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My thanks, once again, to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Users expect apps and agents to reach the tools they already work in. Every integration that gets you there is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, and weeks of infrastructure before you write a line of product code. WorkOS Pipes handles it with one API call. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Dri

Paulo Andrade: My last post on using SwiftUI to build a Mac-assed app got a bit more traction than I expected. It was mentioned on Mastodon several times, included in iOS Dev Weekly, inspired May’s edition of the Swift Blog Carnival, and was eventually mentioned by John Gruber, arguably the person most to blame for popularizing the term “Mac-assed”, on Daring Fireball. All this attention also resu

Yes, there's a video at the end of the article.

These examples are from Windows, but the same degradation is true for the standard look for MacOS alerts too. There was a time when system UI chrome was improving in clarity, everywhere. Today we live in an age when it’s degrading in clarity, everywhere. It’s rather inexplicable.  ★

Nikita “Tonsky” Prokopov: The rule of thumb is: If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see. Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the app. If UI looks good, that means developers had time to polish it, which means that they probably spent a comparable amount of ti

A few days ago I wrote a post entitled Does additional data always reduce posterior variance?. In a nutshell, the answer is no, not always. That led the previous post which looked at posterior means for three Bayesian models, showing how the posterior mean is a weighted average of the prior mean and the mean […] Posterior variance first appeared on John D. Cook.

As icons continue to change across Apple’s platforms, I have thoughts. They mainly revolve around two perspectives: What I think of icons as a long-time user of Apple’s platforms. What I think of icons as a digital collector and physical archivist of icons. Let’s see if I can articulate my thoughts. Apple Recommends Making Icons With Icon Composer For “More Expressivity” In “Create icons with Icon

Guilherme Rambo: Apple ships the fm command-line tool in macOS 27, which can be used to run inference with the local system model or Private Cloud Compute from Terminal or scripts. You know what else can run command-line tools? Mac apps! 😃 I decided to spend some of my Codex tokens and take GPT 5.6 Sol for a spin. I asked it to create this Swift package. All it does is provide a LanguageModel imp

Common sense says that what you believe after seeing new data should be some sort of compromise between what you believed before and what the new data says. You don’t want to ignore previous information or new information. How much should new data change your prior beliefs? When prior judgment and new information are in […] Posterior mean first appeared on John D. Cook.

Elon Musk, linking to his own tweet from March that “Sam Altman is super good at scamming”: He takes scamming to a whole new level Sam Altman: homeboy you’re the one sellling public market investors on short-term space datacenters Musk: We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves. After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple’

After linking to Stacks, his remarkable new modern HyperCard player, I made the terrible mistake of clicking around the rest of Jeff Halter’s website, and fell upon Lunacy: Created by Ben Haller and released in the early ’90s as part of the Macintosh More After Dark software package, Lunatic Fringe was unique among screensavers in that it was not just a passive animation to watch, but an interacti

Well this is just delightful: Run HyperCard stacks directly on your modern Mac. No emulator required! Browse the Internet Archive’s HyperCard collection and run stacks with one-click. Period-accurate typography. Sound, instruments, and MacinTalk speech synthesis. Cross-stack navigation. Stacks is a really beautiful native Mac app, and its presentation of classic HyperCard stacks is exquisitely fai

Last year, my wife and I went on a 5,025 Km Interrail adventure. We got the month-long unlimited pass and saw 10 Countries in 30 Days. That was a bit too intense. So this year we got the 15 travel days in 2 months package. We grabbed the 1st class tickets when they went on sale in December. Here's how our journey ended up: The trip included two ferries - one overnight - which had a small…

I think from this blog you may misunderestimate how absolutely giddy I am about AI. I did hacking from 2007-2014, after that my whole career has been devoted to AI. I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, and coding agents. I set up a Linux box with opencode on my local GLM-5.2 last week and wow like just saying install tmux with the geohot

So, summer gets really hot, and it's not going to get better anytime soon. At my place, it isn't actively dangerous yet, but it's still unpleasant. A normal air conditioner uses a low boiling-point liquid: something like liquid propane will boil all the way down to -42 C. Just like water, this evaporation absorbs a lot of heat and the remaining liquid becomes very cold. Of course, releasing f

One more link from OpenAI’s Help Center, this one explaining how to upgrade from the old Mac app to the new “super” app version: Follow the prompt in the app to download the new ChatGPT desktop app. Then sign in with the same ChatGPT account. The new app may install alongside your current app. If both remain installed, you will see: ChatGPT: The new app with Chat, Work, and Codex. ChatGPT Classic:

OpenAI Help Center, “Where Work and Codex are available”: Work is available on ChatGPT web and mobile for eligible paid plans. Work is also available in the ChatGPT desktop app when included for your plan and workspace. Work on web and mobile runs in the cloud. Work in the desktop app can also use local files and desktop apps with your permission. At launch, cloud Work conversations do not appear

Benedict Evans with a succinct review on Threads: Wow, what a total mess. What is the difference between a project, a task and a chat? Why did chats get a crappy floating window but tasks and projects don’t? Why does choosing ‘plugins’ get me ‘templates’? Am I not allowed to finish ‘setup’ if I don’t use Slack or Google Drive? I forget how I made the Setup dickbar disappear despite my not using Sl

Years ago I wrote about Gilbreath’s conjecture. It’s a simple conjecture; you could explain it to anyone who understands what prime numbers are. See the linked post for a description of the problem. Gilbreath’s conjecture is simple, but it’s also kinda weird. As I wrote before, Paul Erdős speculated that Gilbreath’s conjecture is true but […] Progress on Gilbreath’s conjecture first appeared on Jo

Fred Vogelstein (Om’s partner at Crazy Stupid Tech): We met a week later at his outdoor office — a bench in SF’s South Park. He told me that he was going emeritus at True Ventures, the VC firm, and that he was going to spend more of his time writing. It was awesome to see him. Sitting on a bench with Om could be quasi religious. He talked so softly and deliberately that it forced you to slow down,

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (paywalled, alas): Apple was quickly alarmed by OpenAI’s recruiting drive, which included poaching senior hardware and design leaders and ravaging several teams across its engineering organizations. The practice continued as recently as June, when OpenAI lured away Apple’s smart glasses chief. That executive, Paul Meade, was quickly shown the door at Apple and

Adults living with their parents, Samsung’s profits, Native American data centers, Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, and more.

De Tweede Kamer is met reces, en de out of office replies vanuit de overheid beginnen indrukwekkende vormen aan te nemen. Kunnen ze in Amerika nog wat van leren. Maar, er worden nog steeds dingen gepubliceerd, en het is opvallend hoeveel goeds er recent gezegd is over digitale autonomie. De tl;dr is dat er een duidelijke wending zichtbaar is. Na een decennium van ontkenning publiceren allerhande s

Week eight of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases npm 12.0.0 is out. allow-git and allow-remote now default to none, so installing git dependencies or user-supplied tarball URLs needs explicit opt-in. npm shrinkwrap is removed and npm-shrinkwrap.json is no longer honoured at the project root or inside dependency

Today's links Workplace "flexibility" isn't: What the gig economy calls flexibility is just risk-shifting. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Alanya to Alanya"; ToS are the internet's biggest lie; Soviet jokes; Fox rapists v gag orders; GBAO is the future; "Fun Family"; Sacklers get to keep the loot. Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, Lo

I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware product of similar complexity to a cell phone, and it’s really hard. Reality has lots of finicky details. I would like to see the authors of this document try to change a bike tire. Even

“Yeah, who’s this?” “You know who this is.” “Yes I do, yes I do. I sent a guy to deliver the package ... he didn’t call. Is everything alright?” “Tell you what. Forget the money.”  ★

Drew Pusateri, director of communications at OpenAI, on Twitter/X (or XCancel): Our statement in response to this suit: We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere. Let’s say I think you stole my wallet. I approach a police officer and tell him my suspicion and describe the evidence that makes me think y

Alex Heath, on Threads: At WWDC, Apple execs I met with were ice-cold when I asked about their OpenAI partnership. Now we know why: Apple just sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to consumer hardware (Apple and OAI senior leaders are in Sun Valley this week. Yikes!) I noticed the same ice-cold reaction to my questions about ChatGPT and Siri. (In fact, I think Heath and I even

The AP: Fellow passengers pulled back a man who was partially sucked out of a dislodged airplane window on Friday, a few minutes after takeoff on a flight from northern Greece to Germany. The plane subsequently returned to the airport in Greece. The incident happened on a morning flight from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki to Memmingen, near Munich, operated by Malta Air, a subsidiary of R

Frank Landymore, writing for Futurism: Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details. The talons are horribly deformed and shaped differently from each other. The entire legs are uneven, too, and the base of them are represented as a strange conglomeration of blobs, which are also inconsistent. In fact, the whole thing is slightly asymmetr

Cryan.com: The “View as Buttons” option was a distinctive feature of the Macintosh OS 9 Finder. It allowed users to view the contents of a folder as clickable buttons, each representing a file or application. This view was particularly useful for quickly accessing frequently used programs and documents. I totally forgot this view existed, despite using Mac OS 9 for many years, because I never used

Another bit of follow-up on squircle jail on MacOS. The most-asked question in my inbox from readers is this: Is mandating the squircle a concession to the much-rumored upcoming touchscreen MacBooks? No. The visible shape and appearance of an app icon is unrelated to its clickable — or, perhaps soon, tappable — area. Rendering a visible squircle doesn’t change the shape of the clickable/tappable t

The goal of this post is to answer a simple question: why are the following two definitions of the vector dot product in Euclidean space [1] equivalent for vectors \vec{a} and \vec{b}: Component definition: \vec{a}\cdot\vec{b}=\sum_{i=1}^{n}a_i b_i Geometric definition: \vec{a}\cdot\vec{b}=|\vec{a}||\vec{b}|cos(\theta), where |\vec{a}| is the magnitude of \vec{a} and is the angle between the vect

In short: I prefer strict tables in SQLite because they avoid some datatype problems, such as putting text in number columns. SQLite has a feature that I think is underrated: strict tables. Strict tables help enforce rigid typing, preventing mistakes like putting text into integer columns. I like them, and wrote this post to promote their use! To make a strict table, add STRICT to the end of its d

When I was building my GPT-2 implementation in JAX, I started with just token embeddings for the input, and a separate output head (as I was not using weight tying). It wasn't an LLM -- no Transformer blocks, no attention, no feed-forward networks. I was somewhat surprised when I noticed that even that stripped-down model had 77 million parameters with the "small" settings I was using to train --

Hi premium readers! I’ll be taking a week off of the premium next week — July 17 — to have some well-earned rest. This will mark only the second time I’ve missed a premium piece since I started this newsletter in June 2025, and I

And why black holes are the ultimate power plants.

Opus 4: Henry VI, Part 3

The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight. If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of. When you plug a computer into a network, tools lik

Decoding where those integer came from. The post The case of the mysterious changes to integers when there shouldn’t have been any code generation effect appeared first on The Old New Thing.

My new year's resolution is to play more video games with my wife. Specifically co-operative games. I hate playing competitively; it's rubbish to achieve victory at the expense of someone else. So I asked for recommendations and picked the cheapest things which looked reasonable. Several people recommended Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime. It's a neat little game which is just short enough to…

Gary Kildall’s death investigation, or the seeming lack thereof, has taken on mythical proportions. Gary Kildall’s story seems to have that effect on people. Just like the story of Kildall allegedly going flying instead of meeting with IBM in August The post Gary Kildall’s death investigation appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Conway’s Law says organisations produce systems that copy their own communication structure. Dependency management tooling is part of the system. A resolution strategy is an opinion about how disagreements get settled; a manifest format records who is allowed to depend on whom. Monorepo, single version policy: every package in the tree must agree on one version of each dependency; upgrading anythi

Today's links "Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy: When we were robots in Egypt… Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Awkward questions for the entertainment industry; ISP v record label death penalty; Coming out on Splash Mountain; Negative Swiss bond yields; Are We Having Fun Yet? Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, Sout

At what point do the creative limitations you create for yourself actually harm your ability to create? And what can ALF teach us about that? One look at Paul Fusco’s IMDB page makes clear that he has not worked on anything but ALF since the early 1990s. He has essentially played one character for most of the past 40 years. It’s a good character, and given my elder millennial status, one that I r

You need to rebuild everything that was dependent on the change. The post I’ve decoded a <CODE>#pragma detect_mismatch</CODE> error and fixed the mismatch, but I still get the error appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Monorail was a short-lived PC vendor from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Founded November 2, 1995, they were the first company to sell a Pentium-class PC including a display for under $1,000. And Monorail PCs were the first desktop The post Monorail: Pioneering $999 PCs from 1996 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

This is the first in a series of posts working through individual package managers against a fixed set of headings, so they can be compared directly. The headings come from earlier posts: the client and registry categorisations, the governance post, and the threat model. Zig’s package manager has been built into the zig binary since 0.11 in August 2023, with no separate tool and no central registr

An oscillator so bad it's actually good. But seriously, it's still bad. But in a good way?

Today's links Post-political: What a "leftist" is. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MSFT x OSCON; Parental spyware; "Resurrection Man"; Brexit do-over petition; Workplace email spying; Record label internet death penalty; News should be cheap, free and chaotic; "Jughead". Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent app

For a while I've been planning to put together a separate machine for local LLM training. Until now, I've been using my desktop PC, perry. I have an RTX 3090 installed, and can get useful training runs done (most recently, a 163M-parameter GPT-2 small style LLM in JAX), but there are a couple of problems. perry is my daily driver. If he's doing a training run, then everything is just a little b

Valve wins by doing absolutely nothing

North is up (exact, mirrored). 0.53 "/pixel [18.8' x 7.4'] FWHM = 4.2" This galaxy has a massive (and rather bright) tidal tail, but I can't see an obvious companion galaxy. The general consensus is that there's a second galaxy behind it... although a nearby elliptical has a suspiciously similar redshift: Total exposure time:364 * 30 seconds = 3 hours. Used in stack:165 * 30 seconds = 1

“We asked 100 people: What are the top three companies on earth best positioned to make a world-class Mac-assed Mac app?” Buzz! “Apple!” Survey says: Yes! Apple at the number one spot. Makes sense. Who better to make the very definition of a great Mac app than the people who make the Mac? No brainer, I suppose. Granted, they’ve had some misses, but nobody bats 1000. Ok, let’s keep going. “We

This post is the capstone of the most long-running series on my blog. In December 2024 (!), I started reading Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)", and worked through it carefully. Being who I am, despite trying to apply a strict "no side quests" policy, I found myself zooming off and digging into all kinds of things. It's time to wrap it up. I had decided that

A two-in-one package. The post The other kind of control flow guard check: The combined validate and call appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The 'Special Value' Pi 4 pictured above is probably the rarest Raspberry Pi I own—even rarer than my blue special edition Pi. A Raspberry Pi reseller briefly listed a special 'value edition' Pi 4. But the product page 404's now. While it was up, my curiosity got the better of me, and now I have two 'value' Pi 4s. What makes them a 'value'? They're only certified to run at 1.25 GHz (retail Pi 4s ru

How's this for a location?! I mean, last week was nice with Scott in Mallorca, but Marrakech is, well, wow 😮 Anyway, about those data breaches... This week I'm talking about the futility of attempting to remove piss from a pool, yet here we are, with

A cybersecurity startup dangling millions of dollars to acquire zero-day security vulnerabilities in popular software is run by a pair of far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons whose most recent ventures included fake intelligence companies and a now-defunct AI-based lobbying platform they operated under assumed names.

Verily, some of our brethren (and sistren) be afflicted with a sinister disposition. While the righteous scroll using the thumb of their right hand - as is good and proper - an accurs'd minority swing the other way. Look, you try writing an interesting bug report without sounding like a clanker, OK! I try to optimise my blog as much as possible. It may not look like much, but it has got it…

In July 1981, at the height of Pac-Man fever, Nintendo released its third stand up arcade game. This game, Donkey Kong, took over as the most popular arcade game in the world, but it had a lasting repercussions. It irreversibly The post How Donkey Kong toppled Atari appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Imagine being worth $2 billion. Would you give away $550 million? That's a quarter of your wealth, more money than I could spend in several lifetimes. Yet that's how much Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, and his wife have donated to a charity in California. Specifically, they donated to Undue Medical Debt, an organization that buys Californians' medical debts and expunges them. That's close to $

I managed to write this without using the word endofunctor once. Wait, shit, I just did. Uhhh, oops!

North is up (mirrored, exact). 0.53"/px [15' x 9.2' field]. FWHM = 3.9" Arp 90 is the two interacting galaxies in the east. Total exposure time:314 * 30 seconds = 2.6 hours. Used in stack:276 * 30 seconds = 2.3 hours. Telescope: C9.25 (230mm, f/10, fl=2300mm) + 0.63 Starizona reducer Camera: IMX533 (16mm diagonal, square, color) Processing: Callibration (dark + flat) Stacking (average w/

If you liked this piece, you should 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 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and

It used some heuristics. The post How did Windows 95 decide that a setup program ran? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Today's links How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech: Their common enemies are Trump and his tech giants. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Sex work synonyms; Carthedral; French pirates; Suffragette surveillance; Hidden library apartments; "The Meaning of July the Fourth for the Negro" x James Earl Jones; Farage quits; Peak indifference; Self publi

Raymond Edward Kassar was born January 2, 1928 and died December 10, 2017, aged 89, in Vero Beach, Florida. Ray Kassar was president, and later CEO, of Atari Inc. from 1978 to 1983. Atari’s parent company, Warner Bros, hired him The post Ray Kassar, former Atari CEO appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Content addressing identifies a piece of data by a cryptographic hash of its contents rather than by a name or a location. Two copies of the same bytes get the same identifier wherever they came from, a single changed bit produces a completely different one, and because the identifier is derived from the data itself it works as a lookup key and an integrity check at the same time. I keep running i

Gisteren deed ik op Mastodon live verslag van het kort geding van de aandeelhouders van Solvinity tegen de staatssecretaris van Digitale Economie en Soevereiniteit. Gek genoeg zag ik in de rechtbank dingen die ik later in het nieuws niet of weinig vernam. Pers en media waren in grote getale op komen draven, wat leidde tot de volgende artikelen: AD: Nederlandse overheid wilde bedrijf achter DigiD n

Alternative titles: … earns you a high-risk pregnancy … earns you an ascent of Matterhorn … earns you 10,000 km on a motorcycle … earns you two BASE jumps … earns you a day on the frontline in Ukraine (Continue reading the full article on the web.)

Soundtrack: Ozzy Osbourne — Mr. Crowley A lot of people have been making a lot of fun of the SoftBank 46th annual shareholder meeting and Masayoshi Son’s (to quote Bryce Elder of the Financial Times) Untethered Goose Game, specifically referring to slides that, well, looked like this: As

I ran across a geometry theorem with the following diagram. The theorem corresponding to the diagram is interesting, but I found reproducing the diagram more interesting. The segment AB is a diameter and the line CD is perpendicular to the diameter. Assume the outer circle is a unit circle. I guessed C = (cos(1), sin(1)) and made the […] Reproducing a geometry theorem diagram first appeared on Joh

You can't change your mind, but you can do it a different way. The post I opened a file with <CODE>FILE_<WBR>FLAG_<WBR>DELETE_<WBR>ON_<WBR>CLOSE</CODE>, but now I changed my mind appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I ran across the approximation e ≈ 2721/1001 recently. What makes this remarkable is its accuracy relative to the size of the denominator. You can create a trivial approximation just by truncating a decimal expansion e ≈ 2718/1000 but this is only good to four significant figures, but 2721/1001 is good to seven, almost eight, […] e approximation first appeared on John D. Cook.

I'm just so bored of talking about AI. It's like listening to vapers tell me how delicious their flavoured poison is. Did you ever meet someone at university who'd just tried drugs for the first time? Listening to a stoner ramble on about their mystic crystal revelations is amusing for the first five minutes, but quickly gets tiresome. Wow! You got your little computer friend to automate calling

On July 6, 1995, IBM bought Lotus Development for $3.5 billion. Lotus had once been the second largest software publisher in the world and was worth $5.5 billion at its IPO. Its flagship product, the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, had been The post Why IBM bought Lotus appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Amazon has been accused several times for ripping off merchants on its platform. And every single time they denied any wrongdoing. A merchant, or anyone really, can create a product (or source it from China), then resell it on amazon. Amazon is the service provider, and hosts all the metrics concerning the products. If Amazon themselves were in the business of creating and selling products, th

GLM 5.2 is the first open weights model I'd call a genuine competitor to Opus and GPT for agentic work - at ~15-20% of the price. Part one of why AI inference margins are about to collapse.

If you read anything about health or longevity, you’ll soon find yourself in a world of hazard ratios. Some study might say that eating more fiber might change your risk of dying by a factor of HR = 0.90. Another might say that occasional smoking might change it by HR = 1.30. But how much should you care about that? Is HR = 0.90 or HR = 1.30 a lot? What if you don’t want to eat more fiber? What if

North is right (mirrored). 0.53"/pixel [17'x12' field]. FWHM=3.7" Ok, this is a crazy one. Five tightly spaced galaxies with visible tidal interactions: However, looking at redshift data, the blue spiral on the left is ten times closer than all the other objects: at z=0.0026 instead of z=0.022. This means it's not actually a member of the group, even though it's in the same part of of the sky

Capacitor vendors don't want you to know this! Save money on capacitors by spending more on other components

I made some updates to my notes blog, including a change to how my “Shuffle” feature worked. Figured I’d blog about it. Shuffle? On a Blog? At the time of this writing, I have 974 “notes” that I’ve published. For fun, I have a “shuffle” button that digs up a random note from the past. I like to press it from time to time and re-encounter some insight from the past. It’s like going through an old

I had another excellent PLDI this past June. It was my fourth1. I continued to meet new people and learn new things! Overall: I got to meet a lot of new people, which was exciting. I had some good chats about research. I asked a question at a talk! I got to show Aaron and Jacob PLDI and see them enjoy it. I missed hanging out with CF Bolz-Tereick and Chris Fallin, the usual suspects at conferences

Households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more.

This was a little idea gnawing at the back of my brain. The humble barcode has been in use since the 1970s. In the next few years it will likely be replaced with a 2D QR Code. I couldn't find anyone who'd made a QR code with an embedded UPC - so I decided to make one. If you move your phone close to the code (so it can't see the squares in the corners) it should read the number in the 1D…

Week seven of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases Hex 2.5.0 adds organisation-defined dependency policies: an organisation publishes a named policy through its repository, a project opts in via HEX_POLICY or the :hex block in mix.exs, and resolution then filters out versions that carry an advisory above a given

A discussion over lunch today brought up the fact that additional data does not always decrease the size of a confidence interval. This post will look at this from a Bayesian perspective. In general, new information reduces your uncertainty regarding whatever you’re estimating. The posterior distribution becomes more concentrated as more data are collected. That’s […] Does additional data always r

A very strange Pi issue sent me down a rabbit hole over the last two days. The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit itself is usually correct but the arguments do not match the schema as the model invents made-up keys and Pi thus rejects the tool call

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring. — Will Wright Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a […]

Contextual clues. The post How did we conclude that <TT>CcNamespace.dll</TT> was the ringleader of a group of DLLs that unloaded prematurely? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I was recently summoned to a meeting in Stockholm, a city I had somehow managed to avoid despite living in Copenhagen for years. My Swedish experience, up to this point, consisted entirely of trips to Malmö — the closest Swedish city to Denmark and, more importantly, home to a

Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.

In July 1983, one of my personal favorite Commodore computer magazines of all time, Compute!’s Gazette, was born. An offshoot of the general computer magazine Compute!, Gazette’s first issue was dated July 1983 and quickly proved successful, closely following the The post Compute!’s Gazette magazine, 1983-1995 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code: With great abstraction comes great power comes great responsibility comes great loss of fidelity. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Real elections v reality TV; Copyright troll loses license; Who gets fed housing subsidies? Trump x forced labor. Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, B

I can't recall if someone else originally came up with this saying or if I said it in some off-the-cuff comment and it just propagated, but since it's often attributed back to me, I'll relay it here regardless: Trying to delete yourself

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a sprawling residential proxy service operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies [NASDAQ: ALAR]. The action comes roughly two weeks after KrebsOnSecurity published findings from multiple security firms connecting NetNut to the Popa botn

I was popping off about negation being an act of creativity, when Blake Watson introduce me to the idea of the “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”-Project (Internet Archive): In former times printed manuals had some blank pages, usually with the remark “this page intentionally left blank”. In most cases there had been technical reasons for that. Today almost all blank pages disappeared […] [this

Oops, I didn't realize that I was still doing that. The post The case of the thread executing from an unloaded third-party DLL appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Afgelopen 25 juni deed ik het openingspraatje van de Surf Privacy en Security Conferentie. Nou heb ik vaker over digitale autonomie gesproken, maar deze keer heb ik het nadrukkelijk meer over wat er nu moet gebeuren. Of zoals de titel zegt “en nu echt”. Ondanks dat ik nu letterlijk meer dan 50 praatjes over dit onderwerp heb gegeven had ik nog niet eerder de moeite genomen een goed transcript te m

Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known. Here's the thing. No. All my blog posts start with a simple declaration: <!doctype html> <html lang=en-GB> There's a reason for that. It is more than the…

On July 2, 1984, Atari got a new owner. After a disastrous 1983, its owner, Warner Communications, wanted out, just a year and a half after Atari had $2 billion in sales. It went from being called the greatest acquisition The post Jack Tramiel and Atari appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

July 2026 Understanding is the new bottleneck AI Engineer conference in July 2026, also shared as a tweet thread. Hot take: I think it's still important to understand the code that our agents write! In this talk I'll explain why that's the case, and show some ideas for how to efficiently understand code. Alright, let's dive in. Agents are writing more and more code for us, and we all know i

Today's links The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work": Sometimes, "I got it working" is fine, but sometimes it isn't. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Series of tubes; Paralyzed teen beaten bloody by TSA; "Ultra unreal" Chinese lit; London property prices v Brexit; Biden v surprise billing; "Feeding Ghosts." Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Syd

Web forums were rough around the edges and faded in relevance as seemingly better options emerged. But what if we had stuck with them? Today in Tedium: Recently, I passed 20,000 followers on Bluesky, which I didn’t really say anything about. Sure, I thought about it, but then I had decided to myself, what’s the point? Soon, there will be another mark I can point to and feel weird about. The thing

Abolishing pandemics/ Getting out of the way of AI automation/ Learning from Honk Kong MTR's business model

Today's links Technocarcinization: Enshittification is the great leveler. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Grampa's backyard Disneyland; Elizabeth Warren on monopolies; Spotify v Apple (antitrust edn); Exxon lobbyist confesses; "When the Sparrow Falls." Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I'v

Unlocking the door from the inside. The post It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Changing administrative settings appeared first on The Old New Thing.

For roughly the last ten years, a meaningful percentage of my working hours have been spent thinking about observability. If you're not familiar with the term, "observability" is what we call it now that "monitoring" doesn't sound expensive enough. The actual work

The earliest dated article still active on Tom’s Hardware Guide is dated July 1, 1996. It was an article about CPU softmenus, something we pretty much take for granted today, but at the time was only available on select Abit The post The earliest surviving Tom’s Hardware Guide article appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

At FOSDEM in February and again at UN Open Source Week last week, the Cyber Resilience Act was the answer on offer whenever anyone asked what governments are doing about open source security, and the foundations and corporate advocates presenting it framed it as good news for open source. It is the largest piece of software legislation the EU has passed, the open source community spent two years l

Uit een vandaag verschenen onderzoeksrapport (PDF) blijkt dat de AIVD en MIVD slordig en soms onrechtmatig omgaan met bulkdatasets. Bulkdatasets zijn grote bestanden vol data over vaak miljoenen willekeurige mensen, data die op een of andere manier in het bezit van de diensten gekomen is. Uit het rapport: “De diensten kunnen bulkdatasets bijvoorbeeld verkrijgen van informanten, andere overheidsorg

"The Nuremberg Trial" by John Tusa and Ann Tusa - a detailed, meticulously researched account of the Nuremberg Trials. There's not a whole lot of side questing in this book - it's all focused on the trials themselves. Interesting read overall, though somewhat dry and academic. "Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir" by Craig Mod - a kind of travelogue of the author walking across Japan's Ki

This morning I wrote a post that included the central Delannoy numbers. The nth central Delannoy number Dn counts the number of ways a king can move from one corner of a chessboard to the diagonally opposite corner without backtracking. The more general Delannoy numbers Dm,n are the analogy for an m × n rectangular board, not […] DNA Sequence Alignment and Kings first appeared on John D. Cook.

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anyone asks what the story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. Flannery O'Connor i fall back into stories because i don't know any other way to explain myself. stories conv

For over a year, I've been using Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)" -- and the multitude of side-projects that have branched out from reading it -- as something like a curriculum for learning about modern AI. The one final task I had set myself was to build and train an LLM from scratch just using my notes -- no reference to the book, no reference to the model

Imagine the following dialog. Professor: f is a function of a real variable x that takes a real parameter k. Student: What’s a parameter? Professor: It’s a constant that can vary. Student: Then if it can vary, isn’t it a variable? Professor: Sorta, but no not really. This conversation plays out over and over, and unfortunately it often […] Distinguishing variables from parameters first appeared on

Watch now (94 mins) | Math is where we’ll see superintelligence first. What will it look like?

How's the view?! Back to business, it's now 8 years ago that Scott and I thought it would be a cool idea to build Why no HTTPS? We used the site to shame companies for not implementing their transport later security property, and to make it

If you liked this piece, you should 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 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and

Golden rectangles The defining property of golden rectangle is that if you stick a square on its longer side, you get another golden rectangle. The smaller vertical rectangle is similar to the larger horizontal rectangle. This means φ / 1 = (1 + φ) / φ which tells us φ² = 1 + φ and […] Silver Rectangles and the Ways of Kings first appeared on John D. Cook.

Made it to another midpoint. The post 2026 mid-year link clearance appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Finding an illicit place to hide data. The post A compatibility note on the abuse of Windows window class extra bytes appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Thanks to BookSirens for providing me with a review copy. This is an intriguing self-published novel with a backstory almost as interesting as the plot. The story is a descent into paranoia as an author is convinced that an AI is plagiarising his work. As the madness takes over, he's forced to confront whether his creative processes are genuine or not. It raises some excellent questions about …

Today's links Jo Walton's "Everybody's Perfect": A mystical tour-de-force that makes you feel like your mundane life until this point has all been a boring dream. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Corruption; How much (little) are the AI companies making? Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend. Recent appearances: Where I'

You hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we The post Apricot Computers: An underrated British brand appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I spent last week at UN Open Source Week, where officials from a dozen governments stood up in turn and described open source as critical infrastructure. That framing has been the standard one since Nadia Eghbal’s Roads and Bridges report for the Ford Foundation in 2016, and after ten years it has finally reached the audience it describes. Sitting in a UN conference room full of people whose job i

I've always been interested in how dating apps work. You really only have two choices if you want to get in the business. Help people find a match, and they will never come back Make people pay and keep them on the platform as long as possible. Let's pretend for a second that we actually want people to find love. Love is such a weird thing that we don't even know how to define it properly. As

Here’s kind of a strange problem with an interesting solution: find a function f such that the derivative of f equals the inverse of f for all positive x. f ′(x) = f−1(x) This is a differential equation, but a very unusual one, one that cannot be solved using any of the techniques taught in a class on differential equations. […] Derivative equals inverse first appeared on John D. Cook.

Chicago’s weather is pretty lousy most of the year, but when it’s nice, it’s very nice. June blessed the city with dozens of idyllic days. But don’t worry—I still spent most of the time inside on the computer. Things I did I launched my first big project at Ghost: automations! It’s still in beta, but it’s one of the biggest projects I’ve led. If you happen to be a Ghost publisher, please try it ou

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. Instead, I’m going to occasionally jump into the parts of it that look interesting. Last week, we looked at tagged data in Haskell. The authors of SICP weren’t convinced that’s the best approach, so they move on to data-directed programming. We’ll

Today's links Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search: We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Microsoft antitrust overturned; Scammer carves C64; RIP Jim Baen; GOP rep to constituent's child: "drop dead" (literally); CCTVs jacked for botnet; Olympic profitability lie; Human factors in health infosec; Exfilt

Leaving you with a couple laughs

The calculator utility bc has a minimal math library. For example, there’s no tangent function because you’re expected take the ratio of sine and cosine. (The Gnu version of bc does have a function for tangent, but the POSIX version does not.) And yet bc includes support for Bessel functions J(x). The bc function j […] Who you gonna believe: Grok or the docs? first appeared on John D. Cook.

For as long as I can remember, my home page has been about:blank. But for a good chunk of the 1990s, I would have done well to set it to altavista.digital.com. Here’s what happened to Altavista, the search engine that The post What happened to Altavista appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I got sent a link to a pull request against Dan Burton’s composition, a tiny Haskell package whose whole gimmick is that it depends on nothing, not even base. The upcoming GHC 10.2 breaks it: built-in names resolve through a real module, GHC.Essentials, which is in base, so from 10.2 every package picks up an implicit base dependency whether the cabal file declares one or not. The PR added a flag

It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.

I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide. Some of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs, they were company-destroying bugs: bugs that, if they couldn’t be fixed, would sink the entire company. And the difficulty in solving these bugs was that they had no

The Space Shuttle's five1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands of sensors, displaying data to the astronauts, and navigating the Shuttle. Each computer consisted of two 60-pound aluminum-alloy boxes: the box on the right is the CPU, a 32-bit processor that executed 420,000 instructions per second. These computers were design

Has the US been focused on the wrong things?

Despite vowing not to read sequels of books I love, I'm constantly surprised that regression to the mean is an iron-clad law of the universe. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the series, so eagerly gobbled up the second. What a burlap fool I am. What was charming and wry in The Satsuma Complex is now overdone and clichéd. The violence, which was an undercurrent in the first book, is now …

I don't understand why this generation can't afford a home. When my grandfather was 18, he had already saved enough money from his paper route and various odd jobs to buy his first home. By the time my father turned 26, he was already married, had his first child, and was moving into his first home. We lived frugally, and our parents taught us the value of spending wisely. Today's man-children

Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.) selected deliberately because it can operate with no binary blobs and no firmware you couldn't examine or replace with your own, and runs his choice of fully libre operating systems. The fact it has a Chinese MIPS64 derivative in it was undoubtedly just more compound on the heat spreader. Now, in my case, the fac

Here’s a crazy bash one-liner I found via an article by Peter Krumins: echo {w,t,}h{e{n{,ce{,forth}},re{,in,fore,with{,al}}},ither,at} This prints 30 English words: when, whence, whenceforth, where, wherein, wherefore, wherewith, wherewithal, whither, what, then, thence, thenceforth, there, therein, therefore, therewith, therewithal, thither, that, hen, hence, henceforth, here, herein, herefore, h

The previous post looked at how many digits are in the reduced fraction for the nth harmonic number. I was curious about how long the cycle of digits in a harmonic number might be. I wrote about the period length for the digits of fractions almost a decade ago. This post includes code so I can […] When will the decimals in a/b repeat? first appeared on John D. Cook.

Who’s to blame for the memory crisis that turned Macs and Steam Boxes into unobtanium this week? The memory-makers have a convenient answer. If I was Micron and everyone was hating on my company for making life just a little more unaffordable, I might try looking for a scapegoat, too. But given how little the RAM folks have stuck their necks out in the year of the RAM crisis, this quote from a re

The previous post looked at writing the harmonic numbers as reduced fractions and estimating the number of digits in the numerator and denominator based on asymptotics. This is a follow up post with plots. We’ll choose our base b to be 2. And we’ll look at the total number of bits in both the numerator and […] Height of harmonic numbers first appeared on John D. Cook.

Trump refuses to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slow trucking, why we stopped making new land, and more.

Today's links Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers: Under no circumstances should you rush out and read the book that prompted Mark Zuckerberg to demand $111m and eternal auctorial silence. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Flame warriors; Cryptography and casinos; TSA v dying 95 year old woman's adult diaper; Neoliberalism and Brexit; Beyond solutionis

Week six of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon. Releases Spack 1.2.0 makes the rewritten parallel installer the default, adds concretization groups and concretization caching, and ships SBOM generation alongside experimental build sandboxing and a spack isolate command. pnpm 11.9 computes a tarball’s integrity from the d

This radio station gets many requests for treatises on formal logic.

The Washington Post reported that the US government will decide who can use state-of-the-art LLMs. After the ban of Fable and the limitations coming to ChatGPT 5.6, what's next? My bet is Chinese models. For all of Anthropic's doomsaying and propping up of their secret model Mythos, several open-weight models have proven capable of similar feats, and at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek rocked

The nth harmonic number is the sum of the reciprocals of the first n positive integers. Hn = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + … + 1/n The product of all the denominators is n!, so you could write Hn as a fraction Hn = p/q where p = n! Hn is an integer and q = n!. While […] Writing down harmonic numbers first appeared on John D. Cook.

Data is from 2026-06-20. North is right. 0.53"/pixel (27'x27' field). FWHM=4' A nice, if rather small (~100") edge on spiral galaxy. Arp filed this one under "low surface brightness companions", but the companion doesn't seem to exist. There's a bright spot to the north (right) of the core, but hubble data shows it's just a bright HII region and star cluster. This part of the sky isn't cover

June is not over, and anything could still happen, but a lot already has.

It’s been an incredibly long few weeks, and as a result my previously-planned Hater’s Guide just isn’t possible within what little time I have left in this week, which is why I’m starting an ongoing series — Notes From The Bubble

Labs are throwing away the most valuable data.

I'm not paying seventy bloody quid for an official PS5 controller - so I found a knock-off version for a smidge under £40. And this one has lots of unnecessary blinkenlights! Gamrombo is the consumer-facing brand of the generically named Professional Controller Manufacturer. AKA "Huizhou Ronghui Technology Co., Ltd" - there's virtually no information about them online other than paid-for …

Report filed: 04:13 UTC Status: Resolved (by treaty) Severity: Informational → Critical → Withdrawn → Critical → Negotiated Duration: 96 hours (billable: 2.1 trillion tokens) Affected systems: All of them, plus several we do not own Executive Summary: A security incident occurred. Our AI-augmented defence-in-depth strategy, deployed in direct response to CVE-2024-YIKES, performed exactly as config

This is a quick post, mostly for my own reference. I've avoided LUTs and 'Log' video footage for years1, mostly because of the extra tiny bit of workflow involved. Like RAW photos, 'Log' footage retains the video sensor's full dynamic range, so you can pull more color and luminance information out of the footage later. But unlike photography, where RAW has been a thing for decades, and many workfl

Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content.

I write every word I post on this blog myself. I can’t prove this, of course, but there’s some evidence: This blog existed before AI could write blog posts. If you put any of my posts into an AI-detector they will (I assume) come back squeaky clean. And now let me add this: I, dynomight, guarantee that every word I post here is the product of me physically hitting keys with my fingers. The only ex

Hart’s theorem says If a triangle be formed by the arcs of three circles, the inscribed and the three escribed circles are all tangent to a new circle or line. Here “triangle” means a three-sided figure whose sides are portions of a circle. The inscribed circle is the largest circle that can fit inside the […] Hart’s theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.

If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away. People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him. This one is mine. Back at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts. I was puttering along, publishing whatever came to mind, mostly figuring that nobody was reading any of it. But that was ok. The process was therapeutic and it helped clarify my professional thinking, so I

Disclaimer: Anything can happen at anytime in the market; I don’t give stock picks, and as the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

This post will reveal the connection between my two previous posts: one on the Star Trek lemma and one on Pythagorean triples. In the process of writing the latter, I looked at the Wikipedia article on Pythagorean triples and noticed this curious paragraph. In every Pythagorean triangle, the radius of the incircle and the radii of the […] Incircles and Excircles of Pythagorean triangles first appe

I wrote the following piece for IFP’s Transit Abundance Playbook, a collection of 15 ideas to improve transit delivery in the US.

In this post we find all Pythagorean triples that contain consecutive numbers, all Pythagorean triples (a, b, c) such that a + 1 = b or b + 1 = c. a + 1 = b George Osborne wrote a paper [1] addressing the question of when the squares of two consecutive numbers is also a square. Geometrically this is asking […] Consecutive Pythagorean triangle sides first appeared on John D. Cook.

Today's links Jailbreaking isn't theft: It wasn't progress when they did it, it's not piracy when we do it back to them. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Major AI breakthrough; Disney v Pooh tombstone; Vancouver riot kiss; Farage admits Brexit lies; Protecting the web from its founders; Sanders x Hillary; Surveillance pricing v your dollars. Upcoming appearances: Philade

I was reading an article this evening and saw a footnote to a book by Arthur Baragar [1]. This caught my eye because he was my officemate at UT for a year. I found his book on Archive.org and was surprised to see “The Star Trek Lemma” in the table of contents. What could this […] The Star Trek lemma first appeared on John D. Cook.