-2-small, despite having more parameters (because it wasn't using weight-tying). Specifically: on a particular t

Hackers linked to Russia's military intelligence units are using known flaws in older Internet routers to mass harvest authentication tokens from Microsoft Office users, security experts warned today. The spying campaign allowed state-backed Russian hackers to quietly siphon authentication tokens from users on more than 18,000 networks without deploying any malicious software or code.

Om Malik: “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian. “The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re drivi

Live data with major airport delay times for North America. Available on the web — with a nice “TV Mode” too — and, of course, within the app.  ★

Just lovely data visualization work from Sheets.works — a consulting firm that specializes in, I swear, Google Sheets.  ★

Send me to fall, send me to fall Every time they train a new frontier model, they do a calculation. What’s the most efficient way to make money off of this model? For a while now, it’s been selling access to it like a SaaS subscription. You buy access to the model, you use it to make money, some percent of the money you make pays the API bill, etc… In a growth economy, this calculus works. The eco

The true story of Einstein, Newton, and Darwin

The permanently ineligible list. The post Were there any Windows 3.1 programs that were so incompatible with Windows 95 that there was no point trying to patch them? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

As discussed in my last blog post, the scumsuckers at Apollo.io have been giving out my personal details. Not only did they have my email address, they also had a copy of one of my phone numbers. I asked them where they got it from and they said: Your phone number came from Parsely, Inc (wpvip.com) one of our customers who participates in our customer contributor network by sharing their…

A lot of software advertises itself as working with a Hayes modem or Hayes compatible modem. What does that mean? And what’s Hayes? It’s a de facto standard named after a defunct maker of modems. Let’s talk about why Hayes The post Hayes compatible modem: What it means appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Michael Stapelberg wrote last week about Go’s automatic VCS stamping: since Go 1.18, every binary built from a git checkout embeds the commit hash, timestamp, and dirty flag, queryable with go version -m or runtime/debug.ReadBuildInfo() at runtime. His argument is that every program should do this, so you can always answer “what version is running in production?” without guessing. Go is unusual in

Today's links Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber: Public provision is a layered question. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: EU appoints henhouse fox (copyright); Emacs x Tron: Legacy; Spammer v dead man's AOL account; Scott Walker's pork fountain; "No toilets, try Amazon"; Iceland falls (x Panama Papers); Rooms in Milanese sewers; China bans Panama Papers; "Parent Hacks"; "Th

This week, more time than I'd have liked to spend went on talking about the trials of chasing invoices. This is off the back of a customer (who, for now, will remain unnamed), who had invoices stacking back more than 6 months overdue and despite payment terms of

Landauer’s principle gives a lower bound on the amount of energy it takes to erase one bit of information: E ≥ log(2) kB T where kB is the Boltzmann constant and T is the ambient temperature in Kelvin. The lower bound applies no matter how the bit is physically stored. There is no theoretical lower […] Toffoli gates are all you need first appeared on John D. Cook.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have

Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the widest possible range of readers. We tested Zed with visually impaired patients at a French ophthalmology hospital and found that Zed Text outperformed Helvetica in terms of reading speed across all patient groups. Designed from scratch to

Samual Axon, reporting last week for Ars Technica: Early this morning, Anthropic published version 2.1.88 of Claude Code npm package — but it was quickly discovered that package included a source map file, which could be used to access the entirety of Claude Code’s source — almost 2,000 TypeScript files and more than 512,000 lines of code. Security researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to publicly

Did you know that Jesus gave advice about prototyping with an LLM? Here’s Luke 14:28-30: Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ That pre

New reporting from the New Yorker vindicates concerns that were first raised here

Executive Summary OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has, per The Information, said that OpenAI is not ready to go public in 2026, in part because of the "risks from its spending commitments" and not being sure whether the company's revenue growth would support its spending commitments. Friar

If the compiler is complaining about things you didn't write, find out who wrote them. The post Learning to read C++ compiler errors: Illegal use of <TT>-></TT> when there is no <TT>-></TT> in sight appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I've been working on personal projects since the 2000s. One thing I've always been adamant about is understanding the code I write. Even when Stack Overflow came along, I was that annoying guy who told people not to copy and paste code into their repos. Instead, they should read it and adapt it to their specific case. On personal projects, I've applied this to a fault. Projects never get done beca

This post is exclusive to RSS feed subscribers. Enjoy! I've had this idea stuck in my head for a while, so I decided to make it. This is "Scan Slowly And See". The code is made by cloning some of the banana's spots. Do let me know if the QR code works for you 🍌 …

Released April 6, 1992, Windows 3.1 was the successor to the very successful Windows 3.0. It wasn’t great, just like Windows 3.0 wasn’t great. But it was a graphical user interface that ran on very inexpensive ordinary PCs, and enough The post Windows 3.1 released April 6, 1992 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar is almost thirty years old and people are still finding new ways to extend the metaphor. Drew Breunig recently described a third mode, the Winchester Mystery House, for the sprawling codebases that agentic AI produces: rooms that lead nowhere, staircases into ceilings, a single builder with no plan. That piece got me thinking, though it shares a blind sp

Today's links Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages: Tech rights are labor rights (again). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Arthur C Clarke v Buddhist monks (x DST); Bomb squad v life-size Mario power-ups; Panama Papers; Chinese antitrust; Consumerism v New Jim Crow; Absurd English spelling; Save Netflix! David Cameron's dad v Panama Papers; Trick ph

An elusive hacker who went by the handle "UNKN" and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021.

AI compute demand is growing exponentially while supply constraints bite hard. The next 18-24 months are going to be defined by shortages, rationing and price discovery.

The best way to run AI and remain HIPAA compliant is to run it locally on your own hardware, instead of transferring protected health information (PHI) to a remote server by using a cloud-hosted service like ChatGPT or Claude. [1]. There are HIPAA-compliant cloud options, but they’re both restrictive and expensive. Even enterprise options are […] HIPAA compliant AI first appeared on John D. Cook.

Simon Willison wrote about how he vibe coded his dream presentation app for macOS. I also took a stab at vibe coding my dream app: an RSS reader. To clarify: Reeder is my dream RSS app and it already exists, so I guess you could say my dreams have already come true? But I’ve kind of always wanted to try an app where my RSS feed is just a list of unread articles and clicking any one opens it in the

AI isn’t the only thing behind Medvi

Like all good nerds, I generate a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This has several advantages - it allows me to see if a message is legitimately from a service, if a service is hacked the hackers can't go credential stuffing, and I instantly know who leaked my address. A few weeks ago I signed up for BrowserStack as I wanted to join their Open Source programme. I had a few…

I have these Sunday evenings where I find myself sitting alone at the kitchen table, thinking about my life and how I got here. Usually, these sessions end with an inspiring idea that makes me want to get up and build something. I remember the old days where I couldn't even sleep because I had all these ideas bubbling in my head, and I could just get up and do it because I had no familial responsi

This post will look at the problem of updating an average grade as a very simple special case of Bayesian statistics and of Kalman filtering. Suppose you’re keeping up with your average grade in a class, and you know your average after n tests, all weighted equally. m = (x1 + x2 + x3 + […] Kalman and Bayes average grades first appeared on John D. Cook.

Aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more

Alexandre Dumas ran what was essentially a content production house in 19th century Paris. His most famous collaborator was Auguste Maquet, who wrote substantial portions of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would produce drafts and outlines, and Dumas would rewrite and polish them, but the

What if I told you there was a secret social network, hidden in plain sight? If you're reading this message, you're now a member of RSS Club! RSS Club is a series of posts which are only visible to RSS / Atom subscribers. Like you 😃 If I've done everything right, this page isn't visible on the web. It can't be found by a search engine. It doesn't share to Mastodon or appear syndicated to Ac…

Every few months someone declares that “X will kill open source” or that “open source is not sustainable” or that “open source won”, and every time the responses split into factions that seem to be having completely different conversations. People have been pointing this out for at least a decade. Replacement terms like “post-open source” never stuck, because the problem isn’t the label. The phras

Today's links EU ready to cave to Trump on tech: Surrendermonkeys ahoy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Among a Thousand Fireflies"; "fiscal" not "physical"; Ontario's pusher premiere can't distribute vaccines; You need your head examined (if you trust an AI therapist); Women tell Pence about their periods; Zombie economy and digital arm-breakers; The trouble with tari

About five months ago I wrote about Absurd, a durable execution system we built for our own use at Earendil, sitting entirely on top of Postgres and Postgres alone. The pitch was simple: you don’t need a separate service, a compiler plugin, or an entire runtime to get durable workflows. You need a SQL file and a thin SDK. Since then we’ve been running it in production, and I figured it’s worth s

Welcome back to compiler land. Today we’re going to talk about value numbering, which is like SSA, but more. Static single assignment (SSA) gives names to values: every expression has a name, and each name corresponds to exactly one expression. It transforms programs like this: x = 0 x = x + 1 x = x + 1 where the variable x is assigned more than once in the program text, into programs like this

Wander Console 0.4.0 is the fourth release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website explore interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent website owners. To try it, go to susam.net/wander/. A screenshot of Wander Console 0.4.0 This release brings a few small additions as well as a few minor fixes.

This is the last of the interventions I'm trying out to see if I can improve the test loss for a from-scratch GPT-2 small base model, trained on code based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". Back when I did my first training run for a base model, on my local RTX 3090, I used two optimisations: Setting the 32-bit floating point matrix multiplication precision

Soundtrack — Soundgarden — Blow Up The Outside World A lot of people try to rationalize the AI bubble by digging up the past. Billions of dollars of waste are justified by saying “OpenAI just like Uber” (it isn’t) and “the data center buildout is

I used the term perilune in yesterday’s post about the flight path of Artemis II. When Artemis is closest to the moon it will be furthest from earth because its closest approach to the moon, its perilune, is on the side of the moon opposite earth. Perilune is sometimes called periselene. The two terms come from […] Roman moon, Greek moon first appeared on John D. Cook.

Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11 wireless network.

File copying is not a fundamental operation, nor is it even detectable at the file system layer. The post How can I use <CODE>Read­Directory­ChangesW</CODE> to know when someone is copying a file out of the directory? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Last year, I wrote about my server setup and how I use zipbombs to mitigate attacks from rogue bots. It was an effective method that helped my blog survive for 10 years. I usually hesitate to write these types of articles, especially since it means revealing the inner workings of my own servers. This blog runs on a basic DigitalOcean droplet, a modest setup that can handle the usual traffic spike

When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in place before it is created. It opens with The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows: Which, frankly, should be the end of …

AMD launched its K6 microprocessor on April 2, 1997. It was a competitor for Intel’s Pentium II CPU, but unlike the Pentium II, it plugged into the previous-generation Pentium socket. Being less expensive than a Pentium II and using less The post AMD K6 released April 2, 1997 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

It’s Easter, so here’s a tour of the easter eggs hiding inside package managers. The very first known easter egg in software dates back to 1967-68 on the PDP-6/PDP-10, where typing make love at the TOPS-10 operating system’s COMPIL program would pause and respond “not war?” before creating the file. apt and friends A cow-shaped thread runs through the history of system package managers, starting w

I had coffee last year with a guy - I won't use his real name - who told me he was "building a business." I asked what it did. Dropshipping jade face rollers. I made him say it twice. Jade face rollers. He'd found

Cloudflare’s new attempt to win over the hearts of developers could help keep a few ancient WordPress sites from falling off the internet. That‘s a good thing. Cloudflare started its life nearly 20 years ago, and I found out about it basically because I was running a blog—and obsessed with keeping it online. ShortFormBlog was many things, but the most important was that it was barely held togethe

Shifting goal posts and new efforts at redefining the narrative

I was looking through an old geometry book [1] and saw a hyperbolic analog of Napier’s mnemonic for spherical trigonometry. In hindsight of course there’s a hyperbolic analog: there’s a hyperbolic analog of everything. But I was surprised because I’d never thought of this before. I suppose the spherical version is famous because of its […] Hyperbolic version of Napier’s mnemonic first appeared on

While testing my gopher client, I noticed something interesting: All downloads froze at 13 kilobytes. Sometimes, it was barely noticeable, other times it would stall for a good second or so. Networks operate on small chunks of data called packets. This allows resources to be shared between computers: ... but it does create a problem if you're the one doing that download. Because each packet i

I've been trying to get an 8x A100 instance on Lambda Labs to do a training run for my LLM from scratch series, but they're really busy at the moment, and it's rare to see anything. Thanks to the wonders of agentic coding, I spent an hour today getting something up and running to help, which I've called lambda-manager. It has three commands: list-instance-types, which prints which kinds of instanc

Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never Register/​Register Later/​Register Now would solve that problem, but wouldn’t look so neat. This got me thinking about how you

So go ask your Chomsky 10 years ago, when I started comma and discovered the Professional Managerial Class, I used to talk about the reckoning. It was a nebulous concept, but it mostly involved the abrupt fall from grace of these people at the hands of machines. It’s kind of here, and people are way more of sore winners than I thought they’d be. Something I liked about Trump part one is that, desp

The Artemis II mission launched yesterday. Much like the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the goal is to go around the moon in preparation for a future mission that will land on the moon. And like Apollo 13, the mission will swing around the moon rather than entering lunar orbit. Artemis II will deliberately follow […] Artemis II, Apollo 8, and Apollo 13 first appeared on John D. Cook.

Tempting but misleading. The post Why doesn’t the system let you declare your own messages to have the same semantics as <CODE>WM_<WBR>COPY­DATA</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I spend a lot of time reading about the nature of technological progress, and I’ve found that the literature on technology is somewhat uneven.

A delightful and emotional rendition of three rather different works. Mark-Anthony Turnage's "Three Screaming Popes" was a chaotic cacophony. Wild, bizarre, inventive, and seemingly driven by excess. A fascinating performance, although not one I'll put on in the background. Turnage himself took to the stage to bask in the applause. Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 1. Reading the story behind the …

On April 23, 1987, Thomas Rattigan drove to work just as he would any other day. But when he arrived at Commodore’s office building in suburban Philadelphia that morning, company guards informed him he’d been fired. They escorted him from The post Thomas Rattigan, short-lived Commodore CEO appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links It's extremely good that Claude's source-code leaked: Careful what you wish for. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Elephantmen"; Eve Online war bankrolled by casino; Phishers take Mattel for $3m; Sanders wins 6 primaries, CNN airs Jesus "documentary"; Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse; Embroidered Toast; Mass layoffs at ATT. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montre

Announcing Spring 2026 Pebble App Contest! In honour of Pebble Time 2 entering mass production, we’re hosting a contest to celebrate…

Of all the days to start a blog, I chose April Fools' Day. It wasn't intentional, maybe more of a reflection of my mindset. When I decide to do something, I shut off my brain and just do it. This was a commitment I made without thinking about the long-term effects. I knew writing was hard, but I didn't know how hard. I knew that maintaining a server was hard, but I didn't know the stress it would

Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM, alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75. The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Despite today's date, this is not a joke. I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC' market (4/8/16 GB models in the current generation), which I'll embed below: .embed-container { posit

Things will get wild, but probably not immediately

Happy April Cools! My not-tech post this year is Chicago vs New York Pizza is the Wrong Argument, which is mostly an excuse for me to talk about Chicago food. See here for all of the other April Cools submissions. As of this email we have sixteen posts; there's still time to submit something!1 This one came out of a pizza argument with Marianne Bellotti, a true New Yorker who doesn't think deep di

If you want something at work, say it out loud. Your silence isn't saving you.

What are we reading about here? The post The cover of <I>C++: The Programming Language</I> raises questions not answered by the cover appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Pentagonal numbers are truncated triangular numbers. You can take the diagram that illustrates the nth pentagonal number and warp it into the base of the image that illustrates the (2n − 1)st triangular number. If you added a diagram for the (n − 1)st triangular number to the bottom of the image on the right, you’d […] Pentagonal numbers are truncated triangular numbers first appeared on John D. C

A coworker of mine told me that he uses Microsoft Copilot frequently. In fact, he said "I don't know how I did my work without it." That came as a surprise to me. I can't stand Copilot. This is a very productive employee, one of those 10x engineers you can throw any problem at and he'll find a solution. Obviously, if he found a use for Copilot, then I was probably holding it wrong. So I decided to

This was an idea I had back in the days of Naptster. At the turn of the century, it was common to listen to an "acquired" music file only to find it was missing a few seconds at the end due to a prematurely stopped download. Some video formats would refuse to play at all if the moov atom at the end of the file was missing. I wondered if it would be possible to make a file format which was…

On April 1, 1963, Charles Tandy booked one of the junior ballrooms at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and put out a call to Radio Shack employees to meet there that evening. There were rumors of changes afloat, but no one The post How Tandy bought Radio Shack appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

April 1, 1999 was no April Fool’s joke for Mark Cuban. On that day, he sold his company, broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion and became a billionaire. The deal doesn’t make a lot of sense today, but at the The post How Mark Cuban became rich appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Trumpismo vs minilateralism: The enemy gets a vote. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: My new sigfile is unstoppable; TBL on the future of the web (2006); Wonder Woman sweater pattern; Unpatchable drug cabinets; 50-building mural; DRM v (the next) Netflix. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London

This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Henry Lincoln promised at the end of “The Priest, the Painter, and the Devil” that he would continue to investigate the case of François-Bérenger Saunière and Rennes-le-Château. He proved as good as […]

Apple: The First 50 Years to see if I even wanted to bother with the hardcover. Previously the essential tome on Apple (and especially Mac) history was Owen Linzmeyer's Apple Confidential, still on my shelf in the well-thumbed 2.0 paperback. I was prepared to find this book lightweight on the technical side and I expected that it would concentrate far more on Apple the electronics company than App

A hot take on how AI may have played out in the war so far

As Apple hits its 50th anniversary this week, we got a chance to talk to its forgotten third founder: Ronald G. Wayne. Apple is honestly a footnote in his long life. Quick programming note: Starting this week, we’re doing a bit of a throwback and going back to our Tuesday/Thursday roots. And in honor of that, we’re sharing a great interview we recently did. Today in Tedium: Recently, I had the ch

"Intellectuals and Society" by Thomas Sowell - a collection of essays in which Sowell criticizes "intellectuals", by which he mostly means left-leaning thinkers and opinions. Interesting, though certainly very biased. This book is from 2009 and focuses mostly on early and mid 20th century; yes, history certainly rhymes. "The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics" by

They gave people a heckin tamagochi, what's not to like?

While gopher is usually seen as a proto-web, it's really closer to FTP. It has no markup format, no links and no URLs. Files are arranged in a hierarchically, and can be in any format. This rigid structure allows clients to get creative with how it's displayed... which is why I'm extremely disappointed that everyone renders gopher menus like shitty websites: You see all that text mixed int

It has recently come to my attention that people need a thousand lines of C code to read my website. For simpler clients, my server supports gopher: /* HTML tags, keywords, commands */ h-n {color: #F27;} /* Values */ h-v {color: #B8F;} /* CSS selectors, attribute/varable names, file names */ h-s {color: #AEE;} /* Comments */ h-c {color: #777;} h-e {color: #F6F;} # telnet maurycyz.com 70

I keep a folder in Apple Notes called “cursed websites,” where I save various artefacts that make me feel like the social contract has dissolved. Call it an act of self-loathing. Call it collecting evidence of the fall. Dansugc.com went straight into the folder this morning. It&

Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not subscribe to my premium newsletter? It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,

I’m skeptical that quantum computing will become practical. However, if it does become practical before we’re prepared, the world’s financial system could collapse. Everyone agrees we should prepare for quantum computing, even those of us who doubt it will be practical any time soon. Quantum computers exist now, but the question is when and if […] Quantum Y2K first appeared on John D. Cook.

It was going to be like that when I got here. The post Before you check if an update caused your problem, check that it wasn’t a problem before the update appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Join us at The 7th Annual Red Queen Conference April 22 -23 – Silicon Valley How do Portfolio Acquisition Executives and COCOMs ensure they’re working on the right problem with the right priority before locking in a requirement? Discuss, share and prototype Innovation Targeting concepts with your peers.  Get hands-on with the companies and venture […]

Peter Vogel posted the following image on X yesterday. The receive side of the coin is a decision tree for decoding Morse code. The shape is what makes this one interesting. Decision trees are typically not very compact. Each branch is usually on its own horizontal level, with diagonal lines going down from each node […] Morse code tree first appeared on John D. Cook.

Yesterday the axios package was compromised on npm. An attacker hijacked a maintainer account, published two malicious versions that bundled a remote access trojan through a staged dependency called plain-crypto-js, and the versions were live for two to three hours before npm pulled them. Axios gets 83 million weekly downloads. This keeps happening over and over and over and the post-incident conv

Day by day, I find we're eeking more goodness out of OpenClaw and finding the sweet spot between what the humans do well and the agent can run off and do on its own. Significantly, we're shifting more and more of the workload to the latter

I opened Twitter this morning and three different startups were announcing "the world's first" something. An AI CMO, an autonomous AI marketer, and a design agent "with taste," which is a phrase that made me close my laptop for about ten minutes. None of

If global large-scale human communication continues to be concentrated within large social media platforms and content providers like YouTube, human languages may become sort of irrelevant in that space. Sometimes I Google for something and see a Reddit result in Finnish. I live in Finland, so it makes sense when the search engine prioritizes such results, but most of the time the actual Reddit th

March always seems to be my life’s busiest month. Things I wrote and made “The two kinds of error”: in my mind, software errors are divided into two categories: expected and unexpected errors. I finally wrote up this idea I’ve had for a long time. “All tests pass” is a short story about a strange, and sorta sad, experience I had with a coding agent. Inspired by others, I published a disclaimer abo

A cascading wave of supply chain attacks has hit npm and PyPI in under two weeks. LLMs are making it worse, and current mitigations aren't enough.