When I asked the question, “what made the NES so interesting”, my answer was to describe the memory mappers used by the console. But what’s interesting is that the very first cartridge to feature a memory mapper was not from Nintendo themselves; they were late to the game of expansion hardware on cartridges, since their plan to expand the console...
Apparently there are surgeons who are getting tons of value from the Vision Pro. That’s great, but is it evidence that the Vision Pro is a great success, or is it just that surgeons use literally every headset that comes out regardless of if those headsets are successes or failures?
Mastodon discussion about sandboxing SVG data I asked this on Mastodon and got some really useful replies: How hard is it to process untrusted SVG data to strip out any potentially harmful tags or attributes (like stuff that might execute JavaScript)? The winner for me turned out to be the humble tag. SVG images that are rendered in an image...
LLM Pictionary Inspired by my SVG pelicans on a bicycle, Paul Calcraft built this brilliant system where different vision LLMs can play Pictionary with each other, taking it in turns to progressively draw SVGs while the other models see if they can guess what the image represents. Tags: vision-llms, svg, generative-ai, ai,...
Formulating optimization models inside traditional programming languages such as Python is very popular. The main tool the developers use to make this possible is operator overloading. There are cases, where we can write code that looks somewhat reasonable, is accepted and processed without any warning or error messages, but is total nonsense. In...
I wrote a poem while at the Juniper Writing Institute this summer regarding the color purple. It was an exercise based on listening to a poem of another writer and coming up with a response. The latest draft I have of it is below: Viole(n)t I am the color of fruit in books for children they draw me round but my shape is much less defined at least...
This website you see right now, as well as the CMS powering it, is all thanks to Vim. Not because I wrote it in Vim (which I did, in Neovim) but because coming into contact with Vim as a freshman likely kickstarted my programming career and gave me programming edge that I otherwise would not have leaving university.
ChatGPT advanced voice mode can attempt Spanish with a Russian accent ChatGPT advanced voice mode may refuse to sing (unless you jailbreak it) but it's quite happy to attempt different accents. I've been having a lot of fun with that: I need you to pretend to be a California brown pelican with a very thick Russian accent, but you talk to me...
This one took me a long time, and it was actually the third or fourth RK3588 board I got to review–but the timing of its arrival was completely off, and I had to put it on the back burner for a while for a variety of reasons–from the lack of enough SSDs to getting a suitable case. Disclaimer: FriendlyELEC supplied me with a CM3588 compute module...
Over the past few years my desk has changed. Here, i chronicle it. I lost the dates when i left my last web platform, but i kept the pictures.
One simple trick to fix the worst part of the platform. !--more-- WriteFreely has a built in "drafts" feature (write.as calls them "anonymous posts"), but there's several problems with it: when you save a draft and go to the "preview", it will not use your custom css hashtags are inert when used on drafts, which means there's no way to organize...
I use a lot of git aliases because I work in the terminal and aliases give me short commands for common operations. They are defined in my global git config file and range from simple to powerful but twisty.First, some basic aliases for operations I do often:[alias] br = branch co = checkout sw = switch d = diff di = diff...
JetKVM: tiny IP KVM that's not an Apple Watch Despite what it looks like, this isn't a hot-rod Apple Watch. This is an IP KVM. What does that mean? It's basically a remote control rocket pack for any computer, from a giant tower PC, to a little mini PC you might run in your homelab. It's called JetKVM, and the team behind it sent me...
Every time I've setup a server in the past decade the SSH keys have been set for me, most hosts I've used do this (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc). This week I signed up for a server with Contabo and I had to do it myself, like a caveman. Lewis was kind enough to help because he'd done the same thing mere days before me. Step one is to copy my key to...
Loved the Knicks last night. But.. the crowd erupted in cheers at an odd moment, Mike Breen the announcer guessed it was some result in the World Series game being played in Los Angeles. I switched to fox, and sure enough a freaking jankee had hit a home run going into the lead. I had […]
What life is like on the day before and the day of an ultramarathon 24-hour race for the racer and her one-man crew.
Sometimes the future state of a system depends not only on the current state (position, velocity, acceleration, etc.) but also on the previous state. Equations for modeling such systems are known as delay differential equations (DDEs), difference differential equations, retarded equations, etc. In a system with hysteresis, it matters not only...
The x86 instruction set has a somewhat peculiar set of SIMD integer multiply operations, and Intel’s particular implementation of several of these operations in their headline core designs has certain idiosyncrasies that have been there for literally over 25 years at this point. I don’t actually have any inside information, but it’s fun to...
While the day itself saw a long and discursive post about autism, chronic fatigue, sarcoidosis, and death—featuring, among other things, Carl Linnaeus, J. D. Salinger, Heartbreak High, Oregon Zoo, Soul Coughing, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Powers, Shoplifters of the World, and The Bear—having been written the night before it says...
While the day itself saw a long and discursive post about autism, chronic fatigue, sarcoidosis, and death—featuring, among other things, Carl Linnaeus, J. D. Salinger, Heartbreak High, Oregon Zoo, Soul Coughing, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Powers, Shoplifters of the World, and The Bear—having been written the night before it says...
Watching the Harris speech with the hecklers, it seems they could shut off the audience mikes until the speech calls for cheers from the people, then they would drown out the hecklers. Highly directional mikes, and train Harris 5o be able to speak as if it was quiet.
A stream of bright green chemicals leaked from Tesla’s Palo Alto campus and flowed into a storm drain and creek, prompting a hazardous cleanup response. Tesla doesn’t have a permit to store this type of chemical, officials said, and the electric car company could be fined. Seems bad maybe?...
PAYPHONES at High Volume Existing sites! Earn BIG $$. Money Back Guarantee! Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the...
Master JavaScript logical operators with practical examples and best practices
Pelicans on a bicycle I decided to roll out my own LLM benchmark: how well can different models render an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle? I chose that because a) I like pelicans and b) I'm pretty sure there aren't any pelican on a bicycle SVG files floating around (yet) that might have already been sucked into the training data. My prompt:...
The Washington Post announcing it wouldn’t endorse a candidate for president is the first glimpse we’ve had of how news publishing in the US has been tainted by fear of fascism. The editorial people broke the wall, deciding to give the readers the first glimpse we’ve gotten into the inner conflicts of one two most […]
The way Laplace transforms, as presented in a typical differential equation course, are not very useful. Laplace transforms are useful, but not as presented. The use of Laplace transforms is presented is as follows: Transform your differential equation into an algebraic equation. Solve the algebraic equation. Invert the transform to obtain your...
updown.io has been running on ruby 3.1 since... git log -p .ruby-version... August 2022 so for slighly over 2 years now. More specifically ruby 3.1.2 with jemalloc for better performance. Note: I am not using YJIT in production yet, as my benchmark in 3.1.2 for updown.io daemon code showed a mere 5-10% CPU time performance increase, but with more...
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24279020/browser-company-ai-browser-arc(via @cassidoo)
In this short fable of midwinter, Susanna Clarke tells of the speech of dogs and pigs and foxes and the woods themselves, who talk to those who know how to listen.
The Mellin transform of a function f is defined as For example, it follows directly from the definition that the gamma function Γ(s) is the Mellin transform of the function e−x. I ran across an exercise that states an impressive-looking theorem about the Mellin transform, namely that where F(s) denotes the Mellin transform of f(x). […] The post...
The iPad mini jelly scroll situation taps perfectly into my favorite category of controversy: things that have objective facts mixed with subjective experience. Beware the idea that we all see, hear, and smell the world the same.
Nicholas Carr, one of my favorite technology writers, has been blogging over on Rough Type since [checks archives] 2005. As of late his writing has gone quiet, but he’s got a new book due out early next year and I think he’s starting up blogging again to help drum up interest. However, he’s not blogging on Rough Type anymore. He has a new blog...
At Acquia Engage NYC this week, our partner and customer conference, we shared how Acquia's Digital Experience Platform (DXP) helps organizations deliver digital experiences through three key capabilities: Content: Create, manage and deliver digital content and experiences - from images and videos to blog posts, articles, and landing pages -...
One protocol to rule them all: refining the ideas behind HTTP, BitTorrent, Gemini, and 9p. !--more-- Goals as simple as possible without sacrificing our other goals (less complex than http) performs well under poor network conditions, even when payloads are large (unlike gemini) performs well under high latency (unlike 9p) good single-source...
The Typora giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Nicola Losito Jonathan Clark Michael Harrington Curtis Spendlove Neil Anderson You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but Typora is still...
Yesterday I blogged about a change I made to my bots page and in it, I mentioned how the performance wasn't necessarily as good as it could be. I had made the decision to go from server-side and build-time for the page to a purely client-side solution. At the end of the post, I asked folks to let me know if anyone would like to have me work on...
The chapter 9 of the Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA) book has the following 4 sections (which contain a total of 10 subsections). Consistency guaranteesLinearizabilityOrdering guaranteesDistributed transactions and consensusTMI (Too much info)The chapter tries to do too much. Almost an entire semester of distributed systems content...
Whilst researching what synth to buy, I learned of the Behringer1 Model-D2: a 2018 clone of the 1970 Moog Minimoog, in a desktop form factor. Behringer Model-D In common with the original Minimoog, it's a monophonic analogue synth, featuring three audible oscillators3 , Moog's famous 12-ladder filter and a basic envelope generator. The model-d...
Part 2: Quilter, and building a compiler for the physical world
My tastes in books, music, art and film are all decidedly plebeian and I am alright with that.
Trying to find the answer to how to use Miniflux with Reeder (app) and the Google Reader API proved to be a bit difficult due to the similarly of the app name and the API name. Or maybe I was sleep deprived. Either way, I finally worked it out but I never found a definitive "this is how you do it" just lots of vague Reddit threads so here we are....
When it comes to designing software, the SOLID principles are the gold standard for object-oriented programming. While Rust isn’t an object-oriented language in the strictest sense, it offers plenty of tools to apply SOLID principles effectively. With enums, traits, and strict type safety, Rust provides a solid foundation for building flexible,...
If you’ve seen any Apple advertising recently it’s pretty safe to assume it was pushing Apple Intelligence. This is the marquee feature, or feature set, of the iPhone 16 range,...
Daily we die; the passage of any hour you choose subtracts a portion of life. You have already died a considerable portion of your death. – Carl Linnaeus In early 2018, I legally changed my name to the one by which I’d been known for decades in all ways but the legal and official, the pronunciation of an abbreviated bastardization of an online...
llm-cerebras Cerebras (previously) provides Llama LLMs hosted on custom hardware at ferociously high speeds. GitHub user irthomasthomas built an LLM plugin that works against their API - which is currently free, albeit with a rate limit of 30 requests per minute for their two models. llm install llm-cerebras llm keys set cerebras # paste key here...
This one originally came up for me in Oodle Texture’s BC7 decoder. In the BC7 format, each pixel within a 4×4 block can choose from a limited set of between 4 to 16 colors (ignoring some caveats like the dual-index modes that don’t matter here) and consequently between 2 and 4 bits per pixel are […]
ZombAIs: From Prompt Injection to C2 with Claude Computer Use In news that should surprise nobody who has been paying attention, Johann Rehberger has demonstrated a prompt injection attack against the new Claude Computer Use demo - the system where you grant Claude the ability to semi-autonomously operate a desktop computer. Johann's attack is...
Asynchronous programming is an often misunderstood yet crucial concept in modern software development. While traditionally associated with JavaScript or Python, asynchronous programming is just as powerful and relevant in PHP. In this guide, we’ll explore the foundations of asynchronous programming, why it matters, and how PHP developers can use...
Understanding CSS Object Model (CSSOM), browser security and practical alternatives for dynamic styling
Constructive conversation and venting are mostly distinguished by asking ourselves
A deep dive into how browsers parse and manipulate CSS, its impact on web performance, and why it matters
In July, I described a way to make pinning more ergonomic by integrating it more fully into the language. Last week, I develoepd that idea further with the notion of UnpinCell: a wrapper type that lets a user take an &pin mut UnpinCell and produce an &mut T, similar to how other cells let a user take a shared reference to the cell and produce a...