Latest posts

You can go into the deep end way too easily with a self-hosting project. But is a less-is-more approach possible? Here’s what my attempt to build a “third-place” box taught me. Hey all, I’m working on a new newsletter dedicated to mini-PCs that I’m planning on launching soon, but I wanted to kind of give a sneak peek of what I’m thinking. If tiny computers are your thing, sign up here! Earlier th

Wikipedia: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”. It is used in systems theory, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can or should be read

Chance Miller: Not to be overshadowed by the new Mac mini and Mac Studio, Apple today has also released an updated version of its Polishing Cloth. In an age of everything getting more expensive, the new Polishing Cloth is cheaper than before at $9 (down from $19). [...] Apple released the Polishing Cloth in October 2021 and sold out almost instantly. While it has become a meme, it is genuinely a g

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac: Apple has officially announced its next product event, where it will unveil the iPhone 18 Pro lineup and its first foldable iPhone. The event will take place on September 9 at 10 am, PT. The tagline reads “Surprise and shine,” and the invitation features a glowing Apple logo with a sun shining through. Apple generally prefers Tuesdays, but on years when Labor Day falls in the se

AI-powered coding agents increase productivity for many developers. But do these agents produce good-quality code? Some say this doesn’t matter, we are heading toward dark software factories with source code never inspected, and maybe we should eliminate source code altogether—“source code is the new assembly code”. Others have a different view. Humans sometimes need to […] What is the quality of

The time to tame Silicon Valley has come

When you’re interested in studying a family of functions, it can be useful to look at a differential equation that the functions solve. This is a theme I’ve written about several times, most recently here and here, but also three years ago here. Orthogonal polynomials are mathematically elegant as well as very useful in applications [1]. […] Junk solutions first appeared on John D. Cook.

The good folks at Thermal Master have sent me their latest camera to review - and it is a bit different to all the others I've tried. Whereas previous cameras are good for bird watching, or wildlife spotting, or finding leaks at home - the P3 has a manual macro lens and is specifically designed for getting close-up and personal with your electronics. Yup! See just how hot your CPU is getting…

Digg was a high flying news aggregation site from the early web 2.0 era that still exists today, but really in name only. It serves as a cautionary too for why high profile websites tend not to make major changes The post Digg v4 and lessons not learned appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

When I hear the term ultraspherical I think of something extremely spherical. For example, a baseball is spherical, but a billiard ball is more spherical. Maybe a highly polished billiard ball is ultraspherical. Using this line of thought, the term ultraspherical polynomial is inexplicable. This is an example of the arcane terminology I wrote about recently. In […] Ultraspherical first appeared on

Today's links The age of disinvention: 🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥️1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥1️⃣2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣🟥 Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Metacrap; CmdrTaco retires; Chalk memorial for Jack Layton; By all means tread on these people. Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest bo

What do you wanna bet someone's gonna get promoted for deleting this workaround from the code?

Quality software reigns again

And you thought the SpaceX S-1 was ridiculous

A lot of the time when I've been writing posts for this blog, I've felt that a diagram would really help. But they're a pain to produce well, and I think I underuse them as a result. I wanted to fix that, and wound up adding D2 support to my static site generator. I think it works pretty well! In the past, I've tried drawing my own diagrams in LibreOffice and exporting as SVG, but my complete l

XCancel: On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel. The service XCancel is stopped until further notice. We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now. Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel. I didn’t want to jinx them, but this obvious threat hanging over their head was the mai

Bill Friskics-Warren for The New York Times: Her death was announced in a video posted on social media by her nephew Bryan Seaver. No cause was provided. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health were raised last year as she postponed and later canceled a Las Vegas residency, and intensified to the point that she took to social media in October to announce, “I ain’t dead yet.”This May, she said that she

I made a mistake in my table earlier today regarding the base price of the M5 Max Mac Studio, but my mistake was because of a rather sneaky design in Apple’s purchasing flow. Apple’s web interface looks like this: Both of the available M5 Max SoCs have 18-core CPUs, but the entry model (that starts at $2,500) has a 32-core GPU, and the upgraded chip has a 40-core GPU. That upgrade is labeled “+

You're not going to believe this, but turns out you can't always take criminals at their word. Actually, I'll walk that back a bit as it may not even be the cybercrime guys who got this wrong, but it all starts here: 🚨Cyber

For a mobile 'mini homelab' project I'm working on, I wanted to use 5G Internet as a primary 'on-to-go' connection, but still have the ability to plug in another Internet connection when I put the mobile rack I'm building in a fixed location. I'll have more on that project soon, but I figured this project was a good way to check out Ubiquiti's solutions, especially considering many of their sma

Dave Rupert wrote about shipping microlighter: a tool for handling syntax highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlights API. I saw his post the day he released it, and I had an implementation PR up for my blog by end of day. Then, like I do with so many things, I let it sit there. This is the period where my subconscious takes over. It does the work of, “How do I actually feel about that? Do I want

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of

If you already read my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece yesterday, this morning I added a lengthy footnote regarding the DMA’s predecessor, the GDPR. Click through to read the entire note, but here’s the kicker: The GDPR went into effect 10 years ago. By their inaction, they obviously think it’s working just fine. I think they look at the situation and realize, with satisfaction, that every t

"Every force is screeching towards centralization."

Apple today announced an all new lineup of Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) desktops. The Apple Newsroom announcements for Mac Mini and Mac Studio only note base model prices. Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost. Mac Mini M6

Rigorous thinking about the future produces extreme outcomes.

It wouldn't be a Windows Entertainment Pack then, would it? The post Why didn’t the Windows Entertainment Pack just run the MS-DOS version inside an emulator? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Apple Newsroom: Apple today debuted M6 in the new Mac mini and M5 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, providing an extraordinary leap in performance and AI capabilities. M6, Apple’s first state-of-the-art 2-nanometer chip, advances every compute block, delivering gains across every dimension of performance. The chip features a larger 12-core CPU complex with the world’s fastest CPU core, a larger 12-core

I write about journaling a lot, since it’s honestly my most important practice. In my most recent post on the subject I made the case that active recall is an effective way to remember things, whether that be ideas, thoughts, or events. I'd like to expand on that post and make the case that journaling extends life perception. To wax philosophical for a moment: long life perception and long lifespa

Cats is so silly! In the olden days, after a wild animal was slaughtered, the tribe's shaman would wear the skin and re-enact the hunt. As he became one with the beast, the people slowly understood the ways of nature. Cats is a similarly spiritual experience wherein we watch androgynous sylphs gyrate across the stage and believe (if only for a moment) that the human has become feline, all in…

On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds wrote a message that changed the world. He didn’t expect that when he wrote it, that’s clear from the message and some of the replies. He had something he wanted to share with his The post Linux first announced August 25, 1991 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I’ve been reading through the recent run of incidents where package-manager infrastructure was the attack surface, as one does on a Sunday afternoon. One question I kept coming back to was whether the tools have any defences at the flag and config level. Every package manager has an override that turns off a check: --allow-unauthenticated, --break-system-packages, --ignore-scripts, an env var that

I don't think it's going to work out the way everybody thinks it will. The current narrative, at least the one pushed by the companies selling the shovels, is that AI will become centralized. Anthropic and OpenAI will offer safe, vetted AI. Developers will become mere prompt-engineers, submitting requests to these benevolent gatekeepers. They have tamed the dragon. We will benefit only if we becom

In the 1980s and 1990s, Columbia House could do no wrong—it was a great way to get 12 CDs for a penny. But its business model kind of set the stage for a lot of bad e-commerce. Today in Tedium: No matter how hard you try, disruption comes for you. It might be slow and gradual, or it may be fast and brutal. But eventually, you will find yourself at the end of your line, attempting to hold on to th

The previous post gave several examples of three-term recurrence relations for special functions. These relations can be computationally useful, but they have to be applied carefully. Several years ago I wrote a post on stable and unstable recurrences. In that post I show that the stability of the recurrence relation for Bessel functions produces depends […] Numerical (in)stability of recurrence r

Finalist 4 is the biggest update yet to the paper-inspired day planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch. The headline is Notes, in the app or as a folder of Markdown files that round-trips with Obsidian. Tasks in those files land on the right day, next to your reminders and events, even inside the macOS menu bar app. The rebuilt Timeline lets you pencil tasks into your day, and Apple Pen

All images are links to high quality versions. RC-102: 1.7 kCPS [43 uSv/h]. AB+: 55 CPS, 1960 CPS RC-102: 1.1 kCPS [37 uSv/h] It has nice botryoidal formations of massive Uraninite along with some areas where the shape of the underlying calcite crystal is visible. A few of the "bubbles" are broken, showing the individual crystals that grew on the matrix. RC-102:

Apple Developer News: Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. Existing addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption. After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.

Wesley Hilliard, reporting for AppleInsider last week: A report from Irish Independent detailed the European Commission’s response to Apple’s new business terms for the EU. They share that they welcome the changes and will monitor Apple’s implementation of the terms. Here is the EC’s full statement: “The Commission welcomes Apple’s changes to their business terms, which follow a close dialogue bet

I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago: I make edits in my text editor, I switch over to a terminal window and I run a command to compile and execute the code. I look at the result, then switch back to my editor. If I am unsure of what happens, I either add tracer prints to the code and restart the program, or I restart the program in a debugger. If I hit an exception that crashes m

Today's links How Canada can save Americans and defeat America: True Carneyism has never been tried. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Brazil v AIDS drug patents; TSA v gel-bras; After the Siege (Russian); Names are hard; Layton's last message; Hospital bill secrets; "The Unraveling"; Friction cannot be reduced, only redistributed; Free Kevin; EFF v Barney; MP3tunes; "Gho

10 years ago I wrote about BitCam 1.0: Gorgeous, unbelievably faithful one-bit camera app for iPhone done in the style of the original Mac. A lovely tribute to Bill Atkinson’s remarkable dithering algorithm. “Catnip for old-school Mac users,” says John Siracusa. Check out the fun recent-hire-at-Apple Chris Espinosa is having with it. Originally a creation of The Iconfactory, BitCam is now in the g

Not mutually exclusive

I complained last week that starting with an update last month, the list of apps I’m testing in Apple’s TestFlight app has been sorted alphabetically, rather than by recency. Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many others, has the same problem I do — his list is now alphabetical, and it’s driving him nuts too. Ryan Booker, amongst many ot

There many examples of families of functions where each function can be computed as a linear combination of the two previous terms where a and b are functions of x but not on n. This is called a three-term recurrence formula. It’s amazing how often you can run into three-term recurrence formulas. There are theorems that give conditions […] Three-term recurrences first appeared on John D. Cook.

Probability density function must integrate to 1, and so if you know a density function up to a constant, the constant is determined. When you’re looking at a probability density f(x) for the first time, it helps to ignore the normalizing constant. Concentrate on the part of the function involving x and know that the normalizing […] The von Mises-Fisher distribution first appeared on John D. Cook.

Filling in with your imagination. The post Comparing the two holograms on the Windows 95 box appeared first on The Old New Thing.

On our recent trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, I was bemused by just how little effort performers put in to finding out why people had selected their show. Taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe is ridiculously expensive with some performers paying tens of thousands of pounds. The way performers recoup the costs of performing is by getting people to pay to see a show. Acts are spending huge amounts…

It was on August 24, 1995 that Windows 95 was released, amidst much anticipation. It was the most widely anticipated Windows release of all time, and the runner up really isn’t close. The idea of people lining up for blocks The post Windows 95 released August 24, 1995 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I genuinely think I've nailed the IoT door lock situation! Well, Ubiquiti has, but I think I've worked out how to put it all into a residential house and have it make sense. There are a few basic tenets: Main power (never have to rely on

Sean Goedecke wrote a post arguing that you should never be angry at work — a post with which I strongly agree. Anger can be a useful signal, but being angry at work rarely improves the situation. More often, it makes life worse for the people around you, many of whom have no more power over the source of your anger than you do. I did learn that lesson, but it did not come naturally. One thing

Sorry but the law doesn't care about your merkle trees rain We've all heard the horror stories of dealing with names and technology, and yet, we must persist. In this story, we journey through the thorny brambles of git commit history and life events, and ultimately manage to tame them using ATProto. Let's Write A User Story Say that you have a big 'ol git repo. Thousands of commits, hundreds o

Your life might depend on it.

I’m no stranger to pushing hardware past its limits. For example, seven years ago, I tracked down an issue that prevented 16 GB of RAM being used in a motherboard that only supported 8. It ended up being a one-line GRUB hack to fix one of the ACPI tables that was mistakenly overlapping a PCI […]

On my icon gallery sites, I have metadata I’ve manually added over the years to tag certain icons as being predominantly “blue” or “orange” or some other color. Then I use this metadata to present icons of (roughly) the same color. It’s kinda neat to be able to browse a wall of icons that are all the same color. The thing is: I know there are a lot of icons I’ve missed tagging over the years.

Special functions often have arcane names that not very helpful without some context. The previous post goes into some reasons for this. This post will expand on a point at the end of the post about “modified” functions. Things are given their names for reasons. Discovering those reasons may help you understand their motivation and […] What exactly is modified about a modified Bessel function? fir

Special functions are special because they’re useful. They can also be shrouded in arcane terminology. These two facts are related. The more widely useful a function is, the more likely it is that the function will be discovered independently multiple times. Independent discoveries lead to varying definitions and notations. For example, there are two widely […] Why special function terminology is

John Moltz, in his weekly members-only column for Six Colors (no gift links, but Moltz’s column is worth the subscription in and of itself): This week Anthropic announced that in order to identify AI from human-generated content it would be watermarking all text it generates by subtly altering the randomness at which its models picked the next word. While this might seem a perfectly cromulent mean

Sorry, this one is not about AI. But sometimes one must speak out.

Cheaper tools are thriving. What does this mean for the upcoming IPOs?

Pixels are a lie. Even if you think you're drawing something with "pixel perfect" accuracy, your monitor is lying to you. There is no grid of platonically perfect squares. In CSS, pixels are a double lie: Note that 1px doesn't necessarily equal one physical device pixel. On HD displays, it may span multiple physical pixels. Similarly, 1cm in CSS often doesn't correspond to one hundredth of SI…

Today, we welcome the 48th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka CERT now has access to monitor Sri Lankan government domains against the data in HIBP, helping identify exposed government accounts and respond when they appear in new data breaches.

Suppose you wanted to find the distance between Earth and Mars over time. To first approximation, both planets orbit the sun in elliptic orbits in the same plane. If you wanted to be more accurate, you’d need to take into account the fact that the orbit of Mars is tilted about 1.85° relative to the […] The difference orbit inclination makes first appeared on John D. Cook.

Winter 2025 was the tipping point for coding agents. Summer 2026 is shaping up to be the same for open weights - and compute supply, not model quality, is now setting the price.

What’s in an acronym? How to read between the lines.

Ian Austen, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday explained to Canadians why he walked away, calling the U.S. proposal “a bad deal.” “We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” Mr. Carney said. “We recognize that sometime

There’s a pizza shop near my home with a sign out front that says “Coming Soon.” When I drove by it this morning I thought about how you would model the time until an event happens that is “coming soon.” Suppose I look at the sign one day and guess how many days until the […] Coming soon first appeared on John D. Cook.

This is part 8 in a series of posts on writing concurrent network servers. In this part, we'll switch to Go and see how it tackles the challenges described earlier in the series. All posts in the series: Part 1 - Introduction Part 2 - Threads Part 3 - Event-driven Part 4 - libuv Part 5 - Redis case study Part 6 - Callbacks, Promises and async/await Part 7 - Rust Part 8 - Go (this part) This post a

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring the Daring Fireball weekly newsletter this week to promote their Agent Registration. Agents are hitting your signup flow and they’re bouncing off a browser login that was designed for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see. WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file

Toby Sterling, reporting for Reuters: The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber €825 million ($966 million) for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them, according to an August 17 decision reviewed by Reuters. The penalty would be the second-largest issued yet under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. It is behind only a €1.2 billio

On the rename system call.

Los Angeles’ ADUs, electrical transformer manufacturing, gas turbine power plants, how water in the Colorado River is used, and more.

Week fourteen of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases Go 1.27 is out. On the module side, go mod tidy now consolidates duplicate require blocks into the canonical direct/indirect pair for modules declaring go 1.27 or later, go doc accepts package@version to fetch documentation for a specific module version, and t

Today's links Born on technology's third base: Material forces shape life-chances. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Glue; iPods v unions; RIP Jack Layton; Gibson on cities; Britain's sweatshop for terminally ill help-hcalls; NYPL's open CDN; Radical juries. Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest

One of the memes on Twitter is that “programming is solved now.” I’m not sure to what degree it is, but one thing is pretty clear: the act of familiarizing yourself with a language no longer matters and some of the friction that mattered for humans does not matter for agents. As a result, LLMs make language choice much less consequential than it used to be. If you don’t like the choice, you can

In short: Vim has a joke autocmd called UserGettingBored that doesn’t do anything. Vim’s automatic commands feature, usually shortened to “autocmd”, lets you run code when various events occur. For example, you could implement an auto-save feature by binding the TextChanged event to the :w command. Vim has over 100 events, from “buffer was created” to “file was saved”. But one of them sticks out t

Microsoft’s iPhone app for OneDrive has long supported creating three new document types via a big “+” button right in its file viewer: Excel, Word, PowerPoint. It recently came to my attention that they’ve added a fourth document type, and they even gave it real Microsoft-style “they just have no taste” file icon. Just look at it. The whole world’s coming to an end, Mallory.  ★

Two estimates of how crazy AI Capex has gotten, and four new signs that public opinion has totally soured

Walmart: When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout. We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to

Looking back from the vantage point of today, it’s hard for even me to believe, but it’s true all the same: I used to be a full-blown car guy. I bought my first car, a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for $800 in 1989, when I was sixteen years old. The bad thing about a Beetle was […]

Applying our principles. The post Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function, practical exam appeared first on The Old New Thing.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the number system used in labeling spreadsheet columns. Labels run from A through Z, then AA through AZ, etc. This looks a lot like base 26, but it’s not quite the same. It has no analog of zero. If Z were like zero, Y would be followed by […] How would you know whether an ancient culture had zero? first appeared on John D. Cook.

This is a detailed examination of the various senses possessed by animals. Some will be intimately familiar to you - like sight and sound - whereas some will seem strange and uncanny - like magnetic detection and electro-sensing. Some straddle an almost understandable space like echolocation or tetra-chromatic vision. This isn't a game of Top Trumps where all the animals are ranked by power.…

Microsoft QuickBasic was a commercially available programming language for MS-DOS, initially released August 18, 1985. Qbasic, the Basic interpreter included with MS-DOS versions 5 and 6, was a cut-down version of QuickBasic. Most notably, the bundled version lacked the ability The post Microsoft QuickBasic remembered appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I can’t remember the last time I was actually hot. It’s a thought that keeps looping through my head as I stand next to a children’s play structure in a Greek all-inclusive waterpark. The sun is beating down on an international community of

Rust Glancer Aug 21, 2026 Rust Glancer, a functional LSP server for Rust which uses two orders of magnitude less RAM, is incredibly cool. Go check it out! This post started as a comment on lobste.rs, but I figured it out that it’s better to publish it somewhat more prominently. Don’t expect polished writing though! Some thoughts: rust-analyzer uses rowan for syntax tree representation Yeah, rowan

Today's links The actual epistemic crisis: AI's assault on reality is an opportunistic infection. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Disney goths; Running a con room party; Equation Group's fuggly sourcecode; "Bubble"; "The Weight." Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em,

It’s not even really trying to hide it

In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface: this is the kind of thing that AI makes easy to do, because it can vibe code that whole fake Microsoft Teams interface pretty trivially You’ve probably se

How what one young man did might come to symbolize an entire era

The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It's a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi). The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display, which costs twice as much, with giant bezels and half the resolution! Until today, the Steam Deck LCD didn't work with a Raspberry Pi. But the

Looking for consolidation points. The post Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I like AI-generated ASCII diagrams. Because nobody would ask AI to generate ASCII diagrams, and so, it’s congruous. I like incongruity [1]. Aside from the incongruity of using a gazillion-parameter neural network to make 1970’s style ASCII art, ASCII diagrams have some uses. They’re absolutely tiny compared to image files. But more importantly they can […] AI-generated ASCII diagrams first appeare

On August 20, 1986, Adobe Systems held its initial public offering. Priced at around $11 per share, Adobe has split its stock six times since. Adobe: The sleeper tech stock of 1986 1986 was a good year for tech stocks. The post Adobe Systems IPO August 20, 1986 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

GitHub had a rough Monday this week, with git operations, Actions, and the issue tracker all unavailable for several hours. Code being unreachable during a forge outage is annoying but survivable because every contributor already has a full clone. Issues and pull request threads going dark is a different matter, since for most projects those exist only in GitHub’s database and nowhere else. I aske

And panicking with good reason

Unsurprisingly, PyTorch's own built-in GELU function is faster than the hand-rolled one I've been using to date. But I was surprised at how much faster using it made things when training my models. I discovered this accidentally just now while working on something unrelated, but am logging the details here for anyone else that might find it useful. The headline numbers: the same code, training t

Better Batteries Aug 20, 2026 One of the eternal schisms in programming is over the question of whether the standard library should be minimal or encompassing. This is the wrong question to ask. The right one is: Which social architecture creates a high-quality standard library? Python is always brought up as example of leaky batteries exploding in slow motion, but this has nothing to do with siz

Just use the callable directly. The post On wrapping a callable in a lambda that just calls it with the same parameters appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Why the post-scarcity utopia is unlikely.

One of the promises of the AI-filled future is that we'll all have highly capable autonomous servants "agents" to work for us. Even back in the 1990s, it was a common trope in future-gazing to insist that a person's personal slave agent would negotiate on their behalf. Ask your meek digital pal agent to find you a restuarant in town, tonight, for a hot date, catering to your dietary preferences,

On August 19, 1974, Chuck Peddle, Bill Mensch, Rod Orgill, Harry Bawcom, Ray Hirt, Terry Holdt, Wil Mathys, and Mike Janes quit their jobs at Motorola to venture out on their own, joining MOS Technology. The eight had worked on The post Chuck Peddle joins MOS Technology, August 19, 1974 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links The ordinariness of evil: Stop selling AI (bad). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Dot-crash bumwad; AP v fair use; Nym Wars; What's ctrl-F? Pentagon lost $6.5T in a year; Voter ID is voter suppression; Become unoptimizable. Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep read

In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters (example), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis. One, two, or even three Pis isn't a big deal, but once you hit 4+, the process of plugging the Compute Module into a carrier board, plugging that into a computer, managing Raspberry Pi Im

Their planned IPO is facing headwinds, trust has evaporated, and their burn rate is only getting worse

A new paper just came out, The Maximum-Area Small Polygon Problem. The paper solves the problem of finding, for each n, the n-gon with diameter 1 and maximum area. For odd n, the solution is what you might expect: a regular n-gon. I would expect this to be the solution for even n as well, […] Big little hexagon first appeared on John D. Cook.

TL;DR: if admins turn off browser features, those features won't work in confusing ways that are annoying to debug

A few weeks ago a paper was shared that showed how to extract reasoning traces from closed-weight models. Together with online discussions about tricking models into leaking them, it made me investigate it more out of curiosity. Twitter seems full of half-truths and confusion about how this works, so perhaps this helps some to understand what is happening. Hiding Traces Reasoning traces are usua

A theory about what went wrong, and some open questions about what might happen next

Brief update to last’s week’s note re: the growing backlash.

Newsletter updates were sporadic in July because of two weddings, two conferences (with two different talks!), and finishing Logic for Programmers. Huge thank you to everybody who bought a copy, as well as for your patience with the schedule. There's some podcast appearances, a conf talk, and a book sale at the end of this post. Newsletter updates will be sporadic in August because I just started

The imbalance conjecture is now a theorem. James Alexander Schreib and Yousof Yavari posted a proof last week. What does the conjecture theorem say? Start with a graph G with no edge between two nodes of the same degree. Then for every edge, calculate the absolute value of the difference of the degree of each end. […] The imbalance theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It's $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of

Today's links IP can't save you from AI: Property rights cannot substitute for labor rights and privacy rights. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Flying Brits v brown people; Probability neglect; Law v "enhanced patdowns"; Onion says Brits love paywalls; "Hench"; "Lessons in Magic and Disaster." Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent

A contingency plan. The post Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Suppose you have a planet in an elliptical orbit around a star. The math is identical for any light object orbiting a heavy object, such as a moon or satellite orbiting a planet, but we’ll call the heavy object a star and the light object a planet. The center of the star is not quite […] Mean distance to the sun first appeared on John D. Cook.

Egghead Software was a US retail store that sold computer software from 1984 to 2001. It declared bankruptcy 25 years ago this week, on August 18, 2001, after an attempted reinvention as a dotcom selling online failed. Why did Egghead The post What happened to Egghead Software appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

This month npm stopped accepting bypass-2FA tokens for account-governance actions, one of the steps in the plan GitHub set out last September to close the remaining routes that let a reusable credential bypass 2FA on npm. I went through the other registries ecosyste.ms tracks with more than ten thousand packages to see where each is on the same question, and the answer mostly follows from whose ac

The current ransomware situation is a bit of a kludge (deep breath): a lot of ransomware (which often doesn't even involve "ware", it's just extortion) is carried out by kids who successfully make a truckload of money but can't spend it without

It is common for promotional pamphlets aimed at children to contain a themed variant of snakes and ladders. This is the “game” where the players toss a die, move as many places as the die says, and then some spots on the board have an event that send the player forward, or back, or give them an extra toss or whatever. The theme is typically related to whatever the promoter wants to promote, b

What Amodei left out

Alignment as a rhetorical device.

The usual probing. The post How do functions like <CODE>alloca</CODE> allocate memory from the stack? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In early February 2011 Egypt was in the middle of a political revolution. One morning, everyone's phones suddenly pinged with an alert. The Armed Forces asks Egypt's honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt. A series of messages arrived all ostensibly from the network provider Vodafone. All pro-regime and all with the…

August 17, 2000 was a major milestone for the Internet. You could argue it’s the day the Internet went mainstream, completing the transition from something computer science students used in college to something their parents would use to buy books The post When the Internet reached half of US households appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture': The definitive textbook (with comics!). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Hair-gel bombers v bras; Hair-gel bombers v chemistry; AOL digs for spammer's platinum; Stross on infosec in 2061; In-game Ponzi; Snowden on Shadow Brokers hack; Life v understanding advanced math; "Greatest of Marlys!"; Hou

The first post in the recent series of posts on Hadamard matrices describes a way of constructing new Hadamard matrices from two other Hadamard matrices by taking their Kronecker product. Starting with a Hadamard matrix H0 and a Hadamard matrix G, you can construct a sequence of Hadamard matrices by Hn+1 = G ⊗ Hn for  […] Proportion of 1s in a Hadamard matrix first appeared on John D. Cook.

Some strong claims, dissected

Gordon Brander writes: The thing about computers is that they can do anything you wish, so long as you specify your wish in exacting detail. However, LLMs relieve this constraint. An LLM can extrapolate what you mean (more or less) from just a few words. So computers can do vibes now. It used to be that computers could only ever do exactly what you told them to do, nothing more. If they did someth

This was my first ever time at The Fringe™. Here are some scattered thoughts looking at the good, the bad, and the annoying aspects of this madly extravagant exhibition of talent. We saw 23 shows together, and one separate show each. There were more hits than misses, but the frustration of wasting your time on a bad show is rather heavy when there are literally hundreds of other shows on offer. P

A practical framework for reducing AI costs - auditing token spend, killing legacy models, moving workloads to open weights providers, and fixing the agent and tool inefficiencies that quietly burn tokens.

This is part 7 in a series of posts on writing concurrent network servers. In this part, we discuss how the challenges described in earlier parts are tackled in the Rust programming language. All posts in the series: Part 1 - Introduction Part 2 - Threads Part 3 - Event-driven Part 4 - libuv Part 5 - Redis case study Part 6 - Callbacks, Promises and async/await Part 7 - Rust (this part) Part 8 - G

Error correcting codes are most simply described in terms of the errors they can certainly correct. For example, the Hadamard code used for the Mariner 9 probe to Mars encoded each 6-bit pixel to a 32-bit codeword in such a way that the original pixel could be recovered if no more than 7 bits were […] Probability of correcting errors first appeared on John D. Cook.

Hadamard matrices are in the news following the recent announcement of a newly discovered Hadamard matrix. I’ve written three posts on Hadamard matrices recently, one as a sort of introduction and two on applications: the error correcting code used in the Mariner 9 probe and constructing sphere packings. A Hadamard matrix is an orthogonal matrix […] Compressing a Hadamard matrix first appeared on

The IBM PC Compact Printer is a bit of a misnomer, as it was really intended for the PCjr. But it ended up working with a bunch of other computers as well as part of its second act. Here’s the The post IBM PC Compact Printer model 5181 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Home price declines, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, The Boring Company fundraising, and more.

I'm really not sure what to make of this book. It was recommended by my book club as something between tragedy and comedy. The characters are excruciatingly well written - if you (or your friends) shoplifted Impulse body-spray back in the 1990s, you'll be hit by a terrifying wave of nostalgia. It reminds me of this excellent essay by Marie Le Conte about consent. What can a teenage girl…

Week thirteen of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases pnpm 12, the Rust rewrite, reached RC 5 and the project published What’s different in pnpm 12: commands, flags, settings and the lockfile format are unchanged from pnpm 11, so upgrading is not a migration. RC 5 breaks dependency cycles canonically during peer

Dissecting a web game to re implement the physics engine and train a neural network on it.

TL;DR: hospital drugs are some shit, man

My whole life I’ve felt like I have great eyesight (and I still do). But lately I’ve been noticing what feels like…some slippage. Nothing big. Just this feeling in the morning like, as my brain and body wake up, my vision needs to as well. The strange novelty of this phenomenon was operating in some small part of my subconscious the other day when I was scrolling the internet and come across this

Easily the best show I've seen at the Fringe. For plot-related reasons, a television company asks a literary genius to create a "pro-weapons sitcom". It is a fast paced mix of the sitcoms 2012 and Episodes. The jokes come at a steady pace - some attack with the furiousity of bullets, others the the subtlety of a knife in the night. All four of the cast are spectacular. Turning the…

Richard Goes to the Movies

I’ve heard from people in the past that my articles are too long, and I wanted to start by saying that, for the most part, they’re going to stay long, because I feel like the only way for me to make my arguments is to be

For a pay-what-you-want show this was decent. Three comedians doing sets on the theme of philosophy - followed by a Q&A where the audience poses philosophical conundrums to them. It more-or-less works as a gimmick. Although an early afternoon crowd may have been more likely to ask questions anonymously. I've never seen a Sikh doing an unnervingly accurate impression of Trump before. Daman…

You can request the target machine architecture. The post Forcing an ARM64X executable to run as a specific architecture appeared first on The Old New Thing.

This play is fucked up! Such a brilliant concept - what happened to the kids from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after they were rejected by Wonka? Stuck together in a Big-Brotheresque household, they trauma-dump on each other. New Zealand's Half Trick have shrunk their full-length play into a Fringe-standard 60 minutes. That does make it a little brusque and, simultaneously, a bit…

This is the second installment of my look under the hood of the recently passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, looking at what each provision actually does and trying to suss out its actual impact on housing supply.

It can be daunting to determine who's responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who's harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and c

Today's links Capital formation: Going legit means going mainstream. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: London Copyfighters x Speaker's Corner; TSA v lipstick; Long Beach v photographers; China x David Cameron's internet censorship; McMansion Hell; Copyrighting an MTG deck; "Privacy preserving age verification" delenda est. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourn

On August 14, 1984, Commodore International purchased Amiga Corporation for $27 million, with the expectation of bringing Amiga’s multitasking computer with high-color graphics and sound to market within a year. It took a little longer than that, and it created The post Commodore’s purchase of Amiga, August 14, 1984 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

It’s Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages.

Yesterday Levent Alpöge announced that he and his colleagues had discovered a new Hadamard matrix using Claude AI. That motivated a post I wrote this morning on how to construct Hadamard matrices. I mentioned in that post that these matrices arise in applications. This evening I gave an example, describing how NASA used a Hadamard […] Hadamard Codes and Sphere Packing first appeared on John D. Coo

Printing Lists Aug 14, 2026 To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element: for (items, 0..) |item, item_index| { if (item_index > 0) std.debug.print(", "); std.debug.print("{}", .{item}); }

NASA set Mariner 9 to photograph Mars in 1971. The images had to be encoded for transmission using an error-correcting code, otherwise they would be significantly corrupted when they were received on Earth. The images were encoded for transmission using a code based on Hadamard matrices, specifically a (32, 6, 16) Hadamard code. This means […] How NASA’s Mariner 9 probe encoded images first appear

Quite simply marvellous! Three Scottish divas giving us their interpretations of the greats while backed by an excellent pianist. So many shows at the Fringe skimp on sets and props - not this! A luscious array of costumes, hats, wigs, and ruby slippers bring the characters to life. The framing is thin but serviceable - the backstage helpers are reminiscing about their favourite stars and bring

Walking down the street, I noticed a ringing phone box so, naturally, I answered it. What happened next was a few minutes of pure fringe magic! I had a little chat with the caller, he welcomed me to the smallest venue in the fringe, and then he improvised a banger of a song based on my peculiar proclivities. What a treat to have a front row experience at a one man (and one audience member)…

I'm not sure what they're teaching at LAMDA, but it certainly isn't vocal projection. We were forewarned about the technical difficulties - but if a trained stage singer can't reach the 6th row of a tiny theatre, that can't be blamed on the backstage team. The show advertises itself as: What happens when you take Sondheim’s most beloved music and turn it on its head? Ingénues become villains, vi

From: Third-Party Risk Management To: [address extracted from package metadata] Subject: ACTION REQUIRED: Annual Supplier Security Assessment Due: 5 business days from receipt Hi, Our software inventory has identified you as the supplier of a software component in our production estate (the “Component”). All such suppliers are required to complete our standard security assessment annually. We were

Are menopausal women hot? It is often said that pornographic actresses move straight from "barely legal" to "MILF" without so much as moment in between. Unlike the fringe's other burlesque shows - which seem to exclusively feature nymphettes and twinks with nary a grey hair between them - Hot Flush focuses on the over 40s. Look, you probably don't want to read a review of how tempting I found…

The undisputed queen of short-form viral video comedy snacks takes to the stage. Well, swims to the stage. The Mermaid is a delightful and gentle amble through the confusing world of a girl who just wants to become a mermaid. Less standup and more storytelling, nevertheless it packs in the laughs with some rather clever jokes, a bit of bawdy humour, and - a rarity on The Fringe - a decently…

Another RAII-style wrapper. The post A little helper class for managing <CODE>LPPROC_<WBR>THREAD_<WBR>ATTRIBUTE_<WBR>LIST</CODE>s appeared first on The Old New Thing.

This is a disappointing and frustrating book - not least because it so nearly hits the mark. The subtitle is "How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing" - but it never gets close to discussing that topic, let alone deeply examining it. Instead, it is a book mostly focussed on the history of what we mean by "literacy" and, by contrast, what it meant to be "illiterate". As per the standard…

See the previous post for context and explanation of SSI. After reading Chris Fallin’s aegraph post, new ZJIT contributor dak2 landed a block-local version of the canonicalize function in #16828. The pseudocode of the block-local canonicalize function looks like this: for block in function.reverse_post_order(): rewrite_map = {} for insn in block.insns: insn.operands.map_in_place(l

There are at least four different Heated Rivalry shows at the Fringe this year. Earlier this week we saw Edinburgh Fringe - Heated Rivalry: The Musical Parody!. This is different because it is the unauthorized musical parody. Oh, and it is in the much larger Udderbelly venue. Some people spend the fringe watching every possible interpretation of Timon of Athens - we decided to go for doubles of

This is a technically precise and emotionally complex show with energetic delivery from a talented performer. Sadly, it did nothing for me. I found it a little one note in terms of storytelling. The rhythm of the story followed all the predictable beats which I thought was a little repetitive. There's no doubt he's a gifted storyteller. The comedy is suitably dark with some good moments of joy

The 1980s proved surprisingly fruitful for licensed greeting card mascots. It turns out American Greetings understood the Marvel playbook before Marvel did. Today in Tedium: One of the most-common complaints that you hear about modern media is that it’s often a retread of retreads. (One word: Marvel.) The Big Bang Theory, a show that was on the air for a dozen seasons and remains a rerun juggerna

Understanding the temporal relevance. The post The comments that go into code versus those that go into the pull request description appeared first on The Old New Thing.

There is a machine called Productivity, and on this machine there is a knob and a button. The knob increases productivity, and the button is labeled "reset." My job was data entry at a non-profit. It was my first job in the US where I didn't have to lift heavy objects. My main task was entering collected donations into a database. The data source was email attachments, which came in various fo

For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?" Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put

Today's links Model collapse: Living in a world that's trained on itself. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Wired v Dutch hackers; NYT v DMCA; Hair gel terrorist threat does not exist; AT&T merger is a screwjob; Smart cities are stupid; RIP Reaganomics. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I've been. L

A little wind noise, a little connectivity flakiness, and a little lip-sync issues from YouTube, but look at that view! 🤩 Back to business, it's the Brinks Home FAQ I found most interesting this week. I mean, how do you write your own FAQ then fail to

Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today.