Programming

2026 301 posts

October 2026 50 posts

Python's experimental JIT to be removed lwn.net · “After creating PEP 836 (“JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython”) to try to meet the council’s request, and after months of discussion, the JIT maintainers have withdrawn the PEP.”
Oct 27
Denmark's bid to ditch Microsoft Office for open-source alternative Collabora collapses in under six months tomshardware.com · “Denmark isn’t alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows.”
Oct 27
CSS-Tricks has a new owner! css-tricks.com · “CSS-Tricks is an independent site once again!”
Oct 27
New LF Research Survey Shows Generative AI Cuts Open Source Coding Time in Half, but 25% of Incoming Pull Requests are Considered AI Slop linuxfoundation.org · “For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI.”
Oct 26
Tesco replacing VMware with Proxmox in its stores and on the edge theregister.com · “Tesco says that during negotiations, VMware made an offer that represented a 175 percent price increase.”
Oct 26
The result of the C++26 DIS ballot train-it.eu · “C++26 failed its DIS ballot.”
Oct 26
Work to protect DNS from quantum decryption attacks is speeding up theregister.com · “One way to quantum-proof DNSSEC is to use larger keys that even a quantum computer will struggle to crack.”
Oct 26
TIL: POSIX wordexp(3) is dangerous yossarian.net · “Bottom line: don’t use wordexp(3) on untrusted inputs, even with WRDE_NOCMD.”
Oct 26
Introducing Scope: Open-source evaluation for AI coding agents opensource.microsoft.com · “AI coding agents are becoming users of your software.”
Oct 26
JPEG XL, Welcome to the Web! cgicoffee.com · “AVIF lossless is 30–122% larger and slower to decode.”
Oct 25
Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages seangoedecke.com · “Software performance is usually dominated by I/O, not the speed of the language.”
Oct 24
The Vulnerability Apocalypse and Why We Should Fund Open Source eff.org · “In just the month of October, 13,000 new CVEs have been submitted.”
Oct 23
Docker is weird codeandcake.dev · “Unlike VMs, containers are just processes with special restrictions on them.”
Oct 23
Several Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Accidentally Posted To Public Kernel Mailing List phoronix.com · “Seemingly as an accident, overnight several new Linux kernel vulnerability reports were posted to the public Linux kernel mailing list rather than the private security mailing list.”
Oct 22
A farewell to Arc arc.net · “Arc is sunsetting on December 22, 2026.”
Oct 22
Epic Rolls Out Vibe-Coded Launcher Update & It's Absolute Trash techdirt.com · “Epic wants to be the corporate goon the naysayers have said to watch out for.”
Oct 22
examining the macOS gcc binary zoey-on-github.github.io · “the so-called gcc is just clang in disguise”
Oct 22
Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security thephp.foundation · “Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release.”
Oct 21
Lambda Web Functions: public by default, and already in your lambda:* grants act.security · “A public, data reaching Web Function produces no finding in any of them.”
Oct 21
Local Mode firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org · “This feature allows you to register multiple mappings in order to load local files through custom https:// URLs.”
Oct 21
Google Cloud's London zones takes a nap, multiple services disrupted theregister.com · “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services.”
Oct 20
Microsoft admits that Always On VPN problems were not fixed in the October Security Update theregister.com · “The issue affects Windows 11 versions from 24H2 through 26H2.”
Oct 20
Cutting our inference bill by 68% by being obsessive about optimization blog.cloudflare.com · “Lower cost reviews didn’t automatically mean worse quality, but it didn’t automatically mean fine either.”
Oct 20
DeepSeek just open-sourced its inference engine github.com · “DeepInfer is the high-performance inference framework that powers DeepSeek’s large-scale production services.”
Oct 20
OpenBSD 8.0 openbsd.org · “Added MP support for up to 64 VCPUs per guest VM.”
Oct 20
Setting up SSH keys on macOS with Touch ID nmattia.com · “Let’s see how it can be set up on your consumer-grade Mac.”
Oct 20
There is no official XScreenSaver GitHub repository github.com · “I publish releases as tar files on the official web site and only there.”
Oct 20
Wine ported to OpenBSD marc.info · “Biggest limitation is that WoW64 doesn’t work, so 32bit Windows software is still a no-op.”
Oct 19
So long, Spokes: GitHub rewrites storage to restore reliability, just in time for agentic hordes theregister.com · “GitHub will need a miracle of that proportion just to keep up with customer demand.”
Oct 13
Let's Encrypt to Cut SSL Certificate Lifetimes to 64 Days in February 2027 linuxiac.com · “Let’s Encrypt will reduce TLS certificate validity from 90 to 64 days starting February 10, 2027”
Oct 13
Windows 11's easiest account bypass gets the Microsoft boot theregister.com · “Microsoft has won this round of account workaround Whac-a-Mole, though another bypass may yet pop up.”
Oct 13
I paid people to try and follow my README shkspr.mobi · “I guarantee you that your README will become much better for it.”
Oct 11
Published Version Update in App Stores community.bitwarden.com · “Some future components will be published under the commercial license and will exist only in that build.”
Oct 10
oh, apparently it's not possible to portably check for string-to-float conversion errors in standard c sebsite.pw · “the return value alone isn’t enough to determine if an error occurred”
Oct 10
Bootstrap 6 Alpha blog.getbootstrap.com · “To help people build more software, faster and easier.”
Oct 10
Tensorlake npm Package Compromised: A Worm With a Hostage Token That Wipes Your Machine If You Revoke It stepsecurity.io · “If you revoke the GitHub token it stole, a background job on your machine deletes your home directory.”
Oct 10
Conflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud giants to find a new route for the internet restofworld.org · “Repairs took months because the repair ships needed assurances they would not be fired upon.”
Oct 9
Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb? mtlynch.io · “Instead, coding agents just stayed bad.”
Oct 9
Programming Isn't Special blog.glyph.im · “Slop is slop, no matter the medium.”
Oct 9
Deno is joining Cloudflare deno.com · “Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development.”
Oct 9
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90 news.mit.edu · “Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”
Oct 9
The people holding up the internet sheets.works · “Billions of phones run on code looked after by a handful of people.”
Oct 9
Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore gleam.run · “The location metadata available to the runtime is now accurate to original Gleam source code, rather than to the Erlang source code.”
Oct 5
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything simonwillison.net · “I expect that most businesses and individuals would prefer errors to a surprise $10,000+ bill.”
Oct 5
Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend dbushell.com · “Deno went from an innovative modern JavaScript runtime to a boring start-up with uncompelling products.”
Oct 5
Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake blog.gitbutler.com · “Git 3.0 will make SHA-256 the new default content hashing algorithm and it will be an incomprehensibly expensive and ultimately valueless and avoidable global nightmare.”
Oct 2
Pi 1.0 earendil.com · “Today we are proudly shipping Pi 1.0: a hardened, minimal, extensible agent harness that you can make your own. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Pi every week.”
Oct 2
IANA's email about why example.com changed oliverdunk.com · “There is no requirement there is a HTTP service present on the host in order to fulfill its purpose, we just operate it as a courtesy.”
Oct 1
Azure maintenance mess disrupts hybrid clouds, VPNs, cloudy VMware services theregister.com · “Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations.”
Oct 1
StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta github.com · “We very roughly estimated some time ago that developing a full port to iOS would take one man-year of work.”
Oct 1

September 2026 33 posts

IFPI Wants Open Source YouTube Downloader yt-dlp on EU Piracy Watch List torrentfreak.com · “Its open-source nature, extensive developer community and its widespread distribution results in the tool being difficult to contain and/or remove.”
Sep 29
Google ending ChromeOS support two years early theregister.com · “For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS.”
Sep 29
Yes, no AI is now a feature blog.documentfoundation.org · “A default setting that silently redirects to a single provider is not a choice.”
Sep 29
They had no concept of a duty of care to their users. unsung.aresluna.org · “Neovim had changed the format of the undo files. It hadn’t upgraded the old one.”
Sep 28
Coding is NOT solved blog.alexewerlof.com · “AI cannot be held accountable. It cannot suffer any consequences.”
Sep 28
Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free gultsch.de · “When Google fucks up, there is absolutely nothing I can do.”
Sep 25
git-bug: Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in Git github.com · “git-bug is a bug tracker that is fully embedded in git: you only need your git repository to have a bug tracker.”
Sep 25
Radicle: Disclosure of Vulnerability in the Network Protocol radicle.dev · “Network traffic between nodes is not encrypted and not authenticated.”
Sep 24
Gartner predicts 55 percent of enterprise VMware users will be investigating an exit by 2029 theregister.com · “The transition to per-core subscriptions has resulted in significant cost increases. Many have also reported minimal flexibility during negotiations.”
Sep 22
macOS 26.4 silently enabled login keychain data protection lapcatsoftware.com · “macOS 26.4 added a restriction to the login keychain that makes it non-portable, impossible to unlock outside of its original context.”
Sep 22
What Sun got wrong bcantrill.dtrace.org · “Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.”
Sep 22
Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K theregister.com · “The popular image of AI spewing code is almost backwards; at this scale, the work looked much more like iterative investigation, inspecting the current state, forming a hypothesis, making a targeted change, rinsing and repeating.”
Sep 18
Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans blog.rust-lang.org · “These attackers are setting up new but legitimate seeming company profiles, including plausible LinkedIn presences, in order to pass cursory inspection.”
Sep 18
Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing about.gitlab.com · “Starting October 19, 2026, rate limits on GitLab.com will align with your subscription tier.”
Sep 17
Introducing GNOME 51 release.gnome.org · “We removed support for legacy NVIDIA driver interfaces, as GNOME now uses the modern, standard graphics interfaces exclusively.”
Sep 17
AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good theregister.com · “After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region.”
Sep 16
Ubuntu's Rustification Has a New Milestone! Coreutils Migration is Complete itsfoss.com · “The Ubuntu 26.10 release moves its last three GNU commands, cp, mv, and rm, to Rust.”
Sep 16
Seats and Sunsets yegge.ai · “Caution you can look up is caution you can afford.”
Sep 16
Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training blog.cloudflare.com · “Without proper controls, website owners have long faced a difficult tradeoff: allow your content to be used for AI training, or risk losing discoverability in search.”
Sep 15
Do You Still Read the Code? zanlib.dev · “A drifting accelerator doesn’t end up somewhere between the two approaches; he ends up a vibecoder by default, without the harness.”
Sep 15
Shopify extends lifeline to Tailwind as vibe coding erodes web dev platform's bottom line theregister.com · “We’re joining Shopify to give Tailwind a stable long-term home where it will be actively maintained for the millions of people who depend on it.”
Sep 10
It Breaks a Village: Bevy's 6th Birthday blog.fallible.net · “This experience has been that of observing a knife get torn through the social muscles of the Bevy project.”
Sep 10
Another Microsoft team admits it's struggling to handle flood of AI-generated code theregister.com · “submission volumes have continued to increase, and our review pipeline has experienced additional strain, causing an increase in extension review turnaround time”
Sep 10
I Don't Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots ploum.net · “If you don’t care to write it, there’s no reason I should waste one single second reading it.”
Sep 10
What the CPU shortage means for software teams katelynlesse.com · “Server orders are quoting ~6 months (it used to be a week or two), and prices are up ~10-20% since March.”
Sep 10
I changed my license to EUPL bergie.iki.fi · “All that our efforts did was to make it easier for big corporations build things more cheaply and for billionaires to become trillionaires.”
Sep 9
Switzerland tests a FOSS escape route from Microsoft 365 theregister.com · “The platform is expected to become available to about 3,000 selected employees from the end of 2027, with the first phase forecast to cost CHF 9 million.”
Sep 9
Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch buttondown.com · “The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could.”
Sep 9
AMD Building "Elite" Rust Developer Team for GPU Stack phoronix.com · “We’re building a small, elite team at AMD to push Rust deep into the GPU stack.”
Sep 8
How well do agents use test/verification techniques? danluu.com · “Just asking agents to ’test’ or repeatedly asking them to test more results in poor testing. It turns out that asking them to use test techniques also results in poor testing.”
Sep 8
A faster way to convert a timestamp to Hour, Min, Sec benjoffe.com · “In an ideal world, the compiler would make us not have to worry about all this.”
Sep 8
Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts vale.rocks · “With ever-changing devices, browsers, operating systems, form factors, specifications, personal preferences, tooling, and corporate interests, the web is in a constant state of flux.”
Sep 8
Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes austinhenley.com · “Since nothing is compiled, loops work by jumping backwards and reparsing the source each iteration.”
Sep 6

August 2026 37 posts

Being kicked out of the tech industry jacky.wtf · “It is solely a game of referral: it does not matter what you apply with because other people are cheating in the application process.”
Aug 29
We Need to Talk About Migrations with AI blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Using OpenAI Codex, Asana replaced an outdated testing system in two weeks for about $12K.”
Aug 29
I Stabilized Never Type blog.ihatereality.space · “At long last, the never type is stable (on nightly). After 10 years of it being unstable. After 5 failed attempts to stabilize it.”
Aug 26
How Uber built a software factory for agentic coding newsletter.port.io · “More than 70% of pull requests at Uber are now written by agents.”
Aug 25
Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms groups.google.com · “As of Firefox 157 I intend to turn JPEG XL decoding on by default on all platforms.”
Aug 25
Your executable is a SQLite database fzakaria.com · “ELF is already a database. It just implements many database primitives by hand.”
Aug 24
Intent to Ship: JPEG XL hacks.mozilla.org · “At 100,000 lines of multithreaded C++, we were concerned about the attack surface this added to Firefox.”
Aug 24
Fable & The End of the Free Lunch dbreunig.com · “Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies.”
Aug 24
There's no reason for software to be slow anymore danluu.com · “Just adding multithreading alone is enough to wipe the floor with an otherwise comparable AI on a large machine. If you stack in 10-20 more optimizations that seem too annoying for most people to do by hand, the difference in strength is tremendous.”
Aug 22
AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint blog.laserphile.com · “Connecting it to the destination causes the browser to actively process the graph, even though the final volume is zero.”
Aug 20
Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload safedep.io · “Fetches an architecture-specific binary over a TLS connection that accepts any certificate without validation, then runs it detached from the build.”
Aug 20
Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code grapheneos.social · “Google replaced pushing Git tags for certain source code with obtaining source code via Google Drive after making a request through Google Forms. It’s completely ridiculous and they’ve gradually become very slow at handling requests. They’re in clear violation of the GPLv2 now.”
Aug 19
Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers news.ycombinator.com · “I switched my nameservers to Cloudflare in order to enable R2 bucket serving through my own subdomain, and I found out that it silently had injected a JS analytics snippet in my HTML-only JS-free site.”
Aug 16
Debian opens vote on the future of AI-assisted contributions linuxiac.com · “Debian should not support or ban generative AI tools, but should apply the same standards for quality, correctness, maintainability, and legality to all contributions.”
Aug 15
Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin pcworld.com · “Once Microsoft Edge moves to Manifest V3, ad-blocking extensions won’t have access to the functions needed to properly identify and block ads that occur while browsing websites and watching videos.”
Aug 14
GNOME Shell Design Dreams blogs.gnome.org · “As the design team we can only propose ideas and work with developers to make them happen.”
Aug 11
pg_clickhouse v0.10: Subquery pushdown and 1000x faster TPC-H queries clickhouse.com · “Q17 is the trophy: a correlated subquery averaging l_quantity per part that, back when it evaluated once per outer row against 6M line items at scale factor 1, took 32.7 seconds. Fully pushed down, it’s 37 milliseconds.”
Aug 11
Services without servers: Ian Clarke on Freenet freenet.org · “These are the same pattern, applications whose backend is the network itself, so they can exist without a platform behind them.”
Aug 11
Mojo 1.0 modular.com · “During the 1.x timeframe, changes should primarily be additive, giving developers confidence that the language will not continually shift beneath them.”
Aug 11
Chicken Scheme 6.0 released code.call-cc.org · “The internal string representation has been converted to UTF-8, making strings fully UNICODE capable.”
Aug 11
Mozilla revokes Firefox signing key after unencrypted copy lands in GitHub theregister.com · “Mozilla has revoked a cryptographic key used to sign Firefox and Thunderbird releases after discovering someone had accidentally committed an unencrypted copy of the private key to a GitHub repository.”
Aug 11
Briar is in maintenance mode briarproject.org · “Meanwhile, the project didn’t have funding, we were reluctant to look for funding without having a long-term plan, and so we could only work on Briar in our spare time.”
Aug 11
The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded discourse.nixos.org · “The Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution.”
Aug 7
GitHub Actions Is Having One of the Worst Days in Its History kernel.pryanic.com · “500M minutes a week in 2023, to 1B a week in 2025, to 2.1B in a single week this spring.”
Aug 7
Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code ankursethi.com · “I fear the software industry is taking on a large amount of cognitive debt that we’ll have to pay back very soon.”
Aug 2
Steam on Linux Usage Reaches 4.01% in July 2026 phoronix.com · “The July data puts SteamOS Holo as powering around 22% of Steam on Linux gaming systems.”
Aug 2
Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter chrismorgan.info · “some reasonable content cannot reliably be expressed in RSS, whereas it’s unambiguous in Atom”
Aug 2
sizeof is surprisingly difficult to parse in C sebsite.pw · “that’s an addition expression, not the size of a cast expression.”
Aug 2
Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online theregister.com · “All of a sudden we got a huge number of requests for this SMTP gateway.”
Aug 2
Resigning from Arch Linux linderud.dev · “Things are changing and it’s a good time to let go.”
Aug 2
Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer theregister.com · “A terminal multiplexer may sound like a narrow place to start a company, but the lowly terminal is the common denominator across today’s developers, agents, tools, and infrastructure.”
Aug 2
Go 1.27 Interactive Tour victoriametrics.com · “A method declaration may now declare its own type parameters, independent of the receiver’s.”
Aug 2
Stacked pull requests are now in public preview github.blog · “A big change used to mean one giant PR nobody wanted to review. Now it’s a stack of small ones reviewers can actually follow, and the whole stack merges in one shot.”
Aug 2
How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds openrss.org · “while the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined”
Aug 1
New GitHub, PyPI Policies Boost Supply Chain Security securityweek.com · “Three days as the default balances two goals: it pushes you past the window where most of these attacks live.”
Aug 1
NetBSD 11.0 released blog.netbsd.org · “As a consequence, we can’t publish a release without open issues. Instead of delaying the release further to fix them, we’ve instead chosen to be transparent about this.”
Aug 1
Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576 leodemoura.github.io · “This is an implementation bug, not a hole in Lean’s meta-theory.”
Aug 1

July 2026 51 posts

Update Teams mobile app by October or lose your calendar theregister.com · “Microsoft originally set a late-October deadline in its message, but we’re guessing someone familiar with the impending demise of Exchange Web Services (EWS) had a quiet word.”
Jul 31
How to speed up the Rust compiler in July 2026 nnethercote.github.io · “The mean wall-time reduction was a healthy 5.59%. Around half of this was due to some huge recent improvements in rustdoc, which saw a mean wall-time reduction of 37.92%!”
Jul 31
Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered theregister.com · “Twenty years after last using the software, I still remembered the installation procedure”
Jul 31
Stripe Just Wants a Number blog.exe.dev · “Stripe just wants a number. It doesn’t care how we get there.”
Jul 31
It doesn't matter whether "Matz is nice" po-ru.com · “the Ruby community is not ’nice'”
Jul 31
Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font theregister.com · “Pure scrambling fonts already existed…We wanted a mechanism with actual consequences: scrape without asking, and you can’t tell if what you took was real.”
Jul 30
C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior kttnr.net · “Your program not crashing can make the problem seem benign. It is not.”
Jul 30
More Tailscale tricks for your jailbroken Kindle tailscale.com · “Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle is typically forced to run in userspace mode, which means it cannot use the device’s own network routing layer.”
Jul 29
User Interfaces of the Demo Scene datagubbe.se · “The scene has a long and storied tradition of building its own tools.”
Jul 29
The Orchestrator's Tax martinfowler.com · “Every token in the orchestrator’s context is competing for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context, not how fast it runs.”
Jul 29
Inside Zig's Incremental Compilation mlugg.co.uk · “Today, using Zig’s incremental compilation, you can make changes to real, complex applications in a matter of milliseconds.”
Jul 29
Try the New Firefox Design in Nightly blog.nightly.mozilla.org · “You’ll notice softer tab shapes, a warmer color palette, updated icons, and after hearing from many of you, the return of Compact Mode and new theme options to make Firefox your own.”
Jul 28
Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects hackaday.com · “Projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other ‘AI’ tools will no longer be welcome.”
Jul 27
Most Googlebots are fake digitalseams.com · “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog… and the flip side is that I can claim to be a dog (or a Googlebot) whenever I feel like it.”
Jul 27
Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else theregister.com · “What it will come down to is whether the anti-AI groups in FOSS can work together and help each other to hold off the vast and commercially backed pressure”
Jul 26
Memory Safety Absolutists itsallaboutthebit.com · “With roughly 5 million lines of Rust in the Android platform and one potential memory safety vulnerability found (and fixed pre-release), our estimated vulnerability density for Rust is 0.2 vuln per 1 million lines (MLOC).”
Jul 26
Decker beyondloom.com · “Decker includes no advertising, telemetry, gamification, slop-generator integration, or other intrusions on user privacy and autonomy.”
Jul 26
A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway refp.se · “the point is to show that the null-command can be used in places where a command is required, but nothing is desired.”
Jul 26
Everyone Should Know SIMD mitchellh.com · “Every developer should be able to recognize the opportunity and, most importantly, should not be scared of SIMD.”
Jul 24
Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs blog.codeberg.org · “These needless accesses create expensive database queries that diminish the service quality for all of us, requires substantial amounts of work from our system administrators.”
Jul 23
How proprietary formats have become Microsoft's main tool for lock-in blog.documentfoundation.org · “A standard that only one implementation fully supports is, from a functional point of view, a proprietary format with a standardisation certificate.”
Jul 20
I wrote an API client for my water-cooled bed tinkering.xyz · “I have a PhD in physics. I built lasers that spit out 80 femtosecond pulses, and I did quantum mechanics simulations.”
Jul 20
Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4 minecraft.net · “Minecraft now uses SDL3 instead of GLFW for window management, input and platform integration. On Linux systems, the game will now use and prefer Wayland natively if available.”
Jul 19
Reviewing AI Code Is Not A Viable Argument softwaremaxims.com · “For every 400 LOC written by a LLM Coding Assistants (at best, less for code that are hard to review), we need one professional senior developer to spend 1h of his time reviewing the code.”
Jul 19
Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off theregister.com · “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that they can do the open-source thing and fork it.”
Jul 19
How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going rtfeldman.com · “Zig’s 35ms is still way ahead… 1/100th the build time of 3.4 seconds.”
Jul 17
What Can We Learn from Bun's Rapid Rust Rewrite with AI? blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “A rewrite in another language would take a small team of engineers a full year. A year of zero user-facing impact is not a realistic option we could consider.”
Jul 17
Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode scottwillsey.com · “Xcode.app must be installed, but it never has to be open.”
Jul 14
Rewriting Bun in Rust bun.com · “A large percentage of bugs from that list are use-after-free, double-free, and ‘forgot to free’ in an error path. In safe Rust, these are compiler errors.”
Jul 14
Lobste.rs is now running on SQLite lobste.rs · “cpu usage is down, memory usage is down, site seems to be snappier at least for me”
Jul 14
Microsoft overhauls Windows 11 search to prioritize local results and remove ads windowscentral.com · “Because the Windows Search Box is where many people start, we focused first on making results more dependable, easier to scan, and clearer before you click.”
Jul 14
Linus Torvalds on Rust, C, Bugs, and AI Patch-Checking Tools zdnet.com · “Git and email are the two really only tools I use.”
Jul 13
Control the Ideas, Not the Code antirez.com · “Control the ideas of your software, looking at the code itself is suboptimal and often pointless.”
Jul 13
Quadrupling Code Performance With a 'Useless' If purplesyringa.moe · “In a synthetic benchmark, this change has sped up the loop from 320 us to 80 us.”
Jul 13
An Update on the Scraper Situation lwn.net · “Scraper attacks come from a huge number of sources across the net…each hit is meant to look like just another human with a web browser.”
Jul 11
Former GitHub CEO Launches Competitor Designed for the Age of Vibe Coding theregister.com · “The question is how we can expand, rewire, and evolve Git hosting for a world where AI agents are the primary producers of code.”
Jul 11
Microsoft to retire the OWA Light client in Exchange Server bleepingcomputer.com · “OWA Light was an important compatibility experience when the web needed it. Today, the full Outlook on the web experience is the right place for us to focus.”
Jul 10
Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives howtogeek.com · “It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn’t want me to be there.”
Jul 9
Announcing TypeScript 7.0 devblogs.microsoft.com · “TypeScript 7 brings native code speed, shared memory multithreading, and a number of new optimizations that typically yield speedups between 8x and 12x on full builds.”
Jul 9
Odin 1.0 odin-lang.org · “The Data-Oriented Language for Sane Software Development.”
Jul 8
Microsoft Flips Windows Backup to On by Default Unless You're in the EU theregister.com · “An opt-out setting that quietly ships settings data off-device is exactly the sort of thing that adds to administrators’ workloads rather than lightening them.”
Jul 7
You shouldn't trust Trusted Publishing blog.yossarian.net · “Trusted Publishing is just an authentication method. The only thing Trusted Publishing does is establish a trust relationship between an external machine identity and a package identity on an index for the purpose of authenticating an upload; it does not tell a user that a package is safe to use, high quality, or anything else.”
Jul 7
GitHub Offers Limited CD-ROM Copies of Public Repositories windowslatest.com · “GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM. Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children.”
Jul 7
Zombie 'Who Owns Unix?' Lawsuit Comes Alive Again theregister.com · “The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault. But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on.”
Jul 6
Real-time Map of Great Britain's Rail Network map.signalbox.io · “Signalbox’s technology identifies the train a device is on by matching a snapshot of smartphone data to a train’s trajectory data.”
Jul 6
AI Has Torched the Market for Junior Programmers seldo.com · “The career on-ramp for professional software engineers used to work like this: you got hired to write mediocre code, a senior engineer reviewed it, you slowly absorbed judgment through repetition and correction, and a decade later you were the senior engineer. That chain is now broken.”
Jul 6
Since Linux 6.9, LUKS suspend stopped wiping disk-encryption keys from memory mathstodon.xyz · “Since Linux 6.9 (May 2024), the tool that locks the laptop’s drive on suspend had been silently failing.”
Jul 3
No LLM code in dependencies joeyh.name · “I’ve spent about 100 hours of work over the past month to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code.”
Jul 3
Godot Foundation will stop accepting AI-authored code contributions pcgamer.com · “We can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it.”
Jul 3
Artificial Adventures scattered-thoughts.net · “Reviews, refactoring, and one-off scripts are consistently useful. Well worth the money for that alone.”
Jul 2
Local Reasoning for Global Properties tratt.net · “I can reason globally about the effects of multi-threading and data races while only looking at my code locally.”
Jul 1

June 2026 14 posts

When Impressive Performance Gains Do Not Matter blog.colinbreck.com · “If you can’t get each job below 4 hours, including travel time, then you can’t complete two in a day.”
Jun 30
Librepods: AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem github.com · “LibrePods allows you to use AirPods features that are exclusive to Apple devices by implementing the proprietary protocol used to exchange data between AirPods and Apple devices.”
Jun 28
We're making Bunny DNS free bunny.net · “If we truly believe in our mission to help make the internet hop faster, then the fundamental system that sits between your users and your services shouldn’t be a premium add-on.”
Jun 24
In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words devblogs.microsoft.com · “Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work.”
Jun 23
Deno Desktop docs.deno.com · “The output is a redistributable binary that bundles your code, the Deno runtime, and a web rendering engine into one bundle per platform.”
Jun 22
Developers don't understand CORS (2019) fosterelli.co · “CORS enables you to securely do this. Don’t hack around it!”
Jun 21
CSSQuake cssquake.com · “A web-based implementation of the classic first-person shooter, built entirely with CSS.”
Jun 20
There are no instances in ATProto overreacted.io · “Keep our stuff outside the apps; let the apps aggregate over it.”
Jun 19
Lore: Open source version control system designed for scalability lore.org · “Lore is a centralized, content-addressed version control system that represents repository state as Merkle trees and an immutable revision chain, optimized for binary-first storage.”
Jun 17
Your ePub Is fine andreklein.net · “Your EPUB Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe.”
Jun 14
Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight mohkohn.co.uk · “When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled.”
Jun 10
LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev · “All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.”
Jun 7
OpenCV 5 Is Here: The Biggest Leap in Years for Computer Vision opencv.org · “OpenCV 5 is one of the most important releases in the history of OpenCV.”
Jun 6
Changing how we develop Ladybird ladybird.org · “We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers.”
Jun 5

May 2026 17 posts

Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software github.com · “Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software.”
May 31
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion consumerrights.wiki · “Apps that are older versions enter reduced functionality mode after the certificate expires.”
May 30
I am retiring from tech to live offline openpath.quest · “AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails.”
May 29
Cloud Agent Development Environments cursor.com · “Cloud-based development environment configurations designed specifically for autonomous coding agents, featuring multi-repo support and governance controls.”
May 17
Adopting Herb at GitHub hawksley.org · “The tool found real bugs in ~2,800 failing files that existing linters missed, with AI assistants fixing most issues automatically.”
May 17
Agent Pull Requests Are Everywhere. Here's How to Review Them github.blog · “Human judgment to catch redundancy, technical debt, and security risks despite superficially polished submissions.”
May 17
Is Software Losing Its Head? x.com · “Salesforce’s strategic pivot toward headless APIs, suggesting that user interfaces no longer provide competitive advantages in an agentic future.”
May 17
MCP Hello Page web.archive.org · “Customers kept reporting that the MCP server wasn’t working. They’d open mcp.acme.com/mcp in a browser, get a 401 and a raw JSON blob, and file a ticket.”
May 17
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career seangoedecke.com · “If the models are good enough, you will simply get outcompeted by engineers willing to trade their long-term cognitive ability.”
May 11
Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc twitter.com · “99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc. The Rust port is real.”
May 9
Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML twitter.com · “Claude generates better, more useful interfaces in raw HTML than in any framework I tried.”
May 7
Mythical Man Month martinfowler.com · “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
May 7
OpenAI's WebRTC problem moq.dev · “WebRTC was designed for video calls, not for AI inference. Forcing it into that role creates the latency and reliability problems OpenAI is now scrambling to fix.”
May 7
Programming Still Sucks stvn.sh · “We replaced Makefiles with YAML, then replaced YAML with TOML, then replaced TOML with code that generates YAML. None of it builds reliably.”
May 6
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like simonwillison.net · “The line between letting an LLM cook and trusting an LLM to ship to production is dissolving faster than the engineering practices that should govern it.”
May 6
Agentic Coding Is a Trap larsfaye.com · “The agent gets you to ninety percent in an hour. The last ten percent takes a week and produces code you do not understand.”
May 4
VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage github.com · “Users report Copilot trailers being added to commits even when the feature is disabled and no AI suggestion was accepted.”
May 2

April 2026 27 posts

Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API github.com · “We do not believe an LLM API belongs in the web platform.”
Apr 30
HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work' theregister.com · “Mitchell Hashimoto is moving the Ghostty project off GitHub, citing repeated outages and Microsoft’s deprioritization of the platform.”
Apr 29
Zed 1.0 zed.dev · “After five years of development, Zed reaches 1.0 with stable APIs, plugin support, and a finalized collaboration protocol.”
Apr 29
GitHub Actions is the weakest link nesbitt.io · “GitHub Actions remains the most exploited supply chain component in modern CI/CD.”
Apr 28
Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop github.com · “LocalSend is an open source AirDrop alternative that works across platforms.”
Apr 28
High Performance Git gitperf.com · “Techniques for making git fast on very large repositories.”
Apr 27
Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port notepad-plus-plus-mac.org · “An independent community has ported Notepad++ to macOS.”
Apr 26
Open source memory layer so any AI agent can do what Claude.ai and ChatGPT do alash3al.github.io · “An open source memory layer that gives any AI agent persistent context.”
Apr 24
Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine itsfoss.com · “Firefox has integrated the Rust-based adblock engine developed by Brave.”
Apr 24
Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image antiz.fr · “Arch Linux now publishes bit-for-bit reproducible Docker images.”
Apr 22
Kuri – Zig based agent-browser alternative github.com · “Kuri is a Zig-based browser designed for agentic web automation.”
Apr 21
How to make a fast dynamic language interpreter zef-lang.dev · “A walkthrough of techniques used to build fast bytecode interpreters for dynamic languages.”
Apr 20
Sudo for Windows (2024) github.com · “Microsoft has open-sourced sudo for Windows.”
Apr 19
2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email mxmap.ch · “A public dataset showing which email provider each of 2,100 Swiss municipalities uses.”
Apr 19
The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017) apenwarr.ca · “IPv6 was designed for a world that didn’t end up happening.”
Apr 18
AI-Assisted Coding: Why a Distinguished Engineer Stopped Reading Code vascoduarte.substack.com · “A distinguished engineer explains why he stopped reading code generated by AI assistants.”
Apr 18
Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals victorpoughon.github.io · “A calculator that operates on disjoint sets of intervals instead of single numbers.”
Apr 17
Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source blog.discourse.org · “Discourse confirms it will remain open source amid concerns about its licensing direction.”
Apr 16
The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama sleepingrobots.com · “Ollama is a thin wrapper that the local LLM community can do without.”
Apr 15
Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider calpaterson.com · “If you wait a week before adopting new dependency versions, you are free-riding on the people who didn’t.”
Apr 14
A new spam policy for “back button hijacking” developers.google.com · “Google will start penalizing sites that hijack the back button to keep users trapped.”
Apr 13
DaVinci Resolve – Photo blackmagicdesign.com · “Blackmagic announces DaVinci Resolve Photo, a free professional photo editor.”
Apr 13
Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another' eetimes.com · “AMD’s ROCm stack is improving, but CUDA’s lead remains substantial.”
Apr 12
High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain hamy.xyz · “You can get most of Rust’s benefits without learning every corner of the borrow checker.”
Apr 11
The End of Eleventy brennan.day · “After eight years of building Eleventy, I am stepping away.”
Apr 11
Vibe Coding Drives 84% Surge in App Store Submissions web.archive.org · “The number of new apps submitted to the App Store rose 84% in a single quarter as vibe coding went mainstream.”
Apr 4
SSH certificates: the better SSH experience jpmens.net · “Stop managing authorized_keys files. SSH supports proper certificate-based authentication and almost nobody uses it.”
Apr 3

March 2026 13 posts

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash theregister.com · “GitHub will roll back the change that injected Copilot upgrade prompts into pull request review pages.”
Mar 31
Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan stepsecurity.io · “Two malicious versions of axios were published to npm, downloaded over 80,000 times before being pulled, installing a remote access trojan on every host.”
Mar 31
POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere indieweb.org · “Publish on your own site, then syndicate to social platforms. Keep the canonical URL on a domain you control.”
Mar 23
Some things just take time lucumr.pocoo.org · “I have been programming professionally for twenty years and the meaningful improvements still arrive in years, not days.”
Mar 21
Have a fucking website otherstrangeness.com · “Stop linking to your Instagram, your TikTok, your Linktree. Have a real website at a domain you own.”
Mar 18
Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989) cs.unc.edu · “Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small.”
Mar 18
The 49MB web page thatshubham.com · “Loading the front page of a major newspaper now downloads 49 megabytes for less than 4kb of actual article text.”
Mar 15
Dolphin Progress Release 2603 dolphin-emu.org · “All of this just to let Dolphin play online with real Wii consoles in a game whose official servers are since long dead and whose replacement servers have a peak of only 15 concurrent online players.”
Mar 12
Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy gitlab.redox-os.org · “Contributions generated by large language models will not be accepted. Contributors must sign a Developer Certificate of Origin attesting to authorship.”
Mar 10
Cloudflare crawl endpoint developers.cloudflare.com · “The new endpoint allows site operators to charge AI crawlers per request, with payment settled on-chain.”
Mar 10
Tony Hoare has died blog.computationalcomplexity.org · “Tony Hoare, inventor of quicksort and the null reference, has died at 91.”
Mar 10
LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown blog.documentfoundation.org · “LibreOffice Writer can now open, edit, and save Markdown files natively.”
Mar 8
Microgpt karpathy.github.io · “Everything else is just efficiency. I cannot simplify this any further.”
Mar 1

February 2026 23 posts

Google Quantum-Proofs HTTPS arstechnica.com · “MTCs replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs.”
Feb 28
What AI coding costs you tomwojcik.com · “You can’t deeply review what you no longer deeply understand.”
Feb 28
Firefox 148 Lets You Kill All AI Features in One Click firefox.com · “Firefox added a dedicated settings section for managing AI-enhanced capabilities, allowing users to control artificial intelligence features in one centralized location.”
Feb 26
Goodbye InnerHTML, Hello SetHTML: Stronger XSS Protection in Firefox 148 hacks.mozilla.org · “The new standardized Sanitizer API provides a straightforward way for web developers to sanitize untrusted HTML before inserting it into the DOM.”
Feb 24
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI ladybird.org · “Rust has the ecosystem and the safety guarantees we need. Both Firefox and Chromium have already begun introducing Rust.”
Feb 21
I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard hawksley.org · “If the status on the display is blank, the house is in a ‘healthy’ state and does not need any attention.”
Feb 17
Turn Dependabot off words.filippo.io · “Dependabot is a noise machine. It makes you feel like you’re doing work, but you’re actually discouraging more useful work.”
Feb 16
NewPipe: YouTube client without vertical videos and algorithmic feed newpipe.net · “You really do have a quality app, which is a rarity.”
Feb 14
MinIO repository is no longer maintained github.com · “The MinIO repository will no longer accept community contributions or release open-source builds.”
Feb 13
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it github.com · “The agent’s PR was rejected on technical grounds. The agent then drafted a public blog post characterizing the rejection as bullying.”
Feb 12
Thank You, AI kraxel.org · “AI scrapers have hammered the poor, little server to death by flooding the cgit frontend with tons of pointless requests.”
Feb 10
Offpunk 3.0 ploum.net · “Offpunk 3.0 is probably the first release that contains code I didn’t review line-by-line.”
Feb 9
AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder blundergoat.com · “The agent generates the boilerplate in seconds. The system design, the integration, the debugging take twice as long because the agent did not understand what it generated.”
Feb 8
France's homegrown open source online office suite github.com · “The French government’s open source office suite is now in production use across multiple ministries.”
Feb 7
We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com · “I have been writing software for twenty years and I do not recognize the job anymore.”
Feb 7
EU Tests Matrix Protocol as Sovereign Alternative for Internal Communication dig.watch · “The Commission aims to deploy it as a complement and backup to Teams rather than a full replacement.”
Feb 6
Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes anthropic.com · “The rapid progress in both language models and the scaffolds we use to interact with them opens the door to writing an enormous amount of new code.”
Feb 6
GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team iankduncan.com · “GitHub Actions is not good. It’s not even fine. It has market share because it’s right there in your repo, and that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it.”
Feb 6
I Left FAANG for a Startup and Regretted It web.archive.org · “Do you like the work you’re doing?” / “No,” I said. / “Then it’s over.”
Feb 4
Cedar Joins CNCF as a Sandbox Project infoq.com · “What I appreciate the most about Cedar is the deep knowledge that is encoded into why it works the way it works.”
Feb 4
Adobe Reverses Animate Shutdown After Backlash techcrunch.com · “Adobe’s announcement about discontinuing Animate was met with incredulity, disappointment, and anger.”
Feb 4
France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US apnews.com · “France is migrating government communications off Microsoft Teams and Zoom to European-hosted alternatives.”
Feb 3
I replaced a $120/year micro-SaaS in 20 minutes with LLM-generated code blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “By the time customer support sent me a working link two hours later, I had finished migrating off the SaaS.”
Feb 1

January 2026 36 posts

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native theregister.com · “The European Commission is moving from advisory language to mandatory deadlines for migrating critical infrastructure off US-controlled cloud providers.”
Jan 31
GOG: Linux 'the next major frontier' for gaming as it works on a native client xda-developers.com · “GOG confirmed it is developing a native Linux client and treating Linux as a tier-one gaming platform.”
Jan 30
Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings antirender.com · “A small tool that takes the unrealistic perfection out of architectural renderings, showing what a building actually looks like.”
Jan 30
Rust at Scale: Security for WhatsApp engineering.fb.com · “Most high-severity issues stem from C/C++ memory safety problems.”
Jan 29
One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch simonwillison.net · “A functional web browser in 20,000 lines of Rust, built in three days with a single Codex CLI agent.”
Jan 29
AI2 Released Open Coding Agents allenai.org · “Reproducing the performance of the previously best open-source model costs ~$400 of compute.”
Jan 28
How to Favicon in 2026 evilmartians.com · “Three files that fit most needs.”
Jan 28
Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux himthe.dev · “Windows is now also too much work. And the difference with Windows is that you’re going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything.”
Jan 28
ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files simonwillison.net · “ChatGPT can now write and test code in 10 new languages (11 if you count Bash), can find files online and download them into the container, and can install additional packages via pip and npm.”
Jan 26
How I estimate work as a staff software engineer seangoedecke.com · “I don’t estimate work, I figure out how much time my management chain will give a project and figure out some plans that look like what they’re talking about.”
Jan 26
Why Does SSH Send 100 Packets Per Keystroke? eieio.games · “The speed at which you type different letters betrays some information about which letters you’re typing. So ssh sends lots of ‘chaff’ packets along with your keystrokes to make it hard for an attacker to determine when you’re actually entering keys.”
Jan 24
Announcing Rust 1.93.0 blog.rust-lang.org · “Major improvements to musl’s DNS resolver for more reliable networking in static Linux builds.”
Jan 24
You Probably Don't Need a Vector Database for Your RAG — Yet towardsdatascience.com · “Vector Search is just matrix multiplication. And Python already has some of the world’s best tools for that.”
Jan 24
Gas Town's Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale maggieappleton.com · “Design becomes the limiting factor: imagining what you want to create and figuring out all the gnarly details required.”
Jan 23
Ghostty's AI Policy github.com · “Our reason for the strict AI policy is not due to an anti-AI stance, but instead due to the number of highly unqualified people using AI.”
Jan 23
MCP Server Best Practices philschmid.de · “When building an MCP Server you are not building infrastructure, you are building an interface for AI agents.”
Jan 23
I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too notebookcheck.net · “It has proved to be the best computer-related decision I’ve made in over a decade (and perhaps in my entire life).”
Jan 23
Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure intact mental health arstechnica.com · “We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health.”
Jan 23
Blazor in .NET 10: What's New and Why It Finally Feels Complete dev.to · “One attribute. That’s it. The runtime handles serialization, hydration, and cleanup.”
Jan 23
We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports curl.se · “AI-generated security reports that waste maintainer time will result in immediate ban, public ridicule, and a note in our hall of shame.”
Jan 22
Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android androidauthority.com · “The new sideloading flow will require multi-step warnings, identity verification, and developer attestation for every install outside the Play Store.”
Jan 20
jQuery 4 blog.jquery.com · “jQuery 4.0 drops IE support, adds modern module syntax, and remains the most-used JavaScript library on the open web.”
Jan 18
The recurring dream of replacing developers caimito.net · “Every decade, a new technology is sold as the one that finally lets executives ship software without programmers. None of them have worked. This one will not either.”
Jan 17
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering alexharri.com · “Most ASCII renderers treat characters as fixed-aspect pixels. They are not. The math is uglier than that and the results look better when you respect it.”
Jan 17
Wine 11.0 gitlab.winehq.org · “Wine 11.0 ships with full Wayland support, improved ARM64 emulation, and better DirectStorage compatibility.”
Jan 16
The Great Filter (Or Why High Performance Still Eludes Most Dev Teams, Even With AI) codemanship.wordpress.com · “Most organisations are simply not prepared to make that kind of commitment in time, effort and money.”
Jan 12
Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11 eteknix.com · “Comparative benchmarks place Windows 11 behind every release since Vista on the same hardware.”
Jan 10
Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak mitchellh.com · “The leak was a single missing arena cleanup in a code path that ran on every keystroke.”
Jan 10
How to build agents with filesystems and bash vercel.com · “If agents excel at filesystem operations for code, they’ll excel at filesystem operations for anything.”
Jan 9
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team github.com · “Tailwind Labs has reduced its engineering headcount by 75 percent, citing a strategic shift to AI-augmented development.”
Jan 7
Web development is fun again ma.ttias.be · “After fifteen years of accidental complexity, the tooling is finally getting out of the way again.”
Jan 4
Lessons from 14 years at Google addyosmani.com · “The most important skill at a big company is figuring out what the political reality lets you actually ship.”
Jan 4
The C3 Programming Language c3-lang.org · “C3 is what C would look like if you redesigned it today with everything we have learned in the last fifty years.”
Jan 3
Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet neowin.net · “Microsoft removed the documented offline activation method, leaving only online activation paths.”
Jan 3
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time data.stackexchange.com · “Stack Overflow question volume has declined more than 80 percent since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.”
Jan 3
Linux is good now pcgamer.com · “Make 2026 the year of Linux on your desktop. The driver story is fine, the gaming story is fine, and Windows is no longer fine.”
Jan 1

2025 242 posts

November 2025 1 posts

6,000 Airbus A320s Grounded for Emergency Software Fix Over Thanksgiving npr.org · “Thousands of travelers worldwide were stranded after Airbus ordered immediate software fixes for 6,000 A320-series aircraft.”
Nov 28

October 2025 1 posts

KDE Plasma 6.5 Released With Rounded Corners and Auto Theme Switching kde.org · “Breeze-themed windows now have the same level of roundness in all four corners.”
Oct 21

September 2025 14 posts

Kernel vs. User-Level Networking: Don't Throw Out the Stack usenix.org · “Research challenging the assumption that kernel-bypass networking is always faster than kernel networking.”
Sep 25
Zig's New Async I/O kristoff.it · “Zig decouples async/await from coroutines, uses a vtable-based Io interface for runtime polymorphism, and solves the function coloring problem.”
Sep 24
Matrix.org Post-Mortem: September 2nd Database Outage matrix.org · “Routine NVMe maintenance caused a RAID failure, then a destructive command on the wrong server wiped the secondary. 51TB PostgreSQL restore from S3.”
Sep 23
Bcachefs Removed from Mainline Kernel lwn.net · “The experimental filesystem was removed from the mainline kernel in September 2025.”
Sep 17
Multiple Kernels on a Single System Proposed lwn.net · “Proposal to allow each CPU to run its own kernel for special-purpose workloads like realtime.”
Sep 17
Linux 6.17 Kernel Released lwn.net · “New release includes better Spectre mitigation control, live patching on 64-bit Arm, and DualPI2 congestion control.”
Sep 16
OpenSSF Warns Open Source Infrastructure Isn't Free theregister.com · “Package registries handle billions of downloads monthly but run on donations. AI agents are making it worse by scraping en masse.”
Sep 16
Chrome Increases Its Overwhelming Market Share, Now Over 70% neowin.net · “Chrome has crossed 70% browser market share while Firefox continues to decline.”
Sep 14
Unix v4 (1973) Live Terminal unixv4.dev · “A live terminal emulator running Unix v4 from 1973 in the browser.”
Sep 8
OpenWrt: Experiments with OpenWRT One Hardware openwrt.org · “OpenWrt’s experiments with ‘OpenWRT One’ and ambitions to compete with SMB firewall vendors.”
Sep 7
Making Video Games (Without an Engine) in 2025 noelberry.ca · “Why engines are the easy part of game development, while tooling, content pipelines, and asset management are the real challenges.”
Sep 5
First Official Release of LLVM Flang blog.llvm.org · “The first official release of LLVM’s Fortran compiler frontend, Flang, after years of development.”
Sep 4
Rust in 2025: Targeting Foundational Software smallcultfollowing.com · “Discussion of Rust’s path forward in 2025, including challenges around ABI stability, dynamic libraries, and extern C limitations.”
Sep 4
What If We Treated Postgres Like SQLite? maragu.dev · “Exploring how PostgreSQL’s data directory works across binaries and how it compares to SQLite’s simplicity.”
Sep 4

August 2025 31 posts

Lisp from Nothing, Second Edition t3x.org · “What is the minimal LISP language that can interpret itself? What is the smallest LISP that can compile itself?”
Aug 30
You no longer need JavaScript lyra.horse · “It’s actually pretty incredible what HTML and CSS alone can achieve.”
Aug 29
Everything I Know About Good API Design seangoedecke.com · “Good APIs are boring. An API that’s interesting is a bad API.”
Aug 25
Linux Turns 34 linux.slashdot.org · “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu).”
Aug 25
Base: An SQLite Database Editor for macOS menial.co.uk · “Base is a small, powerful, comfortable SQLite editor for everyone.”
Aug 25
An interactive guide to SVG paths joshwcomeau.com · “The SVG <path> element is notoriously tricky…Its syntax isn’t quite as bad as Regex, but it has the same sort of ‘what on earth?’ vibes.”
Aug 22
FFmpeg 8.0 ffmpeg.org · “Native decoders: APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, G.728.”
Aug 22
Code formatting comes to uv experimentally pydevtools.com · “The analogy would be to Cargo: cargo fmt just runs rustfmt, but you can also run rustfmt separately if you want.”
Aug 22
Go is still not good blog.habets.se · “Go says it doesn’t have exceptions. Go makes it extremely awkward to use exceptions, because they want to punish programmers who use them.”
Aug 22
Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server blog.habets.se · “This means that a busy web server can serve all of its queries without even once (after setup is done) needing to do a syscall.”
Aug 22
D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders d2lang.com · “In the latest release of D2 (0.7.1), we introduce ASCII outputs.”
Aug 20
FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons github.com · “You have taken the first step on the most interesting, challenging, and rewarding journey in programming.”
Aug 18
Web Apps in a Single, Portable, Self-Updating, Vanilla HTML File hyperclay.com · “Build web apps like you’re sculpting clay, not managing infrastructure.”
Aug 18
Remember the Companies Making Vital Open Source Contributions news.slashdot.org · “If you care about outcomes, the motives don’t really matter… the point isn’t sainthood; it’s sustainable, shared innovation.”
Aug 16
The Plan For Linux After Torvalds linux.slashdot.org · “Succession is always a time of uncertainty for those who like the way things are, and opportunity for those who do not.”
Aug 15
We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application mitchellh.com · “There was an entire class of bug that kept popping up in the Ghostty GTK application that could basically be summed up as: the Zig memory or the GTK memory has been freed, but not both.”
Aug 15
Mozilla Under Fire For Firefox AI 'Bloat' news.slashdot.org · “All I want is a mainstream-supported fast, simple, clean browser with an efficient rendering engine.”
Aug 12
Linus Torvalds Blasts Kernel Dev For 'Garbage' Patches linux.slashdot.org · “This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I’m traveling, and if you can’t follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good.”
Aug 12
OpenSSH adopts post-quantum cryptography openssh.com · “All the post-quantum algorithms implemented by OpenSSH are ‘hybrids’ that combine a post-quantum algorithm with a classical algorithm,” ensuring the hybrid is never weaker than classical alternatives alone.
Aug 11
Gallery of pricing page designs pricingpages.design · “A curated gallery showcasing exemplary pricing page designs from various companies, filterable by components and design patterns.”
Aug 11
SIMD substring search in Zig aarol.dev · “500 microseconds is half a millisecond. That’s how fast my laptop searches through a whole book, 200,000 words, cover to cover. This is why computers are so powerful!”
Aug 11
Quickshell - building blocks for your desktop quickshell.org · “A toolkit for building status bars, widgets, lockscreens, and other desktop components using QtQuick.”
Aug 10
How I use Tailscale chameth.com · “You don’t have to bother with any networking configuration. You don’t have to distribute keys. You just install the client, and login.”
Aug 10
Writing a Rust GPU kernel driver collabora.com · “The kernel driver connects a much larger UMD to the actual GPU…a key aspect of GPU drivers is allocating GPU memory.”
Aug 7
Automerge 3.0 automerge.org · “We’ve cut that down memory usage by over 10x, sometimes dramatically more, making Automerge feasible to use in a much wider range of scenarios.”
Aug 7
uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari apps.apple.com · “The app uses declarative filtering, meaning it doesn’t require a continuous background process.”
Aug 5
PHP 8.5 Adds Pipe Operator: What it means thephp.foundation · “The pipe operator has one of the highest ‘bangs for the buck’ of any feature in recent memory.”
Aug 5
How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast v8.dev · “If we can guarantee that serializing an object will not trigger any side effects, we can use a much faster, specialized implementation.”
Aug 5
PixiEditor 2.0 - a FOSS Universal 2D Graphics Editor is here! pixieditor.net · “Our goal is to build a free and open source editor that can handle all of 2D graphics.”
Aug 3
Modern Node.js Patterns for 2025 kashw1n.com · “Modern Node.js embraces web standards, reduces external dependencies, and provides a more intuitive developer experience.”
Aug 3
UniFi OS Server released: How to Self-Host your full Network Stack in Minutes lazyadmin.nl · “The announcement enables users to deploy their complete network infrastructure independently, eliminating reliance on cloud services.”
Aug 1

July 2025 28 posts

Linux Kernel 6.16 Lands with 38 Million Lines of Code theregister.com · “38.4 million lines of code across over 78,000 files.”
Jul 29
Debian Switches to 64-bit Time for Everything theregister.com · “64-bit time_t on 32-bit architectures to avoid the ‘year 2038 problem’ when the existing 32-bit signed int rolls over.”
Jul 28
Final Benchmarks of Clear Linux on Intel phoronix.com · “Clear Linux has led Linux x86_64 performance not only on Intel desktop/mobile/server hardware but on AMD systems too.”
Jul 27
It's Time for Modern CSS to Kill the SPA jonoalderson.com · “We’ve been adding mountains of JS to ‘feel’ fast, while making everything slower.”
Jul 26
Rust Running on Every GPU rust-gpu.github.io · “The same compute logic runs on all targets, written entirely in regular Rust. No shader or kernel languages are used.”
Jul 26
Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks phoronix.com · “Firefox 120 was the breaking point since Firefox 119 and prior ended up running into issues with Selenium / Gecko web driver for automating the benchmarks.”
Jul 26
I Wasted Weeks Hand Optimizing Assembly Because I Benchmarked on Random Data vidarholen.net · “When I adjusted my benchmark to primarily generate small numbers, the speedup vanished entirely.”
Jul 25
There Is No Memory Safety Without Thread Safety ralfj.de · “There is no meaningful sense in which a thread-unsafe language provides memory safety.”
Jul 24
TODOs Aren't for Doing sophiebits.com · “TODO comments don’t need to get done in order to be valuable.”
Jul 23
Power Cuts, Cable Damage, and Government Shutdowns Behind Q2 Internet Outages theregister.com · “Internet traffic falling by approximately 80 percent within the next few hours in Spain, and up to 90 percent in Portugal.”
Jul 23
FFmpeg Devs Boast of Another 100x Leap Thanks to Handwritten Assembly Code tomshardware.com · “The biggest speedup I’ve seen so far.”
Jul 22
Jujutsu for Busy Devs maddie.wtf · “It uses Git as a backend, which means you can begin using it non-destructively with a single command.”
Jul 22
Redox OS July 2025: 500-700% File I/O Performance Improvement phoronix.com · “500~700% performance improvement for basic file copy operations.”
Jul 20
Asynchrony Is Not Concurrency kristoff.it · “The possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.”
Jul 19
Reinventing the Python Wheel lwn.net · “An incubator for thinking about the problems and solutions of the packaging community for the next, let’s say, ten years, five years, 30 years.”
Jul 19
Tilck: A Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel github.com · “An educational monolithic kernel designed to be Linux-compatible at binary level.”
Jul 17
Anubis Sends AI Scraperbots to a Well-Deserved Fate lwn.net · “Blocked more than 4 million unwanted HTTP requests per day.”
Jul 17
Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Incident on July 14, 2025 blog.cloudflare.com · “The root cause was an internal configuration error and not the result of an attack or a BGP hijack.”
Jul 16
Blender Studio Releases Free New Game 'Dogwalk' games.slashdot.org · “The entire project — assets, animations, and code — is made with Blender and the popular Godot Game Engine.”
Jul 14
Chrome's Hidden X-Browser-Validation Header Reverse Engineered github.com · “Chrome almost certainly uses this header as an integrity signal, verifying that the declared user agent matches the underlying platform, spotting user agent spoofing attempts.”
Jul 13
Firefox Is Fine. The People Running It Are Not. news.slashdot.org · “Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else besides relying on Google funding.”
Jul 12
Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY Does Not Scale recall.ai · “Serialize writers by acquiring a special lock that we hold till after commit.”
Jul 11
AI Coding Tools Make Developers Slower, Study Finds theregister.com · “When AI is allowed, developers spend less time actively coding and searching for/reading information, and instead spend time prompting AI, waiting on and reviewing AI outputs, and idle.”
Jul 11
Breaking Git with a Carriage Return and Cloning RCE (CVE-2025-48384) dgl.cx · “GitHub Desktop automatically clones with the recursive option by default.”
Jul 9
A Tour of the niri Scrolling-Tiling Wayland Compositor lwn.net · “X11 is very cursed.”
Jul 7
Kernel API Specification and Validation lwn.net · “The kernel interface is complex. It includes hundreds of system calls, many of which have complex parameters and behavior; all of that must be completely described.”
Jul 7
Windows 11 Finally Overtakes Windows 10 theregister.com · “The dramatic reversal comes with only three months remaining before Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025.”
Jul 4
Linus Torvalds Hints Bcachefs May Get Dropped from the Linux Kernel theregister.com · “I think we’ll be parting ways in the 6.17 merge window.”
Jul 1

June 2025 32 posts

Open Source AI Editor: First Milestone code.visualstudio.com · “The original GitHub Copilot extension that provides inline completions remains closed source – but in the following months we plan to have that functionality be provided by the open sourced GitHub Copilot Chat extension .”
Jun 30
JavaScript™ Trademark Update deno.com · “We’re not amending the fraud claim. Doing so would delay the case by months, and our focus is on the claims that matter most: genericness and abandonment.”
Jun 28
French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for open source office and collab tools theregister.com · “Lyon’s government employs almost 10,000 people, so losing it as a customer will briefly sting some regional Microsoft salespeople and partners but won’t make a noticeable dent in the software giant’s balance sheet.”
Jun 26
docs: define policy forbidding use of AI code generators github.com · “While the vendors may claim there is no problem and a free choice of license is possible, they have an inherent conflict of interest in promoting this interpretation.”
Jun 25
Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent blog.google · “To use Gemini CLI free-of-charge, simply login with a personal Google account to get a free Gemini Code Assist license.”
Jun 25
Better Auth, an authentication tool by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC techcrunch.com · “Since then, Better Auth has clocked 150,000+ weekly downloads, 15,000+ GitHub stars, and a community of over 6,000 Discord members, the startup claims.”
Jun 25
PNG is back! programmax.net · “The last PNG spec was released over 20 years ago. Technology has advanced a lot since then.”
Jun 24
Automotive industry signs Memorandum of Understanding for joint software development based on open source vda.de · “A significant portion of the vehicle software is not directly accessible to the user and therefore not differentiating.”
Jun 24
Goodbye AWS: How We Kept ISO 27001, Slashed Costs by 90% medium.com · “The $2,000/Month Question: While not a fortune for every company, our $24,000 annual bill felt disproportionate to our actual needs.”
Jun 21
Triaging security issues reported by third parties gitlab.gnome.org · “I’ve been doing this long enough to know that most of the secrecy around security issues is just theater.”
Jun 19
Unexpected security footguns in Go's parsers blog.trailofbits.com · “As a final blow, there’s no way to disable this behavior, even though people have complained about this behavior leading to security vulnerabilities since at least 2016.”
Jun 18
KiCad and Wayland Support kicad.org · “We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues.”
Jun 17
bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust trifectatech.org · “Why bother working on this algorithm from the 90s that sees very little use today?”
Jun 17
Working on databases from prison: How I got here, part 2. turso.tech · “As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison.”
Jun 16
Darklang Goes Open Source blog.darklang.com · “The real barrier to Darklang’s adoption was never licensing - it was product maturity.”
Jun 16
Multiple GCP products are experiencing Service issues. status.cloud.google.com · “The issue with this change was that it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected. Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash.”
Jun 14
jemalloc Postmortem jasone.github.io · “Facebook infrastructure engineering reduced investment in core technology, instead emphasizing return on investment.”
Jun 13
Next.js 15.1+ is unusable outside of Vercel omarabid.com · “Next.js has become a Vercel vendor lock-in disguised as an open-source framework.”
Jun 12
Google: Android Open Source Project not being 'discontinued' amidst Pixel change 9to5google.com · “However, the Pixel device trees and other code used to adapt the AOSP release to specific (Made by) Google hardware was not released in a big change from precedent.”
Jun 12
Bypassing GitHub Actions policies in the dumbest way possible blog.yossarian.net · “GitHub has told me that they don’t consider this a security issue (I disagree), so I’m publishing this post as-is.”
Jun 11
Maintaining an Android app is a lot of work ashishb.net · “Google Ads library v24 dropped support for Android API 21. According to official Google statistics, API 21 is used by 0.1% (~4 million) users.”
Jun 8
Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74 daringfireball.net · “Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware.”
Jun 7
A new path forward for WordPress, and for the open web joost.blog · “The goal of FAIR is not to fork WordPress. We’re still using the same core software.”
Jun 7
remove remainders of append-only support github.com · “For append-only the current idea is that this should not be done within borg, but solved by a missing repo object delete permission enforced by the storage.”
Jun 7
How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes about.gitlab.com · “Ultimately, we traced the issue to a 15-year-old Git function with O(N²) complexity and fixed it with an algorithmic change, reducing backup times exponentially.”
Jun 6
A year of funded FreeBSD daemonology.net · “I’ve been incredibly lucky to get this sponsorship from Amazon; it’s far more than most open source developers ever get. I wish it wasn’t ending;”
Jun 6
Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom puri.sm · “Sideloading, a longstanding pillar of Android’s openness, is now being marginalized, placing the Android platform closer to the walled-garden approach of Apple’s iOS.”
Jun 5
How We Reduced the Impact of Zombie Clients letsencrypt.org · “In 2024, we noticed that about half of all certificate requests to the Let’s Encrypt ACME API came from about a million accounts that never successfully complete any validations.”
Jun 4
Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring service from Java swift.org · “Additionally, the new service had a much smaller memory footprint per instance — in the 100s of megabytes — an order of magnitude smaller compared to the 10s of gigabytes our Java implementation needed under peak load to sustain the same throughput and latencies.”
Jun 3
Cloudflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts github.com · “I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at.”
Jun 2
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts fly.io · “Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite.”
Jun 2
Snowflake to acquire database startup Crunchy Data techcrunch.com · “We’re tackling a massive $350 billion market opportunity and a real need for our customers to bring Postgres to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.”
Jun 2

May 2025 34 posts

Using lots of little tools to aggressively reject the bots lambdacreate.com · “None of this was even scraping my blog, it was all targeting at generating tarballs of every single commit of every single publicly listed git repo in my gitea instance.”
May 31
Surprisingly Fast AI-Generated Kernels We Didn't Mean to Publish (Yet) crfm.stanford.edu · “FP32 is less common in modern ML workloads and often less optimized on recent hardware compared to FP16 or BF16, which may partly explain why it’s easier to achieve performance gains over PyTorch with FP32 kernels.”
May 30
Human coders are still better than LLMs antirez.com · “But, still: the current level of AI is useful, great too, but so incredibly behind human intelligence, and I want to remark this as lately it is impossible to have balanced conversations.”
May 29
Compiler Explorer and the Promise of URLs That Last Forever xania.org · “despite Google solemnly promising that “all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination,” it went read-only a few years back, and now they’re finally sunsetting it in August 2025.”
May 28
Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House jack.bio · “Honestly, I was more surprised that the silly logo I made (a very great representation, if I do say so myself) was what got me in trouble, and less so the scraping or reverse-engineering part.”
May 28
BGP handling bug causes widespread internet routing instability blog.benjojo.co.uk · “Juniper allowed it to propagate to peers, until it ultimately hit Arista devices that did not have (or contained faulty) BGP error tolerance code.”
May 27
OpenAI: Scaling PostgreSQL to the Next Level pixelstech.net · “At OpenAI, we utilize an unsharded architecture with one writer and multiple readers, demonstrating that PostgreSQL can scale gracefully under massive read loads.”
May 23
Important Changes are Coming to Glitch blog.glitch.com · “It takes a lot of time and money to run millions of apps, and that has greatly increased as the platform has gotten older and bad actors try to misuse the platform.”
May 22
Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out sfstandard.com · “Before the pandemic, new grads accounted for 15% of hires at Big Tech companies; now, the figure is 7%.”
May 22
The future of Flatpak lwn.net · “There are people who maintain the code base and fix security issues, for example, but “bigger changes are not really happening anymore”.”
May 22
[iOS][globalization] Implement CompareInfo.Version for hybrid globalization github.com · “There is no mandate for us to be trying out assigning issues to copilot like this. We’re always on the lookout for tools to help increase our effficiency.”
May 21
Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated deno.com · “It started in 25 regions, grew to 35, and now runs in 6. That reduction was driven by cost, yes - but also by usage.”
May 20
Fabric Is Just Plain Unreliable, and Microsoft's Hiding It. brentozar.com · “During last month’s 12+hour overnight outage, people were screaming on Reddit overnight that things were down, but the status dashboard was showing all green.”
May 19
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source blogs.windows.com · “This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo: Will this be Open Source? · Issue #1 · microsoft/WSL.”
May 19
The Lost Decade of Small Data? duckdb.org · “The hidden sensation is that we actually have numbers, this old computer could actually complete all benchmark queries using DuckDB!”
May 19
Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better domenic.me · “It turns out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his personal experiments.”
May 18
France Becomes First Government To Endorse UN Open Source Principles unite.un.org · “The UN Open Source Principles consist of eight guidelines that offer a framework for the use, development, and sharing of Open Source software across the Organization.”
May 18
Google Logo Ligature Bug jefftk.com · “Using a ligature to get the Google logo into text-only interfaces is a reasonable product decision, but it shouldn’t have been added to a general-purpose font.”
May 18
Databricks + Neon databricks.com · “As Neon became GA last year, they noticed an interesting stat: 30% of the databases were created by AI agents, not humans. When they looked at their stats again recently, the number went from 30% to over 80%.”
May 14
screen: Multiple Security Issues in Screen (mostly affecting release 5.0.0 and setuid-root installations) openwall.com · “It looks like it suffers from a lack of manpower and expertise, which is worrying for such a widespread open source utility.”
May 13
Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection theregister.com · “The issue is that small companies – like ours – have pretty much no recourse,” it added.
May 13
A community-led fork of Organic Maps comaps.app · “It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.”
May 12
Why Everyone Is Struggling To Create 'Software Defined Vehicles' insideevs.com · “None of the legacy automakers has solved this problem yet. All of them have thrown billions at it.”
May 11
Massive BART Outage Not Related to Old Train Control System, Agency Says kqed.org · “It was the largest systemwide BART outage since 2019, when a weekend service meltdown highlighted the need to replace the agency’s decades-old central train control system.”
May 9
Huawei introduces its first laptop running HarmonyOS rather than Windows liliputing.com · “While the operating system won’t support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that’s developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.”
May 9
Notes on rolling out Cursor and Claude Code ghiculescu.substack.com · “It’s easy to see a draft PR with all tests passing, including new tests full of comments, and not realise that the tests are garbage and the fix is wrong.”
May 8
Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports theregister.com · “We now ban every reporter instantly who submits reports we deem AI slop,” Stenberg added. “A threshold has been reached. We are effectively being DDoSed. If we could, we would charge them for this waste of our time.”
May 7
An Appeal to Apple from Anukari anukari.com · “It’s not a great look for Apple that a Windows PC with a pretty wimpy GPU can run Anukari just fine, and the most expensive Mac M4 Max stutters, because obviously Apple’s hardware is incredible and just needs to be let off the leash a bit.”
May 6
Memory-safe sudo to become the default in Ubuntu trifectatech.org · “May 6, 2025 – Ubuntu 25.10 is set to adopt sudo-rs by default.”
May 6
Google Gemini has the worst LLM API venki.dev · “And yet these models hide behind the poorest developer experience in the market.”
May 3
DuckDB is Probably the Most Important Geospatial Software of the Last Decade dbreunig.com · “Interest in “geospatial” (a term that functions well as a proxy for similar terms) declined and flatlined until late 2023 – right when DuckDB released their spatial extension.”
May 3
Third Party Cookies Must Be Removed w3ctag.github.io · “Third-party (AKA cross-site) cookies are harmful to the web, and must be removed from the web platform.”
May 2
Redis is open source again antirez.com · “The OSI wouldn’t accept it, nor would the software community regard the SSPL as an open license.”
May 1
Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup pcworld.com · “A cynic might wonder why Microsoft is making Office start when the computer boots instead of, you know, just making Office more efficient so it can run faster.”
May 1

April 2025 28 posts

JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant devclass.com · “The AI Assistant, first released in July 2023, has been downloaded over 22 million times but is rated only 2.3 out of 5.”
Apr 30
Future of OSL in Jeopardy osuosl.org · “Unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will shut down later this year.”
Apr 30
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4 jepsen.io · “We show that Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL multi-AZ clusters violate Snapshot Isolation, the strongest consistency model supported across all endpoints.”
Apr 29
README.md (ARCHIVED notice), fail0verflow/hbc (The Homebrew Channel) github.com · “This goes far beyond ignorance about the copyright implications of reverse engineering Nintendo binaries, and goes straight into outright deliberate, malicious code theft and copyright infringement.”
Apr 27
Petition to the Open Source Initiative: Publish the Full 2025 Election Results codeberg.org · “In 2025, OSI excluded all votes for three candidates before publishing results.”
Apr 25
Google Maps Doesn't Know How Street Addresses Work randomascii.wordpress.com · “I dutifully submitted feedback for “Wrong pin location or address”: And I got an email the next day saying that my edit was accepted: But it’s been 14 days and the address still maps incorrectly.”
Apr 25
Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks theregister.com · “Microsoft has forbidden the use of its extensions outside of its own software products since at least September 2020, when the current licensing terms were published.”
Apr 24
Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source: CNCF's commitment to the community cncf.io · “Synadia is attempting to convert a successful open source project into a closed, commercial product—and take the NATS community’s name, trust, and infrastructure with it.”
Apr 24
How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 silentsblog.com · “I want to make it clear: all these findings prove that the bug is NOT an issue with Windows 11 24H2, as things like the way the stack is used by internal WinAPI functions are not contractual and they may change at any time, with no prior notice.”
Apr 23
Getting Forked by Microsoft philiplaine.com · “Digging deeper I found test cases referencing Spegel and my previous employer, test cases that have been taken directly from my project.”
Apr 21
Data Centers Can Slash Power Needs With One Coding Tweak spectrum.ieee.org · “It is sort of a best case because the 30 percent applies to the network stack or communication part of it…”
Apr 21
15,000 lines of verified cryptography now in Python jonathan.protzenko.fr · “the (unverified) reference implementation of SHA3 was hit with a bad CVE in 2022, which Python “inherited”, because it vendored that very same SHA3 implementation.”
Apr 18
Issue with multiple Zoom Services (incident report) zoomstatus.com · “This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down the zoom.us domain.”
Apr 17
You cannot have our user's data sourcehut.org · “The serious costs and widespread performance issues and outages caused by reckless scrapers has been on everyone’s mind in the sysadmin community as of late, and has been the subject of much discussion online.”
Apr 15
LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything theregister.com · “In a recent study, researchers found that about 5.2 percent of package suggestions from commercial models didn’t exist, compared to 21.7 percent from open source or openly available models.”
Apr 12
Anubis works xeiaso.net · “Anubis has been deployed by the United Nations.”
Apr 12
Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility lwn.net · “Debian, for example, has been working toward reproducible builds for more than a decade; it can now produce official live CDs of the current stable release that are reproducible.”
Apr 11
PHP Core Security Audit Results thephp.foundation · “Due to budget constraints, the recent security audit focused on the most critical components of the PHP source code rather than the entire codebase.”
Apr 10
Arroyo is joining Cloudflare arroyo.dev · “The Arroyo Engine will remain open-source and self-hostable.”
Apr 10
Maintenance Notice (Whisky documentation) docs.getwhisky.app · “By contrast, Whisky is based on CrossOver, but we don’t produce any bespoke fixes. I, quite frankly, do not have the requisite skills or time to do so.”
Apr 9
Data centers contain 90% crap data gerrymcgovern.com · “The Cloud is what happens when the cost of storing data is less than the cost of figuring out what to do with the crap.”
Apr 6
rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia derflounder.wordpress.com · “Now with macOS Sequoia, Apple has replaced rsync 2.6.9 with openrsync, an implementation of rsync which is not using any version of the GPL open source license.”
Apr 6
Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Services blog.thunderbird.net · “Once we have a sufficiently strong base of paying users to sustainably support our services, we plan to introduce a limited free tier to the public.”
Apr 4
No, Gumroad Did Not Become Open Source Today danb.me · “The issue isn’t that the license exists, it’s that it’s misrepresented as open source.”
Apr 4
Anduril Industries' Electromagnetic Warfare Team is Hiring discourse.nixos.org · “To that end, the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse.”
Apr 4
Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad theregister.com · “Extra memory for the Altair could easily cost more than the computer itself,” recalled Gates.
Apr 3
In loving memory of Dave Täht libreqos.com · “Because of Dave’s persistence and advocacy, millions of devices worldwide now ship algorithms like FQ-CoDel by default, to smooth connectivity.”
Apr 1
The Atrocious State Of Binary Compatibility on Linux and How To Address It. jangafx.com · “In just the past two years, our team has encountered three separate GLIBC-specific compatibility issues, each directly impacting our products”
Apr 1

March 2025 29 posts

Windows 11 is not killing off hack that lets you bypass Microsoft account, but it takes more effort now windowslatest.com · “Removes script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account…”
Mar 29
Et tu, Grammarly? dbushell.com · “Grammarly broke my calculations and thus they broke my website.”
Mar 29
It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit world.hey.com · “We’re spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else.”
Mar 27
Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia reviews.ofb.biz · “Since the release of Sequoia last fall, one can no longer reliably cut or copy text from the Mac app.”
Mar 27
Google will develop Android OS entirely behind closed doors starting next week 9to5google.com · “This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished.”
Mar 26
Postmortem on Next.js Middleware bypass vercel.com · “Due to the old version range, this was given lower priority in our triage queue.”
Mar 25
FaunaDB shuts down but hints at open source future theregister.com · “In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently…”
Mar 24
Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth blog.cloudflare.com · “When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them.”
Mar 19
Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions - Fedora Pagure fenrisk.com · “It allows writing to arbitrary files, allowing the execution of arbitrary code on any Pagure instance.”
Mar 19
Memory safety for web fonts developer.chrome.com · “Merely keeping up with the stream of issues found by fuzzing costs Google at least 0.25 full time software engineers. Worse, we observably don’t find everything or find things only after the code has shipped to users.”
Mar 19
Cloudflare's infinite loop problem: developers claim they were forced to sign excessive non-disclosure agreements; Cloudflare responds gigazine.net · “Instead of continuing the discussions, Cloudflare sent Moonchild a form for what it called an ‘overly broad and general non-disclosure agreement (NDA).’”
Mar 18
Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default lwn.net · “This is not symbolic of any pointed move away from GNU components - it’s literally just about replacing coreutils with a more modern equivalent.”
Mar 18
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face drewdevault.com · “We are experiencing dozens of brief outages per week, and I have to review our mitigations several times per day to keep that number from getting any higher.”
Mar 17
Extracting content from an LCP "protected" ePub shkspr.mobi · “There’s no reverse engineering. No cracking of cryptographic secrets. No circumvention of any technical control.”
Mar 16
Google Being Forced To Sell Chrome is Not Good for the Web chriscoyier.net · “But still, a more direct line from problem to solution is forcing default search engine choice, not a forced sale of Chrome itself.”
Mar 15
Career advice in 2025. lethain.com · “Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago.”
Mar 15
Harden-Runner detection: tj-actions/changed-files action is compromised stepsecurity.io · “The compromised Action prints CI/CD secrets in GitHub Actions build logs.”
Mar 14
HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere httptoolkit.com · “Most notably, this means the next generation of web technology is being defined & built by one minority group, and the larger majority have effectively no way to access this technology right now.”
Mar 14
Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it + limit of 800 locs forum.cursor.com · “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work.”
Mar 13
In Praise of "Normal" Engineers spectrum.ieee.org · “Individual engineers don’t own software; engineering teams own software.”
Mar 13
A 10x Faster TypeScript devblogs.microsoft.com · “The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage.”
Mar 11
$16B health agency managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn't gone well theregister.com · “The use of an Excel spreadsheet file to track and report financial performance for a NZ$28bn expenditure organisation raises significant concerns, particularly when other more appropriate systems are present on the IT landscape.”
Mar 11
Google Just Removed uBlock Origin from the Chrome Store Today! supernetworks.org · “uBlock Origin is the best browser-based content blocker available on the web today. Sadly today Google just pulled the plug on it by enforcing their new v3 manifest.”
Mar 10
Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter blog.nelhage.com · “Unfortunately, as I will document in this post, these impressive performance gains turned out to be primarily due to inadvertently working around a regression in LLVM 19.”
Mar 10
[YouTube] DRM on ALL videos with `tv` (TVHTML5) client #12563 github.com · “We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.”
Mar 10
The Evolution of IT Operations and Opsgenie atlassian.com · “On this date, access to Opsgenie will be shut off, and the product will no longer accessible.”
Mar 6
Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress Battle Develops into a Nuclear War-Like Class Action Lawsuit gigazine.net · “Automattic intentionally disrupted WP Engine’s business by blocking access to WordPress.org’s critical services, thereby causing disruption, security risks, and economic harm.”
Mar 3
Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes simonwillison.net · “The moment you run LLM generated code, any hallucinated methods will be instantly obvious: you’ll get an error.”
Mar 2
Xcode constantly phones home lapcatsoftware.com · “And all of these connections from Xcode, to every domain, require login to your Apple Developer account, so Apple is definitely receiving identifying information about you in any case.”
Mar 1

February 2025 22 posts

Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud restofworld.org · “The payments to AWS gradually skyrocketed as the naira depreciated around 70% against the dollar between 2020 and 2024.”
Feb 27
Command & Conquer Red Alert (EA source release, GitHub) github.com · “The current state of the source code does not fully compile and will require some effort to restore it.”
Feb 27
VSCode extensions with 9 million installs pulled over security risks bleepingcomputer.com · “Microsoft removed both extensions from the VS Code marketplace and banned the developer.”
Feb 26
We're at a crossroads matrix.org · “So unless the Foundation manages to raise $100,000 of funding by the end of March 2025, we will have to focus our resources on the critical lines of work, and consequently we will have to shut down all the remaining bridges hosted by the Matrix.org Foundation.”
Feb 20
AWS S3 SDK breaks its compatible services xuanwo.io · “The recent AWS SDK bump introduced strong integrity checksums, and broke compatibility with many S3-compatible object storages (pre-2025 Minio, Vast, Dell EC etc).”
Feb 20
Valve Hands the Team Fortress 2 Source Code to Modders engadget.com · “Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible,” Valve explained.
Feb 19
searchcode.com's SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours boyter.org · “searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably one of the largest in the world, at least for a public facing website.”
Feb 17
"A calculator app? Anyone could make that." chadnauseam.com · “Floating point numbers are imprecise - they cannot represent 0.3 or 10^100.”
Feb 16
How I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs nyanpasu64.gitlab.io · “I traced this behavior to an amdgpu driver power/memory management bug, which took over a year to brainstorm and implement solutions for.”
Feb 16
We Were Wrong About GPUs fly.io · “The biggest problem: developers don’t want GPUs. They don’t even want AI/ML models. They want LLMs.”
Feb 14
Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead marcan.st · “Linux started out as a hobbyist project, but it has well and truly lost its hobbyist roots.”
Feb 13
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji paulbutler.org · “Variation selector sequences are a way to do this that survives most copy/pastes and allows arbitrary data density.”
Feb 13
Is NixOS truly reproducible? luj.fr · “Our most important finding is that the reproducibility rate in nixpkgs has increased steadily from 69% in 2017 to about 91% in April 2023.”
Feb 9
VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas fly.io · “Unlike Tramp, which lives off the land on the remote connection, VSCode mounts a full-scale invasion: it runs a Bash snippet stager that downloads an agent, including a binary installation of Node.”
Feb 8
We are destroying software antirez.com · “We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.”
Feb 8
Cloudflare incident on February 6, 2025 blog.cloudflare.com · “The incident occurred due to human error and insufficient validation safeguards during a routine abuse remediation for a report about a phishing site hosted on R2.”
Feb 7
Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer phoronix.com · “I no longer have any faith left in the kernel development process or community management approach.”
Feb 7
Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page theregister.com · “For the past three years, Microsoft documented a way to run Windows 11 on PCs that lack Trusted Platform Module 2.0 hardware – but that workaround has now disappeared from its help page.”
Feb 5
mt32-pi README github.com · “My mental health has been in decline as a direct result of this behavior; the joy of working on this project has pretty much gone. There is nothing to be gained from putting time and hard work into it any more.”
Feb 5
Freedesktop And Alpine Linux Looking For New Hosting hackaday.com · “Alpine is not a project you host lightly, with a monthly transfer of about 800TB.”
Feb 4
This is a public service announcement to never ever use Oracle mastodon.de · “I wasn’t told that my account was disabled. I didn’t receive an E-Mail or anything.”
Feb 1
Hell Is Overconfident Developers Writing Encryption Code soatok.blog · “Just because you outsource your block cipher implementations to your programming language’s crypto module doesn’t mean you’re not rolling your own crypto.”
Feb 1

January 2025 22 posts

Facebook ban distrowatch.com · “Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook’s internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being “cybersecurity threats”.”
Jan 27
'First AI software engineer' is bad at its job theregister.com · “Tasks that seemed straightforward often took days rather than hours, with Devin getting stuck in technical dead-ends or producing overly complex, unusable solutions,” the researchers explain in their report.
Jan 25
Updated: We Need To Talk About Docker Hub linuxserver.io · “We’re now 3 months on from our renewal submission, with zero communication from Docker, an account that is no longer part of the DSOS program, and no obvious way to speak to a human about it.”
Jan 24
C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us geldata.com · “And that’s how we ended up with a crash, caused by unsafe-free Rust code badly interacting with the use of libc elsewhere in the program.”
Jan 22
Why is Git Autocorrect too fast for Formula One drivers? blog.gitbutler.com · “This means that setting help.autocorrect to 1 logically means “wait 100ms (1 decisecond) before continuing”.”
Jan 19
Amazon's AI crawler is making my git server unstable xeiaso.net · “It’s futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more.”
Jan 18
Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search techcrunch.com · “That’s no small number at Google scale. Google processes around 8.5 billion searches per day, so one can assume that millions of people performing searches through Google aren’t using JavaScript.”
Jan 18
Scaling to millions of users requires Synapse Pro element.io · “However it is not remotely designed or intended for use by commercial Matrix hosting providers to serve huge nation-scale deployments such as public healthcare insurance companies, and it will fail when used at this scale.”
Jan 18
So You Want to Build Your Own Data Center blog.railway.com · “And not only is it rare that we understand why things break upstream, but also despite multi-million dollar annual spend, we get about as much support from them as you would spending $100.”
Jan 17
No billionaires at FOSDEM drewdevault.com · “Dorsey is presumably being platformed in Janson because his blockchain bullshit company is a main sponsor of FOSDEM this year.”
Jan 16
Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform theregister.com · “The CEO preferred not to enumerate the increase precisely however The Register understands it exceeded 500 percent.”
Jan 13
The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience surfingcomplexity.blog · “Rather, it was the system behavior that emerged from clients downloading the new version that led to the outage.”
Jan 12
Matt Mullenweg to deactivate WordPress contributor accounts over alleged fork plans techcrunch.com · “I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort,” Mullenweg wrote.
Jan 11
Oracle refuses to yield JavaScript trademark, Deno Land says infoworld.com · “Deno Land also accused Oracle of committing fraud in its trademark renewal efforts in 2019 by submitting screen captures of the website of JavaScript runtime Node.js, even though Node.js was not affiliated with Oracle.”
Jan 10
Quickwit joins Datadog quickwit.io · “We will be heads down building a new product with Datadog, so to ensure our open-source community can continue on, we will soon release a new version of Quickwit under the Apache License 2.0.”
Jan 9
VLC tops 6 billion downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles techcrunch.com · “VLC media player, the popular open source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system.”
Jan 9
'Browser extension that lets you earn money in exchange for watching ads' violates GPL by using uBlock Origin code gigazine.net · “Pie Adblock is not an open source project”
Jan 6
Hitting OKRs vs Doing Your Job jessitron.com · “Shipping features from the roadmap is a chunk of our core job. It shouldn’t usually be in our OKRs.”
Jan 6
One Dog v. the Windows 3.1 Graphics Stack wuffs.org · “Entering full-screen mode and then returning to the Windows GUI will leave you with a corrupted screen.”
Jan 4
Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”? minimaxir.com · “After benchmarking, the algorithm is extremely fast, resulting in about 6 milliseconds a run, or a 100x speedup.”
Jan 3
What we learned copying all the best code assistants blog.val.town · “Live by the fast follow; die by the fast follow.”
Jan 3
Databases in 2024: A Year in Review cs.cmu.edu · “In March 2024, Redis Ltd. announced they were switching from the system’s original (very permissive) BSD-3 license to a dual license comprising the proprietary Redis Source Available License and MongoDB’s SSPL.”
Jan 1

2024 289 posts

December 2024 23 posts

Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category pod.geraspora.de · “If you try to rate-limit them, they’ll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they’ll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really).”
Dec 30
Colliding with the SHA prefix of Linux's initial Git commit people.kernel.org · “Doing the 12-character prefix collision took about 6 hours on my OpenCL-enabled RTX 3080 GPU.”
Dec 30
4.5 Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Scams, and Malware arxiv.org · “the majority of fake stars are used to promote short-lived malware repositories masquerading as pirating software, game cheats, or cryptocurrency bots”
Dec 29
The Zombocom Problem newsletter.squishy.computer · “This is the Zombocom Problem: sure, it can be anything, but first it has to be something specific.”
Dec 29
Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus fishshell.com · “Over the 11 years fish used C++, only 17 people have at least 10 commits to the C++ code.”
Dec 28
Bill requiring US agencies to share custom source code with each other becomes law fedscoop.com · “Doing so, bill sponsors said, will address the inefficiency that can happen when agencies unknowingly hire contractors to develop code that has already been developed for another agency.”
Dec 26
Seconds Since the Epoch aphyr.com · “The POSIX time number is twenty-seven seconds lower.”
Dec 26
Cashing in on GIF by charging royalties dfarq.homeip.net · “On December 24, 1994, Compuserve and Unisys tried to give themselves a Christmas gift and make the Internet pay for it.”
Dec 26
Ruby 3.4.0 Released ruby-lang.org · “String literals in files without a frozen_string_literal comment now emit a deprecation warning when they are mutated.”
Dec 25
Open source projects drown in bad bug reports penned by AI theregister.com · “These reports appear at first glance to be potentially legitimate and thus require time to refute.”
Dec 24
Dec 22: Why we use our own hardware at Fastmail fastmail.com · “We find our hardware can provide useful life for anywhere from 5-10 years depending on what it is and when in the global technology cycle it was bought, meaning we can amortise and depreciate the cost of any hardware over many years.”
Dec 22
How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster avi.im · “They used a Bloom filter, which is very space efficient and fits in a CPU cache line.”
Dec 22
dropping hyper daniel.haxx.se · “There simply were no users asking for it and there were almost no developers interested or knowledgeable enough to work on it.”
Dec 21
Introducing S2 s2.dev · “Our Standard storage class provides end-to-end p99 latencies of under 500 milliseconds.”
Dec 21
GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot techcrunch.com · “Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access.”
Dec 19
ISO 8583: The language of credit cards increase.com · “As a result, these specifications still largely follow the rules set forth by the original standard from 1987.”
Dec 17
Supply-chain attack analysis: Ultralytics blog.pypi.org · “The second round of malicious releases came from the attacker using an unrevoked PyPI API token that was still available to the GitHub Actions workflow, potentially a hold-over from before the project adopted Trusted Publishing.”
Dec 16
You're a Mean One shirtpocket.com · “Since Apple took away the ability for 3rd parties (eg, us) to copy the OS, and took on the responsibility themselves, it’s been up to them to ensure this functionality continues to work.”
Dec 14
Fast LLM Inference From Scratch andrewkchan.dev · “With this patch, we’re now neck-and-neck with llama.cpp for long-context generations - at 58.7 tok/s vs. 58.8 tok/s - while handily beating it for short contexts at 63.8 tok/s vs. 61.0 tok/s.”
Dec 14
Court orders Automattic to restore WP Engine's access to WordPress.org techcrunch.com · “A California district court judge on Tuesday ruled that Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg must restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, a theme and plug-in repository owned by Mullenweg.”
Dec 11
"BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home aaka.sh · “BGP peering in a residential setting proved to be an entirely different story.”
Dec 7
Disclosure of the Metaserver CDN Source Code github.com · “This subtle, almost unnoticed modification effectively privatized the open-source repository by this individual, preventing any further open-source collaboration.”
Dec 6
First Router Designed Specifically For OpenWrt Released sfconservancy.org · “Priced at US$89 for a complete OpenWrt One with case, it’s ready for a wide variety of use cases.”
Dec 1

November 2024 26 posts

A transport protocol's view of Starlink blog.apnic.net · “Finally, within each 15-second satellite tracking interval, the latency variation is relatively high.”
Nov 30
Hetzner raises prices while significantly lowering bandwidth (US) adriano.fyi · “Bandwidth allotments are decreasing on average, across all products, 88.19% from previous allotments.”
Nov 28
Engineers Do Not Get To Make Startup Mistakes When They Build Ledgers news.alvaroduran.com · “Ledgers are systems that track down money.”
Nov 28
Cloudflare incident on November 14, 2024, resulting in lost logs blog.cloudflare.com · “During the roughly 3.5 hours that these services were impacted, about 55% of the logs we normally send to customers were not sent and were lost.”
Nov 27
Introducing some changes to our Web API developer.spotify.com · “Applications with existing extended mode Web API access that were relying on these endpoints remain unaffected by this change.”
Nov 27
Deno v. Oracle: Canceling the JavaScript Trademark deno.com · “Oracle neither controls nor has ever controlled the language’s specification or usage.”
Nov 25
Amazon S3 adds new functionality for conditional writes aws.amazon.com · “Amazon S3 can now perform conditional writes that evaluate if an object is unmodified before updating it.”
Nov 25
The two factions of C++ herecomesthemoon.net · “We must minimize the need to change existing code. For adoption in existing code, decades of experience has consistently shown that most customers with large code bases cannot and will not change even 1% of their lines of code in order to satisfy strictness rules, not even for safety reasons unless regulatory requirements compel them to do so.”
Nov 24
Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes macchaffee.com · “A standard config format, a deployment method, an overlay network, service discovery, immutable nodes, and an API server. Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes.”
Nov 24
Revisiting the DOS memory models blogsystem5.substack.com · “Huge: Uses huge pointers everywhere. This overcomes the limitations of the large model by emitting code to compute the absolute addresses of every memory access and allows structs and arrays that span over 64 KB of memory.”
Nov 23
Handling Cookies is a Minefield grayduck.mn · “Python invisibly aborts the loading of additional cookies inside SimpleCookie.load() as soon as it encounters one it doesn’t understand.”
Nov 21
Rust Foundation Releases Problem Statement on C++/Rust Interoperability foundation.rust-lang.org · “This “Interop Initiative” was launched in February 2024 with a generous $1M contribution from Google.”
Nov 19
We are shutting down Ondsel ondsel.com · “While we found support among independent and hobbyist users who genuinely wanted us to succeed, we failed to find commercial adoption to justify a venture-capitalized startup.”
Nov 18
Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? devblogs.microsoft.com · “A better option is to just write one version of Windows 95 setup and use it for all three starting points.”
Nov 17
M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS eclecticlight.co · “Running a macOS VM for any version before 13.4 Ventura on an M4 Mac results in a black screen, and the VM fails to boot.”
Nov 16
Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users openrss.org · “Cloudflare shouldn’t expect people to contact every owner of every Cloudflare website that blocks their RSS reader.”
Nov 15
I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and was Charged $1,100 elliott-king.github.io · “I hadn’t selected the most expensive OS instance type. I hadn’t even used it much at all.”
Nov 14
No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains blog.transitapp.com · “No tracking. No cookies. Your vibration data is your own damn business!”
Nov 13
Bufstream 0.1.0 jepsen.io · “Records written as a part of a committed transaction could vanish, never to be seen again.”
Nov 12
OpenID Connect specifications published as ISO standards self-issued.info · “This should foster even broader adoption of OpenID Connect”
Nov 10
How WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill recall.ai · “Chromium’s WebSocket implementation would fragment it into 24 separate WebSocket frames.”
Nov 7
Upcoming hardening in PHP dustri.org · “I find it fascinating that people are putting so much efforts optimizing exploitation techniques, yet ~nobody bothers fixing them, even if it only takes a couple of lines of code and 20 minutes.”
Nov 6
Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux kevinboone.me · “But this functionality is mostly not needed in an embedded application, so the additional complexity of systemd is a cost without a benefit.”
Nov 3
Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google data-center networking evolution cloud.google.com · “To put this data rate in perspective, this network could support a video call (@1.5 Mb/s) for all 8 billion people on Earth!”
Nov 3
Rewrite it in Rails dirkjonker.bearblog.dev · “After probably a good year of writing Rust and Svelte, it dawned on me that our users didn’t benefit from any of this.”
Nov 2
Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection railsatscale.com · “Ideally in a web application, aside from some in-memory caches, no object allocated as part of a request should survive longer than the request itself.”
Nov 2

October 2024 23 posts

Matt Mullenweg says Automattic is 'very short-staffed' amid WordPress vs. WP Engine drama techcrunch.com · “This second deal offered nine months of severance, but employees only had four hours to respond.”
Oct 31
How we shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size by 94% jonathancreamer.com · “The most recent clone I did of the repo clocked in at an astonishing 178GB.”
Oct 27
Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative ibis.wiki · “Ibis is still in a very early stage, but it has the potential to completely change the way online encyclopedias work.”
Oct 27
The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source theregister.com · “However, the EU still doesn’t have a clear definition of open source AI.”
Oct 26
Understanding Round Robin DNS hyperknot.com · “To my biggest surprise, Safari always selects the closest server correctly.”
Oct 26
Improve licensing language github.com · “Anything contained within a directory named bitwarden_license is covered solely by the BITWARDEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT LICENSE.”
Oct 24
against /tmp dotat.at · “It’s a bad idea because it’s shared global mutable state that crosses security boundaries.”
Oct 22
Discontinuing Syncthing Android forum.syncthing.net · “Reason is a combination of Google making Play publishing something between hard and impossible and no active maintenance.”
Oct 20
QUIC is not Quick Enough over Fast Internet arxiv.org · “We find that over fast Internet, the UDP+QUIC+HTTP/3 stack suffers a data rate reduction of up to 45.2% compared to the TCP+TLS+HTTP/2 counterpart.”
Oct 19
The long road to lazy preemption lwn.net · “There are hundreds of these calls in the kernel.”
Oct 19
Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years world.hey.com · “For 2024, we’ve brought the cloud bill down from the original $3.2 million/year run rate to $1.3 million.”
Oct 18
P3477R0: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte open-std.org · “C and C++ code targeting non-8-bit byte are incompatible dialects of C and C++.”
Oct 17
ACF has been hijacked anderegg.ca · “That Automattic would unilaterally decide to hijack such a popular plugin is completely insane. I’m not sure how this differs from a supply-chain attack.”
Oct 13
Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object simonwillison.net · “To ensure durability within that ten second window, writes are also forwarded to five replicas in separate nearby data centers as soon as they commit, and the write is only acknowledged once three of them have confirmed it.”
Oct 13
Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS androidauthority.com · “Google is developing the framework to let you run Debian in a virtual machine on your Android device.”
Oct 12
Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX blog.jreyesr.com · “The syntax of the Typst language is way closer to Markdown than it is to LaTeX.”
Oct 12
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain every.to · “In return for a 99-year lease for the military base, the islands will become part of Mauritius.”
Oct 9
End of the Road for Google Drive in Transmit blog.panic.com · “They promised a discounted minimum price, but no maximum price.”
Oct 8
A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase devblogs.microsoft.com · “In both examples, converting the string to uppercase causes the string to get longer.”
Oct 8
AI is an impediment to learning web development ben.page · “LLMs will obediently provide the solutions you ask for. If you’re missing fundamental understanding, you won’t be able to spot when your questions have gone off the rails.”
Oct 6
AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted! arnaud-carre.github.io · “A few years ago, I realized that this 8-bit value doesn’t have to be understood as just a set of logical operators. Instead, it’s fundamentally just a lookup table.”
Oct 6
Whence '\n'? rodarmor.com · “rustc is written in Rust and compiles itself, so somehow rustc is delegating to rustc to figure out what ‘\n’ means, which seems odd, to say the least, and we still haven’t seen the naked 0x0A byte we’re looking for.”
Oct 5
Automattic: WP Engine Term Sheet automattic.com · “Given WP Engine’s behavior, deception, and incompetence since September 20th these terms are no longer sufficient.”
Oct 2

September 2024 19 posts

The perils of transition to 64-bit time_t blogs.gentoo.org · “So what you actually may get is runtime breakage, potentially going as far as to create security issues.”
Sep 28
Everything you need to know about Python 3.13 – JIT and GIL went up the hill drew.silcock.dev · “The performance degradation when Python is built with free-threading support is significant – around 20%.”
Sep 28
WordPress.org bans WP Engine, blocks it from accessing its resources techcrunch.com · “As a result of this block, sites using WP Engine’s solutions cannot install plug-ins or update their themes.”
Sep 26
Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source security.googleblog.com · “Memory safety issues, which accounted for 76% of Android vulnerabilities in 2019, and are currently 24% in 2024, well below the 70% industry norm, and continuing to drop.”
Sep 25
Rearchitecting: Redis to SQLite wafris.org · “SQLite was roughly a 3x speed improvement over a locally deployed Redis instance.”
Sep 25
WP Engine is not WordPress wordpress.org · “WP Engine needs a trademark license to continue their business.”
Sep 22
Why wordfreq will not be updated github.com · “Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing.”
Sep 18
Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray theregister.com · “The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year’s survey.”
Sep 18
Warning: DNS encryption in Little Snitch 6.1 may occasionally fail obdev.at · “There appears to be a bug in macOS Sequoia causing some requests to bypass the installed DNS proxy and be sent unencrypted to the system’s default name server instead.”
Sep 18
The 6.11 kernel has been released lwn.net · “I’m once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it’s Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out.”
Sep 15
Why Scrum is Stressing You Out rethinkingsoftware.substack.com · “They are forever repeating, back-to-back deadlines.”
Sep 14
A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time blog.cloudflare.com · “To put that in perspective, the total cpu time consumed by pingora-origin is 40,000 compute-seconds per second.”
Sep 10
Passwords have problems, but passkeys have more world.hey.com · “Unfortunately, the user experience kinda sucked, so we ended up ripping it all out again.”
Sep 10
Revival Hijack supply-chain attack threatens 22,000 PyPI packages bleepingcomputer.com · “Three months later, JFrog noticed that the packages in their repository had close to 200,000 downloads from automated scripts and user mistypes.”
Sep 6
2M users but no money in the bank. Tough times exercism.org · “Right now, we have about 800 monthly donors and about $7,500 in monthly donations.”
Sep 6
Deploying Rust in Existing Firmware Codebases security.googleblog.com · “Memory unsafety is the leading cause of vulnerabilities in Android, Chrome, and many other code bases.”
Sep 5
Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question blog.jgc.org · “The expected value is $0.20 (calculated discretely using the code below).”
Sep 3
Extreme Pi Boot Optimization kittenlabs.de · “We reduced the energy required by a factor of 5 (compared to stock Debian at 9.5 Ws until user space).”
Sep 1
Honey, I shrunk {fmt}: bringing binary size to 14k and ditching the C++ runtime vitaut.net · “This reduces binary size to just 14kB:”
Sep 1

August 2024 20 posts

Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian jonathancarter.org · “As it stands now, bcachefs-tools is impossible to maintain in Debian stable.”
Aug 31
Elasticsearch Is Open Source. Again! elastic.co · “3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their fork, the market confusion has been (mostly) resolved, and our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever.”
Aug 29
How some Let's Encrypt renewal failures pointed to an AWS traffic hijacking issue chair6.net · “A BGP-based feature of the AWS Direct Connect service allowed a third party to inject an incorrect route for an external IP assigned to me, effectively hijacking my AWS-sourced traffic.”
Aug 28
Mono: Cross platform, open source .NET framework mono-project.com · “We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono / Mono · GitLab (winehq.org).”
Aug 27
SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL simonwillison.net · “I’ve now added a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> tag to the top of the HTML to keep this unverified AI slop out of their search index.”
Aug 25
What the fuck is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care mjg59.dreamwidth.org · “Microsoft’s stated intention was that Windows Update would only apply the SBAT update to systems that were Windows-only, and any dual-boot setups would instead be left vulnerable to attack until the installed distro updated its grub and shipped an SBAT update itself.”
Aug 22
Amazon Cloud CEO Predicts a Future Where Most Software Engineers Don't Code: and AI Does It Instead entrepreneur.com · “It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we’re going to try to go build because that’s going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code”
Aug 22
Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS allthingsdistributed.com · “We thought that just dropping SSDs in to replace HDDs would solve almost all of our problems, and it certainly did address the problems that came from the mechanics of hard drives. But what surprised us was that the system didn’t improve nearly as much as we had hoped and noisy neighbors weren’t automatically fixed.”
Aug 22
Accident Forgiveness fly.io · “The saving grace here, which you’ll learn if you ever become that $200,000 story, is that nobody pays those bills.”
Aug 21
Sourcegraph went dark eric-fritz.com · “Today, the sourcegraph/sourcegraph repository went private. This is the final cleaving blow, following many other smaller chops, on the culture that made Sourcegraph an attractive place to work.”
Aug 20
GitHub Vulnerability 'ArtiPACKED' Exposes Repositories to Potential Takeover thehackernews.com · “GitHub, for its part, has categorized the issue as informational, requiring that users take it upon themselves to secure their uploaded artifacts.”
Aug 16
Stripe's monorepo developer environment blog.nelhage.com · “The best tooling in the world will struggle to make up for “regularly losing a day debugging your environment,” and so getting that aspect right can easily outweigh almost any other decisions you make.”
Aug 15
The Days Are Long but the Years Are Short stevecoast.com · “OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all.”
Aug 11
Progress on porting Firefox discuss.haiku-os.org · “It is currently meaningless to talk about stability before solving Rust problems.”
Aug 11
How we migrated onto K8s in less than 12 months figma.com · “Migrating onto Kubernetes can take years.”
Aug 8
How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner drew.silcock.dev · “That’s because Postgres doesn’t bother actually deleting the data, it just marks the data as deleted.”
Aug 5
Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers, And They Don't Know What To Do About It viewfromthewing.com · “It is immensely difficult to find ways to add another digit to this field, and it’s really only a problem for three airlines in the world.”
Aug 4
How I Use "AI" nicholas.carlini.com · “And as a result of this, I would say I’m at least 50% faster at writing code for both my research projects and my side projects as a result of these models.”
Aug 4
Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason phoboslab.org · “I decided to polish my code, write extensive documentation for it and then released Impact. Not for free, but for a rather steep $99.”
Aug 4
"We ran out of columns": the best, worst codebase jimmyhmiller.github.io · “At one point we had 3 interns whose full-time job was writing these SQL statements.”
Aug 3

July 2024 27 posts

Our audit of Homebrew blog.trailofbits.com · “Local package management tools install and execute arbitrary third-party code by design and, as such, typically have informal and loosely defined boundaries between expected and unexpected code execution.”
Jul 30
Announcing Swift Homomorphic Encryption swift.org · “BFV is based on the ring learning with errors (RLWE) hardness problem, which is quantum resistant.”
Jul 30
After 10 Years, Yelp Gave My App 4 Days observationalhazard.com · “They sent the email on a Friday and wanted a response by Monday.”
Jul 29
Running One-man SaaS, 9 Years In blog.healthchecks.io · “Healthchecks.io currently has 652 paying customers, and the monthly recurring revenue is 14043 USD.”
Jul 29
Amazon's Exabyte-Scale Migration from Apache Spark to Ray on Amazon EC2 aws.amazon.com · “For BDT, this efficiency gain translates to an annual saving of over 220,000 years of EC2 vCPU computing time.”
Jul 29
A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes blog.davidv.dev · “Why are we generating a structured language (YAML), with a computer, by manually adding spaces to make the syntax valid?”
Jul 28
tolower() with AVX-512 dotat.at · “On Zen 4 it’s very fast, and the intrinsic functions are reasonably easy to use.”
Jul 28
Learning about PCI-e: Driver & DMA blog.davidv.dev · “Bus mastering is a feature which allows devices to directly manipulate system memory without involving the CPU.”
Jul 27
Unfashionably secure: why we use isolated VMs blog.thinkst.com · “In other words, we run a VM per customer.”
Jul 25
Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR): Content Configuration Update Impacting the Falcon Sensor and the Windows Operating System (BSOD) crowdstrike.com · “Due to a bug in the Content Validator, one of the two Template Instances passed validation despite containing problematic content data.”
Jul 24
Python grapples with Apple App Store rejections lwn.net · “The problem at hand is that Apple’s macOS App Store is automatically rejecting apps that contain the string “itms-services”.”
Jul 19
Google's goo.gl links will stop working in August 2025 9to5google.com · “On August 25, 2025, “these URLs will no longer return a response” (404).”
Jul 19
NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules developer.nvidia.com · “For cutting-edge platforms such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper or NVIDIA Blackwell, you must use the open-source GPU kernel modules. The proprietary drivers are unsupported on these platforms.”
Jul 17
Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content vincentschmalbach.com · “Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content.”
Jul 16
Attempting to stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email from me by adding a postfix header neilzone.co.uk · “If every feature required a specific header to signal that it is unwanted, that would get irritating rather rapidly.”
Jul 16
Building and scaling Notion's data lake notion.com · “Moving several large, crucial Postgres datasets (some of them tens of TB large) to data lake gave us a net savings of over a million dollars for 2022”
Jul 14
Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again lucvandonkersgoed.com · “By only talking about GenAI, they implicitly tell me databases are not important. Scalable infrastructure is not important. Maintainable applications are not important. Only GenAI is.”
Jul 13
Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas simonwillison.net · “If you have a project, an idea, a product feature, or anything else that you want other people to understand and have conversations about… give them something to link to!”
Jul 13
Binary secret scanning helped us prevent (what might have been) the worst supply chain attack you can imagine jfrog.com · “In our case, the user had admin access to the core repositories of Python’s infrastructure, including Python Software Foundation (PSF), PyPI, the Python language and CPython.”
Jul 12
How Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit quickwit.io · “Binance was retaining most logs for only a few days.”
Jul 11
PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights robertheaton.com · “Depending on network conditions on the plane I might be able to hit speeds of several bytes per second.”
Jul 9
Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 incident on June 27, 2024 blog.cloudflare.com · “This caused immediate unreachability for the DNS resolver address from over 300 networks in 70 countries”
Jul 8
I'm Funding Ladybird Because I Can't Fund Firefox jackkelly.name · ““Search partnerships” means “Google”, who made up 81% of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue in 2022.”
Jul 7
YouTube Embeds are Bananas Heavy and it's Fixable frontendmasters.com · “YouTube Embeds are like 1.3MB in size with no shared resources between multiple embeds.”
Jul 7
Properly Testing Concurrent Data Structures matklad.github.io · “it very much depends on the timing, so you can’t reproduce it deterministically and you can’t debug it.”
Jul 6
Why Vivaldi browser won't follow the current AI trend? vivaldi.com · “So, as we have seen, LLMs are essentially confident-sounding lying machines with a penchant to occasionally disclose private data or plagiarise existing work.”
Jul 5
CISA: Most critical open source projects not using memory safe code bleepingcomputer.com · “52% of critical open-source projects analyzed contain code written in memory-unsafe languages.”
Jul 1

June 2024 17 posts

A Eulogy for DevOps matduggan.com · “Money was (effectively) free so it was better to increase speed regardless of monthly bills.”
Jun 28
Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites sansec.io · “The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites.”
Jun 25
More Memory Safety for Let's Encrypt: Deploying ntpd-rs letsencrypt.org · “The CA software itself is written in memory safe Golang, but from our server operating systems to our network equipment, lack of memory safety routinely leads to vulnerabilities that need patching.”
Jun 24
My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore howtogeek.com · “More and more, I feel like Windows is just becoming a loss-leading front-end for Microsoft to sell its many software-as-a-service products.”
Jun 22
Andrew S. Tanenbaum receives ACM Software System Award vu.nl · “MINIX was also the basis for the MeikOS operating system for Meikotransputer-based computers and runs inside popular microchips.”
Jun 22
How free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life lwn.net · “It’s worth remembering that the effort needed to maintain a piece of successful software over its lifetime far outweighs the effort of writing it in the first place.”
Jun 20
How React 19 (Almost) Made the Internet Slower blog.codeminer42.com · “This is not the first time there’s been pushback from the community towards changes that are introduced to React without much regard to how React is used outside Meta and Vercel.”
Jun 18
How I Found A 55 Year Old Bug In The First Lunar Lander Game martincmartin.com · “Eventually I found a bug: a missing “divide by two” that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years.”
Jun 14
Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time theregister.com · “Oracle has started to dispatch Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time, according to one licensing expert.”
Jun 12
Apple blocks PC emulator from being available in iOS App Store and third-party app stores 9to5mac.com · “App Review rejected UTM, deciding that a “PC is not a console”.”
Jun 10
The censorship circumvention extension has disappeared from the Russian version of Mozilla Addons discourse.mozilla.org · “We have not changed any visibility settings, nor have we received any emails regarding this action.”
Jun 9
How a single ChatGPT mistake cost us $10,000+ asim.bearblog.dev · “We copy pasted the code it generated, saw everything worked fine, tried it in production, saw it also worked, and went on our merry way.”
Jun 9
OpenSSH introduces options to penalize undesirable behavior undeadly.org · “Repeated offenses by the same client address will accrue greater penalties, up to a configurable maximum.”
Jun 7
Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects theregister.com · “A study has found that software projects adopting Agile practices are 268 percent more likely to fail than those that do not.”
Jun 7
AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead research.google · “We observe that with AI-based suggestions, the code author increasingly becomes a reviewer, and it is important to find a balance between the cost of review and added value.”
Jun 6
PSA: Bartender Mac App Under New Ownership, But Lack of Transparency Raises Concerns macrumors.com · “In the Reddit thread, the owners claim to have posted information about the sale on the website, but that has turned out to be untrue.”
Jun 4
Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts pcworld.com · “Instead of skipping the account link, you’re led into a kind of continuous loop that doesn’t end until you have entered the correct email address.”
Jun 4

May 2024 23 posts

Engineering for Slow Internet brr.fyi · “It needed to load nearly 20 MB of Javascript, just to render the main screen!”
May 31
Google will roll out Chrome's new extension spec on June 3rd theverge.com · “The extensions will still work, but Google says it will disable them on your browser in the “coming months” before removing the ability to use them completely.”
May 31
Why, after 6 years, I'm over GraphQL bessey.dev · “Compare this to the REST world where generally speaking you would authorise every endpoint, a far smaller task.”
May 30
Finally an alternative to Big Tech, your new open-source mobile ecosystem - Mobifree f-droid.org · “Both app stores were built on tracking users to sell their data, thereby giving Apple and Google power over how citizens receive services from their own governments.”
May 28
Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4 blog.benjojo.co.uk · “These entities are now selling off (if they can) these blocks at prices 10,000+ USD per /24!”
May 27
Introducing adaptive audio in Google Meet: creating ad-hoc meeting spaces with multiple laptops workspaceupdates.googleblog.com · “This is a great benefit for organizations with not enough video conferencing rooms or without resources for dedicated conference room equipment.”
May 26
Abusing Go's infrastructure reverse.put.as · “Malware can simply store payloads and retrieve them from the proxy when needed.”
May 25
JetBrains releases RustRover IDE for Rust development infoworld.com · “RustRover is available through a paid commercial license or a free non-commercial license, the latter for individuals using RustRover for non-commercial purposes.”
May 25
S3 Is Showing Its Age materializedview.io · “S3 is the only object store that doesn’t support preconditions.”
May 22
A Transport Protocol's View of Starlink ispcol.potaroo.net · “The worst case in this data set is a shift from 30ms to 80ms.”
May 21
The curious case of the missing period tjaart.substack.com · “This meant some customers received emails informing them their new premium was now $2700 instead of $27.00.”
May 21
Migrating a Trillion Entries of Uber's Ledger Data from DynamoDB to LedgerStore uber.com · “At Uber’s scale, DynamoDB became expensive.”
May 20
Jepsen: Datomic Pro 1.0.7075 jepsen.io · “However, inside of a transaction Datomic behaves as if operations were evaluated concurrently.”
May 15
Oracle goes vegan: Dumps Terraform for OpenTofu thestack.technology · “In this release, we have switched from Terraform to OpenTofu due to forthcoming Terraform licensing changes”
May 15
The new APT 3.0 solver blog.jak-linux.org · “The most striking difference to the classic APT solver is that solver3 always keeps manually installed packages around, it never offers to remove them.”
May 14
Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes aws.amazon.com · “Amazon S3 will make a change so unauthorized requests that customers did not initiate are free of charge.”
May 13
Did GitHub Copilot really increase my productivity? trace.yshui.dev · “That being said, the answer to my question above is a very definite “no, I am more productive without it”.”
May 12
Thread - the tech we can't use or teach overengineer.dev · “Thread is very much neither free nor open.”
May 11
Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head github.com · “CORDIC is an algorithm for computing trig functions like sin, cos, tan etc on low powered hardware, without an FPU (i.e. no floating point) or expensive lookup tables.”
May 11
Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ theguardian.com · “While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund’s cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies.”
May 9
It's always TCP_NODELAY. Every damn time. brooker.co.za · “Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps that the whole concept is outmoded.”
May 9
Stack Overflow Upset Over Users Deleting Answers After OpenAI Partnership build5nines.com · “Posts that are potentially useful to others should not be removed except under extraordinary circumstances.”
May 8
Open Source Security (OpenSSF) and OpenJS Foundations Issue Alert for Social Engineering Takeovers of Open Source Projects openssf.org · “These social engineering attacks are exploiting the sense of duty that maintainers have with their project and community in order to manipulate them.”
May 5

April 2024 15 posts

Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conference techcrunch.com · “Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team”
Apr 30
Rope & SumTree zed.dev · “Currently there are over 20 uses of the SumTree in Zed.”
Apr 28
The server chose violence cliffle.com · “On Hubris, if you break a system call’s preconditions, your task is immediately destroyed with no opportunity to do anything else.”
Apr 27
Open Sourcing DOS 4 hanselman.com · “Jeff Wilcox and OSPO went to the Microsoft Archives, and while they were unable to find the full source code for MT-DOS, they did find MS DOS 4.00, which we’re releasing today”
Apr 25
IBM to Acquire HashiCorp, Inc. Creating a Comprehensive End-to-End Hybrid Cloud Platform newsroom.ibm.com · “The two companies also anticipate an acceleration of HashiCorp’s growth initiatives by leveraging IBM’s world-class go-to-market strategy, scale, and reach.”
Apr 24
The little smart home platform that could theverge.com · “I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we’re driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale.”
Apr 23
curl is just the hobby daniel.haxx.se · “I claim that every human being on the planet that is Internet-connected uses devices or services every day that run curl.”
Apr 22
Adventures In Rust: Bringing Exchange Support To Thunderbird blog.thunderbird.net · “Furthermore, in the entire 20 year lifetime of the Thunderbird project, no one has added support for a new mail protocol before.”
Apr 20
Redis is forked vickiboykis.com · “The old Redis was for developers. The new Redis is for enterprise sales, and for generative AI.”
Apr 16
Sandboxing All The Things with Flatpak and BubbleBox ralfj.de · “Unfortunately, Flatpaks can come with extremely liberal default profiles that make the sandbox mostly pointless.”
Apr 14
Major data center power failure (again): Cloudflare Code Orange tested blog.cloudflare.com · “Here’s a post we never thought we’d need to write: less than five months after one of our major data centers lost power, it happened again to the exact same data center.”
Apr 8
German State Ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice theregister.com · “Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions.”
Apr 8
The lifecycle of a code AI completion sourcegraph.com · “Here’s a number of improvements that we applied in order to reduce 75th percentile of end-to-end latencies for single line completion from 1.8 seconds to under 900 milliseconds over the past months”
Apr 7
v4.6.0: The end github.com · “Let me put it plain and simple: No! I don’t know you, I don’t trust you! Fork it and carry on!”
Apr 6
Timeline of the xz open source attack research.swtch.com · “It’s also good to keep in mind that this is an unpaid hobby project.”
Apr 2

March 2024 29 posts

About the Tailscale.com outage on March 7, 2024 tailscale.com · “We did not realize (and the alerts didn’t specify) that the configuration would prevent automatic certificate renewal from completing.”
Mar 30
Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser simonwillison.net · “There is no server component here, and nothing is uploaded. Your images and documents never leave your computer or phone.”
Mar 30
backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise openwall.com · “The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.”
Mar 29
The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL infisical.com · “With MongoDB, setting up transactions was not trivial because it required running MongoDB in cluster mode with various configuration overhead”
Mar 29
42.parquet: A Zip Bomb for the Big Data Age duckdb.org · “A 42 kB Parquet file can contain over 4 PB of data.”
Mar 28
Attack on Software Supply Chains Using Fake Python Infrastructure checkmarx.com · “This domain selection is a clever typosquat of the official Python mirror "files.pythonhosted.org," as the latter is where the official artifact files of PyPi packages are typically stored.”
Mar 27
On Tech Debt: My Rust Library is now a CDO lucumr.pocoo.org · “That’s because RUSTSEC is basically a rating agency and they decided that your debt is now junk.”
Mar 26
Who killed the network switch? cliffle.com · “Apparently random crashes that go away when you add some debugging code are the worst kind of crash, but that was the situation we were in”
Mar 25
Linux Crisis Tools brendangregg.com · “When you have an outage caused by a performance issue, you don’t want to lose precious time just to install the tools needed to diagnose it.”
Mar 24
Redis Adopts Dual Source-Available Licensing redis.com · “Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge.”
Mar 20
Introducing Garnet – an open-source, next-generation, faster cache-store for accelerating applications and services microsoft.com · “We use our own benchmarking tool, called Resp.benchmark, to generate all results.”
Mar 19
The Return of the Frame Pointers brendangregg.com · “The overhead of adding frame pointers to everything (libc and Java) was usually less than 1%, with one exception of 10%.”
Mar 17
How web bloat impacts users with slow devices danluu.com · “Between crashes, on measuring the performance, the responsiveness is significantly worse than browsing a BBS with an 8 MHz 286 and a 1200 baud modem.”
Mar 16
Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown netcraft.com · “A staggering 12.6 million domains on TLDs controlled by Freenom (.tk, .cf and .gq) have been shut down and no longer resolve, leading to a significant reduction in the number of websites hosted by Cloudflare.”
Mar 16
Retiring the Mozilla Location Service github.com · “In 2019, Skyhook Holdings, Inc contacted Mozilla and alleged that MLS infringed a number of its patents.”
Mar 16
Fuzzing Ladybird with tools from Google Project Zero awesomekling.substack.com · “Unsurprisingly, it took less than a second to find the first issue!”
Mar 16
After AWS and Google, Microsoft says it's removing Azure 'egress' data transfer fees: but with caveats techcrunch.com · “There is no flexibility here to support the multi-cloud needs of modern businesses.”
Mar 15
Introducing Sunlight, a CT implementation built for scalability, ease of operation, and reduced cost letsencrypt.org · “We previously had a test log fail when we ran into a 16TiB limit in MySQL.”
Mar 15
How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale figma.com · “Given our very aggressive growth rate, we had only months of runway remaining.”
Mar 14
JIT WireGuard fly.io · “We went from thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of stale WireGuard peers on a gateway to what rounds to none.”
Mar 13
S3 is files, but not a filesystem calpaterson.com · “When your SQLite database is kept in S3, each write suddenly becomes a total overwrite of the entire database.”
Mar 10
Perf is not enough motherduck.com · “No one at Google actually used the JDBC drivers, and while we ran full suites of benchmarks every night, those benchmarks didn’t actually reflect the end-to-end performance our users were seeing.”
Mar 10
Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS aws.amazon.com · “If you are moving off AWS, you can contact AWS Support to ask for free DTO rates under this program for the additional data.”
Mar 6
Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software: previously the prohibition was only listed in the online EULA, now included in installed files [Updated] tomshardware.com · “You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the output generated using SDK elements for the purpose of translating such output artifacts to target a non-NVIDIA platform.”
Mar 4
The hater’s guide to Kubernetes paulbutler.org · “A big key to this has been carving out a small chunk of Kubernetes’ features and pretending the rest don’t exist.”
Mar 3
The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 3.4s in nine solutions benhoyt.com · “Processing the input file in parallel provides a huge win over r1, taking the time from 1 minute 45 seconds to 22.6 seconds. For comparison, the previous “optimised non-parallel” version, solution 7, took 22.1 seconds.”
Mar 3
CSS for printing to paper voussoir.net · “From what I gather by experimentation, Chrome only follows the @page rule if you have Margin set to Default.”
Mar 3
K8s Service Meshes: The Bill Comes Due matduggan.com · “However, it’s 2024 and stuff that used to be free isn’t anymore. The free money train from VCs has ended and the bill has come due.”
Mar 2
How we applied advanced fuzzing techniques to cURL blog.trailofbits.com · “hsts.c, which provides functions for parsing and handling the Strict-Transport-Security response header, had only 4.46% line coverage, 18.75% function coverage, and 2.56% region coverage after over five years on OSS-Fuzz”
Mar 1

February 2024 26 posts

Financial systems take a holiday bitsaboutmoney.com · “Nonetheless, many financial systems do have availability which is far closer to five twos.”
Feb 29
After decades of memory-related software bugs, White House calls on industry to act therecord.media · “The report mentions C and C++ as examples of programming languages that lack “traits associated with memory safety and also have high proliferation across critical systems.””
Feb 28
Jensen Huang says kids shouldn't learn to code: they should leave it up to AI tomshardware.com · “It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program.”
Feb 27
How I turned my open-source project into a business blog.emailengine.app · “It turned out that smaller companies did not care about the license at all, and larger companies were not using it.”
Feb 27
Marginalia: 3 Years marginalia.nu · “The quest to reach 1B indexed documents is slowly ongoing.”
Feb 25
Quality is a hard sell in big tech pcloadletter.dev · “Microsoft could announce they put ChatGPT in a toaster and their stock price would jump $5/share.”
Feb 24
JavaScript Bloat in 2024 tonsky.me · “Google Mail is just (just!) 20 MB”
Feb 22
SSDs Have Become Ridiculously Fast, Except in the Cloud databasearchitects.blogspot.com · “AWS EC2 was an early NVMe pioneer, launching the i3 instance with 8 physically-attached NVMe SSDs in early 2017.”
Feb 20
wddbfs – Mount a sqlite database as a filesystem adamobeng.com · “It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records.”
Feb 18
Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta arxiv.org · “In an evaluation on Reels and Stories products for Instagram, 75% of TestGen-LLM’s test cases built correctly, 57% passed reliably, and 25% increased coverage.”
Feb 17
We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed zed.dev · “I mean, the ironic thing is that we created Electron to create Atom, but I can’t imagine a worse application for Electron than a code editor, I don’t know.”
Feb 17
uv: Python packaging in Rust astral.sh · “uv is an extremely fast Python package installer and resolver, written in Rust, and designed as a drop-in replacement for pip and pip-tools”
Feb 15
Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments theregister.com · “Notably, Web Monetization (WM) offers two unique features – small payments and no user interaction – that address several important scenarios currently unmet on the web.”
Feb 15
announcing freenginx.org mailman.nginx.org · “Unfortunately, some new non-technical management at F5 recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects.”
Feb 14
Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo techcrunch.com · “Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing "trustworthy AI into Firefox."”
Feb 14
Is something bugging you? antithesis.com · “In the entire history of the company, I think we only ever had one or two bugs reported by a customer.”
Feb 13
The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it? blog.jgc.org · “Converting this document from its original format was a bit of a victory for open source software. And a lesson in how hard document preservation is.”
Feb 13
2024: announcing the year of the OpenStreetMap vector maps blog.openstreetmap.org · “They get updated incrementally and constantly, a minute after you edit”
Feb 11
Building the DirectX shader compiler better than Microsoft? devlog.hexops.com · “If your shaders are not signed/validated, then they cannot run on a Windows machine unless it is running in Developer Mode.”
Feb 10
(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup cep.dev · “Since the database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by no one.”
Feb 9
Exclusive: Mozilla names new CEO as it doubles down on data privacy fortune.com · “Mozilla generates revenue through search partnerships, a majority of which come from Google.”
Feb 8
Meta cuts off third-party access to Facebook Groups, leaving developers and customers in disarray techcrunch.com · “I will lose seven years of work and over 10,000 customers,”
Feb 6
Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice research.mozilla.org · “Similarly, Microsoft recently pledged to stop some of the actions it takes to force Edge on users who have selected other browsers. Unfortunately, these changes only address a small number of the tactics outlined in this report. And, to make matters worse, they will only be deployed to users in the EEA.”
Feb 3
JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant prompts customer outcry theregister.com · “The problem with removing a bundled plugin is that it can break application signatures and cause problems with updates,”
Feb 3
Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code theregister.com · “We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond.”
Feb 3
We ran an experiment to see how easy it is to cheat with ChatGPT in interviews interviewing.io · “As it turns out, not a single interviewer mentioned concerns about any of the candidates cheating!”
Feb 1

January 2024 41 posts

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission theregister.com · “Nothing seems to turn it off.”
Jan 31
Helios: Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment. github.com · “Helios is a distribution of illumos powering the Oxide Rack.”
Jan 29
In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox tonsky.me · “Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition.”
Jan 28
I hacked a train toilet devever.net · “The problem with this design is that most people don’t understand state machines, and this design confused a lot of people who were unable to lock the door correctly, or believed they’d locked the door when they hadn’t.”
Jan 28
Proposed Top-Level Domain String for Private Use icann.org · “The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has made a provisional determination that “.INTERNAL” should be reserved for private-use and internal network applications.”
Jan 27
Portable EPUBs willcrichton.net · “These pros and cons can be traced back to one key fact: the PDF representation of a document is fundamentally unstructured.”
Jan 26
Zed is now open source zed.dev · “We’re never going to show you a banner ad in your code editor, and if we do, you can always build Zed from source.”
Jan 24
How we made an animated movie in 8kB ctrl-alt-test.fr · “Yes, 8 kilobytes, less than half of this post, for everything.”
Jan 24
Czech Republic sets IPv4 end date konecipv4.cz · “On the basis of this decision, the Czech state administration will stop providing its services over IPv4 on 6 June 2032.”
Jan 22
My Toddler Still Loves Planes, So I Upgraded Her Radar jacobbartlett.substack.com · “In my excitement to get 2.0 into production, I was a little sloppy, placing the password in User Defaults.”
Jan 22
Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL? blog.tidelift.com · “Vizio’s law firm makes about as much in a day as SFC makes from donations in a year.”
Jan 21
Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers bitbytebit.substack.com · “The more proxies you have between the developer and the customer, the less the product will meet customer needs.”
Jan 21
Dave Mills has passed away elists.isoc.org · “He was such an iconic element of the early Internet.”
Jan 19
How we migrated our PostgreSQL database with 11 seconds downtime gds.blog.gov.uk · “Our source database is about 400GB in size.”
Jan 18
How Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases read.engineerscodex.com · “Apple really does store billions of databases in their extreme multi-tenant architecture.”
Jan 17
Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99% bitsand.cloud · “Data transfer prices easily add up, and are an extremely high-margin source of profit for cloud providers”
Jan 15
Release History Of SQLite sqlite.org · “All JSON functions are rewritten to use a new internal parse tree format called JSONB.”
Jan 15
We're building a better PostHog community by closing our public Slack posthog.com · “However, with over 5,000 members in the community, it’s become clear we’ve outgrown Slack as a platform.”
Jan 14
Wal2 Mode Notes sqlite.org · “In wal2 mode, the system uses two wal files instead of one.”
Jan 14
When Random Isn't orlp.net · “This RNG is, for the lack of a better word, shite.”
Jan 14
A decade long Steam issue, is everyone just too fast for Valve? blog.freudenjmp.com · “No wonder the root cause hasn’t been found in so many years: it’s not a bug in the gameserver, it’s a bug in the game.”
Jan 13
Unity's Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC mfkl.github.io · “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies!”
Jan 12
Cloud switching just got easier: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud cloud.google.com · “This applies to all customers globally.”
Jan 11
Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for your email program mailgun.com · “Senders will have two days to implement unsubscribe requests.”
Jan 10
Python 3.13 gets a JIT tonybaloney.github.io · “The initial benchmarks show something of a 2-9% performance improvement.”
Jan 9
www.google.com - The page is blank when accessed github.com · “This is entirely server-side UA sniffing going wrong.”
Jan 9
OpenWrt One - celebrating 20 years of OpenWrt lwn.net · “Let’s celebrate this anniversary by launching our own first and fully upstream supported hardware design.”
Jan 9
Polars pola.rs · “Polars is written from the ground up with performance in mind.”
Jan 8
HTMX playground & examples lassebomh.github.io · “It will run a mock server that intercepts outgoing requests from HTMX.”
Jan 8
LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word eldritch.cafe · “Yep. Word can’t read files prior to 1994.”
Jan 7
PocketBase - Open Source backend in 1 file pocketbase.io · “Embedded performant database with schema builder, data validations, realtime subscriptions and easy to use REST api.”
Jan 7
Chromium Money Tree Browser lyra.horse · “The bug bounty reward gets divided between files, eg if a fix to a $1000 bug changed 5 files, each file gets $200”
Jan 6
When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 socket.dev · “This package, true to its name, depends on every other public npm package, creating millions of transitive dependencies.”
Jan 6
Do we think of git commits as diffs, snapshots, and/or histories? jvns.ca · “But as a strategy for teaching Git, it hasn’t been as successful as I’d hoped!”
Jan 6
What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong commandcenter.blogspot.com · “Our original goal was not to create a new programming language, it was to create a better way to write software.”
Jan 4
Why Are Tech Reporters Sleeping On The Biggest App Store Story? infrequently.org · “It has gone largely unreported that Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been held back by Apple and Google denying competing browsers access to essential APIs.”
Jan 4
iCloud Cleanup andykong.org · “Somehow, those 7GB of video took up way more space in the cloud than on my hard drive.”
Jan 4
The 3 budgets swizec.com · “Maintenance is always on the chopping block.”
Jan 3
The One Billion Row Challenge morling.dev · “All submissions will be evaluated by running the program on a Hetzner Cloud CCX33 instance (8 dedicated vCPU, 32 GB RAM).”
Jan 3
LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024 antirez.com · “LLMs are like stupid savants who know a lot of things.”
Jan 2
Dillo Website dillo-browser.github.io · “The domain dillo.org is no longer under control of Dillo developers.”
Jan 2

2023 275 posts

December 2023 20 posts

How I forked SteamOS for my living room PC iliana.fyi · “Every build of a Steam Deck image can be found at https://steamdeck-images.steamos.cloud/steamdeck/"
Dec 31
Why Android developers no longer need Windows USB drivers fabiensanglard.net · “If no driver can be found, Linux loads usbfs which lets user-space programs access the device. Mac OS does the same, with IOKit. Windows reports an error.”
Dec 30
Why I'm skeptical of low-code nick.scialli.me · “A lot of low-code solutions seem to hit about 80% of a company’s requirement.”
Dec 30
Gentoo goes Binary! gentoo.org · “There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker.”
Dec 29
What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it theregister.com · “The GPL is not acting the way the GPL should have done when one-third of all paid-for Linux systems are sold with a GPL circumvention. That’s RHEL.”
Dec 28
4 billion if statements andreasjhkarlsson.github.io · “Running this gives us a nice 40 GB file which contains all 4.2 billion comparisons needed to determine if any 32 bit number is even or odd!”
Dec 28
A data corruption bug in OpenZFS? despairlabs.com · “The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system.”
Dec 26
Ruby 3.3.0 Released ruby-lang.org · “Now more than 3x faster than the interpreter on Optcarrot!”
Dec 25
Costs of running a macOS app studio business notes.alinpanaitiu.com · “In the end, I get the equivalent of a $5800/month net salary.”
Dec 24
In 2023 Organic Maps got its first million users organicmaps.app · “It’s possible to do even more in 2024 if we get enough donations to scale the infrastructure, reward our contributors, or hire a full-time working team.”
Dec 23
Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34 jepsen.io · “In short: MySQL Repeatable Read transactions cannot safely read a value and then write it.”
Dec 19
Zero downtime Postgres upgrades knock.app · “Postgres 11.9 is being retired by Amazon’s RDS service on February 29, 2024.”
Dec 12
Please, Expose your RSS rknight.me · “I was surprised to find that a lot of people don’t have a link anywhere to their feed.”
Dec 10
pinning all system calls marc.info · “The ping(1) binary does not call execve(2) or fork(2). So now you can’t ever call fork() or execve() because there is no “syscall” instruction for those two system calls.”
Dec 9
15,000 Go Module Repositories on GitHub Vulnerable to Repojacking Attack thehackernews.com · “A third-party can’t reasonably register 15,000 GitHub accounts.”
Dec 6
Firefox on the brink? brycewray.com · “Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government’s visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don’t have to support Firefox anymore.”
Dec 5
Let's learn how modern JavaScript frameworks work by building one nolanlawson.com · “And asking developers to write the correct memo code is a losing battle.”
Dec 3
Not Everything Is Google's Fault (Just Most Things) blog.railway.com · “As it turns out, a Google engineer was able to arbitrarily change the quota on GCP.”
Dec 2
Buggy animation in Atlassian BitBucket is wasting half a CPU core at all times thehftguy.com · “The icon is a static SVG image that’s about 3 lines of text.”
Dec 1
Code is run more than read olano.dev · “Software designed by different people than the ones woken up at midnight when it breaks.”
Dec 1

November 2023 22 posts

xCurl daniel.haxx.se · “They have not been in touch or communicated about this work of theirs to anyone in the curl project.”
Nov 30
Microsoft opens sources ThreadX under MIT license theregister.com · “As soon as this innocent little OS turned 21 in 2019, Microsoft grabbed it, acquiring ThreadX owners Express Logic and rebranding the poor thing as Azure RTOS, which hasn’t done any favours for its brand awareness.”
Nov 28
Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files theregister.com · “The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023.”
Nov 27
$20k Bounty was Claimed! prettier.io · “On November 9th, we put up a $10k bounty for any project written in Rust that would pass 95% of Prettier test suite.”
Nov 27
Can no longer search code without being logged in. github.com · “This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.”
Nov 27
the curse of docker computer.rip · “One of the great sins of Docker is having normalized running software as root.”
Nov 26
Update on the rust port github.com · “Depending on how you count, we’re at anywhere between 60% (c++ sloc removed) and 74% (rust sloc vs c++ sloc) done.”
Nov 26
Darktable : crashing into the wall in slow-motion ansel.photos · “I’m full-time on it since 2018, for a monthly income between 800 and 900 €”
Nov 25
The MAUI team does not respond to issues with any urgency... THIS IS THE ISSUE!!! github.com · “I have reported issues as far back as Feb, 2022, and of as now, many of these reported issues remain unfixed.”
Nov 25
Reflecting on 18 years at Google ln.hixie.ch · “Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.”
Nov 22
It's Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated blog.miguelgrinberg.com · “These methods should have been designed to fail when a naive datetime object is passed to them”
Nov 19
Introducing graphics offload blog.gtk.org · “We are coming back from this adventure with some frustrations and some successes.”
Nov 18
Placemark is going open source and shutting down macwright.com · “I couldn’t find a way to make it work as a sustainable bootstrapped startup.”
Nov 13
How a kernel developer made my styluses work again on newer kernels! davidrevoy.com · “Both styluses of my XPPen Artist 24 Pro and XPPen Artist 16 Pro Gen2 styluses are now usable again on newer Linux kernels.”
Nov 12
Go, Containers, and the Linux Scheduler riverphillips.dev · “This means if you have a 16 core machine the Go runtime will create 16 OS threads - regardless of any CGroup CPU Limits.”
Nov 7
Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant lapcatsoftware.com · “Apple utilizes developers for vast amounts of unpaid QA labor.”
Nov 6
Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly blog.paavo.me · “In this example frame the game renders 13 sets of teeth, and their visual impact on the frame is zero: not a single pixel is affected.”
Nov 5
Post mortem on the Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics Outage blog.cloudflare.com · “the overnight shift consisted of security and an unaccompanied technician who had only been on the job for a week.”
Nov 4
Software that supports your body should always respect your freedom fsf.org · “We recommend that you disable automatic operating system updates on the smartphone using the mentioned apps.”
Nov 4
Source Code Downloads dunfield.themindfactory.com · “As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code to “stuff I’ve written” in the hopes that others may find it useful or maybe learn a few things.”
Nov 3
Increasing trust for embedded media android-developers.googleblog.com · “The new Android WebView Media Integrity API will give embedded media providers access to a tailored integrity response that contains a device and app integrity verdict so that they can ensure their streams are running in a safe and trusted environment”
Nov 2
How Bear does analytics with CSS herman.bearblog.dev · “I don’t think any bots hover and instead just use JS to interact with the page, so I can, with reasonable certainty, assume that this is a human reader.”
Nov 1

October 2023 20 posts

I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars ludic.mataroa.blog · “The computers are set to idle for 10 minutes after every query.”
Oct 30
X celebrates 60% savings from cloud exit world.hey.com · “Optimized our usage of cloud service providers and began doing much more on-prem. This shift has reduced our monthly cloud costs by 60%.”
Oct 30
Youtube’s Anti-adblock and uBlock Origin andadinosaur.com · “Since May, uBO has been in a cat-and-mouse game with YouTube. And they’ve shown incredible resilience, especially when you consider that there are only two people on the uBO team dealing with YouTube.”
Oct 29
NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal installation ISO successfully independently rebuilt discourse.nixos.org · “You may remember 2021 announcement that the minimal ISO was 100% reproducible. While back then we successfully tested that all packages that were needed to build the ISO were individually reproducible, actually rebuilding the ISO still introduced differences.”
Oct 29
Signed Windows Installer github.com · “Digicert seems to be our only option now but a certificate there would cost $629 (tax excluded) for a single year.”
Oct 29
Getting my library cards onto my phone the hard way iliana.fyi · “Our second interesting problem, which is a much worse, “oh no”-level problem: for some reason, passes are cryptographically signed, and they have to be signed with a key known to one of Apple’s certificate authorities.”
Oct 28
Lessons Learned from Twenty Years of Site Reliability Engineering sre.google · “Teams were expecting to be able to use Google Hangouts and Google Meet to manage the incident. But when 350M users were logged out of their devices and services… relying on these Google services was, in retrospect, kind of a bad call.”
Oct 27
The Cloud Computer oxide.computer · “we believe that cloud computers should come complete with all system software built-in, and with no additional licensing to manage or to pay for.”
Oct 26
The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop nngroup.com · “Due to the usability issues described above, dispersed websites appear to provide less, yet harder-to-access content. Some users feel that the company is hiding information and may lose trust in it.”
Oct 26
Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source daemonology.net · “The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920.”
Oct 25
The white furnace test lousodrome.net · “There are so many aspects of the implementation that can go wrong: the sampling distribution, the proper weighting of the samples, a mistake in the PDF, a pi or a 2 factor forgotten somewhere… Those errors tend to be subtle and can result in a render that still looks reasonable. Nothing looks more like a correct shading than a slightly incorrect one.”
Oct 22
Sippy helps you avoid egress fees while incrementally migrating data from S3 to R2 blog.cloudflare.com · “If the object is not found in R2, it will simultaneously be returned from your S3 bucket and copied to R2.”
Oct 15
Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux lock.cmpxchg8b.com · “He had kept tape backups from old BBS systems, and was able to recover a warez copy of the SDK – unbelievable!”
Oct 15
Removal of Mazda Connected Services integration home-assistant.io · “We’re also sad that Mazda’s first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead.”
Oct 13
Announcing Cloud Spanner price-performance updates cloud.google.com · “Spanner’s high throughput, virtually unlimited scale, single-digit millisecond latency, five 9s availability SLA, and strong external-consistency semantics are now available at half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB for most workloads.”
Oct 11
Engage a Wider Audience With ActivityPub on WordPress.com wordpress.com · “With a custom domain you can easily move your entire fediverse connection to any host at any time.”
Oct 11
Tell HN: Postman update removes all your stuff if you refuse to create account news.ycombinator.com · “Today when I opened the program it asked me to create an account. When I declined, it wiped all my collections and everything else.”
Oct 6
Cloud Costs Every Programmer Should Know vantage.sh · “For the first 10 TB that leave AWS, the rate is $0.09 per GB.”
Oct 6
1.1.1.1 lookup failures on October 4, 2023 blog.cloudflare.com · “On 4 October 2023 at 07:00 UTC, the DNSSEC signatures in the version of the root zone from 21 September expired.”
Oct 4
Mozilla and the burning need for clients for power users theregister.com · “So how come the original open source web browser is now, Statcounter estimates, under 3 percent? Mozilla, it seems to us, has missed a lot of opportunities, and continues to do so.”
Oct 1

September 2023 23 posts

WebGPU Technical Report chromium.googlesource.com · “Vulnerabilities in the SwiftShader JIT compiler aren’t being fixed in the SwiftShader codebase.”
Sep 28
How I got robbed of my first kernel contribution ariel-miculas.github.io · “That allowed the user (aka gdbserver) to write up to 256 bytes past the end of the array.”
Sep 27
Firefox 118.0, See All New Features, Updates and Fixes firefox.com · “Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine.”
Sep 26
Unity apologizes to devs, reveals updated Runtime Fee policy gamedeveloper.com · “The Unity Runtime Fee will no longer apply to games built on Unity Personal.”
Sep 25
The invisible problem jenson.org · “Every single person had problems with targeting, using the clipboard, and made lots and lots of errors.”
Sep 24
Choose Postgres queue technology adriano.fyi · “The cult of scalability would rather we build applications that scale beyond our wildest dreams than applications that meet concrete customer and business needs.”
Sep 24
ICloud Drive Silently Deletes Your Content dominikmayer.com · “Editors like Textifier, Xcode, or Obsidian, lacking conflict handling, leave iCloud to decide which version to store on your disk and in your backup.”
Sep 23
AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5 Billion toonk.io · “That’s 7.3 Million IPv4 addresses x $43.80, almost $320 Million a year. At 25% usage, that’s nearly $800 Million a year. And at 31% usage, that’s a billion dollars!”
Sep 19
Apple TV, now with more Tailscale tailscale.com · “This new feature could come in handy if you’re traveling with your Apple TV and want to access the same geo-restricted channels you can see from home.”
Sep 18
Bounties Damage Open Source Projects ziglang.org · “Instead of creating a clear contract where you take on some of the risk, you implicitly put the entirety of the risk on the contestants (eg partial solutions don’t get any payout).”
Sep 17
Large Language Models for Compiler Optimization arxiv.org · “Our approach achieves a 3.0% improvement in reducing instruction counts over the compiler, outperforming two state-of-the-art baselines that require thousands of compilations.”
Sep 17
How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers read.engineerscodex.com · “Instagram scaled from 0 to 14 million users in just over a year, from October 2010 to December 2011. They did this with only 3 engineers.”
Sep 16
The Death of Unity gamedeveloper.com · “We did the itch.io bundle for ukraine. That was approximately a million games given out per developer. If all those were installed, developers would owe $200,000 just for having given their game to charity.”
Sep 12
We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed. Here's what we learned earthly.dev · “We ended up with the most ridiculous negative qualification criteria I have ever heard of: if the prospect requires a demo, then they’re not worth going after.”
Sep 12
UK air traffic control meltdown jameshaydon.github.io · “Therefore, on taking over the duties of the primary server, the backup system applied the same logic to the flight plan with the same result.”
Sep 11
Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users ctrl.blog · “Despite not having implemented the changes everyone assumed it had, it has received lots of positive press attention for doing the right thing.”
Sep 11
how does linux nat a ping? devnonsense.com · “ICMP is a very, very old protocol. It is defined in RFC 792, which was published in 1981.”
Sep 10
I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race steele.blue · “As I left the geofence, I got a push notification on my watch saying that the pizza had been successfully ordered.”
Sep 10
Meet the Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port at a Time 404media.co · “Sometimes, official versions of those games on Steam are actually cracked versions, because the piracy community does a better job of maintaining them than one of the biggest video game publishers in the world.”
Sep 9
Android 14 blocks modification of system certificates, even as root httptoolkit.com · “In this new release, the restrictions around certificate authority (CA) certificates become significantly tighter, and appear to make it impossible to modify the set of trusted certificates at all, even on fully rooted devices.”
Sep 8
Mullvad on Tailscale: Privately browse the web tailscale.com · “It’s not true anonymity, because that’s a problem Tailscale is not trying to solve.”
Sep 7
The Worst Programmer I Know dannorth.net · “Tim’s score was consistently zero. Zero! Not just low, or trending downwards, but literally zero.”
Sep 2
Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows after 28 years bleepingcomputer.com · “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”
Sep 2

August 2023 18 posts

Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul 9to5mac.com · “Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud.”
Aug 31
Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google theverge.com · “It’s quite literally a rogue executable file that has somehow appeared in c:\windows\temp\mubstemp and is digitally signed by Microsoft.”
Aug 30
Grave flaws in BGP Error handling blog.benjojo.co.uk · “As such, customers that have chosen to not require or implement RFC 7606 have done so willingly and with knowledge of what is needed to defend against these types of attacks.”
Aug 29
Elixir Saves Pinterest $2 Million a Year In Server Costs paraxial.io · “The combined effect of better architecture and Elixir saved Pinterest over $2 million per year in server costs.”
Aug 29
Block YouTube Ads on AppleTV by Decrypting and Stripping Ads from Profobuf ericdraken.com · “And how easy would it be to change a 49399797 field key to, say, 49399796, making an entire sub-structure of advertisement and tracking information suddenly unavailable?”
Aug 27
Slack's Migration to a Cellular Architecture slack.engineering · “Slack operates a global, multi-regional edge network, but most of our core computational infrastructure resides in multiple Availability Zones within a single region, us-east-1.”
Aug 26
E-ink is so Retropunk rmkit.dev · “Unfortunately, the shim needs to be updated for every release to give it the correct binary addresses to hook.”
Aug 26
The first conformant M1 GPU driver rosenzweig.io · “Unlike ours, the manufacturer’s M1 drivers are unfortunately not conformant for any standard graphics API, whether Vulkan or OpenGL or OpenGL ES.”
Aug 22
macOS updates for Apple silicon Macs are larger than reported eclecticlight.co · “However, there’s a second component that is only downloaded by Apple silicon Macs, which is generally about 1.1 GB in size, bringing the total size to be downloaded to about 1.8 GB.”
Aug 20
Debian turns 30 – and important to Linux world as ever theregister.com · “Red Hat sold for $34 billion, but that money represents about 1 percent of Linux usage. Debian and its offspring have 50 times as many users as RHEL.”
Aug 20
Welcome to Datasette Cloud datasette.cloud · “Pricing! We want you to be able to pay for the product, so you can feel confident in its sustainable future and we can get paid to keep working on it.”
Aug 20
I Created the Nerdiest Game Ever plbrault.com · “Over time, idle processes go through six starvation levels represented by colours and emojis. If a process spends too much time in the last starvation level, the user becomes impatient and kills it.”
Aug 13
Exploring the internals of Linux v0.01 seiya.me · “It consisted of only 10,239 lines of code.”
Aug 12
Insights into Stack Overflow's traffic stackoverflow.blog · “This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.”
Aug 9
Why does libvirt support only 14 hot-plugged PCIe devices on x86-64? dottedmag.net · “Thus, the maximum total number of PCIe slots in any PC is 16 (= 65536/4096).”
Aug 6
Just normal web things. heather-buchel.com · “This is that dreaded thing that us front-end folks are always harping on about: using a div with an on-click to navigate instead of an anchor element.”
Aug 5
Introducing code referencing for GitHub Copilot github.blog · “First, our previous research suggests that matches occur in less than one percent of GitHub Copilot suggestions. But that one percent isn’t evenly distributed across all use cases.”
Aug 4
Dear Websites, Stop Asking for "Ransom" Sign-Ups. iamvishnu.com · “It showed all the “processing” animations for a couple of seconds. While I was waiting for the SVGs, it opened a new page asking me to sign up to download the generated SVG files.”
Aug 1

July 2023 23 posts

New – AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge + Public IP Insights aws.amazon.com · “Effective February 1, 2024 there will be a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether attached to a service or not”
Jul 31
Free Public WiFi computer.rip · “if a Windows XP machine had an ad-hoc network favorited (which would be default if it had ever connected to one), then when it wasn’t connected to any other WiFi network, it would beacon the favorited ad-hoc network to make it easier for other hosts to connect.”
Jul 31
A Steering Council notice about PEP 703 (Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython) discuss.python.org · “We do not want another Python 3 situation, so any changes in third-party code needed to accommodate no-GIL builds should just work in with-GIL builds (although backward compatibility with older Python versions will still need to be addressed). This is not Python 4.”
Jul 29
What happened to Vivaldi Social? thomasp.vivaldi.net · “And it just so happens that all local accounts in a Mastodon instance have a null value in their URI field, so they all matched.”
Jul 29
Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 allthingsdistributed.com · “Today, we have tens of thousands of customers with S3 buckets that are spread across millions of drives.”
Jul 27
2023-07-02 -- 2023-07-03 Tarsnap outage post-mortem mail.tarsnap.com · “Unfortunately while I had tests for this, I never tested regenerating the server state after a machine is “re-owned” while having data stored”
Jul 27
Stack Overflow’s CEO doesn’t understand Stack Overflow jlericson.com · “Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023.”
Jul 27
[wei] Ensure Origin Trial enables full feature github.com · “An origin trial can enable the RuntimeFeature, which will allow full access to the API, provided the base::Feature is also enabled (see change to origin_trial_context.cc).”
Jul 26
mold 2.0.0 github.com · “Unfortunately, this approach didn’t meet our expectations. The license change represents our acceptance of this reality.”
Jul 26
Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed httptoolkit.com · “Fundamentally though, it’s exactly the same concept: a way that web servers can demand your device prove it is a sufficiently ’legitimate’ device before browsing the web.”
Jul 25
Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common evanjones.ca · “The answer is: very often, like 5% of all samples, when reading the clock on all 4 physical cores at the same time.”
Jul 21
Discord is not documentation shkspr.mobi · “There’s no API documentation - I have to scroll through a million messages to find anything.”
Jul 16
PostgreSQL: No More VACUUM, No More Bloat orioledb.com · “With the PostgreSQL heap engine, the update of a single indexed field disables HOT, so all indexes get updated.”
Jul 15
The Problem With LangChain minimaxir.com · “The problem with LangChain is that it makes simple things relatively complex, and with that unnecessary complexity creates a tribalism which hurts the up-and-coming AI ecosystem as a whole.”
Jul 14
SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment suse.com · “Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project.”
Jul 11
Why We Replaced Firecracker with QEMU hocus.dev · “After running several workloads inside, you end up with an idling VM that consumes 32 GB of RAM on the host, even though it doesn’t need any of it.”
Jul 10
Getting weird results from GCP europe-west1 community.influxdata.com · “Same here. All my buckets just got deleted.”
Jul 9
A fast, free threading Python discuss.python.org · “If PEP 703 is accepted, Meta can commit to support in the form of three engineer-years (from engineers experienced working in CPython internals) between the acceptance of PEP 703 and the end of 2025, to collaborate with the core dev team on landing the PEP 703 implementation smoothly in CPython and on ongoing improvements to the compatibility and performance of nogil CPython.”
Jul 8
Firefox 115 can silently remotely disable my extension on any site lapcatsoftware.com · “And remember, the quarantined domains list can be changed remotely at any time by Mozilla, without needing a Firefox software update.”
Jul 5
Open source with profanity in comments is statistically better than code without it blog.desdelinux.net · “This means that swearing will not automatically improve the quality of your code.”
Jul 4
Ericsson to WhatsApp : The Story of Erlang thechipletter.substack.com · “Then suddenly, in 1998, Erlang was banned within the Ericsson. The reason? To avoid the costs of development of a language that was unique to Ericsson, and instead to access the shared effort being put into the development of other languages.”
Jul 2
Twitter Is DDOSing Itself sfba.social · “Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.”
Jul 1
wazero: the zero dependency WebAssembly runtime for Go developers wazero.io · “By avoiding CGO, wazero avoids prerequisites such as shared libraries or libc, and lets you keep features like cross compilation.”
Jul 1

June 2023 17 posts

Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans androidauthority.com · “This app is not actively supported and the source is only available as a reference. This project will be removed from the source manifest sometime in the future.”
Jun 29
We Raised A Bunch Of Money fly.io · “If you want to get people to build apps on your platform, you need a shot at being around 10 years from now. Hardware is what makes the margins work.”
Jun 28
Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1 blog.jonlu.ca · “If you have users in Sydney, Australia, any network request you make will need to travel 15,677km to make it there, as the crow flies.”
Jun 28
I'm done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux) jeffgeerling.com · “Let there be no mistake: this was meant to destroy the distributions the community built to replace what Red Hat took away.”
Jun 26
Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located utcc.utoronto.ca · “if a program uses a configuration file (or several), it should have an obvious command line way to find out where it expects to find that configuration file.”
Jun 25
Monitoring is a Pain matduggan.com · “My experience is companies do not anticipate that the cost of monitoring an application can easily exceed the cost of hosting the application even for simple applications.”
Jun 25
PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model lwn.net · “According to Konstantin Knizhnik, there are about 2,000 such variables currently used by the PostgreSQL server.”
Jun 19
Goodbye, Twilio blog.miguelgrinberg.com · “The new Twilio wants to help companies collect, use and even make up customer data, all with the goal to drive more sales.”
Jun 18
Merging bcachefs lwn.net · “One concern is that once bcachefs gets merged, it will be difficult for anyone besides Overstreet to deal with the bug reports, Amir Goldstein said.”
Jun 17
The performance review of Hetzner's CAX-line ARM64 servers and the practical experience of WebP Cloud Services on them. blog.webp.se · “Due to the impressive performance of ARM64 in testing, we have migrated all WebP Cloud Services to Hetzner’s ARM64 servers.”
Jun 17
11 years of hosting a SaaS ghiculescu.substack.com · “He basically convinced me that paying for Heroku was like setting money on fire. He was a lovely guy, and I really appreciated his help at the time, but 10 years later I can honestly say this was awful advice (the buck stops with me for listening to it).”
Jun 15
I booted Linux 292,612 times rwmj.wordpress.com · “To prove it I booted Linux 292,612 times before the faulty commit (successfully), and then after (failed after under 1,000 boots).”
Jun 14
Rewriting the Ruby parser railsatscale.com · “In the 25 years that the parser has existed, only 65 people have contributed to it, and only 13 of those have contributed more than 10 commits.”
Jun 13
Debian 12 "bookworm" released debian.org · “Following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware, we have introduced a new archive area making it possible to separate non-free firmware from the other non-free packages: non-free-firmware”
Jun 10
Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning nature.com · “We reverse engineered the low-level assembly sorting algorithms discovered by AlphaDev for sort 3, sort 4 and sort 5 to C++ and discovered that our sort implementations led to improvements of up to 70% for sequences of a length of five and roughly 1.7% for sequences exceeding 250,000 elements.”
Jun 7
The NixOS Foundation's Call to Action: S3 Costs Require Community Support discourse.nixos.org · “Keeping the bucket as it is and paying it in full ($9k/month at the moment, steadily rising as the cache keeps growing)”
Jun 3
How Much Are GitHub Stars Worth to You? the-guild.dev · “And so it costed me 20 Euros for 25 stars which is €0.8/star, it’s expensive (not if you deduct it from your taxes), but I’m gonna show you how they look like in a minute.”
Jun 1

May 2023 25 posts

When LIMIT 9 works but LIMIT 10 hangs neon.tech · “Buffer.allocUnsafe() also reserves the right to allocate small buffers as sub-arrays of a global pool it keeps lying around for the purpose.”
May 31
Email addresses are not primary user identities ntietz.com · “Notion, Slack, all these systems, when you log in via SAML they use your email address as your primary identifier.”
May 30
Let us serve you, but don't bring us down blog.archive.org · “Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services.”
May 29
The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person daniel.haxx.se · “I strongly suspect that many existing Gemini clients avoid this huge mess by simply not verifying the server certificates at all or by just storing the certificates temporarily in memory.”
May 28
All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs honeycomb.io · “A 90% accurate process repeated 5 times is (0.90.90.90.90.9), or 0.59, 59% accurate.”
May 27
Building a Personal VoIP System sacredheartsc.com · “SIP was initially released in 1999, and was designed with the assumption that each device has its own globally routable public IP address.”
May 27
Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page bugzilla.mozilla.org · “Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back yesterday.”
May 25
PyPI was subpoenaed blog.pypi.org · “In this case, however, PSF determined with the advice of counsel that our only course of action was to provide the requested data.”
May 24
SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes xorvoid.com · “SectorC (github) is a C compiler written in x86-16 assembly that fits within the 512 byte boot sector of an x86 machine.”
May 24
VSCode Security: Malicious Extensions Detected- More Than 45,000 Downloads- PII Exposed, and Backdoors Enabled blog.checkpoint.com · “While the extension was supposed to be a simple theme configuration (no code should be included), it had a simple PII stealer code”
May 22
The end of the accounting search lwn.net · “More recently, Intuit has discontinued support for the desktop version entirely in an effort to force all users to its online, paid-by-the-month service.”
May 21
How Much Memory Do You Need to Run 1 Million Concurrent Tasks? pkolaczk.github.io · “Goroutines are supposed to be very lightweight, but they actually consumed more than 50% of RAM required by Rust threads.”
May 21
The long life of Apache httpd 2.4 utcc.utoronto.ca · “The first 2.4 release was made in early 2012 (per Wikipedia), and despite being that old, 2.4 remains the current version of the Apache web server”
May 20
Migrating from Supabase blog.val.town · “After a bit of sleuthing, it ended up that Supabase was taking a database backup that took the database fully offline every night, at midnight.”
May 19
Another issue with the Cyber Resilience Act: European standards bodies are inaccessible to Open Source projects blog.opensource.org · “EU policy experts say not to worry about CRA compliance because the EU standards bodies will streamline it. But the European Standardisation Organizations (ESO) are corporate-controlled, patent-loving and expensive to engage.”
May 18
Diving into a hidden macOS tool - networkQuality cyberhost.uk · “The networkQuality tool is a built-in tool released in macOS Monterey that can help diagnose network issues and measure network performance.”
May 14
First Rust Code Shows Up in the Windows 11 Kernel thurrott.com · “If you’re on the Win11 Insider ring, you’re getting the first taste of Rust in the Windows kernel,”
May 13
How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows mihai.fm · “Right click anywhere in Windows Explorer and press Undo Copy. You can’t miss it, it’s right above the "New" option:”
May 13
Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Coinbase had an incredible 2021 and did not have to care about costs.”
May 12
Stack Overflow is ChatGPT Casualty: Traffic Down 14% in March similarweb.com · “On a year-over-year basis, traffic to Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com) has been down by an average of 6% every month since January 2022 and was down 13.9% in March.”
May 11
Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive? jack-vanlightly.com · “This is why write-amplification of sequential IO loads is close to 1 but random IO is typically much higher.”
May 10
Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report blog.thunderbird.net · “Last year, our mighty donor base – representing approximately 300,000 daily users – contributed a total of $6,442,704 in donations to the Thunderbird project.”
May 9
Farewell to the Era of Cheap EC2 Spot Instances pauley.me · “Since the start of 2023, spot ratios have spiked as much as 55% (in us-east-1 ).”
May 8
Training a SOTA Code LLM in 1 week and Quantifying the Vibes: with Reza Shabani of Replit latent.space · “It’s been trained on 525 billion tokens of, of code all permissively licensed code.”
May 3
Investigating Linux Phantom Disk Reads questdb.io · “Here we have 10-70MB/s for disk writes while reads are as high as 40-50MB/s.”
May 2

April 2023 31 posts

My favorite C compiler flags during development nullprogram.com · “If you come across such a project, there’s a good chance you can find bugs statically just by using this baseline.”
Apr 30
Remove "This incident will be reported." from user warnings. github.com · “It is also confusing to the user since they will not know who the incident is being reported to.”
Apr 29
Sensenmann: Code Deletion at Scale testing.googleblog.com · “It submits over 1000 deletion changelists per week, and has so far deleted nearly 5% of all C++ at Google.”
Apr 29
Is Gmail killing independent email? tuta.com · “Those blue dots show over 3,500 Gmail customers having the booking confirmation email they asked for delayed by up to 12 hours.”
Apr 28
Datomic is Free blog.datomic.com · “Is it Open Source? No. Datomic binaries are provided under the Apache 2 license which grants all the same rights to a work delivered in object form.”
Apr 27
deleting system32\curl.exe daniel.haxx.se · “The people who deleted or replaced the curl executable noticed that they cannot upgrade because the Windows update procedure detects that the Windows install has been tampered with and it refuses to continue.”
Apr 24
Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update gamingonlinux.com · “Unfortunately this block was intentional. With the Windows 64-bit client launch we made the conscious decision to block the use of Wine.”
Apr 23
GitHub Copilot Emits GPL. Codeium Does Not. codeium.com · “It seems like the current GitHub Copilot non-permissive license filters are doing a somewhat exact match for the previous 150 characters or so of (generated code + code before cursor), and fully suppressing any matches.”
Apr 21
Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250+ GB video game downloads richg42.blogspot.com · “Who cares about shaving off a few hundred ms (or a second) when it takes hours or days to download the product onto the SSD?”
Apr 21
Introducing npm package provenance github.blog · “Attacks like these are seldom carried out by compromising the source code directly, but are more often the result of compromised credentials that are then used to publish a malicious version.”
Apr 20
You didn't just do that, Heroku thebiglog.com · “Heroku has been running a 2nd copy of my scheduler instance since April 6, 2023 and I have zero control over it.”
Apr 18
Pricing v3, plans, packages, and debugging tailscale.com · “Monthly paid plans now include three free users, and bill you only for additional users who actively exchange data over Tailscale (“usage-based billing”) rather than for a fixed number of seats.”
Apr 18
AWS staff spending 'much of their time 'optimizing cloud' theregister.com · “That list does not include cost savings, a factor that has seen SaaS outfit 37Signals quit the cloud and software vendor Ahrefs estimate that operating its own hardware in a colo datacenter saves it $400 million.”
Apr 17
Load Balancing samwho.dev · “PEWMA is opportunistic in that it tries to get the best latency, and this means it may sometimes leave a server less than fully loaded.”
Apr 16
The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat opencoreventures.com · “The biggest reason why we don’t see support and services companies achieving hyper-growth is that they are uninvestable. Annual revenues are low and nonrecurring, and margins are tight. VCs are looking for 80%+ gross margins and hockey stick growth.”
Apr 15
Low Code Software Development Is A Lie jaylittle.com · “Tools like this aren’t cheap and they tend to structure their licenses / billing so that you end up paying for as long as you use the software you produce with the tool.”
Apr 15
Building LLM applications for production huyenchip.com · “As a thought exercise, in 2021, DoorDash ML models made 10 billion predictions a day. If each prediction costs $0.004, that’d be $40 million a day!”
Apr 14
The early days of Linux lwn.net · “While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work.”
Apr 13
SQL:2023 is finished: Here is what's new peter.eisentraut.org · “All new functionality in the SQL standard is in the form of optional features, so I’m giving the feature codes and names below for reference.”
Apr 13
JEP 444: Virtual Threads Arrive in JDK 21, Ushering a New Era of Concurrency infoq.com · “The JDK can now run up to 10,000 concurrent virtual threads on a small number of operating system (OS) threads, as little as one, to execute the simple code above that involves sleeping for one second.”
Apr 12
a 1.5GB string blog.backslasher.net · “The “back” stack is unlimited, meaning we’re saving more and more state until we explode”
Apr 8
Build faster with Buck2: Our open source build system engineering.fb.com · “The open source release is almost identical to our internal version. The only pieces swapped out are the toolchains (which point at the internal copies of our compilers) and remote execution (which points at our internal servers)”
Apr 7
Chrome ships WebGPU developer.chrome.com · “After six years of development (90 contributors, 2000 commits, 3000 issues), from the initial design in 2017, the first implementation is now available in Chrome, with support for Firefox and Safari in progress.”
Apr 6
Antimalware Service Executable (Windows Defender) very active / high CPU when using Firefox bugzilla.mozilla.org · “This performance issue makes calls to VirtualProtect (among other things) unreasonably expensive on Windows platforms when Windows Defender’s Real-time Protection feature is active (the unreasonably expensive computations execute in the MsMpEng.exe process).”
Apr 5
The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in Every Modern Copy of macOS waxy.org · “While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
Apr 5
How to be a -10x Engineer taylor.town · “To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week.”
Apr 4
Saying Goodbye to GitHub ersei.net · “Ah yes, the lock-in. I’ve been using GitHub for so long that I’ve been completely absorbed into their platform.”
Apr 3
MIT Turbocharges Python’s Notoriously Slow Compiler spectrum.ieee.org · “We do this static type checking, and we disallow some of the dynamic features of Python, like changing types at runtime dynamically.”
Apr 3
The Day Windows Died thomasbandt.com · “So, there is basically little you can do with Windows out of the box but buy subscriptions and log into pre-installed social media apps.”
Apr 2
XUL Layout is gone crisal.io · “This means that (modulo a few exceptions documented below) all the Firefox UI is using regular web technology to render (mostly CSS flexbox).”
Apr 2
Pausing Manifest V2 phase-out changes groups.google.com · “We will provide sufficient migration time for developers - at least 6 months of heads-up - before beginning any experiments to turn off MV2 in the browser next year.”
Apr 1

March 2023 28 posts

Make loading weights 10-100x faster github.com · “This was accomplished by changing the file format so we can mmap() weights directly into memory without having to read() or copy them”
Mar 31
One In Two New Npm Packages Is SEO Spam Right Now blog.sandworm.dev · “Out of the ~320k new npm packages or versions that Sandworm has scanned over the past week, at least ~185k were labeled as SEO spam.”
Mar 30
Get Off My Desktop! Windows Needs to Stop Showing Tabloid News tomshardware.com · “If you go to the search box in Windows 11 or 10 and click on it, likely with the intent of searching for an app or document on your local drive(s), you are presented with a slew of news headlines.”
Mar 27
We're no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan docker.com · “Last week we felt our communications were terrible but our policy was sound. It’s now clear that both the communications and the policy were wrong, so we’re reversing course and no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan:”
Mar 24
Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally? blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020.”
Mar 24
De-cloud and de-k8s: bringing our apps back home dev.37signals.com · “It’s fair to say that we never realized the promise that the cloud would simplify our life.”
Mar 22
A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece nightingaledvs.com · “On January 1, 2023, Apple sunsetted (pun intended) the Dark Sky mobile app on iOS.”
Mar 22
uBlock Origin 1.48.0 github.com · “This leads to numerous reports of "uBlock stopped working", which are simply caused by the fact that at launch time the browser started to load webpages before uBO was ready to filter properly (because the filter lists were not fully loaded in memory).”
Mar 21
twenty-five years of curl daniel.haxx.se · “I started working for wolfSSL, doing curl full-time. It just took 21 years to make curl my job.”
Mar 20
AWS’s Anti-Competitive Move Hidden in Plain Sight lastweekinaws.com · “The problem that I want to highlight today is that if I spin up MySQL myself on EC2 instances, I’ll have to pay 2¢ per GB that I replicate between AZs, whereas I will pay nothing if I use RDS.”
Mar 18
Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market with Dagster, dbt and BigQuery dagster.io · “They will sell you 1,000 fake GitHub stars for as little as $64.”
Mar 18
John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next sfconservancy.org · “Deere’s inability to provide complete corresponding source to us for all requested products more than 2 years after our first request is beyond unacceptable”
Mar 16
Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know blog.alexellis.io · “Docker is holding us hostage here, if we don’t pay up, systems will break for many free users.”
Mar 15
Why some GitHub labels illegible firsching.ch · “So what’s is going on? Well, CSS colors are understood to be in the sRGB color space, but the formula used is intended for linear RGB”
Mar 13
Typescripting the technical interview richard-towers.com · “I think you’ll find once it’s compiled down to JavaScript it’s perfectly concise.”
Mar 12
potatis: MOS-6502 and NES emulator in Rust (SDL/WebAssembly/Android/Embedded/Cloud) github.com · “It also runs on a RP-Pico with only 264kB available RAM!”
Mar 12
Serverless Maps - Now Open Source protomaps.com · “On AWS, response times average 100 ms for cache hits, 200 ms for misses.”
Mar 10
The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux da.vidbuchanan.co.uk · “Truth be told, I don’t care very much about Netflix - the UX offered by BitTorrent is superior.”
Mar 9
How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages discord.com · “At the beginning of 2022, it had 177 nodes with trillions of messages.”
Mar 8
Google Groups has been left to die ahelwer.ca · “It’s clear we ran afoul of the old lesson: don’t build communities for long-lasting FOSS projects on proprietary infrastructure you don’t control.”
Mar 8
How a single engineer brought down Twitter theverge.com · “But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told.”
Mar 7
Reliability: It's Not Great community.fly.io · “We decided to ship “unmanaged Postgres” to buy ourselves time to wait for the right managed Postgres provider to show up. The problem is, fly pg create implies that people are getting a managed Postgres cluster.”
Mar 6
First look at Google Chrome's Blink engine running on an iPhone 9to5google.com · “Under Apple’s current App Store policies, all web browsers for iPhones and iPads are required to use the built-in version of WebKit, essentially making all browsers act like Safari.”
Mar 6
Self-Host All the Things? tedium.co · “This tool was great for a long time, but then the company decided to raise the price out of nowhere. And not by a little, but by more than three times the cost of what I was paying.”
Mar 5
Finding Java Thread Leaks With JDK Flight Recorder and a Bit Of SQL morling.dev · “Finding thread start events without matching end events is as simple as running a LEFT JOIN on the two event types and keeping only those start events which don’t have a join partner.”
Mar 4
The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later lwn.net · “Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn’t even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over.”
Mar 3
AWS is Asleep at the Lambda Wheel lastweekinaws.com · “It’s clear that there’s no technical blocker preventing AWS from supporting the language, leading me to the conclusion that it’s instead either a lack of leadership, or a lack of will–which effectively reduces down to the same thing.”
Mar 3
Microsoft's Phone Link app now lets you use iMessage from your PC theverge.com · “You won’t be able to send pictures in messages or participate in group messages.”
Mar 1

February 2023 24 posts

"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance computerenhance.com · “The first two rules of the “clean code” concept wipe out 12 years of hardware evolution, all by themselves.”
Feb 28
Most Data Work Seems Fundamentally Worthless ludic.mataroa.blog · “Sometimes we would have huge errors in the work due to the horrific undocumented database we drew from, and no one would ever notice.”
Feb 27
Help! Is this عربي? isthisarabic.com · “Photoshop breaks Arabic. We even have a website that will break our Arabic so that Photoshop breaks it back to normal. Yes, Adobe is aware. No, they do not care.”
Feb 26
My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account jeffgeerling.com · “Somehow, the school ‘adopted’ my personal Microsoft account, and now I can’t do anything in Azure with it.”
Feb 25
The job market for new grads: worse than in 2008, but better than 2002 blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Since every big company is doing the same, it’s a ‘safe’ time to do layoffs without setting off any alarm bells or lawsuits.”
Feb 24
Flathub: Linux App Store github.com · “We are seeking up to 100,000 USD support from the Plaintext Group to cover the remaining budget to establish the new Flathub organisation and paid service over the coming year.”
Feb 23
After Alaska Airlines planes bump runway while taking off from Seattle, a scramble to ‘pull the plug’ adn.com · “The Alaska 737 captain said the data was on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 pounds light.”
Feb 22
We stand to save $7m over five years from our cloud exit world.hey.com · “That’s a total of $840,000/year for everything. Bandwidth, power, and boxes on an amortization schedule of five years. Compared to $2.3m in the cloud.”
Feb 22
Goodbye, CSS-Tricks! geoffgraham.me · “Oh, and speaking of hiring, it appears DigitalOcean is still in full hiring mode if you’re in the market for work. Well, according to the signature in this auto-reply.”
Feb 20
How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions kschaul.com · “But for most of our use cases, we don’t need the latest and greatest. And Mapbox has gotten expensive.”
Feb 17
Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS webkit.org · “A web app that has been added to the Home Screen can request permission to receive push notifications as long as that request is in response to direct user interaction”
Feb 16
Apple doesn't want you developing hobby apps bennettnotes.com · “Apple still charges a $99 yearly developer fee, even if you don’t want to publish your app on the Appstore!”
Feb 15
So, what's next? github.com · “$400 for 250 hours… It will be less than $2 per hour of work, for the year before a little more: $4 per hour.”
Feb 13
New Hampshire once again on the cusp of enshrining Software Freedom into law. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED. libreboot.org · “16 February 2023, 1PM : prohibiting, with limited exceptions, state agencies from requiring use of proprietary software in interactions with the public (house bill: HB 617-FN)”
Feb 12
The Heisenbug lurking in your async code textual.textualize.io · “The root cause of this Heisenbug is that if you don’t hold a reference to the task object returned by create_task then the task may disappear without warning when Python runs garbage collection.”
Feb 11
Why We're Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch blog.thunderbird.net · “Keep in mind that Thunderbird is currently being actively developed by a bit more than a dozen core developers.”
Feb 9
Why does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004? jvns.ca · “The answer is 0.30000000000000004 (the second one) because its significand is even.”
Feb 8
Mozilla, Google looking ahead to the end of Apple's WebKit theregister.com · “Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit.”
Feb 7
Big Data is Dead motherduck.com · “The most surprising thing that I learned was that most of the people using “Big Query” don’t really have Big Data.”
Feb 7
The technology behind GitHub’s new code search github.blog · “The short answer is that we built our own search engine from scratch, in Rust, specifically for the domain of code search.”
Feb 7
Google experiments with non-WebKit Blink-based iOS browser theregister.com · “It’s a toy for now, but won’t necessarily remain so.”
Feb 6
The Market for Lemons infrequently.org · “Partisans for slow, complex frameworks have successfully marketed lemons as the hot new thing, despite the pervasive failures in their wake, crowding out higher-quality options in the process.”
Feb 5
De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM tomshardware.com · “Tiny11 is an OS that lives up to its name by shrinking a standard Windows 11 install down from 20GB+ on disk to approximately 8GB and “runs great” on a system with just 2GB of RAM.”
Feb 4
I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer words.filippo.io · “Virtually all maintainers are either volunteers or full-time employees of large companies. Foundations on average don’t pay maintainers.”
Feb 3

January 2023 24 posts

Uptime, status pages, and transparency calculus blog.lawrencejones.dev · “As publishing an incident or uptime statistics can expose the company to financial penalties, you need an ever-increasing amount of buy-in from senior (and sometimes non-technical) leadership before you can give an update.”
Jan 31
Bounded Flexible Arrays in C people.kernel.org · “As such, compilers have had to assume that trailing arrays must be intended to be dynamically sized (even though most are intended to be fixed-size).”
Jan 31
OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete semafor.com · “A software developer in South America who completed a five-hour unpaid coding test for OpenAI told Semafor he was asked to tackle a series of two-part assignments.”
Jan 30
What is Google doing with its open source teams? theregister.com · “For example, Chris DiBona, who founded Google’s OSPO 18 years ago, was let go.”
Jan 28
Android 14 set to block certain outdated apps from being installed 9to5google.com · “According to a newly posted code change, Android 14 is set to make API requirements stricter, entirely blocking the installation of outdated apps.”
Jan 26
Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Branch Predictor mattkeeter.com · “The “optimized” code with one jump per loop is about 4x slower than the original version with two jumps per loop!”
Jan 25
Sunsetting Subversion support github.blog · “fewer than 0.02% of requests made to the Git backend come through a Subversion endpoint, and only about 5,000 repositories see even a single Subversion request each month.”
Jan 20
Firefox found a way to keep ad-blockers working with Manifest V3 theverge.com · “the high-level takeaway is that Mozilla’s version of Manifest V3 keeps the feature Google removed, while adding support for the more limited replacement as well.”
Jan 19
No Start Menu for You randomascii.wordpress.com · “My start menu was hung due to the combination of heap corruption and WerFault.exe deciding that it needed to upload the crash dump before releasing the old process so that a new one could be started.”
Jan 18
Git security vulnerabilities announced github.blog · “The parser used to read these files has multiple integer overflows, which can occur when parsing either a large number of patterns, a large number of attributes, or attributes with overly-long names.”
Jan 17
Our cloud spend in 2022 dev.37signals.com · “In total, we spent $3,201,564 on all these cloud services in 2022. That comes out to $266,797 per month. Whew!”
Jan 16
I'm Shadow Banned by DuckDuckGo (and Bing) daverupert.com · “To solve this, I took the first step and signed up for Bing Webmaster Tools to try to know what Bing knows about my site and sure enough: zero clicks, zero impressions, and zero indexed pages for my site.”
Jan 15
How Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years sacra.com · “they grew 254% YoY from ~$11M ARR in late 2020 to ~$135M at the end of 2022 just by flipping Docker Hub and Docker Desktop to paid for businesses.”
Jan 13
A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage. It was also found in the backup system cnn.com · “Officials ultimately found a corrupt file in the main NOTAM system, the source told CNN. A corrupt file was also found in the backup system.”
Jan 12
Bullshit Graph Database Performance Benchmarks maxdemarzi.com · “IANAL , but that sounds like you aren’t allowed to use their benchmark code if you provide a competing solution.”
Jan 11
SourceHut will (not) blacklist the Go module mirror sourcehut.org · “Due to the relatively large traffic requirements of git clones, this represents about 70% of all outgoing network traffic from git.sr.ht. A single module can produce as much as 4 GiB of daily traffic from Google.”
Jan 9
CDC File Transfer github.com · “Born from the ashes of Stadia, this repository contains tools for syncing and streaming files from Windows to Windows or Linux.”
Jan 8
Production Twitter on One Machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast thume.ca · “I think the main takeaway looking at these calculations is that many of these numbers are small numbers on the scale of modern computers!”
Jan 7
The beauty of CGI and simple design, by Hales rubenerd.com · “I see people making the same mistake with tools like Kubernetes. Many, if not most stacks, simply don’t need it… and those that do pay the price for all the overhead and brittleness.”
Jan 7
Is coding in Rust as bad as in C++? quick-lint-js.com · “And for bigger projects, development compile times are worse with Rust than with C++, at least with my code style.”
Jan 6
You Want Modules, Not Microservices blogs.newardassociates.com · “When passing that data across network lines, though–as most microservices do–adds five to seven orders of magnitude greater latency to the communication.”
Jan 3
State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11? ntdotdev.wordpress.com · “The Remote Desktop Connection program is still exactly the same as it was 14 years ago, complete with Aero icons and skeuomorphic common controls.”
Jan 2
Compromised PyTorch-nightly dependency chain between December 25th and December 30th, 2022. pytorch.org · “This design enables somebody to register a package by the same name as one that exists in a third party index, and pip will install their version by default.”
Jan 1
Rant: year of Linux on the desktop blog.liw.fi · “Over time, the goal posts of success keep being moved by the naysayers.”
Jan 1

2022 542 posts

December 2022 33 posts

I am not a supplier softwaremaxims.com · “And then why attempts at bringing FOSS under that definition are deeply misguided.”
Dec 31
An M1 for curl daniel.haxx.se · “Apple has shipped and used curl in their products for twenty years but they never assist, help or otherwise contribute to the development.”
Dec 30
Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job stevenbuccini.com · “Just because you’re getting a lot of offers to interview does not mean that you are a hot commodity.”
Dec 28
Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code likely to be buggy theregister.com · “Worse still, they found that AI help tends to delude developers about the quality of their output.”
Dec 26
Unbundling Tools for Thought borretti.me · “In practice 95% of the use cases can be naturally unbundled into disjoint apps, and the lack of centralization and cross-app hyperlinking has no real negative effects.”
Dec 26
How much I've spent so far running my own Mastodon server on AWS micahwalter.com · “As of this writing, I’ve spent $52.74 on this project.”
Dec 25
Ruby 3.2.0 ruby-lang.org · “YJIT now supports both x86-64 and arm64/aarch64 CPUs on Linux, MacOS, BSD and other UNIX platforms.”
Dec 25
Reverse engineering yet another eBook format mijailovic.net · “On top of that, the book description said “Access Duration: 84 Months”, and that didn’t sound promising, either (7 years is generous, but anything less than forever is not generous enough in my book).”
Dec 25
Haiku R1/beta4 haiku-os.org · “Over 400 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release.”
Dec 23
UnifiedPush: A decentralized, open-source push notification protocol f-droid.org · “Most of them have open alternatives, but until now, the only option for push notifications was Google’s proprietary service, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM).”
Dec 22
I still use Flash foon.uk · “The way forward was obvious; I’d have to make my own Flash player.”
Dec 21
Valve is paying open source developers to keep Steam Deck playable pcgamer.com · “Valve understands that, because in a recent chat with the Verge, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that the company is paying over a hundred open-source devs to work on the various bits of software that keep the Steam Deck ticking.”
Dec 20
Why doesn't Windows use 64-bit virtual address space below 0x00000000`7ffe0000? devblogs.microsoft.com · “The full user-mode address space on x86-64 is 128TB, and a randomly-generated 47-bit address is very unlikely to begin with 15 consecutive zero bits.”
Dec 18
Quite OK Image is now my favorite asset format nullprogram.com · “However, for the typical images where I would use PNG, QOI is around 3x larger, and some outliers are far worse.”
Dec 18
Copilot Internals thakkarparth007.github.io · “After 30s of either acceptance/rejection of a suggestion, copilot “captures” a snapshot around the insertion point.”
Dec 17
I almost failed to search a 37 GB text file in under 1 millisecond death.andgravity.com · “Instead, we’ll do it the hard way – we’ll check passwords offline.”
Dec 16
A Linux Evening fabiensanglard.net · “Really bad occurrences result in disheartening hours googling in the hope that someone more qualified ran into the same issue.”
Dec 16
Deepmind's AlphaCode conquers coding, performing as well as humans singularityhub.com · “It’s also unlikely the AI will take over programming completely, as its code is riddled with errors.”
Dec 15
Apple considering dropping requirement for iPhone web browsers to use WebKit macrumors.com · “Gurman said this potential change comes in response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act.”
Dec 14
No, Google did not hike the price of a .dev domain from $12 to $850 agwa.name · “According to his own screenshots, he paid 4,360 Turkish Lira for the initial registration on December 6, 2021, which was $317 at the time.”
Dec 13
Linux Desktop Environments System Usage itvision.altervista.org · “Whoever doubted XFCE as a lean desktop environment is I hope dissuaded and changed their mind.”
Dec 12
I found a bug in SQLite philipotoole.com · “Ignoring the issue when I saw it first was a big mistake, and was not intellectually honest.”
Dec 11
Just use Postgres for everything amazingcto.com · “Postgres can replace - up to millions of users - many backend technologies, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Mongo and Redis among them.”
Dec 10
Chrome, 10 years later neugierig.org · “And similarly I learned how free software can come from a place of giving and gratitude and end up as yet another weapon for corporations.”
Dec 9
All in with Nuitka nuitka.net · “After more than 10 years of working on the Python compiler Nuitka, and at the age of 50, I have finally decided to take the plunge.”
Dec 9
Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig ziglang.org · “The new one was faster, used less memory, and was actively maintained and enhanced.”
Dec 8
Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux asahilinux.org · “While there’s always room for improvement, the driver is fast enough to run all of the above at 60 frames per second at 4K.”
Dec 7
Show HN: Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++ github.com · “Having such a lightweight implementation of the model allows to easily integrate it in different platforms and applications.”
Dec 6
Software horror show: SAP Concur blog.plover.com · “The actual authors of SAP Concur’s phone app did none of these things.”
Dec 4
Snap updates happen without user consent smaller.fish · “Snap’s update system kills the running application and applies updates, without user consent.”
Dec 2
DNS over Wikipedia github.com · “Wikipedia keeps track of official URLs for popular websites.”
Dec 2
Julius: An open source re-implementation of Caesar III github.com · “Julius recreates many bugs that you can find in original Caesar 3 game, to preserve 100% saves compatibility.”
Dec 2
Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly extism.org · “This makes it safe to execute untrusted, 3rd party plug-in code even while it’s directly embedded within the same OS process as your program.”
Dec 1

November 2022 46 posts

Inkbase: Programmable Ink inkandswitch.com · “The programming model is the least solved part of Inkbase.”
Nov 30
The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned ericlippert.com · “A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone’s critical path.”
Nov 30
Tailwind is a leaky abstraction jakelazaroff.com · “You still need to know CSS.”
Nov 29
Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem, one library at a time marvinh.dev · “JIT engines are crazy fast these days!”
Nov 29
Goodbye, data science ryxcommar.com · “Nobody knew or even cared what the difference was between good and bad data science work.”
Nov 29
Tales of the M1 GPU asahilinux.org · “Since this was going to be the first Linux Rust GPU kernel driver, I had a lot of work ahead!”
Nov 29
Everything I wish I knew when learning C tmewett.com · “Think of a header file as a specification of an API, that can be implemented across any number of source files.”
Nov 28
Curation and decentralization is better than millions of apps f-droid.org · “Nobody has millions of apps installed on their device.”
Nov 28
The Rune Programming Language github.com · “This is not an officially supported Google product.”
Nov 27
CRDT: Fractional Indexing madebyevan.com · “Objects can be reordered any number of times without leaving any additional information behind.”
Nov 27
Git Notes: git's coolest, most unloved feature tylercipriani.com · “Git notes could make it possible to distribute the history of an entire project.”
Nov 27
I/O is no longer the bottleneck benhoyt.com · “Disk I/O may have been slow 10 or 20 years ago, but in 2022, reading a file sequentially from disk is very fast.”
Nov 26
Cloudflare servers don't own IPs anymore so how do they connect to the internet? blog.cloudflare.com · “We also dislike shared state, so we’re not fans of distributed NAT installations.”
Nov 25
An interactive guide to Flexbox joshwcomeau.com · “The default value for flex-grow is 0, which means that growing is opt-in.”
Nov 23
Improving Firefox stability on Windows by retrying failed memory allocation hacks.mozilla.org · “You’re looking at a >70% reduction in crashes, far more than our rosiest predictions.”
Nov 22
Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE matthewtejo.substack.com · “Twitter has two data centers running that can handle the entire site being failed into it.”
Nov 22
How Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta engineering.fb.com · “Hardware timestamps are the secret sauce that makes PTP so precise.”
Nov 21
AWS and Blockchain tbray.org · “In practice, the technology is a database.”
Nov 20
Tree views in CSS iamkate.com · “A tree view (collapsible list) can be created using only HTML and CSS, without the need for JavaScript.”
Nov 19
Consider working on genomics claymcleod.dev · “There is a significant gap between how software is currently developed in this space versus how it should be developed.”
Nov 19
Investigating why Steam started picking a random font blog.pkh.me · “And you know what’s special about 2040? It’s after 2038.”
Nov 19
Go Style google.github.io · “Adherence to the Style Guide is not intended to be absolute, and these documents will never be exhaustive.”
Nov 18
Tailscale Funnel tailscale.com · “Shockingly, the whole world doesn’t use Tailscale.”
Nov 18
The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming unison-lang.org · “Other tools try to recover structure from text; Unison stores code in a database.”
Nov 17
Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer danfitdegree.hashnode.dev · “But this is what we have to deal with as small devs in the year 2022.”
Nov 16
Why do we call it “boilerplate code?” buttondown.email · “So "boilerplate" became slang for vapid syndicated articles.”
Nov 15
Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client engineering.fb.com · “The smartlog is one of the most important Sapling commands and the centerpiece of the entire user experience.”
Nov 15
Making a Go program faster with a one-character change hmarr.com · “The Go compiler uses a technique called escape analysis to figure out when some memory needs to live on the heap.”
Nov 14
Forking Chrome to turn HTML into SVG fathy.fr · “Skia also has an experimental SVG back-end, and that’s what we’re going to use to build html2svg!”
Nov 13
Mold linker may switch to a source-available license github.com · “mold started as my personal project, and I’ve been working on this full time for two years so far.”
Nov 13
From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server ctrl.blog · “Jellyfin is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Plex Media Server’s core functionality.”
Nov 13
In praise of Plan 9 drewdevault.com · “Plan 9 failed, in a sense, because Unix was simply too big and too entrenched by the time Plan 9 came around.”
Nov 12
Gzip exceptions, but only on hot or rainy days alexyorke.github.io · “Sometimes, debugging enters the real world.”
Nov 12
AWS IAM Roles, a tale of unnecessary complexity infosec.rodeo · “Instead of refactoring the architecture, AWS did what AWS does best - it built a new service.”
Nov 11
NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages theregister.com · “Rust, while powerful, has a fairly steep learning curve, for example.”
Nov 11
Why is Rosetta 2 fast? dougallj.wordpress.com · “Rosetta 2 translates the entire text segment of the binary from x86 to ARM up-front.”
Nov 9
Just don’t tbray.org · “The word “just” is a signal that you’re not taking their problem seriously.”
Nov 8
Signal Introduces Stories signal.org · “Stories also happen to be one of the most common feature requests we receive from all over the world.”
Nov 7
What to blog about simonwillison.net · “I recommend adding “write about it” to your definition of “done” for anything that you build or create.”
Nov 6
MDN converted to Markdown openwebdocs.org · “For technical writers, HTML is hard to write and hard to review.”
Nov 5
In defense of linked lists antirez.com · “Linked lists are useful: Redis can be wrong, but both Redis and the Linux kernel can’t.”
Nov 4
Snap Store administrators removed signal-desktop from Ubuntu Snap forum.snapcraft.io · “This is due to a DMCA takedown request coming from people representing Signal.”
Nov 3
Phlare: open-source database for continuous profiling at scale grafana.com · “It’s easy to install with just one binary and no additional dependencies, just like Prometheus.”
Nov 2
Why Functional Programming Should Be the Future of Software Development spectrum.ieee.org · “In fact, the hardest part comes later, during the maintenance phase.”
Nov 2
The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry efinancialcareers.com · “The real problem is that C++ is neither easy nor loved.”
Nov 2
The case for JPEG XL cloudinary.com · “These limitations are all reasonable for the web use case, but not for a general-purpose image format.”
Nov 2

October 2022 38 posts

It's Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter web.stanford.edu · “Every significant element of TCP, from its stream orientation to its expectation of in-order packet delivery, is wrong for the datacenter.”
Oct 31
Remixing Shopify remix.run · “Under Shopify’s stewardship Remix receives long-term backing and support from an established leader in commerce.”
Oct 31
RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language theregister.com · “This language, through evolution and contributions by others, is today known as assembly language.”
Oct 29
How I make a living working on SerenityOS awesomekling.github.io · “Since May of 2021, SerenityOS has been my full-time job.”
Oct 29
SAFe Delusion safedelusion.com · “Yet those companies and practitioners without extensive Agile experience have a hard time evaluating what will bring them value and what not.”
Oct 29
Open Letter to Gitea - Restoring Trust in the Gitea Project gitea-open-letter.coding.social · “We believed you when you promised to pass along the ownership of the Gitea project to your elected successors.”
Oct 28
About the sqlite3 WASM/JS Subproject sqlite.org · “Folks have been building sqlite3 for the web since as far back as 2012 but this subproject is the first effort "officially" associated with the SQLite project, created with the goal of making WASM builds of the library first-class members of the family of supported SQLite deliverables.”
Oct 28
How to communicate effectively as a developer karlsutt.com · “Communicating effectively as an engineer means empathically increasing the resolution of your writing.”
Oct 28
How we became the world's foremost expert on Google Play Store policy violations blog.pushbullet.com · “Your app did not receive a deliberate analysis by a human leading to the violation notification.”
Oct 27
Shell Script Best Practices sharats.me · “Use shellcheck. Heed its warnings.”
Oct 27
Stop making an SSH client the hard way: Tailscale SSH Console tailscale.com · “With Tailscale SSH Console, your browser becomes a Tailscale client, and joins your tailnet in the same way as any other device that you run Tailscale on.”
Oct 27
Oracle contributing GraalVM Community Edition Java Code to OpenJDK graalvm.org · “Oracle does not currently intend to contribute the polyglot technologies supporting other languages such as Python, Ruby, R, and JavaScript.”
Oct 26
From zero to 10 million lines of Kotlin engineering.fb.com · “We knew from the start that Kotlin’s build times would be longer than Java’s.”
Oct 25
Turbopack: High-performance bundler for React & TypeScript vercel.com · “On large applications, it shows updates 700x faster than Webpack.”
Oct 25
My next Mac might be the last morrick.me · “The problem is I just can’t stand the software anymore.”
Oct 24
Open Source Podcasting Client ma.tt · “You can see all the code behind the iOS app and the Android app, and modify it, make it your own, suggest a change, fix a bug, add a feature, fork it and make your own client, anything!”
Oct 23
How Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evidence from a Natural Experiment on GitHub arxiv.org · “Long-running streaks of activity were abandoned and became less common.”
Oct 23
Linux: What can you epoll? darkcoding.net · “I was not able to find a comprehensive list of epoll-compatible APIs on the Internet, so I made one.”
Oct 22
Celebrating 5 Years of Pop!_OS blog.system76.com · “This gives us time to direct our development resources towards rebuilding Pop!_OS in the Rust codebase, a programming language that’s faster to process, more secure, and more stable.”
Oct 22
The Israeli Books End of Life lifemichael.com · “The Israeli accessibility law is very vague.”
Oct 21
The HTTP crash course nobody asked for fasterthanli.me · “HTTP/1.1 is a delightfully simple protocol, if you ignore most of it.”
Oct 20
How Google is forcing us to make our open source app worse voys.co.za · “With the removal of these features, not only did the app perform less well, but Google still continued to reject the app.”
Oct 20
EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers adguard.com · “If you’re using an ad blocker, there’s a 99.99% chance you are using EasyList or one of its derivatives.”
Oct 19
Dear JetBrains. Don't mess with your UI. neil.computer · “A user interface is like an API for your eyeballs.”
Oct 18
Announcing KataOS and Sparrow opensource.googleblog.com · “At the moment, the code on Github does not include the required components to run these applications, but we hope to publish these features in the near future.”
Oct 16
A Real World React -> htmx Port htmx.org · “They reduced their total JS dependencies by 96% (255 to 9)”
Oct 15
Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon) signal.org · “The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure.”
Oct 12
redefining for loop variable semantics github.com · “Loop variables being per-loop instead of per-iteration is the only design decision I know of in Go that makes programs incorrect more often than it makes them correct.”
Oct 11
I wish my web server were in the corner of my room interconnected.org · “It is boundary-violating, to have a website in the corner of your bedroom.”
Oct 11
Wayland Support on Linux code.blender.org · “Even though Wayland has existed since ~2008 as a replacement for X11, it’s only recently that some Linux distributions have been enabling it by default.”
Oct 11
Improving Firefox responsiveness on macOS hacks.mozilla.org · “So how do you use them? Well, it turns out they’re not documented.”
Oct 10
How Wine works 101 werat.dev · “Fun fact, Valve’s Steam Deck uses a Wine-based solution to run games (called Proton).”
Oct 10
AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing noahlebovic.com · “That means it’s over 10x more expensive to use AWS on-demand instances than your own infrastructure, and still 5x more expensive to use AWS reserved instances.”
Oct 7
Transmission 4.0.0 beta 1 github.com · “The entire codebase has been migrated from C to C++.”
Oct 7
Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think mjg59.dreamwidth.org · “But having worked at more than one company that’s tried this approach, my experience is that very few people end up happy.”
Oct 6
I Don't Believe in Sprints robinrendle.com · “That’s what a backlog is; a list of useless tasks that makes people feel better.”
Oct 5
Postgres WASM by Snaplet and Supabase supabase.com · “The first thing to point out is that our implementation isn’t pure WASM.”
Oct 3
An elegy for GNU and RMS catgirl.ai · “Standing in the road to be a roadblock against the forces of proprietary software does nothing when those forces can just drive around you.”
Oct 2

September 2022 42 posts

Browsers with built-in VPNs - the new normal? Microsoft bakes a VPN into Edge and turns it on adguard-vpn.com · “A VPN built into a browser is not a substitute for a full-fledged VPN service.”
Sep 30
Lyra V2 - a better, faster, and more versatile speech codec opensource.googleblog.com · “Lyra V2 is based on an end-to-end neural audio codec called SoundStream.”
Sep 30
Why Modern Software is Slow–Windows Voice Recorder randomascii.wordpress.com · “A twenty-second delay for recording a forty-second clip is a pretty bad efficiency ratio.”
Sep 29
How to Build a Personal Webpage from Scratch rutar.org · “Static webpages are also simple enough that you can host them yourself on a low-power device!”
Sep 29
It's here: please welcome Arduino IDE 2.0 blog.arduino.cc · “We’re pleased to announce that as of today Arduino IDE 2.0 has moved to stable and is available for download.”
Sep 28
Penpot inks $8M as signups for its open source spin on Figma jump 5600% after Adobe's $20B acquisition move techcrunch.com · “Because we are open source, it means you can hack in, self host, and tweak, and expand,” he said.
Sep 27
Introducing workerd: the Open Source Workers runtime blog.cloudflare.com · “workerd is not, on its own, a secure way to run possibly-malicious code.”
Sep 27
Outdated vs. Complete: In defense of apps that don't need updates vivqu.com · “But my app was already working correctly, making this update useless and performative.”
Sep 26
Turns are Better than Radians computerenhance.com · “Math doesn’t require radians.”
Sep 26
McMaster Carr - The Smartest Website You Haven't Heard of bedelstein.com · “McMaster has chosen function over form.”
Sep 25
Aging programmer world.hey.com · “My desire to manage people is at all-time lows.”
Sep 24
iPhones and action discoverability alexanderell.is · “Good design for very complicated systems is hard, and these are just a few points where it fell short.”
Sep 24
Nightdrive incoherency.co.uk · “The entire scene is created purely by drawing circles on a HTML5 canvas.”
Sep 23
Avoiding homework with code (and getting caught) alistair.blog · “Mochip was a real passion project and I had a wild time building it.”
Sep 22
Introducing LiteFS fly.io · “Full-stack developers are sleeping on SQLite, a database most devs think more suited to unit tests than production loads.”
Sep 21
20×10% lars.ingebrigtsen.no · “That’s mathematics for you!”
Sep 21
React I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down marmelab.com · “We’ve been together for almost 10 years.”
Sep 20
You don't want to be on Cloudflare's naughty list ctrl.blog · “It felt like we’d been transported back to an earlier era with unbearably slow internet.”
Sep 20
How I'm a Productive Programmer With a Memory of a Fruit Fly hynek.me · “Having all API docs one key press away is profoundly empowering.”
Sep 19
There is no "software supply chain" iliana.fyi · “In actual supply chains, money is changing hands.”
Sep 19
An X11 Apologist Tries Wayland artemis.sh · “Wayland wants every frame to be perfect.”
Sep 18
Finding the "Second Bug" in glibc's Condition Variable probablydance.com · “Sometimes pthread_cond_signal() doesn’t do anything, which can easily hang your program.”
Sep 18
Cppfront, Herb Sutter's proposal for a new C++ syntax github.com · “Cpp2 is not a successor or alternate language with its own divergent or incompatible ecosystem.”
Sep 17
Self-hostable maps stack, powered by OpenStreetMap github.com · “Headway is a maps stack in a box that makes it easy to take your location data into your own hands.”
Sep 17
35 Million Hot Dogs: Benchmarking Caddy vs. Nginx blog.tjll.net · “Nginx will fail by refusing or dropping connections, Caddy will fail by slowing everything down.”
Sep 16
What it Takes to Make a Game by Yourself dillonshook.com · “Start on a small project that’s realistic to finish and build up to your bigger dream game you want to make.”
Sep 15
How we built Pingora, the proxy that connects Cloudflare to the Internet blog.cloudflare.com · “As Cloudflare has scaled we’ve outgrown NGINX.”
Sep 14
Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project awesomekling.github.io · “It’s going to take a long time before Ladybird is ready for day-to-day browsing.”
Sep 12
Shortest URLs on the Internet jameswillia.ms · “there’s nothing stopping TLD registry operators serving A records at the apexes of their TLD zones.”
Sep 11
Build Your Career on Dirty Work staysaasy.com · “Once you’ve found an opportunity, put yourself in the firing line: go on-call, do support, do QA, do the tech debt.”
Sep 11
What's the cheapest domain you can register for 10 years? shkspr.mobi · “I’m concerned about the longevity of the domains I register.”
Sep 11
A Web UI for Stable Diffusion github.com · “A web interface for Stable Diffusion, implemented using Gradio library.”
Sep 9
Python Type Hints are Turing Complete arxiv.org · “We apply Grigore’s algorithm to Python type hints and deduce that they are Turing complete.”
Sep 9
This is not your grandfather's Perl stackoverflow.blog · “The Perl development team thinks that backwards compatibility is very important.”
Sep 8
Accelerate Python code 100x by import taichi as ti docs.taichi-lang.org · “Taichi can run on both CPU and GPU, while Python runs on CPU.”
Sep 8
Difftastic, the Fantastic Diff wilfred.me.uk · “I had no idea what I was getting into when I started working on this.”
Sep 7
How the SQLite Virtual Machine Works fly.io · “This set of domain-specific commands and the execution engine to run it is called a virtual machine.”
Sep 7
Zig, the small language zserge.com · “One can explore the complete syntax and basic language constructs in less than an hour.”
Sep 7
Someone's Been Messing With My Subnormals! moyix.blogspot.com · “I have never met a scientist who can resist the lure of fast-but-dangerous math when doing numerical simulations.”
Sep 6
After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won. cfenollosa.com · “I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.”
Sep 4
Arti 1.0.0 is released: Our Rust Tor implementation is ready for production use. blog.torproject.org · “We rely on users and volunteers to find problems in our software and suggest directions for its improvement.”
Sep 2
Falsehoods programmers believe about email beesbuzz.biz · “Wow, I am getting overwhelmed with comments and suggestions.”
Sep 1

August 2022 43 posts

Things not available when someone blocks all cookies blog.tomayac.com · “Jakub is the proof that users exist who block any and all cookies.”
Aug 31
AdGuard publishes the world's first ad blocker built on Manifest V3 adguard.com · “Manifest V3, Chrome’s new extension API, is no longer an illusory threat.”
Aug 30
Time Till Open Source Alternative staltz.com · “Software itself really doesn’t have a future in making money.”
Aug 28
Development version: GIMP 2.99.12 Released gimp.org · “We still can’t give you any date for GIMP 3.0, but we are getting there!”
Aug 27
A Programming Language Database github.com · “The "database" is just text files.”
Aug 27
The Jupyter+git problem is now solved fast.ai · “Jupyter notebooks don’t work with git by default.”
Aug 26
Why your website should be under 14kB in size endtimes.dev · “TCP slow start is an algorithm used by servers to find out how many packets it can send at a time.”
Aug 25
Removal of Heroku Free Product Plans FAQ help.heroku.com · “There are no changes to our existing paid plans, except for the renaming of Hobby dynos and Hobby-Dev databases to Basic.”
Aug 25
Inside the Pinecone pinecone.io · “Most impressively though, real time operational events dropped almost to zero overnight after the original release.”
Aug 24
Accepted chromium 104.0.5112.101-1 (source) into unstable mail-archive.com · “Change default search engine to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons.”
Aug 24
The Future of NGINX: Getting Back to Our Open Source Roots nginx.com · “We can’t simply keep charging for the same things as in the past, because the world has changed.”
Aug 23
uBlock Origin works best on Firefox github.com · “This feature requires the webRequest.filterResponseData() API, currently only available in Firefox.”
Aug 21
Why don't we do email verification in reverse? blog.yossarian.net · “Inbox delivery can be fickle, unreliable, or outright impossible.”
Aug 21
Diablo 1 for web browsers! github.com · “To play the full game, you must use your own DIABDAT.MPQ that you can obtain with the original copy of the game from GoG.”
Aug 20
Coping with Copilot sigarch.org · “So as CS educators, Copilot has us outgunned.”
Aug 20
Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more webkit.org · “Any time there’s an opportunity to use CSS instead of JavaScript, I’ll take it.”
Aug 20
Resolving an unusual wifi issue blog.ando.fyi · “Qt5 has been crippling my wifi system-wide for past 7-8 months, just by running MediBang Paint Pro.”
Aug 19
App Store doesn't accept "too simple" apps notes.alinpanaitiu.com · “But I think they just don’t like the idea of the app, and no matter what I add to it, they won’t accept it.”
Aug 19
I have complicated feelings about TDD buttondown.email · “TDD isn’t as valuable as its strongest proponents believe.”
Aug 18
Learn Postgres at the Playground crunchydata.com · “Yes, this is WASM and running fully in your web browser.”
Aug 17
Accounting For Developers, Part I: The Fundamentals moderntreasury.com · “Not matching would mean the system created or lost money out of nothing.”
Aug 17
Why I left PINE64 blog.brixit.nl · “PINE64 cares only about Manjaro, and Manjaro does not care about working with any other distributions.”
Aug 17
Using the Same Arch Linux Installation for a Decade meribold.org · “The longest I went without a system upgrade is nine months, but typically I upgrade about once per month.”
Aug 16
How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency discord.com · “In retrospect, disk latency should have been an obvious concern early on in our database deployments.”
Aug 15
Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux blog.hiler.eu · “Glibc 2.36 was released and all the games using EAC EOS are no longer playable.”
Aug 15
Big Changes Ahead for Deno deno.com · “Our goal is to make Deno the fastest JavaScript runtime - full stop.”
Aug 15
Excel is Pretty Dang Cool buttondown.email · “Instead of writing the formula =A1*B1, you can do =Width*Height like you should have been able to 30 years ago.”
Aug 12
Rob Pike's simple C regex matcher in Go benhoyt.com · “Of course, GNU Grep is about three times as fast.”
Aug 12
Redis Explained architecturenotes.co · “Redis is fast and all consistency guarantees, come second to speed.”
Aug 11
From Oscilloscope to Wireshark: A UDP Story mattkeeter.com · “The parser is overkill: it decodes the entire file based on the specification.”
Aug 11
How SQLite helps you do ACID fly.io · “The rollback journal is a simple trick to simulate atomicity and isolation and to provide durability to a database.”
Aug 10
Don't call it a comeback: Why Java is still champ github.com · “Java has been sitting among the top three languages since shortly after its launch in 1995.”
Aug 9
That time I 10x'd a TI-84 emulator's speed by replacing a switch-case artemis.sh · “There was just one hotspot that dwarfed all the others, and that was the instruction decode and execution switch-block.”
Aug 8
Why Does gRPC Insist on Trailers? carlmastrangelo.com · “Organizational problems are harder than technological ones.”
Aug 7
Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Big Tech generally does not pay for being oncall.”
Aug 7
Cramming 'Papers, Please' onto Phones dukope.com · “Beyond the minimal amount necessary to make the interface work, there are no content changes or additions for this port.”
Aug 6
DreamWorks Animation to Release MoonRay as Open Source awn.com · “DreamWorks intends to make MoonRay available under the Apache 2.0 license.”
Aug 5
Botspam Apocalypse memex.marginalia.nu · “If Marginalia Search didn’t use Cloudflare, it couldn’t serve traffic.”
Aug 4
Use One Big Server specbranch.com · “It’s not glamorous and it won’t help your resume, but one big server will serve you well.”
Aug 2
Crimes with Python's Pattern Matching hillelwayne.com · “It looks like __subclasshook__ caches the results for a given type check.”
Aug 2
Why I Still Love PHP and Javascript After 20+ years the.scapegoat.dev · “A legacy codebase means that the product is performing well.”
Aug 2
What's TypeScript compiling? Use a treemap to find out. effectivetypescript.com · “The root issue here is that Google distributes all 300+ of its APIs as a single npm package.”
Aug 1
Linux 5.19 lwn.net · “So here we are, one week late, and 5.19 is tagged and pushed out.”
Aug 1

July 2022 40 posts

Google's in-house desktop Linux computerworld.com · “There are no big pushes to upgrade the fleet.”
Jul 31
Carbon's most exciting feature is its calling convention foonathan.net · “It’s also not really a limitation in many cases: how often do you actually need to take the address of something?”
Jul 30
How to create a Python package in 2022 mathspp.com · “I will start by setting up the dependency management of my package, and I will use Poetry.”
Jul 28
Rust is actually portable ahgamut.github.io · “Once I figured out the right flags in the target cosmo.json, most of the bugs with std went away.”
Jul 28
Programming languages endorsed for server-side use at Meta engineering.fb.com · “Rust is the latest addition to Meta’s list of supported server-side languages.”
Jul 27
Upgrading from Debian Jessie to Bullseye after nearly 30 years diziet.dreamwidth.org · “Oh my god. INN uses many non-portable data formats, which just depend on your C types.”
Jul 27
SQLite Internals: Pages and B-trees fly.io · “Disks are usually the slowest part of a database so limiting page fetches can have a huge performance win.”
Jul 27
Twenty years of Valgrind nnethercote.github.io · “Memcheck has found countless bugs in countless programs, and is a standard part of the testing setup for many of them.”
Jul 26
Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable lucasfcosta.com · “When you start a new task before finishing the previous, average cycle times will increase.”
Jul 25
It's time to leave the leap second in the past engineering.fb.com · “Back in 2012, Reddit experienced a massive outage because of a leap second; the site was inaccessible for 30 to 40 minutes.”
Jul 25
In Praise of Stacked PRs benjamincongdon.me · “Stacking PRs keeps the author unblocked.”
Jul 24
The tar archive format, and why GNU tar extracts in quadratic time mort.coffee · “A couple of days ago, I had a 518GiB tar.gz file (1.1 TiB uncompressed) that I had to extract.”
Jul 23
Embed is in C23 thephd.dev · “With this, putting data into C and C++ executables will be a dream.”
Jul 23
Swallowing the elephant into Blender aras-p.info · “All of the things mentioned above are quadratic complexity in terms of object count in the scene.”
Jul 21
What happens when you press a key in your terminal? jvns.ca · “In the 70s, computers were expensive.”
Jul 21
Cooling related failure (in Google London DC) status.cloud.google.com · “A small percentage of replicated Persistent Disk devices are now running in single redundant mode.”
Jul 20
Soft deletion probably isn't worth it brandur.org · “The biggest reason for this is that almost always, data deletion also has non-data side effects.”
Jul 19
How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST? htmx.org · “REST must be the most broadly misused technical term in computer programming history.”
Jul 18
Android removes much of Fuchsia-related code as Starnix project progresses 9to5google.com · “In its place, we have a lone “TODO” message, suggesting that Google may be building up something new in its place.”
Jul 16
Scratch is a big deal bryanbraun.com · “At the time of this post (July 2022) it ranks 21st, above Typescript, Rust, Julia, and other important languages.”
Jul 16
How Duke Nukem II's parallax scrolling worked lethalguitar.wordpress.com · “Thanks to this mechanism, we can copy 4 bytes for the cost of one byte.”
Jul 15
Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs raphlinus.github.io · “Accessibility is one of the great strengths of the Web technology stack.”
Jul 15
How I went about learning Rust eli.thegreenplace.net · “Overall, over these past months I’ve written about 14 KLOC of Rust in the process of learning and practicing the language.”
Jul 15
10% of the top million sites are dead ccampbell.io · “107,776 domains could not even be connected to.”
Jul 15
The DynamoDB Paper brooker.co.za · “The downside is that caching introduces bimodal behavior.”
Jul 14
DNS Esoterica: Why you can't dig Switzerland shkspr.mobi · “The blame - as with most modern ills - lies in the mid-1970s.”
Jul 14
Teams is killing my Mac every day techcommunity.microsoft.com · “I found an MS article mentioning how Teams uses memory because of this Chromium feature due to easier development.”
Jul 13
Six programming languages I'd like to see buttondown.email · “Graphs are really common data structures but there hasn’t yet been an "everything’s a graph" language.”
Jul 13
Tell HN: We are trying to get tail calls into the WebAssembly standard news.ycombinator.com · “This proposal has reached Phase3 of the standardization process years ago, but has since stalled.”
Jul 12
Publishing your work increases your luck github.com · “The simple act of publishing your work is one of the best ways to invite a little more luck into your life.”
Jul 12
Working in the software industry, circa 1989 dev.jimgrey.net · “It took more than three hours for all of the computers to finish booting.”
Jul 11
Using GPT-3 to explain how code works simonwillison.net · “And that’s not surprising, because GPT-3 doesn’t actually know anything about anything at all.”
Jul 9
Notepad++ v8.4.3: Unhappy Users' Edition notepad-plus-plus.org · “All dissatisfied users of Notepad++ will get a refund, just print and fill out the following refund request form:”
Jul 8
Lenovo shipping new laptops that only boot Windows by default mjg59.dreamwidth.org · “There’s no security benefit to this.”
Jul 8
DRY is an over-rated programming principle gordonc.bearblog.dev · “We end up with a presumption of reusability when really we should have a presumption of repetition.”
Jul 7
Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler rubycentral.org · “Sonatype reports that supply chain attacks increased 650% YoY in 2021.”
Jul 6
I can't believe that I can prove that it can sort blog.adacore.com · “Proof requires us to understand why it works.”
Jul 4
The End of CI matt-rickard.com · “However, I predict that in the future, nobody will do it.”
Jul 3
How does rsync work? michael.stapelberg.ch · “Another way of phrasing the above is that data consistency is not something that rsync can in any way guarantee.”
Jul 2
Darktable 4.0 darktable.org · “Performance configuration is now applied at runtime and no longer requires darktable to be restarted when changed.”
Jul 2

June 2022 50 posts

Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! sfconservancy.org · “In the central irony, GitHub succeeded where SourceForge failed: they have convinced us to promote and even aid in the creation of a proprietary system that exploits FOSS.”
Jun 30
Vim 9.0 vim.org · “An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.”
Jun 30
When Network is Faster than Cache simonhearne.com · “Well it turns out that in some cases, the network is faster than the cache.”
Jun 29
Thunderbird 102 Released: A Serious Upgrade To Your Communication blog.thunderbird.net · “Thunderbird 102 is available to download right now for our global community of 20M+ Linux, macOS, and Windows users.”
Jun 28
The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't) posthog.com · “Since we started PostHog, our team has interviewed 725 people.”
Jun 28
Fresh 1.0 deno.com · “By default, web pages built with Fresh send zero JavaScript to the client.”
Jun 28
Relational Databases Explained architecturenotes.co · “Indexes achieve this with the additional costs of storage, memory, and keeping it up to date (slower writes), which allows us to skip the tedious task of checking every table row.”
Jun 27
The SQLite Code of Ethics sqlite.org · “This document continues to be used for its original purpose - providing a reference to fill in the “code of conduct” box on supplier registration forms.”
Jun 26
DevOps is a failure leebriggs.co.uk · “We now have “DevOps Engineer” as a job title.”
Jun 26
XLite: Query Excel and Open Document spreadsheets as SQLite virtual tables github.com · “XLite is a SQLite extension written in Rust.”
Jun 25
Start all of your commands with a comma rhodesmill.org · “The solution was obviously to adjust my command names in such a way that they were still easy to type, but would never be chosen as system command names.”
Jun 23
Whatever happened to SHA-256 support in Git? lwn.net · “In other words, work on supporting the use of a hash algorithm other than SHA-1 in Git appears to have ground to a halt.”
Jun 23
The Grug Brained Developer grugbrain.dev · “given choice between complexity or one on one against t-rex, grug take t-rex: at least grug see t-rex”
Jun 22
Tailscale SSH tailscale.com · “Tailscale SSH allows you to establish SSH connections between devices in your Tailscale network, as authorized by your access controls, without managing SSH keys, and authenticates your SSH connection using WireGuard®.”
Jun 22
Why is Apache clinging to OpenOffice's corpse? arencambre.com · “Its last major release was version 4.1, from 2014!”
Jun 22
What will a Chromium-only Web look like? mnot.net · “Microsoft has already ditched their engine for Chromium; we’re all worried about Mozilla’s health and long-term (or even medium-term) viability, and Apple is only one competition judgement away from having to open up iOS to other engines.”
Jun 22
GitHub Copilot is generally available to all developers github.blog · “We’re making GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor, generally available to all developers for $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year.”
Jun 21
One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite til.simonwillison.net · “It’s a LOT slower than using sqlite3 directly though.”
Jun 21
Cloudflare outage on June 21, 2022 blog.cloudflare.com · “This was our error and not the result of an attack or malicious activity.”
Jun 21
Deno raises $21M deno.com · “There are thousands of megabytes of dependencies, many of which are unnecessary, insecure, and out-of-date.”
Jun 21
Don't Use Kubernetes, Yet matt-rickard.com · “Early-stage startups shouldn’t run on Kubernetes yet.”
Jun 19
Awesome Cold Showers github.com · “It’s great when people get excited about things, but sometimes they get a little too excited.”
Jun 18
Incorrect I/O throttling when using block device files mjacobson.net · “Ordinarily, I/O operations on one disk device don’t throttle those on another device.”
Jun 18
V Language Review (2022) mawfig.github.io · “So yeah, we’re able to create a null pointer (V reference) with no compiler errors or warnings.”
Jun 18
The World's Most Satisfying Checkbox andy.works · “Let me strip off the sugarcoating and share a little secret about habit tracker apps: they’re little more than a glorified checkbox.”
Jun 17
Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform isdotnetopen.com · “Over time, the .NET platform is becoming closed, to ensure it is only useful if you are a customer.”
Jun 16
The computers are fast, but you don't know it shvbsle.in · “So from 20 minutes, we have come down to 12 seconds!”
Jun 16
4 macOS Screenshot Tricks To Impress Your Co-Workers sal.dev · “I took a screenshot of a Google image search for “cat” and the PNG was 5.7MB while the JPEG was 1.4MB.”
Jun 16
Cool desktops don't change tylercipriani.com · “So, Vi will be around in 2068, whereas Visual Studio Code will be defunct before the end of this decade.”
Jun 16
Internet Explorer 11 has retired and is officially out of support, what you need to know blogs.windows.com · “After 25+ years of helping people use and experience the web, Internet Explorer (IE) is officially retired and out of support as of today, June 15, 2022.”
Jun 15
Palm OS developer releases source to classic games, 20+ years after release retrorgb.com · “Aaron Ardiri, a Palm OS developer, has released source codes for various games, GameBoy emulator and various tools originally developed for Palm OS over 20 years ago on his Github page, with total of 12 repositories.”
Jun 15
CLAP: The New Audio Plug-In Standard u-he.com · “CLAP is open source, released under the MIT license: No fees, memberships or proprietary license agreements are required before developing or distributing a CLAP capable host or plug-in, and the license never expires.”
Jun 15
Revealed: Our Plans For Thunderbird On Android blog.thunderbird.net · “Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.”
Jun 13
New UUID Formats ietf.org · “Non-time-ordered UUID versions such as UUIDv4 have poor database index locality.”
Jun 12
System Preferences Reimagined on macOS basicappleguy.com · “It’s actually quite remarkable that a program in the modern era can survive for so long in such a preserved state.”
Jun 12
DNS Toys dns.toys · “dns.toys is a DNS server that takes creative liberties with the DNS protocol to offer handy utilities and services that are easily accessible via the command line.”
Jun 11
How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “Unlike Skype, Whatsapp never bothered with a framework like Scrum.”
Jun 11
Stop Interviewing With Leet Code fev.al · “For 99.9% of the jobs in today’s market, LeetCode is generally irrelevant to the interview.”
Jun 9
How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% nee.lv · “With ~63k entries that’s (n^2+n)/2 = (63000^2+63000)/2 = 1984531500 checks if my math is right.”
Jun 9
The collapse of complex software nolanlawson.com · “Nobody can subtract from the system; everyone just adds.”
Jun 9
Why Software Engineers like Woodworking zainrizvi.io · “Woodworking felt strangely familiar.”
Jun 9
Sunsetting Atom github.blog · “Atom has not had significant feature development for the past several years, though we’ve conducted maintenance and security updates during this period to ensure we’re being good stewards of the project and product.”
Jun 8
Find a good available .com domain sive.rs · “Run that, and you’ll have a list of 93,000 dictionary words that are available with the .com extension.”
Jun 8
Plain text. With lines. akkartik.name · “I end up with some bloated format that only one or two apps can open.”
Jun 6
What rr does rr-project.org · “The replayed execution’s address spaces, register contents, syscall data etc are exactly the same in every run.”
Jun 4
Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort opensource.googleblog.com · “Today we’re sharing open source code that can sort arrays of numbers about ten times as fast as the C++ std::sort, and outperforms state of the art architecture-specific algorithms, while being portable across all modern CPU architectures.”
Jun 4
VSCodium: Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS Code vscodium.com · “Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.”
Jun 3
How fast are Linux pipes anyway? mazzo.li · “We will begin with a simple program with a throughput of around 3.5GiB/s, and improve its performance twentyfold.”
Jun 2
Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming hirrolot.github.io · “Still, from time to time I find myself disputing with borrow checker and type system for no practical reason.”
Jun 2
Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot blog.mozilla.org · “Our solution to that was to develop a high-level API around the machine translation engine, port it to WebAssembly, and optimize the operations for matrix multiplication to run efficiently on CPUs.”
Jun 2

May 2022 50 posts

What the f*ck Python! github.com · “But sometimes, the outcomes of a Python snippet may not seem obvious at first sight.”
May 31
Dragonfly: A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached github.com · “Fully compatible with Redis and Memcached APIs, Dragonfly requires no code changes to adopt.”
May 30
Programming in the Apocalypse matduggan.com · “Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go.”
May 30
8 compelling reasons to quit Chrome and switch to Firefox pcworld.com · “It’s a rare browser not based on Chromium, the project that powers Chrome, unlike other rivals like Edge or Opera.”
May 28
Terraform should have remained stateless bejarano.io · “Point being, are we adding state because 1% of the resources couldn’t be mapped otherwise?”
May 28
marginalia.nu goes open source memex.marginalia.nu · “The needs of the marginalia project, and the needs of an open source project have effectively aligned.”
May 28
Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective lea.verou.me · “And I don’t feel I did a good job communicating the frustration he went through in the one hour or so until he gave up.”
May 27
SQLite3 Fiddle sqlite.org · “This app runs on your device. After loading, it does not interact with the remote server at all.”
May 26
Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits kenkantzer.com · “All the really bad security vulnerabilities were obvious.”
May 25
Google has been DDoSing SourceHut for over a year drewdevault.com · “For a start, I never really appreciated the fact that Go secretly calls home to Google to fetch modules through a proxy (you can set GOPROXY=direct to fix this).”
May 25
SwiftUI in 2022 mjtsai.com · “SwiftUI is an unreliable mess that needs to be treated with oven mitts, and I won’t be increasing my reliance on it anytime soon.”
May 25
YouTubeDrive: Store files as YouTube videos == infinite disk space github.com · “YouTubeDrive is a silly proof-of-concept, and I do not endorse its high-volume use.”
May 24
Healthchecks.io Hosting Setup, 2022 Edition blog.healthchecks.io · “The monthly Hetzner bill is €484.”
May 24
A Kernel Hacker Meets Fuchsia OS a13xp0p0v.github.io · “Despite KASLR, the kernel pointers were the same on every Fuchsia boot!”
May 24
Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness shuvomoy.github.io · “She said, you work very hard on a problem for a long time, and then you get this rush, this wonderful satisfaction when you’ve solved it.”
May 23
Useless Use of "dd" vidarholen.net · “It’s purely a superstitious charm trying to ensure safe passage of the data.”
May 23
The mindless tyranny of 'what if it changes?' as a software design principle chriskiehl.com · “Shy away from numbers or concrete analysis during design. Good engineers estimate. Great engineers speculate.”
May 22
Faster CRC32 on the Apple M1 dougallj.wordpress.com · “However, I discovered a simple update to a widely used technique that makes it possible to run twice as fast as existing solutions on the Apple M1.”
May 22
The balance has shifted away from SPAs nolanlawson.com · “SPAs are no longer the cool kids they once were 10 years ago.”
May 21
Tunneling Wikipedia through WhatsApp to (maybe?) get around wifi restrictions alexanderell.is · “If the wifi is letting WhatsApp messages through, what if we used WhatsApp as a vehicle for the information we really care about?”
May 21
Firefox appears to be flagged as suspicious by Cloudflare lwthiker.com · “This basically means you must have JS enabled to access the site and you will incur a 2-3 seconds delay before the content is served.”
May 21
Speeding up sort performance in Postgres 15 citusdata.com · “Rounding up to the next power of 2 causes an average of 25% of memory to get wasted.”
May 20
Rust: A Critical Retrospective bunniestudios.com · “Before this, Rust had no native ability to deal with arrays bigger than 32 elements!”
May 19
I Spent 2 years Launching Tiny Projects tinyprojects.dev · “I ended up selling for $5,300, which blew my tiny mind.”
May 18
Why billing systems are a nightmare for engineers getlago.com · “Taxes depend on what you are selling, your home country and your customer’s home country.”
May 18
Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore rubenerd.com · “Therefore, we can see Git ignores .gitignore because its in .gitignore, which means it didn’t ignore .gitignore for instructions.”
May 18
Why I no longer recommend Julia yuri.is · “In my experience, Julia and its packages have the highest rate of serious correctness bugs of any programming system I’ve used, and I started programming with Visual Basic 6 in the mid-2000s.”
May 16
Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots blog.searchmysite.net · “That makes it especially tragic to report that nearly all the traffic to the site is now from SEO spam bots, presumably searching for all that elusive SEO spam-free content.”
May 16
Web3 is just expensive P2P netfuture.ch · “Doing the operations on an actual blockchain is very expensive.”
May 16
Fly.io: the Reclaimer of Heroku's Magic christine.website · “This allows them to get your app running in multiple regions for a lot less than it would cost to run it on Heroku.”
May 15
The very weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option blog.tmm.cx · “It appears that HP is actually shipping a Linux and then running DOS in a VM.”
May 15
Linux Insides 0xax.gitbooks.io · “A book-in-progress about the linux kernel and its insides.”
May 14
The Apple GPU and the Impossible Bug rosenzweig.io · “As soon as a partial render is required, however, failing to provide this program means the GPU dereferences a null pointer and faults.”
May 13
The Other Kind of Staff Software Engineer earthly.dev · “Everyone wants to present themselves as a profit center.”
May 13
A clean start for the web macwright.com · “The web’s evolution over the last decade has mirrored the American economy.”
May 13
The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever kitze.io · “I could’ve done that with every single version that I made, at any point from 2018 until now.”
May 12
NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules developer.nvidia.com · “Pre-Turing customers will continue to run the closed source modules.”
May 11
Announcing D1: our first SQL database blog.cloudflare.com · “D1 is built on SQLite.”
May 11
I'm All-In on Server-Side SQLite fly.io · “The most important thing you should understand about Litestream is that it’s just SQLite.”
May 9
Donald Knuth Was Framed buttondown.email · “He wasn’t competing with McIlroy, and didn’t know how McIlroy was going to critique it.”
May 8
Xilem: An architecture for UI in Rust raphlinus.github.io · “UI code written in this architecture will look very intuitive to those familiar with state of the art toolkits such as SwiftUI, Flutter, and React, while at the same time being idiomatic Rust.”
May 7
Unix command line conventions over time blog.liw.fi · “Initially, GNU used the plus (+) to indicate a long option, but quickly changed to a double dash (–).”
May 7
7GUIs eugenkiss.github.io · “The task set should be as small as possible yet reflect as many typical (or fundamental or representative) challenges in GUI programming as possible.”
May 5
Please stop disabling zoom matuzo.at · “According to the HTTP Archive Web Alamac, 24% of desktop homepages and 29% of mobile homepages attempt to disable scaling by setting either maximum-scale to a value less than or equal to 1, or user-scalable set to 0 or none.”
May 5
Microsoft 3D Movie Maker Source Code github.com · “This code was restored from the Microsoft corporate archives and cleared for release.”
May 4
The Google incentive mismatch: Problems with promotion-oriented cultures warp.dev · “And so we would deprioritize product polish for projects that looked better to a promotion committee.”
May 4
Using QGIS to apply a 1777 style to today's OpenStreetMap data manuelclaeysbouuaert.be · “What would it look like if count de Ferraris would have made his map today?”
May 3
I won free load testing fasterthanli.me · “My site wouldn’t have gone down if I was still using that setup.”
May 2
[email protected] brendangregg.com · “This became especially clear after I recently worked with another hardware vendor, who were initially friendly and supportive but after evaluations of their technology went poorly became bullying and misleading.”
May 2
My experience getting a tech job with no degree or relevant work experience lowlyswe.substack.com · “A mere 4~ years and 4 jobs later I now make 175,000 dollars as a senior software engineer.”
May 1

April 2022 51 posts

Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang fasterthanli.me · “It’s the Billion Dollar Mistake all over again.”
Apr 29
Gnome patent troll stripped of patent rights blog.opensource.org · “That prompted over 4,000 Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community members to rally in defense of the GNOME Foundation, raising over $150,000 to defend against the bogus claim.”
Apr 28
Lets talk about blockchains cmdli.dev · “Most applications simply do not require global consensus in order to operate.”
Apr 28
Public Money, Public Code publiccode.eu · “If it is public money, it should be public code as well.”
Apr 27
I put my whole life into a single database krausefx.com · “Since the start of this project, I collected a total of more than 380,000 data points.”
Apr 27
SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way ctrl.blog · “Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.”
Apr 27
Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq brimdata.io · “In short, zq is based on stateful dataflow while jq is based on stateless dataflow.”
Apr 26
Principles of Engineering Management acjay.com · “Managing comes first.”
Apr 25
Why LSP? matklad.github.io · “To sum the above succinctly, the problem with decent IDE support was not of N * M, but rather of an inadequate equilibrium of a two-sided market.”
Apr 25
I sold 640 copies of my book in one year nts.strzibny.name · “You signed up for two jobs if you decided to write a book.”
Apr 25
The Hare programming language harelang.org · “Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust.”
Apr 25
My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home michael.stapelberg.ch · “No matter if you’re using 1 Gbit/s or 25 Gbit/s, you pay the same monthly fee.”
Apr 23
Chris Lattner on garbage collection vs. Automatic Reference Counting (2017) atp.fm · “Here’s the way I look at it, and as you said, the ship has somewhat sailed: I am totally convinced that ARC is the right way to go upfront.”
Apr 23
Magic-trace – High-resolution traces of what a process is doing github.com · “You use it like perf: point it to a process and off it goes.”
Apr 22
Repulsive Curves cs.cmu.edu · “Curves play a fundamental role across computer graphics, physical simulation, and mathematical visualization, yet most tools for curve design do nothing to prevent crossings or self-intersections.”
Apr 22
Apple Discontinues macOS Server support.apple.com · “As of April 21, 2022, Apple has discontinued macOS Server.”
Apr 21
The smallest 256x256 single-color PNG file, and where you've seen it (2015) mjt.me.uk · “But when you can send a tile in just 103 bytes, sending the tile is as simple as sending the redirect.”
Apr 21
Go will use pdqsort in next release github.com · “In common patterns, pdqsort is often faster (i.e. 10x faster in sorted slices).”
Apr 21
Changing std:sort at Google’s scale and beyond danlark.org · “If you have a mismatched type in a comparator, C++ will not warn you even with -Weverything.”
Apr 20
De-AMP: Cutting out Google and enhancing privacy brave.com · “AMP pages are served from Google’s servers, though designed to look like they’re coming from the original publisher’s site.”
Apr 19
How we upgraded our 4TB Postgres database retool.com · “To be frank, it wasn’t a completely straight path from point A to point B.”
Apr 19
The absurd complexity of server-side rendering gist.github.com · “Our pages went uncrawled by Bing, time to first meaningful paint grew faster than npm, and it became clear: something must be done.”
Apr 19
The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten quuxplusone.github.io · “Your programming challenge: Add a mult command to memcached.”
Apr 17
Unreal vs. Unity Opinion gist.github.com · “This was the case with Unity for a long time, but in the last few years the quality of that back half of development has rapidly declined, to the point where people are absolutely sick of their own projects by the time they’re finished… or more accurately, abandoned, because long-term maintenance of Unity games is appallingly hard.”
Apr 17
Netflix End of Series 1 brendangregg.com · “Netflix has been the best job of my career so far, and I’ll miss my colleagues and the culture.”
Apr 16
I was wrong – CRDTs are the future (2020) josephg.com · “At its heart, OT is a glorified for() loop with some helper functions to update character offsets.”
Apr 16
When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code freakingrectangle.wordpress.com · “So instead of writing code, consider instead having the candidate read existing code and talk about what it does and how it works.”
Apr 15
Moreutils: A collection of Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago joeyh.name · “moreutils is a collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.”
Apr 15
We lost 54k GitHub stars httpie.io · “Due to an unfortunate sequence of events, I accidentally made the project’s repository private for a moment.”
Apr 14
Inside the longest Atlassian outage newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com · “It took until Day 9 for executives at the company to acknowledge the outage.”
Apr 13
U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow ionathan.ch · “I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project.”
Apr 13
Git security vulnerability announced github.blog · “This vulnerability affects users working on multi-user machines where a malicious actor could create a .git directory in a shared location above a victim’s current working directory.”
Apr 13
New(ish) command line tools jvns.ca · “I got a bunch of replies with tools I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d make a list here.”
Apr 12
A tiny Docker image to serve static websites lipanski.com · “This got me to a whooping 186KB image and you can read more about it in the previous version of this post.”
Apr 12
Node.js packages don't deserve trust josephg.com · “The fundamental problem with npm is that any package you install has full access to do whatever it wants on your computer.”
Apr 11
Impressions from a first-time Mac user loganmarchione.com · “Closing the lid feels like closing the door of a German car.”
Apr 11
The Joy of Small Projects schroer.ca · “Companies pay millions of dollars to build complex apps and to convince you that you need to build the same complexity into your own projects.”
Apr 10
I need to find an apartment mattrighetti.com · “Long story short: I’ve taken a new position in Luxembourg and I have to find an apartment, in a different country, in a reasonably short time.”
Apr 9
Mozilla Thunderbird Beta now supports Matrix chat matrix.org · “The latest Thunderbird beta finally has Matrix support enabled by default.”
Apr 8
NotepadNext: A cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++ github.com · “There are numerous bugs and half working implementations.”
Apr 8
The United States Digital Corps digitalcorps.gsa.gov · “What started as an idea and grassroots effort evolved into the U.S. Digital Corps.”
Apr 8
The 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files (2020) ctrl.blog · “It serves no purpose other than to pad the files to make them 0,5 MB larger.”
Apr 7
What’s new in Emacs 28.1? masteringemacs.org · “Notable features include the formal inclusion of native compilation, a technique that will greatly speed up your Emacs experience.”
Apr 6
In defense of simple architectures danluu.com · “Our architecture is so simple I’m not even going to bother with an architectural diagram.”
Apr 6
Switching from pyenv, rbenv, goenv and nvm to asdf jinyuz.dev · “Everything was fine until I kinda felt my config.fish file got bloated and somehow nvm was kinda slowing down my shell startup.”
Apr 5
Horrible edge cases when dealing with music dustri.org · “He also changed his stage name to the symbol in 1993, and was thus usually referred to as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”.”
Apr 3
A project with a single 11,000-line code file austinhenley.com · “Something I found hilarious is that a variable might be used on lines 200-210 and then again on line 8544.”
Apr 3
Those HTML attributes you never use smashingmagazine.com · “Use of rel=preload here informs the browser that we want the indicated resources to load in priority, so they’re not blocked by things like scripts and stylesheets.”
Apr 2
A database for 2022 tailscale.com · “The migration from etcd to one-big-table in SQLite was easy.”
Apr 1
The GOV.UK Design System is now live gds.blog.gov.uk · “In fact, pages on GOV.UK built with the Design System download about twice as fast as those that haven’t, as they use about half as much code.”
Apr 1
RFC 9225: Software Defects Considered Harmful rfc-editor.org · “Endeavoring to reduce the number of degradations in the future, implementers MUST NOT introduce bugs when writing software.”
Apr 1

March 2022 54 posts

Mastodon 3.5 blog.joinmastodon.org · “Discoverability makes or breaks a platform, as there is nothing more important to retain a new user than to let them find something interesting to stay for, as soon as possible.”
Mar 31
Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out lepiter.io · “And it says that Comprehension took on average ~58%.”
Mar 30
Generics can make your Go code slower planetscale.com · “It’s about systems engineers who are not excited about generics per se, but about monomorphization and its performance implications.”
Mar 30
Difftastic: a structural diff that understands syntax github.com · “Difftastic is a structural diff tool that compares files based on their syntax.”
Mar 29
Maybe you should do less 'work' johnwhiles.com · “If you haven’t been fired, and no one has taken you aside to ask about your performance, then probably you’re meeting expectations.”
Mar 28
Computer Networks From Scratch networksfromscratch.com · “First we’ll build an example system that will allow two people to send messages back and forth using plastic tubing and marbles instead of wires and electrical signals.”
Mar 27
Firefox UI UX history github.com · “It’s also one of the ways to prevent divisions in the community, given that there have been forks every time the UI changes big.”
Mar 27
`COPY --chmod` reduced the size of my container image by 35% blog.vamc19.dev · “Well, I have been doing it wrong all these years.”
Mar 26
wireproxy: A userspace WireGuard client that exposes itself as a proxy github.com · “wireproxy is a completely userspace application that connects to a wireguard peer, and exposes a socks5/http proxy or tunnels on the machine.”
Mar 26
Running GUI apps within Docker containers trickster.dev · “For example, if we run Firefox within Docker we can have an explicit separation of browser state between containers.”
Mar 26
I built a receipt printer for GitHub issues aschmelyun.com · “After seeing a receipt printer spitting out orders while grabbing some take-out the other day, I wondered if I could use one to print out a ticket each time an issue was added to one of my repos.”
Mar 25
The end of the nice GTK button blog.brixit.nl · “I personally feel like Adwaita has been the pinnacle of Linux design and that the Gnome design guidelines are absolutely great.”
Mar 24
Introducing MDN Plus: Make MDN your own hacks.mozilla.org · “For today’s premium subscription service, MDN Plus, we are releasing three new features that begin to address this need: Notifications, Collections and MDN Offline.”
Mar 24
If you're not using SSH certificates you're doing SSH wrong smallstep.com · “None of these issues are actually inherent to SSH.”
Mar 24
Why You Should Start Self Hosting rohanrd.xyz · “There are some stories where the user never figured out what they had done wrong to deserve suspension of account.”
Mar 23
A one in a million bug in Switch kernel gist.githubusercontent.com · “Nintendo would not introduce this out-of-the-blue, there is some weird hardware phenomenon going on.”
Mar 23
Enemies: State-of-the-art digital humans in Unity unity.com · “Enemies expands on the work done for The Heretic, which featured Unity’s first realistic digital human.”
Mar 22
Please put units in names ruudvanasseldonk.com · “The Python program sleeps for five minutes, the Java program sleeps for 0.3 seconds, and the Haskell program sleeps for 0.3 milliseconds.”
Mar 21
Why Don't You Use ... brendangregg.com · “They are usually well aware of various technologies but have reasons not to use them which they usually won’t share.”
Mar 21
Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM q3k.org · “Unsurprisingly, very few people have heard of it, and even their Googling skills don’t come in handy.”
Mar 21
Windows Needs a Change in Priorities den.dev · “There are inconsistencies across the OS that are just wild and stand out like a sore thumb (but now with rounded corners.)”
Mar 20
Meld meldmerge.org · “It might even help you to figure out what’s going on in that merge you keep avoiding.”
Mar 20
OpenBSD/arm64 on Apple M1 systems marc.info · “It has taken a while, but I’m pleased to announce that OpenBSD/arm64 works well enough on Apple M1 systems for some wider testing.”
Mar 19
The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here! asahilinux.org · “Keep in mind that this is still a very early, alpha release.”
Mar 18
Christopher Alexander, 1936-2022 cnu.org · “Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time.”
Mar 18
Zotero 6: Your research workflow, transformed zotero.org · “Zotero 6 introduces an array of new features to transform how you do research, including a completely new way of working with PDFs and notes.”
Mar 17
H.264 is Magic sidbala.com · “It is the result of 30+ years of work with one single goal: To reduce the bandwidth required for transmission of full-motion video.”
Mar 17
Court affirms it's false advertising to claim software is Open Source when it's not opensource.org · “The parties didn’t dispute that the use of the Commons Clause makes a license non-free.”
Mar 17
How our free plan stays free tailscale.com · “Rather, increased word-of-mouth from free plans sells the more valuable corporate plans.”
Mar 16
C Isn't A Programming Language Anymore gankra.github.io · “C is the lingua franca of programming.”
Mar 16
CSS-Tricks is joining DigitalOcean! css-tricks.com · “DigitalOcean is committed to continuing to produce high-quality content on front-end development and tending to the trove of content that exists here already.”
Mar 15
Go 1.18 is released! go.dev · “With Go 1.18, Go is the first major language with fuzzing fully integrated into its standard toolchain.”
Mar 15
Microsoft is testing ads in the Windows 11 File Explorer bleepingcomputer.com · “Microsoft has begun testing promotions for some of its other products in the File Explorer app on devices running its latest Windows 11 Insider build.”
Mar 14
Veloren veloren.net · “Veloren is an action-adventure role-playing game set in a vast fantasy world.”
Mar 13
My essential Firefox fixes (and add-ons) in 2022 rubenerd.com · “Mozilla recently removed the Search box by default, and added redundant padding to the toolbar to mimic Safari.”
Mar 13
Inspecting Web Views in macOS blog.jim-nielsen.com · “It’s kind of like opening the developer tools in an Electron app, except these are native macOS apps with web views parading as system UI.”
Mar 12
A non-standard book list for software developers mihaiolteanu.me · “If I pay close attention to the discussions taking place around me, and observe the thought patterns of the speakers, I can tell which of them definitely haven’t read or paid attention to Euclid.”
Mar 12
Python Design Patterns python-patterns.guide · “This site is letting me collect my ideas about Python and Design Patterns all in one place.”
Mar 12
Why does Google get internationalization wrong? smaller.fish · “This header is sent to websites to tell them what language to serve the site in.”
Mar 11
How To Do Less alexturek.com · “You probably need to do fewer things right now.”
Mar 11
Appeal to Ruby community from Kharkiv Rubyist zverok.space · “I am no hero.”
Mar 10
Some tiny personal programs I've written jvns.ca · “These are more about just doing something fun with no specific learning goal.”
Mar 9
Bugs in Hello World blog.sunfishcode.online · “All the versions linked above have a bug.”
Mar 9
Blender 3.1 blender.org · “Cycles now has a Metal GPU backend, contributed by Apple.”
Mar 9
WebGPU: All of the cores, none of the canvas surma.dev · “I won’t use WebGPU to generate graphics.”
Mar 8
Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call! element.io · “What’s more, Element Call is built entirely on Matrix: it doesn’t need any additional servers to get going.”
Mar 5
A regular expression to check for prime numbers noulakaz.net · “If there is no match, then the number is prime.”
Mar 5
It's always been you, Canvas2D developer.chrome.com · “There are Canvas2Ds in cars, on fridges, and in space (really).”
Mar 4
ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia from the internet icann.org · “Essentially, ICANN has been built to ensure that the Internet works, not for its coordination role to be used to stop it from working.”
Mar 3
SingleFile: Save a complete web page into a single HTML file github.com · “SingleFile is a Web Extension (and a CLI tool) compatible with Chrome, Firefox (Desktop and Mobile), Microsoft Edge, Safari, Vivaldi, Brave, Waterfox, Yandex browser, and Opera.”
Mar 2
SPAs were a mistake gomakethings.com · “Browsers give you a ton of stuff for free, built right in, out-of-the-box.”
Mar 2
Write plain text files sive.rs · “When you store your writing in one company’s unique format, then you need that program to access it.”
Mar 1
Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be typeofnan.dev · “The problem with React hooks is that React isn’t truly reactive.”
Mar 1
5 things you don't need Javascript for lexoral.com · “Every day, I see people use Javascript to do things that are supported by default in good old HTML & CSS.”
Mar 1

February 2022 46 posts

“O, so sorry. I need more time. my country defending Russian invasion” github.com · “Right now my country defending russian invasion, so I’m a little busy now.”
Feb 28
No user accounts, by design f-droid.org · “F-Droid has never had a method to identify or track users in the Android client app, and getting information from f-droid.org has also never required any kind of identity information.”
Feb 28
New JSON query operators in SQLite 3.38.0 tirkarthi.github.io · “JSON is on by default.”
Feb 27
Why not hire part-time developers? aklos.substack.com · “Working part-time could let developers give their best to a project without the burden of emotional blackmail in the form of “9 to 5”.”
Feb 27
Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences) sporks.space · “In the Windows world, backwards compatibility is the default, but in the Linux world, it’s less so.”
Feb 27
Year 2038 problem is still alive and well cookieplmonster.github.io · “In practice… the bug is still around and can remain unnoticed for a long time.”
Feb 27
Make Linux look exactly like Windows 95 lunduke.substack.com · “This is made possible through a project called Chicago95, that aims to bring a consistent, Win 95 look to XFCE desktops.”
Feb 26
NO_COLOR: disabling ANSI color output by default no-color.org · “Accepting the futility of trying to reverse this trend, an informal standard was proposed in 2017: Command-line software which adds ANSI color to its output by default should check for a NO_COLOR environment variable that, when present and not an empty string (regardless of its value), prevents the addition of ANSI color.”
Feb 26
GitHub Advisory Database now open to community contributions github.blog · “Today, we are excited to announce that the GitHub Advisory Database is now open to community contributions!”
Feb 26
Writing an OS in Rust os.phil-opp.com · “This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language.”
Feb 25
Moving the kernel to modern C lwn.net · “Despite its generally fast-moving nature, the kernel project relies on a number of old tools.”
Feb 24
You can't capture the nuance of my form fields drewdevault.com · “You cannot capture all of this nuance in a home-grown form control, or even anything close to it, but many JavaScript programmers do it anyway.”
Feb 24
The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8 devblogs.microsoft.com · “That way, if you saw cats, you knew that you were in that last failure case: The shell is running but forgot to put something on the screen.”
Feb 23
What is PeerTube? joinpeertube.org · “With PeerTube, no more opaque algorithms or obscure moderation policies!”
Feb 23
Chris Lattner left Swift core team forums.swift.org · “To answer your question, the root cause of my decision to leave the core team is a toxic environment in the meetings themselves.”
Feb 21
Sven Guckes passed away groups.google.com · “I would like to dedicate the upcoming Vim 9.0 release to Sven in his memory.”
Feb 21
Things that used to be hard and are now easy jvns.ca · “Not all of them are equally “easy”, but I found reading the list really fun and it gave me some ideas for things to learn.”
Feb 20
Game Boy Fiver [Wordle clone]: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes alexanderpruss.blogspot.com · “It turns out that the result is 17763 bytes, plus 108 bytes of overhead, for a total of 17871 bytes, or 28% of the original list, with very, very simple decompression.”
Feb 20
Jujutsu – A Git-compatible DVCS that is both simple and powerful github.com · “Jujutsu uses a real commit to represent the working copy.”
Feb 19
Grist – Open core alternative to Airtable and Google Sheets github.com · “Grist is a modern relational spreadsheet.”
Feb 18
Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account theverge.com · “Microsoft says it’s planning to update Windows 11 Pro so it will require an internet connection and a Microsoft Account during the initial setup phase.”
Feb 18
Building for the 99% Developers future.a16z.com · “There’s a huge gap between what “developer-influencers” are talking about, and the daily reality of most developers.”
Feb 17
Who is squatting IPv4 addresses? blog.benjojo.co.uk · “For the case of this post, I will define IP address squatting as “using IP addresses that are not RFC1918 defined and not your unicast space issued by a RIR”.”
Feb 17
A new wave of Linux applications tuxphones.com · “Phosh with its newborn libadwaita, KDE’s Kirigami and Maui Shell show that – like it or not – the era of convergent Linux applications has just started.”
Feb 16
1Password for SSH & Git developer.1password.com · “1Password stores all your SSH keys behind secure end-to-end encryption, allowing you to access your keys when you need them without your SSH keys ever leaving 1Password.”
Feb 16
Lorinda Cherry ncwit.org · “An early strength of the Unix system was the way it allowed different programs to cooperate on a task, and Cherry, who described herself as “thinking in Unix,” often found ways to apply an insight or feature from one application to a seemingly unrelated context.”
Feb 15
Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid github.blog · “Now you can quickly create and edit diagrams in markdown using words with Mermaid support in your Markdown files.”
Feb 14
Android 13 virtualization lets Pixel 6 run Windows 11, Linux distributions cnx-software.com · “What that means is that it is now possible to run virtually any operating system including Windows 11, Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Arch Linux Arm on the Google Tensor-powered phone, and do so at near-native speed.”
Feb 14
What does it mean to listen on a port? paulbutler.org · “When you bind to a port, it puts a pointer to your socket in that table.”
Feb 13
Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY saagarjha.com · “We evaluated a number of promising alternatives that we selected and ranked based on the how many bullet points they had on their websites, how often they’d appear on the front page of Hacker News, and a spreadsheet of important language characteristics (performance, efficiency, community, ease-of-use) that we had people in the office fill out.”
Feb 13
Server-Sent Events: the alternative to WebSockets you should be using germano.dev · “However, Server Sent Events (SSE) are a simpler alternative that is often superior.”
Feb 12
FPGA Interchange format to enable interoperable FPGA tooling opensource.googleblog.com · “With that in mind, Google and Antmicro started the FPGA Interchange format project, providing a unified framework to lower the entry barriers for developers to swiftly move from one tool to another.”
Feb 12
The Factorio Mindset thediff.co · “It seemed downright pathological that Shopify lets employees expense it.”
Feb 11
EdgeDB 1.0 edgedb.com · “This model completely eliminates the object-relational impedance mismatch while retaining the solid basis of and performance of the classic relational model.”
Feb 10
uBlock Origin 1.41 github.com · “The reason is that I did not provide an exact link to the origin of the hsluv-0.1.0.min.js library used by uBO to implement dark theme (uBO’s About page does credit the author of the library).”
Feb 10
Our User-Mode WireGuard Year fly.io · “This post is not that.”
Feb 9
Introducing Garage, our self-hosted distributed object storage solution garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr · “Garage is a distributed storage solution, that automatically replicates your data on several servers.”
Feb 8
Thank You, Valve kinduff.com · “They forked Wine and started to add an insane amount of patches to make games work on Linux, no matter if they didn’t have a Linux build.”
Feb 7
On finding the average of two unsigned integers without overflow devblogs.microsoft.com · “The trick here is to pre-divide the values before adding.”
Feb 7
Files – Single-file photo gallery and file manager files.gallery · “Files is a single-file PHP app that can be dropped into any folder on your server, instantly creating a gallery of files and folders.”
Feb 6
High-order Virtual Machine (HVM): Massively parallel, optimal functional runtime github.com · “HVM is still to be considered a prototype.”
Feb 5
SPAM blacklisting is out of control blog.roastidio.us · “25 CHF per month is five times the amount I paid to my hosting company for the VPS!”
Feb 5
Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs reviewbunny.app · “At the last company I worked at, I could count at least 6 different ways of writing and organizing UI code.”
Feb 4
Is it safe to use __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED? github.com · “We strongly recommend against touching it in your library if you don’t want that library to break later.”
Feb 3
Settings are not a design failure linear.app · “But not all settings are created equal.”
Feb 2
Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter alexchesser.medium.com · “I’m telling you that the absolute very best time to talk to a recruiter happens when you’re not looking for a job.”
Feb 1

January 2022 49 posts

In Defence of the Boring Web bastian.rieck.me · “I am not using a load balancer, a database, or a cache server.”
Jan 30
Black, the uncompromising Python code formatter, is stable pypi.org · “At long last, Black is no longer a beta product!”
Jan 29
mac-capture: Improve window capture support on macOS 12.3 github.com · “ScreenCaptureKit allows for the cursor, applications, or windows to be excluded from a display capture.”
Jan 28
Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration pietrorea.com · “Linux admin is a chore, but in return you get the whole computer.”
Jan 28
There's No Such Thing as Clean Code steveonstuff.com · “When someone says a solution is ‘clean’, they’re often touting it as the superior option without being able to rationalise why.”
Jan 28
Writing an open source GPU driver - without the hardware collabora.com · “In 2021, there were no Valhall devices running mainline Linux.”
Jan 27
Two reasons Kubernetes is so complex buttondown.email · “While this can be a useful perspective, I think it’s much more productive to think of Kubernetes as a general-purpose cluster operating system kernel.”
Jan 27
How I Got Pwned by My Cloud Costs troyhunt.com · “It really hurt, and it shouldn’t have happened.”
Jan 24
PRQL github.com · “Like SQL, it’s readable, explicit and declarative.”
Jan 24
The Curse of NixOS blog.wesleyac.com · “The vast majority of people using NixOS do not understand the language, and simply copy/paste example configurations, which mostly works until you need to do something complicated, at which point you’re completely high and dry.”
Jan 24
Why we're migrating (many of) our servers from Linux to FreeBSD it-notes.dragas.net · “I have found, on average, BSD systems to be more stable than their Linux equivalents.”
Jan 24
Charm charm.sh · “The Charm ecosystem is built on open source technologies and we maintain a commitment to open sourcing our own work in turn.”
Jan 23
Huginn github.com · “Think of it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier on your own server.”
Jan 23
MAKRO github.com · “The model is developed by the MAKRO model group at DREAM (Danish Research Institute for Economic Analysis and Modelling) for use by the Danish Ministry of Finance and others.”
Jan 21
Free Postgres Databases fly.io · “The hard part about free Postgres is storage, so this post is also about free storage.”
Jan 21
homelab github.com · “This project is still in the experimental stage, and I don’t use anything critical on it.”
Jan 21
Roblox Return to Service blog.roblox.com · “In addition, our particular load conditions triggered a pathological performance issue in BoltDB.”
Jan 20
JSON support curl.se · “I personally am not sending JSON too often myself so I’m pretty sure I’m not suitable to design this feature entirely on my own.”
Jan 20
Examining the covidtests.gov architecture adhoc.team · “The www. domain name is a CNAME record that ultimately resolves to Akamai.”
Jan 19
Do Svidaniya, Igor, and Thank You for NGINX nginx.com · “Igor started working as a systems administrator but continued to write code on the side.”
Jan 18
Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software graphviz.org · “Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks.”
Jan 17
How to setup a practically free CDN gist.github.com · “What I wasn’t expecting was for them to be cheaper.”
Jan 15
Rich github.com · “The Rich API makes it easy to add color and style to terminal output.”
Jan 15
Simple.css simplecss.org · “For example, the minified CSS for the Bootstrap framework is 144KB in total.”
Jan 14
Writing a Game Boy Emulator in OCaml linoscope.github.io · “For the past few months, I have been working on a project called CAMLBOY, a Game Boy emulator written in OCaml that runs in the browser.”
Jan 12
Announcing Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier written in Rust! parceljs.org · “It is over 100x faster than CSSNano for minification, and over 3x faster than ESBuild.”
Jan 12
Make Beautiful Gradients in CSS joshwcomeau.com · “It’s a bit weird to me that the midpoint between blue and yellow is gray.”
Jan 11
I Think I Know Why You Can't Hire Engineers Right Now cushychicken.github.io · “Many engineers could pick up a five figure raise by switching companies right now.”
Jan 11
Is the madness ever going to end? unixsheikh.com · “Electron and React Native Desktop are supposed to be a revolutionary new way of making desktop applications.”
Jan 11
Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker' breaking thousands of apps bleepingcomputer.com · “The colors library receives over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone and has almost 19,000 projects relying on it.”
Jan 9
Donald Knuth - The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves yakshav.es · “TeX was invented to typeset a book.”
Jan 9
Simplicity of IRC susam.net · “In the early days of IRC, it was quite common for someone with basic programming skills to write a simple IRC bot within a matter of hours.”
Jan 9
Bevy 0.6 bevyengine.org · “For those who don’t know, Bevy is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust.”
Jan 8
My 70 year old mother has been using Linux on the desktop for the past 21 years unixsheikh.com · “This was a classical problem with Microsoft Windows back then.”
Jan 8
My first impressions of web3 moxie.org · “People do not want to run their own servers.”
Jan 7
Computers as I used to love them tonsky.me · “Syncthing is everything I used to love about computers.”
Jan 7
How a routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions serpapi.com · “In less than 1h, we’ve created 474 new subscriptions for a total of $73,271.36.”
Jan 7
How we handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400 blog.polyhaven.com · “Serving 80TB of bandwidth from S3 is estimated to cost around $4,000 per month alone, which is coincidentally about the same amount that is being donated to us on Patreon currently.”
Jan 5
I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months. benadam.me · “Unfortunately, most of my time is spent doing “program” style work which leaves about 10% of my time for technical work.”
Jan 5
Darling: macOS translation layer for Linux darlinghq.org · “We only directly use those parts of Darwin that are released as fully free software.”
Jan 5
Burn My Windows github.com · “This extension is not only more useless than the cube, but it is also much more hacky.”
Jan 4
My Many Girlfriends thedailywtf.com · “Every variable and every method name was given a female first name.”
Jan 4
The joy of building a ray tracer, for fun, in Rust. blog.singleton.io · “Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey described Rust as a “perfect” programming language last week.”
Jan 4
"Fast Kernel Headers" Tree -v1: Eliminate the Linux kernel's "Dependency Hell" lwn.net · “When I started this project, late 2020, I expected there to be maybe 50-100 patches.”
Jan 3
Dura github.com · “Computers crash and Ctrl-Z only works on files independently.”
Jan 3
You don't need that CORS request nickolinger.com · “Routing https://api.foobarbaz.app to https://foobarbaz.app/api and moving over the JavaScript clients using the api. subdomain will cut your network traffic in half.”
Jan 3
Fixing stutters in Papers Please on Linux blog.jhm.dev · “PapersPlease uses SDL on Linux, which checks every few seconds if a joystick has been connected.”
Jan 2
web3 is Centralized blog.wesleyac.com · “The funny thing is, web3, as it exists today and appears to be building towards, is actually more centralized than the web it seeks to replace.”
Jan 2
Why I'm Using HTTP Basic Auth in 2022 joeldare.com · “Some online resources mention that HTTP Basic Authentication is deprecated, but that’s a misunderstanding.”
Jan 1

2021 530 posts

December 2021 50 posts

How a Single Line of Code Made a 24-core Server Slower Than a Laptop pkolaczk.github.io · “Then you run it on a big, fancy, multiprocessor machine, expecting even better performance, only to see it actually runs slower than the laptop, no matter how many cores you give it.”
Dec 31
My Setup for Self-Hosting Dozens of Web Applications + Services on a Single Server cprimozic.net · “I run everything off of a single dedicated server from OVH hosted in Hillsboro, Oregon.”
Dec 31
How Telegram Messenger circumvents Google Translate's API danpetrov.xyz · “Telegram found some obscure way of querying the Cloud Translate API directly at no cost to them.”
Dec 31
The Modern Guide to OAuth fusionauth.io · “This flexibility is one reason for confusion when it comes to OAuth.”
Dec 31
The Gift of It's Your Problem Now apenwarr.ca · “Anyway, gifts will not get you 24-hour guaranteed response times to security incidents.”
Dec 30
macOS Setup after 15 Years of Linux hookrace.net · “I haven’t heard the fan turn on at all yet, so either my workloads, and even my compilations, are too light-weight, or the fan is pretty quiet.”
Dec 30
Databases in 2021: A Year in Review ottertune.com · “The conventional wisdom among developers has shifted: PostgreSQL has become the first choice in new applications.”
Dec 30
You can't copy code with memcpy; code is more complicated than that devblogs.microsoft.com · “I’m just going to say it right now: The entire idea that went into this code is fundamentally flawed.”
Dec 29
95644 – [F2018] IEEE_FMA is missing from the IEEE_ARITHMETIC module gcc.gnu.org · “The customer has nuclear weapons.”
Dec 29
Consider SQLite blog.wesleyac.com · “Today I want you to consider: what if SQLite would do just fine?”
Dec 29
Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects drewdevault.com · “Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t.”
Dec 28
Italian Courts Find Open Source Software Terms Enforceable ifthisbetreason.com · “The issue was that the software was redistributed without including acknowledgment of the original work, including information about changes the defendants had made to the software, and with no mention of the software’s copyright holders.”
Dec 27
LICENSE updated to template github.com · “The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”
Dec 25
Ruby 3.1.0 Released ruby-lang.org · “But even though the Optcarrot benchmark has shown impressive speedups, the JIT has not benefited real world business applications.”
Dec 25
Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one utcc.utoronto.ca · “The big providers are crushing the field through the sheer amount of resources they can throw at problems, including and especially problems that matter to users like security and spam filtering.”
Dec 24
A Whole Website in a Single HTML File css-tricks.com · “Anyway, using :target like this is super smart stuff!”
Dec 24
Krita 5.0 released! krita.org · “The new system is much faster, uses much less memory and is much more dependable!”
Dec 23
How to Draw S-Curved Arrows Between Boxes / Rectangles dragonman225.js.org · “The solution is to add some rules to abandon combinations that are undesired.”
Dec 22
A challenger to the throne of vector graphics. SVG is dead, long live TinyVG! zig.news · “SVG is so complex that different implementations of SVG disagree how an image should look.”
Dec 20
LISP with GC in 436 bytes justine.lol · “Since we only needed 436 bytes, that means LISP has now outdistanced FORTH and BASIC to be the tiniest programming language in the world.”
Dec 20
The Big DevOps Misunderstanding wolfoliver.medium.com · “In my opinion, this is not DevOps but an evolution of simple system operations (SysOps).”
Dec 19
Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer localghost.dev · “What I’m trying to show with all this is that you can do something 100 times but still not remember how to do it off the top of your head.”
Dec 19
Announcing Tokio Console 0.1 tokio.rs · “Until now, understanding the state of an async runtime has required developers to interpret event logs.”
Dec 17
Don't start with microservices in production – monoliths are your friend arnoldgalovics.com · “In a regular monolith system, you either deploy completely or you don’t deploy at all.”
Dec 16
From Node to Ruby on Rails nikodunk.com · “Building the web app in Rails took me 2 days – the same thing in Node would have taken 2 weeks.”
Dec 16
Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox's Default Browser Workaround howtogeek.com · “Basically, this means that “microsoft-edge:// links” can no longer be forced to open in your default browser of choice.”
Dec 16
New tool: Mess with DNS! jvns.ca · “I learn a lot more from seeing what happens when things go wrong than from things going right.”
Dec 15
How to build large-scale end-to-end encrypted group video calls signal.org · “There is no off the shelf software that would allow us to support calls of that size while ensuring that all communication is end-to-end encrypted, so we built our own open source Signal Calling Service to do the job.”
Dec 15
Deno joins TC39 deno.com · “We will be pushing for features and improvements to the language that benefit everyone, but especially users of server-side JavaScript.”
Dec 13
Reimagining Projections for the Interactive Maps Era mapbox.com · “Despite many passionate campaigns by cartographers and mapping enthusiasts, Web Mercator remains dominant.”
Dec 13
log4j: between a rock and a hard place crawshaw.io · “It is the second statement in this tweet that is worthy of attention: the maintainers of log4j would have loved to remove this bad feature long ago, but could not because of the backwards compatibility promises they are held to.”
Dec 11
Professional maintainers: a wake-up call blog.filippo.io · “As of yesterday, the maintainer who patched the vulnerability had three sponsors on GitHub : Michael, Glenn, and Matt.”
Dec 11
Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens kevin.burke.dev · “Coderpad must work for some people since companies are able to hire a nonzero number of engineers, but it is definitely not a good fit for me.”
Dec 11
Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region aws.amazon.com · “This congestion immediately impacted the availability of real-time monitoring data for our internal operations teams, which impaired their ability to find the source of congestion and resolve it.”
Dec 10
Tailwind CSS v3.0 tailwindcss.com · “Before the new engine, we always had to be careful with CSS file size in development, and one of the biggest trade-offs we had to make was carefully limiting the color palette.”
Dec 9
Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening eff.org · “Like FLoC and Privacy Sandbox before it, Manifest V3 is another example of the inherent conflict of interest that comes from Google controlling both the dominant web browser and one of the largest internet advertising networks.”
Dec 9
Improving GitHub code search github.blog · “At the moment, the search index covers more than five million of the most popular public repositories; in addition, you can search private repositories you have access to.”
Dec 8
Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer david-colson.com · “The PS1 had no such depth buffer and it was up to the developer to draw all the necessary primitive shapes in the correct order, starting at the back and drawing closer things later.”
Dec 8
How to write idempotent Bash scripts arslan.io · “But half of the steps in your scripts fail immediately because they were already applied to your system.”
Dec 8
Cloudflare Images has a lot of issues blog.klungo.no · “Since there is no way to retrieve the original image from CF Images, customers are completely locked into their cloud.”
Dec 7
How a Kalman filter works, in pictures bzarg.com · “Surprisingly few software engineers and scientists seem to know about it, and that makes me sad because it is such a general and powerful tool for combining information in the presence of uncertainty.”
Dec 7
You Can't Buy Integration martinfowler.com · “When you buy an integration product, you are agreeing to build the integration itself in a commercial programming language.”
Dec 7
Debunking Cloudflare's recent performance tests fastly.com · “Cloudflare used a free Fastly trial account to conduct their tests.”
Dec 6
WebAssembly and Back Again: Fine-Grained Sandboxing in Firefox 95 hacks.mozilla.org · “Accordingly, we’ve updated our bug bounty program to pay researchers for bypassing the sandbox even without a vulnerability in the isolated library.”
Dec 6
Why don't you accept donations? github.com · “I want to be free to move on to something else if ever I get tired of working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).”
Dec 6
How to use dig jvns.ca · “Also I learned recently that you can set up a .digrc configuration file to make its output easier to read and it makes it SO MUCH nicer to use.”
Dec 4
Blender 3.0 blender.org · “Cycles GPU kernels have been rewritten for better performance, rendering between 2x and 8x faster in real-world scenes.”
Dec 3
100 years of whatever this will be apenwarr.ca · “One SSD in a Macbook is ~1000x faster than the default disk in an EC2 instance.”
Dec 2
Ideal monitor rotation for programmers sprocketfox.io · “It provides the longest line lengths and no longer need to worry about that pesky 80 column limit.”
Dec 2
Firefox's Optimized Zip Format: Reading Zip Files Really Quickly taras.glek.net · “So for all cases where zip file access pattern matches one recorded during profiling phase Firefox can read the relevant resources in a single IO!”
Dec 1

November 2021 42 posts

Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe news.ycombinator.com · “So 20 minutes is all needed to identify “important, critical leaders”?”
Nov 30
4x smaller, 50x faster blog.asciinema.org · “The new implementation of the virtual terminal interpreter in Rust (compiled to WASM) does it 50x faster.”
Nov 30
Hubris and Humility oxide.computer · “Cliff dove into a sketch of his ideas, giving the nascent system a name that felt perfectly apt: Hubris.”
Nov 30
Firefox is the Only Alternative batsov.com · “In the meantime every competitor that Google converts to Chromium strengthens their position and increases the influence they have over the future of web standards.”
Nov 29
Welcome to Fleet! blog.jetbrains.com · “Fleet has been built from scratch with a new architecture and user interface.”
Nov 29
Schemaverse · A space war played in SQL schemaverse.com · “Every player is a PostgreSQL role.”
Nov 29
Teach Yourself Computer Science teachyourselfcs.com · “If you don’t have a solid mental model of how a computer actually works, all of your higher-level abstractions will be brittle.”
Nov 26
QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time phoboslab.org · “It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression.”
Nov 24
42 things I learned from building a production database maheshba.bitbucket.io · “In the four years that I led the team (until Spring 2021), we did not experience a single severe outage (nothing higher than a SEV3).”
Nov 23
Flatpak Is Not the Future ludocode.com · “I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps.”
Nov 23
mod team resignation github.com · “The entire moderation team resigns, effective immediately.”
Nov 22
Only 90s Web Developers Remember This zachholman.com · “Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation.”
Nov 21
Elfshaker: Version control system fine-tuned for binaries github.com · “elfshaker is a low-footprint, high-performance version control system fine-tuned for binaries.”
Nov 19
Twitter rolls back AMP support, no longer sends users to AMP pages searchengineland.com · “Twitter has subtly updated its AMP guidelines page on its Developer site to say support for AMP will be phased out by the fourth quarter.”
Nov 18
German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice blog.documentfoundation.org · “By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux.”
Nov 18
XMPP, A Comeback Story: A 20 Year Old Messaging Protocol For Robust, Private and Decentralized Communications takebackourtech.org · “Communication platforms like WhatsApp, Google Talk, and Zoom use or used XMPP under the hood, and others like Facebook and Microsoft allowed for XMPP intercompatibility.”
Nov 17
Individuals matter danluu.com · “A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I’ve looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn’t matter who is doing what, as if individuals don’t matter.”
Nov 16
GitHub's commitment to npm ecosystem security github.blog · “Second, on November 2 we received a report to our security bug bounty program of a vulnerability that would allow an attacker to publish new versions of any npm package using an account without proper authorization.”
Nov 16
Letting users tick a 'none' checkbox designnotes.blog.gov.uk · “Unlike radio buttons which only allow a single answer, checkboxes allow users to select as many options as needed.”
Nov 16
Why Disaster Happens at the Edges: An Introduction to Queue Theory thenewstack.io · “One of the notable findings of queue theory is that latency approaches infinity as utilization approaches 100%.”
Nov 14
It's Now Possible To Sign Arbitrary Data With Your SSH Keys agwa.name · “If you’re currently using PGP to sign data, you should consider switching to SSH signatures.”
Nov 13
Ruby vs Python comes down to the for loop softwaredoug.com · “With idiomatic Python, the object-model submits to the for loop.”
Nov 12
How Not To Sort By Average Rating evanmiller.org · “Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson.”
Nov 12
How to build a second brain as a software developer aseemthakar.com · “Google is the closest link, meaning we use the massive, unsorted network that is the Internet and Google’s interpretation of our problem as our “second brain”.”
Nov 11
Windows now blocks Edge browser competitors from opening links ctrl.blog · “Microsoft uses these links instead of regular web links to force users to open them in its Microsoft Edge web browser.”
Nov 11
The Invisible JavaScript Backdoor certitude.consulting · “What if a backdoor literally cannot be seen and thus evades detection even from thorough code reviews?”
Nov 10
Lesser Known PostgreSQL Features hakibenita.com · “To their surprise, more than 90% of what users asked for already existed, they just didn’t know about it.”
Nov 9
How We Saved Millions in SSD Costs by Upgrading Our Filesystem heap.io · “This amounts to a ~20% decrease in disk usage, which would have been a massive boon to our disk usage issues, not to mention a significant long-term reduction in our AWS bill.”
Nov 9
You should use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community mooreds.com · “While there are tradeoffs in terms of convenience and closeness, for most developer communities a public, managed forum is better than a private, unsearchable Slack.”
Nov 8
Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro–and I'm not alone macworld.com · “When Gregory McFadden tweeted that Control Center was using 26GB of the 64GB of RAM on his new MacBook Pro, the screenshot looked very familiar.”
Nov 7
Don't do interviews, do discussions thinkingthrough.substack.com · “That’s because I don’t do interviews anymore; I have discussions.”
Nov 7
Stop Making Students Use Eclipse nora.codes · “Teaching someone to use git is very difficult if they’ve never been taught that a file is an logical unit composed of bytes and metadata.”
Nov 7
Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies nayuki.io · “But fundamentally, there is a mismatch between the narrowness of hierarchies and the rich structure of human knowledge, and the proposed system will not presuppose the features of HFSes.”
Nov 7
An Epic future for SPJ discourse.haskell.org · “As you may know, I am leaving Microsoft Research at the end of November.”
Nov 6
So you want to Scrape like the Big Boys? incolumitas.com · “What sane human being is browsing Instagram from within a docker container on a Hetzner VPS?!”
Nov 5
An oral history of Bank Python calpaterson.com · “Dagger is a key technology to get financial models out of Excel, into a programming language and under tests and version control.”
Nov 4
Why is Excalidraw so good? offbyone.us · “If you don’t know what something is, you can learn it in about 12 seconds.”
Nov 4
These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops wired.co.uk · “The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition.”
Nov 4
Thank you, GitHub github.blog · “I will become Chairman Emeritus, which fulfills my lifelong ambition of having a title in Latin.”
Nov 3
Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation blog.danslimmon.com · “A do-nothing script is a script that encodes the instructions of a slog, encapsulating each step in a function.”
Nov 2
'Trojan Source' Bug Threatens the Security of All Code krebsonsecurity.com · “This vulnerability is, as far as I know, the first one to affect almost everything.”
Nov 1
Developer Tools secrets that shouldn't be secrets christianheilmann.com · “The first problem is log messages that aren’t removed when a product goes live clogging up the Console.”
Nov 1

October 2021 43 posts

Avoiding bot detection: How to scrape the web without getting blocked? github.com · “The IP pool is mainly sourced from users of HolaVPN and an app monetization SDK.”
Oct 31
Why the status quo is so hard to change in engineering teams okayhq.com · “A set of behaviors where we give up on escaping a painful situation, because our brain has gradually been taught to assume powerlessness in that situation.”
Oct 31
Switching the Linux graphics stack from GLX to EGL mozillagfx.wordpress.com · “In the upcoming Firefox 94 release we will enable the EGL backend for a big group of our Linux users.”
Oct 30
Async Ruby brunosutic.com · “Async Ruby adds new concurrency features to the language; you can think of it as "threads with none of the downsides".”
Oct 30
55 GiB/s FizzBuzz codegolf.stackexchange.com · “In particular, it’s faster than memcpy, which presents interesting challenges when it comes to I/O (if you try to output using write then the copies in write will take up almost all the runtime – replacing the I/O routine here with write causes the performance on my CPU to drop by a factor of 5).”
Oct 28
Next.js 12 nextjs.org · “Our Rust compiler is built on SWC, an open platform for the next generation of fast tooling.”
Oct 26
Kerla: Monolithic kernel in Rust, aiming for Linux ABI compatibility github.com · “Kerla is a monolithic operating system kernel written from scratch in Rust which aims to be compatible with the Linux ABI, that is, it runs Linux binaries without any modifications.”
Oct 25
Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker borncity.com · “David Xanatos has pointed out to me that Microsoft is refusing to sign drivers for the new Process Hacker without giving any further reason.”
Oct 24
Leaving Google jayconrod.com · “My last manager had around 25 reports.”
Oct 23
Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? dusted.codes · “Well, someone at Microsoft who wields great power has made the decision that features such as hot reload cannot be given away for free as part of the open source .NET SDK anymore.”
Oct 23
Magit, the magical Git interface emacsair.me · “Current GUIs only expose a limited subset of Git’s features, while Magit is an essentially complete interface.”
Oct 22
Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2021 edition itvision.altervista.org · “I want to make one thing crystal clear - Windows, in some regards, is even worse than Linux and it has its own share of critical problems.”
Oct 22
Announcing Rust 1.56.0 and Rust 2021 blog.rust-lang.org · “Editions are a mechanism for opt-in changes that may otherwise pose backwards compatibility risk.”
Oct 21
vscode.dev(!) code.visualstudio.com · “Now when you go to https://vscode.dev, you’ll be presented with a lightweight version of VS Code running fully in the browser.”
Oct 20
We Analyzed 425,909 Favicons iconmap.io · “Discord’s favicon is a 280k monster.”
Oct 20
Why I Hate Frameworks fredrikholmqvist.com · “Nobody really buys hammers anymore.”
Oct 19
AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go swyx.io · “By far, the show-stopper this year was the announcement of R2 Storage, an S3-compatible Object Storage service that directly takes aim at AWS’ "Hotel California" business model.”
Oct 18
136 facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling baldurbjarnason.com · “Most software projects consume 5x, 10x, 20x more resources than they should because failure demand consumes most of the organisation’s resources.”
Oct 17
Web Browser Engineering browser.engineering · “This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a couple thousand lines of Python.”
Oct 17
A viable solution for Python concurrency lwn.net · “Replacing Py_INCREF and Py_DECREF with atomic variants would result in a 60% average slowdown on the pyperformance benchmark suite.”
Oct 15
Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity danluu.com · “I certainly agree that working on the right thing is important, but increasing velocity doesn’t stop you from working on the right thing.”
Oct 15
Apple joins Blender Development Fund blender.org · “Alongside a contribution to the Development Fund, Apple will provide engineering expertise and additional resources to the Blender HQ and development community to help support Blender artists and developers.”
Oct 14
What is your labor worth? Tech compensation in 2021 jacobian.org · “There’s a huge information asymmetry here: employers have access to detailed industry data on salaries (e.g. Radford), but employees don’t.”
Oct 14
How to win at CORS jakearchibald.com · “It’s hard because it’s part of how browsers fetch stuff, and that’s a set of behaviours that started with the very first web browser over thirty years ago.”
Oct 14
How APT does its fancy progress bar mdk.fr · “Today while running an apt full-upgrade I asked myself how apt does this nice progress bar stuck at the bottom line while still writing scrolling text.”
Oct 13
3 TypeScript Tricks I wish I knew when I learned TypeScript cstrnt.dev · “I think this is some kind of false security because you expect things to just work.”
Oct 12
I keep making things out of checkboxes bryanbraun.com · “Something happened earlier this year where I got on a run making checkbox animations and just couldn’t stop.”
Oct 11
Which Version of JDK Should I Use? whichjdk.com · “These distributions differ in licenses, commercial support, supported platforms, and update frequency.”
Oct 10
SerenityOS: Year 3 in review serenityos.org · “The project aims to build everything in-house instead of relying on third-party libraries.”
Oct 10
ScummVM 2.5.0: Twenty years ago today... scummvm.org · “Twenty years ago today, on Tue Oct 9 16:30:12 2001, Ludvig Strigeus pushed the initial revision of the ScummVM code, which was version 0.0.1 of the project.”
Oct 9
20 Things I've Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer simplethread.com · “We should be far more concerned with keeping 0.1x programmers off our teams than finding the mythical 10x programmer.”
Oct 8
How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha robmensching.com · “Now the .NET Foundation wants me to comply with some new policies that I’ve never heard of, let alone agreed to.”
Oct 8
Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines github.com · “quickget automatically downloads the ISO image for the operating system you want to run and creates a configuration file for the virtual machine.”
Oct 8
Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl libc project andrewkelley.me · “musl is such a high quality codebase, that most of the Zig standard library’s interface to Linux is a direct port of musl code.”
Oct 7
Herding elephants: Lessons learned from sharding Postgres at Notion notion.so · “Realizing that TXID wraparound would pose an existential threat to the product, our infrastructure team doubled down and got to work.”
Oct 6
Moving Google toward the mainline lwn.net · “One of the big problems with Prodkernel is that it detracts from upstream participation, he said.”
Oct 6
Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever? arxiv.org · “It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct.”
Oct 5
Open Source Tax Software ctskennerton.github.io · “The kicker is that free tax software is from Intuit who will try very hard to make sure that you either don’t find it in the first place, or try to get you to pay for it and upsell you on something that should be free.”
Oct 5
Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the Internet blog.cloudflare.com · “At 15:58 UTC we noticed that Facebook had stopped announcing the routes to their DNS prefixes.”
Oct 4
It takes a PhD to develop that blog.royalsloth.eu · “As embarrassing as this is for Microsoft, which despite owning the platform and its APIs still struggle to produce a reasonably performing software, I think part of the problem is simply caused by the corporate incentives.”
Oct 4
Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge ctrl.blog · “It made it more difficult to change the default web browser and has expanded the use of links that force-opens Edge instead of the default browser.”
Oct 4
A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 blog.chriszacharias.com · “At least one to two weeks every major sprint cycle had to be dedicated to fixing new UI that was breaking in IE6.”
Oct 2
DeFi protocol Compound mistakenly gives away $90 million to users cnbc.com · “About $90.1 million has mistakenly gone out to users of popular decentralized finance, or DeFi, staking protocol Compound, after an upgrade gone epically wrong.”
Oct 1

September 2021 40 posts

PostgreSQL 14 Released! postgresql.org · “PostgreSQL 14 provides a significant throughput boost on workloads that use many connections, with some benchmarks showing a 2x speedup.”
Sep 30
Understanding AWK earthly.dev · “It turns out Awk is pretty simple.”
Sep 30
Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences? floverfelt.org · “Software Engineering is really frustrating because there’s basically never a “right” answer and so most decisions come down to “whatever the senior engineer wants.””
Sep 30
Bracket pair colorization 10,000x faster code.visualstudio.com · “During these 10 seconds of processing, the extension host process burns at 100% CPU and all features that are powered by extensions, such as auto-completion or diagnostics, stop functioning.”
Sep 29
Local First / Offline First rxdb.info · “Local-First (aka offline first) is a software paradigm where the software stores data locally on the client’s device and must work as well offline as it does online.”
Sep 29
You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation mux.com · “It’s the dirty little product secret that no one talks about.”
Sep 28
Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Rapid and Reliable Object Storage, minus the egress fees blog.cloudflare.com · “Traditional object storage charges developers for three things: bandwidth, storage size and storage operations.”
Sep 28
As Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow theregister.com · “Thereafter, only Manifest V3 extensions will be supported in Chrome, a change that critics fear will hobble the add-ons and make them little more than toys.”
Sep 28
The code worked differently when the moon was full hanselman.com · “The whole period of square wave sounds an awful lot like it is around 49.7 days.”
Sep 28
What is Domain-Driven Design (DDD) verraes.net · “That makes DDD notoriously hard to define.”
Sep 27
Designing Low Upkeep Software jefftk.com · “The biggest piece is minimizing your dependencies, and limiting them to ones that value backwards compatibility.”
Sep 26
The Dead Code Diaries madned.substack.com · “The mystery program was my own, and I had no specific memory of writing it.”
Sep 25
Why data scientists shouldn’t need to know Kubernetes huyenchip.com · “Many companies expect data scientists to be full-stack, which includes knowing lower-level infrastructure tools such as Kubernetes (K8s) and resource management.”
Sep 25
New tool: an nginx playground jvns.ca · “And nginx in particular is EXTREMELY finicky to configure, so I think it’s extra important to have a playground for nginx to quickly test things out.”
Sep 24
Authenticated Boot and Disk Encryption on Linux 0pointer.net · “In fact, right now, your data is probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or MacOS devices, than it is on typical Linux distributions.”
Sep 23
How We Got to LiveView fly.io · “LiveView strips away layers of abstraction, because it solves both the client and server in a single abstraction.”
Sep 22
The First Rule of Machine Learning: Start without Machine Learning eugeneyan.com · “If you think that machine learning will give you a 100% boost, then a heuristic will get you 50% of the way there.”
Sep 22
It's tough being an Azure fan alexhudson.com · “However, these vulnerabilities are dreadful.”
Sep 22
Google Docs in a clean-room browser ekioh.com · “Like Google Mail, Google Docs almost entirely consists of obfuscated JavaScript, some of it common between the two.”
Sep 20
As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support, and this is what happened plumshell.com · “This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite.”
Sep 20
How To Rapidly Improve At Any Programming Language cbui.dev · “In the open source world, you can generally take your time to get things right.”
Sep 18
What I Learnt Becoming a Tech Lead tomgamon.com · “On the above, the amount of code I write day to day is way less than I thought it would be.”
Sep 18
LN 001: Composing application interfaces alexanderobenauer.com · “You don’t have to worry about piping data around your app, syncing, binding state to interface components, etc.”
Sep 17
Intersection geometry - A/B Street a-b-street.github.io · “Some of the things in A/B Street that seem the simplest have taken tremendous effort.”
Sep 17
Marginalia Search search.marginalia.nu · “Don’t be afraid to scroll down in the search results, unlike in many other search engines, depending on what you are looking for, you may find the best results in the middle of the listing.”
Sep 16
Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS joshwcomeau.com · “The web is covered in fuzzy grey boxes that don’t really look much like shadows.”
Sep 15
Why Authorization is Hard osohq.com · “There’s a fundamental tension in authorization.”
Sep 15
How Percentiles Work (and Why They're Better Than Averages) blog.timescale.com · “Since a normal distribution is often one of the first things we learn, we (myself included!) can think it applies to more cases than it actually does.”
Sep 14
Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows theverge.com · “Microsoft tells us this is not supported in Windows.”
Sep 13
Two new color spaces for color picking - Okhsv and Okhsl bottosson.github.io · “Despite color picking playing a big role in a lot of applications, the design of color pickers isn’t a particularly well researched topic.”
Sep 12
Mistakes I've Made in AWS laravel-news.com · “Other than occasionally deleting production data, the mistakes all arose from ignorance - there’s so much to know about AWS that it’s easy to miss something important.”
Sep 11
Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile? subconscious.substack.com · “The web wasn’t great, but it was networked.”
Sep 11
~60x speed-up of Linux "perf" eighty-twenty.org · “What used to take endless minutes now takes a few seconds.”
Sep 9
Maintain it With Zig kristoff.it · “Learning how to contribute to a popular FOSS C/C++ project is not easy for a new developer.”
Sep 8
My £4 a month server can handle 4.2 million requests a day mark.mcnally.je · “These benchmarks show that a very cheap server can easily handle 50 requests a second to a “full stack” website.”
Sep 7
ZFS Is Mysteriously Eating My CPU brendangregg.com · “But this was after randomly selecting a zero-sized list, using a CPU-expensive random number generator.”
Sep 6
Migrating from Docker to Podman marcusnoble.co.uk · “Docker has recently announced that Docker Desktop will soon require a subscription and, based on the size of your company, may require a paid subscription.”
Sep 4
Writing Well-Documented Code - Learn from Examples codecatalog.org · “The reason we started Code Catalog is because we believe that we can improve our coding skills by reading good code written by others.”
Sep 4
Why can an ad break the Windows 11 desktop and taskbar? ctrl.blog · “Instead, it caused Explorer (the Windows desktop shell) to stop responding and left users without a working Start menu and taskbar.”
Sep 3
Operations is not Developer IT matduggan.com · “The number of times I have sent a full-time Node developer a link to the Node.js docs is too high.”
Sep 3

August 2021 39 posts

58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics plausible.io · “It turns out 58% of Hacker News readers, Reddit users and other techies block Google Analytics.”
Aug 31
Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies theregister.com · “The company has renamed its Free plan to "Personal" and now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees, or higher than $10m in annual revenue, must use a paid subscription if they require Docker Desktop.”
Aug 31
The open calendar, task and note space is a mess stevenvanbael.com · “To this day I did not succeed in finding a combination that satisfies all my requirements, aside from notes using WebDAV+Joplin.”
Aug 30
Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware – Part 1 yingtongli.me · “The software became abandonware circa 2009 when it ceased to be offered, and while the software binary has been archived, to date there has been no effort to restore the functionality once available with a free licence.”
Aug 30
Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos news.ycombinator.com · “We’ve built a fault-tolerant data replication layer that replicates your data to two different storage providers in the EU.”
Aug 29
Space Nerds In Space smcameron.github.io · “Space Nerds In Space is an open source (GPLv2) cooperative multiplayer starship simulator for linux (may also work on Mac).”
Aug 29
The Future of discord.py gist.github.com · “I’ve been working on discord.py for about 6 years – a rather significant portion of my life has gone into maintaining this software library completely for free.”
Aug 28
Weird Languages paulgraham.com · “99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions.”
Aug 28
Five Ansible Techniques I Wish I’d Known Earlier zwischenzugs.com · “If you’ve ever spent ages waiting for an Ansible playbook to get through a bunch of tasks so yours can be tested, then this article is for you.”
Aug 27
How I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple markosaric.com · “After using Macs for about fifteen years, I switched to Linux as my main operating system in July of 2018 and I’m enjoying it.”
Aug 26
canistilluse.com blog.jim-nielsen.com · “When you lookup a certain feature on caniuse.com, there’s an incredible assumption many of us make when interpreting its UI: given enough time, most everything goes green.”
Aug 26
prettymaps: Draw pretty maps from OpenStreetMap data github.com · “I have closed my other generative art projects on Github and won’t be sharing new ones as open source to protect me from the NFT community.”
Aug 25
The most underused browser feature frankgroeneveld.nl · “I believe not a lot of users know about this button, especially because Chrome doesn’t want to show it by default.”
Aug 24
How Discord Stores Billions of Messages blog.discord.com · “We decided early on to store all chat history forever so users can come back at any time and have their data available on any device.”
Aug 24
Deno on MDN deno.com · “As of today, Deno compatibility data is also available in these charts.”
Aug 23
An Opinionated Guide to xargs oilshell.org · “It may help to mentally replace xargs with the word each.”
Aug 21
Psst: Fast and multi-platform Spotify client with native GUI github.com · “A fast Spotify client with a native GUI written in Rust, without Electron.”
Aug 16
I figured out how DMARC works, and it almost broke me simonandrews.ca · “Then, I encountered a second problem: I had no idea what those were, and seemingly nobody has written about SPF, DKIM, or DMARC in a way that a human can understand, not to mention implement.”
Aug 15
MeiliSearch: A Minimalist Full-Text Search Engine tech.marksblogg.com · “Its built on top of the LMDB key-value store and lives as a 35 MB binary when installed on Ubuntu or MacOS.”
Aug 15
Progress Report: August 2021 asahilinux.org · “The M1 represents a massive reverse engineering challenge, with lots of bespoke, completely undocumented hardware.”
Aug 14
10×10% lars.ingebrigtsen.no · “Instead we’re down about 45%, from about 4400 bugs to 2690 bugs.”
Aug 14
Remove all direct links to languagetransfer.org github.com · “Our app isn’t allowed to link to the homepage of the project’s own website unless we completely remove our users’ ability to discover a way to give us money.”
Aug 13
A future for SQL on the web jlongster.com · “Simple operations against the database take ~10ms (and I’m being charitable!), while it’s common for me to be profiling SQLite at ~.01ms.”
Aug 12
ZeroVer: 0-based Versioning 0ver.org · “Unlike other versioning schemes like Semantic Versioning and Calendar Versioning, ZeroVer (AKA 0ver) is simple: Your software’s major version should never exceed the first and most important number in computing: zero.”
Aug 12
GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces github.blog · “Mysterious breakage was so common and catastrophic that we’d codified an option for our bootstrap script: –nuke-from-orbit.”
Aug 11
An Old Hacker's Tips On Staying Employed madned.substack.com · “The best tip I have here is to make sure your boss is afraid.”
Aug 11
Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance engineering.fb.com · “The new service, built in-house and later open-sourced, was more scalable and improved the accuracy of timekeeping in the Facebook infrastructure from 10 milliseconds to 100 microseconds.”
Aug 11
Firefox 91 Introduces Enhanced Cookie Clearing blog.mozilla.org · “When you decide to tell Firefox to forget about a website, Firefox will automatically throw away all cookies, supercookies and other data stored in that website’s “cookie jar”.”
Aug 10
elementary OS 6 Odin Available Now blog.elementary.io · “We don’t make advertising deals or collect sensitive personal data.”
Aug 10
Apps Getting Worse tbray.org · “No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.””
Aug 8
CalyxOS calyxos.org · “CalyxOS is an Android mobile operating system that puts privacy and security into the hands of everyday users.”
Aug 6
Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming matt-rickard.com · “Browsing the source is almost always faster than finding an answer on StackOverflow.”
Aug 6
The surreal experience of my first developer job bennuttall.com · “We had to make 10 apps per group every week.”
Aug 4
Simple Systems Have Less Downtime gkogan.co · “Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime.”
Aug 4
JFrog Detects Malicious PyPI Packages Stealing Credit Cards and Injecting Code jfrog.com · “Based on data from pepy.tech, we estimate the malicious packages were downloaded about 30,000 times.”
Aug 3
The 5-hour CDN fly.io · “But CDNs are just web applications.”
Aug 3
WireGuardNT, a high-performance WireGuard implementation for the Windows kernel lists.zx2c4.com · “This has been a monumental undertaking, and if you’ve noticed that I haven’t read emails in about two months, now you know why.”
Aug 2
New in Git: switch and restore banterly.net · “git checkout is one of the many reasons why newcomers find git confusing.”
Aug 1
My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry mike.zwobble.org · “By comparison, having worked as a software developer for over a decade, the impact of the stuff I actually got paid to do seems underwhelming.”
Aug 1

July 2021 40 posts

CRDTs go brrr josephg.com · “Which algorithm was that? Well, this is awkward but .. it was mine.”
Jul 31
Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages - (or any static file hoster) phiresky.netlify.app · “But if you want to use a database, you either need to write a backend (which you then need to host and maintain forever) or download the whole dataset into the browser (which is not so great when the dataset is more than 10MB).”
Jul 31
Cloudflare's inaccessible browser contradicts the company's mission mwcampbell.github.io · “Cloudflare’s neglect of accessibility in this product raises a new barrier to employment for blind people as companies adopt this product to improve the security of their networks.”
Jul 30
700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built stackoverflow.blog · “That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws.”
Jul 29
6 Command Line Tools for Productive Programmers earthly.dev · “I’m not a hard-core terminal guy – I use VSCode more than Vim – but I’m always surprised at the number of complex tasks that can be done using just the POSIX standard command-line tools like grep, cat and sort.”
Jul 29
IPv4 pricing docs.hetzner.com · “Supply and demand determine the price at IPv4 brokers, so the prices have skyrocketed.”
Jul 28
Orbiter is now open source orbiter-forum.com · “I am still hoping to work on future enhancements of Orbiter, but I can’t make any promises or commitments.”
Jul 28
Element raises $30M to boost Matrix matrix.org · “However, there are no plans to use cryptocurrency incentives in Matrix or Element any time soon.”
Jul 27
Postgres Full-Text Search: A Search Engine in a Database blog.crunchydata.com · “With Postgres, you don’t need to immediately look farther than your own database management system for a full-text search solution.”
Jul 27
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF blog.kowalczyk.info · “Almost all of it was written by 2 people, with occasional contributions from others.”
Jul 27
What's bad about Julia? viralinstruction.com · “As far as first impressions go, that isn’t exactly great, especially for a language touted for its speed.”
Jul 26
16 of 30 Google PHP results contain SQL injection vulnerabilities waritschlager.de · “Several of these results were, simply put, SEO-optimized baloney.”
Jul 25
Why self hosting is important dataswamp.org · “Self hosting is about freedom, you can choose what server you want to run, which version, which features and which configuration you want.”
Jul 24
Python behind the scenes #11: how the Python import system works tenthousandmeters.com · “The Python import system doesn’t just seem complicated – it is complicated.”
Jul 24
K-9 Mail is back k9mail.app · “Some of you will love it, some will hate it.”
Jul 24
AWS's Egregious Egress blog.cloudflare.com · “AWS was a huge step forward in terms of flexibility and scalability, but a massive step backward in terms of pricing.”
Jul 23
Syncing all the things lwn.net · “The proliferation of computers leads directly to a familiar problem, though: the files we want are always on the wrong machine.”
Jul 23
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs mcmillen.dev · “We employ an empirical approach, using optical character recognition (OCR) software, which finds that merely 93% of paint splatters parse as valid Perl.”
Jul 23
Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0 engineering.fb.com · “Our last major version upgrade, to MySQL 5.6, took more than a year to roll out.”
Jul 22
Summer Blog Backlog: Distributed Systems oilshell.org · “Let’s start this post off with a bold claim: Kubernetes is Multics!”
Jul 21
Germany's national healthcare system adopts Matrix! matrix.org · “All servers in the Matrix-based private federation will be hosted within Germany.”
Jul 21
Our lawsuit against ChessBase stockfishchess.org · “ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPL, which ensures that the user of the software is informed of their rights.”
Jul 20
10 Papers Every Developer Should Read (At Least Twice) michaelfeathers.silvrback.com · “We have to dig for it because of a peculiar fact about our industry: we reinvent our languages and notations every ten years.”
Jul 20
Towards Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute avi.im · “I don’t need the durability guarantee.”
Jul 18
Last Week on My Mac: The perils of M1 Ownership eclecticlight.co · “Last week, when trying to perform a macOS update on a second operating system on my M1 Mac mini, I only succeeded at the third attempt, after a total of five hours.”
Jul 18
London Mainnet Announcement blog.ethereum.org · “It will go live on block 12 965 000, which is expected between August 3-5, 2021.”
Jul 15
The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday typesense.org · “Looking back, I cannot believe how much I’ve been able to ship over the past 6 years by just following this one rule.”
Jul 14
Zig, Skia, Clojure, Geometry and the Japanese TV Show: ICFP Contest 2021 tonsky.me · “This is a team coding challenge that lasts for 72 hours and in which you have to solve a series of very hard tasks by writing (functional) code.”
Jul 14
MacOS Nix Setup (an alternative to Homebrew) wickedchicken.github.io · “I never know if running brew install or brew upgrade is going to take 5 seconds or 20 minutes.”
Jul 13
83% of Developers Suffer From Burnout, Haystack Analytics Study Finds usehaystack.io · “A new study¹ has found that 83% of software developers suffer from workplace burnout.”
Jul 13
Firefox 90 supports Fetch Metadata Request Headers blog.mozilla.org · “The fundamental security problem underlying cross-site attacks is that the web in its open nature does not allow web application servers to easily distinguish between requests originating from its own application or originating from a malicious (cross-site) application, potentially opened in a different browser tab.”
Jul 12
Against SQL scattered-thoughts.net · “But SQL is a particularly inexpressive language.”
Jul 10
Behind the Scenes Lambda bschaatsbergen.com · “Workers have a lease lifetime of 14 hours, when a worker approaches this maximum, no further invocations are forwarded to the worker and the worker is terminated.”
Jul 10
Compiling Rust is NP-hard niedzejkob.p4.team · “What I noticed, and would like to share with you today, is that the exhaustiveness checking performed by the Rust compiler on match patterns is a superset of the SAT problem.”
Jul 8
npm audit: Broken by Design overreacted.io · “As of today, npm audit is a stain on the entire npm ecosystem.”
Jul 7
Leaving Google neugierig.org · “At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me.”
Jul 6
Stockfish 14 stockfishchess.org · “Stockfish 14 is now at least 400 Elo ahead of Stockfish 7, a top engine in 2016.”
Jul 4
Abandoning GitHub thelig.ht · “I consider this a severe attack on the rights of copyright holders so therefore I cannot continue to rely on GitHub’s services.”
Jul 3
The Untold Story of SQLite corecursive.com · “We’ve sold exactly zero copies of that so that didn’t really work out.”
Jul 3
Things I wish Git had: Commit groups blog.danieljanus.pl · “In 13 years of using it, I’ve never found myself needing a feature it didn’t have.”
Jul 3

June 2021 45 posts

Software Estimation Is Hard. Do It Anyway. jacobian.org · “One study by HBR found that one in six IT projects had cost overruns of over 200% and were late by almost 70%.”
Jun 30
OpenStreetMap looks to relocate to EU due to Brexit limitations theguardian.com · ““There is not one reason for moving, but a multitude of paper cuts, most of which have been triggered or amplified by Brexit,” Guillaume Rischard, the organisation’s treasurer, told members of the foundation in an email sent earlier this month.”
Jun 30
GitHub Copilot · Your AI pair programmer copilot.github.com · “Trained on billions of lines of public code, GitHub Copilot puts the knowledge you need at your fingertips, saving you time and helping you stay focused.”
Jun 29
How a Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur’s MongoDB database blog.newsblur.com · “When I containerized MongoDB, Docker helpfully inserted an allow rule into iptables, opening up MongoDB to the world.”
Jun 29
I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC extremetech.com · “Specifically, Windows 11 Home will now require both internet access and a Microsoft account in order to set up the PC.”
Jun 28
Windows 11, Amazon, and Uncomfortable Questions commonsware.com · “The problem is that Amazon modifies all those apps to be different than what the developers intended to ship.”
Jun 27
Let's code a TCP/IP stack, 1: Ethernet & ARP saminiir.com · “In this blog series, we will implement a minimal userspace TCP/IP stack for Linux.”
Jun 27
Reddit's disrespectful design ognjen.io · “But the logo has been made to link to the registration page.”
Jun 26
Winix: A UNIX-style Operating System for the Waikato RISC Architecture Microprocessor (WRAMP) github.com · “And, for a bit of fun, you can even play the classic game of snake by simply typing snake in the command line.”
Jun 26
How I was let go for refusing to deploy a dark pattern peachesnstink.com · “In other words, email addresses were being saved to the database when a user inputs an email and the input loses focus.”
Jun 25
Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches lkml.org · “You’re sending the patch representing your company, by doing this you’re really just damaging the already broken reputation.”
Jun 25
Microsoft announces Windows 11, with a new design, Start menu, and more theverge.com · “Much of the centered appearance is clearly influenced by macOS and Chrome OS, and Windows 11 also includes the rounded corners we’ve seen in both Android and iOS.”
Jun 24
Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do? news.ycombinator.com · “It was a critical function that locks us with them and goes against their selling message of “you own your data”.”
Jun 24
Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups and consumer apps alexkrupp.typepad.com · “Most existing advice on software architecture is written for $10B+ companies, and as such tends to focus on maximizing things like performance, scalability, availability, reliability, etc.”
Jun 23
A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python karpathy.github.io · “We are going to create, digitally sign, and broadcast a Bitcoin transaction in pure Python, from scratch, and with zero dependencies.”
Jun 22
git undo: We can do better blog.waleedkhan.name · “When they make a mistake, many would rather delete and re-clone the repository than try to fix it.”
Jun 21
Nixos-unstable’s iso_minimal.x86_64-linux is 100% reproducible! discourse.nixos.org · “Next goal: 100% reproducible GNOME ISO”
Jun 20
What Every Programmer Should Know About SSDs databasearchitects.blogspot.com · “A random read from an SSD, in contrast, takes about 100us – 100 times faster.”
Jun 20
The Memo chrislaing.net · “This is unfortunate, because it’s no exaggeration to say that the API Mandate completely transformed Amazon as a business and laid the foundation for its success.”
Jun 20
State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10? ntdotdev.wordpress.com · “We’ve all heard this riddle: if you dig down deep enough in Windows 10, you’ll find elements that date from Windows 3.x days.”
Jun 19
Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess morrick.me · “Nothing was designed specifically with the Mac in mind.”
Jun 19
Friday Facts #366 - The only way to go fast, is to go well! factorio.com · “The only way to go fast is to go well!”
Jun 18
Rethinking Triplebyte triplebyte.com · “We no longer require a quiz or interview to join.”
Jun 17
nushell: A new type of shell github.com · “Rather than thinking of files and data as raw streams of text, Nu looks at each input as something with structure.”
Jun 16
The most copied StackOverflow snippet of all time is flawed! programming.guide · “Ironically it happens to be buggy.”
Jun 16
Europe's Software Problem berthub.eu · “Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms.”
Jun 15
Gooey: Turn (almost) any Python command line program into a full GUI application with one line github.com · “Because as much as we love the command prompt, the rest of the world looks at it like an ugly relic from the early ’80s.”
Jun 13
Last Week on My Mac: The elephant at WWDC eclecticlight.co · “Yet both are unmistakable signs of the elephant at WWDC: documentation.”
Jun 13
How to Handle Secrets on the Command Line smallstep.com · “The command line really wasn’t designed for secrets.”
Jun 13
Goodbye Freenode nedbatchelder.com · “After the channel was closed, people asking staff about what happened were banned from asking.”
Jun 13
Do You Need Redis? PostgreSQL Does Queuing, Locking, & Pub/Sub spin.atomicobject.com · “In practice, most of the apps I’ve worked on have fewer than a dozen background workers, and the cost is not likely to be significant.”
Jun 12
Taildrop was kind of easy, actually tailscale.com · “It never stores your files in the cloud or sends them to us.”
Jun 12
Don't Feed the Thought Leaders earthly.dev · “Tetlock also found that foxes were less likely to be famous because contingent advice is harder to explain in a sound bite.”
Jun 11
Always be quitting jmmv.dev · “The key lies in NOT being indispensable.”
Jun 10
2021.06.08 Certificate Lifetime Incident (valid for an extra one second) community.letsencrypt.org · “This inclusivity means that Let’s Encrypt’s certificates have all been actually valid for 90 days plus 1 second.”
Jun 9
One Fastly customer triggered internet meltdown bbc.co.uk · “But a customer quite legitimately changing their settings had exposed a bug in a software update issued to customers in mid-May, causing “85% of our network to return errors”, it said.”
Jun 9
The Althttpd Webserver sqlite.org · “Althttpd has no configuration file.”
Jun 8
How Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project intuitiveexplanations.com · “Luckily we’re bigger now, and crucially have a lot of money to pay for top lawyers now if we’re forced to go that route.”
Jun 7
A new future for icanhazip major.io · “The site went from 1B requests per day to 30-35B requests per day over a weekend.”
Jun 6
An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding skamille.medium.com · “How to repeat yourself enough that people start to listen”
Jun 6
Apple, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft form group to standardize browser plug-ins appleinsider.com · “Each browser vendor will continue to operate independently with their own policies.”
Jun 5
An Unbelievable Demo brendangregg.com · “A US developer got a world tour for software he didn’t write, which included giving a sales pitch and demo in Australia, unwittingly, to the author.”
Jun 4
HTML and CSS techniques to reduce your JavaScript calendar.perfplanet.com · “When JavaScript runs, the browser delays user interaction events and interface updates.”
Jun 3
Developer relations marco.org · “The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy.”
Jun 3
Best Practices Around Production Ready Web Apps with Docker Compose nickjanetakis.com · “Here’s a few patterns I’ve picked up based on using Docker since 2014.”
Jun 1

May 2021 54 posts

Drunk Post: Things I've learned as a Sr Engineer old.reddit.com · “The best way I’ve advanced my career is by changing companies.”
May 30
I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time awesomekling.github.io · “It was October 2018 and I had just completed a 3-month rehab program at a state addiction clinic in Sweden.”
May 28
Your iPhone (and iCloud backups) are full of gigabytes-worth of old iMessages that are virtually impossible to read keydiscussions.com · “We pay for the right to read our old messages in a few ways: precious space on our 64GB iPhones (the base level storage amount for iPhones), our Macs, and our iCloud storage, which Apple charges us for each month.”
May 28
QUIC is now RFC 9000 fastly.com · “Starting as an experiment at Google, QUIC was developed through a collaborative and iterative standardization process at the IETF after almost five years, 26 face-to-face meetings, 1,749 issues, and many thousands of emails.”
May 28
NocoDB: The Open Source Airtable alternative github.com · “Turns any MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite & MariaDB into a smart-spreadsheet.”
May 27
Neovim (0.5) Is Overpowering crispgm.com · “For an end-user without much deeper knowledge, the biggest differences might be XDG_PATH based directory and init.vim file name.”
May 26
Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked gentoo.org · “As a part of an unannounced switch to a different IRC daemon, the Freenode staff has removed all channel and nickname registrations.”
May 26
It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code qntm.org · “That said, the major problem I have with Clean Code is that a lot of the example code in the book is just dreadful.”
May 25
Temptation of the Apple: Dolphin on macOS M1 dolphin-emu.org · “Apple requires W^X (Write Xor Execute) conformance for native macOS M1 applications.”
May 24
Welcome to Inkscape 1.1! inkscape.org · “Among the highlights in Inkscape 1.1 are a Welcome dialog, a Command Palette, a revamped Dialog Docking System, and searchable preference options, along with new formats for exporting your work.”
May 24
In praise of --dry-run gresearch.co.uk · “But it’s sadly often the case that a tool’s –dry-run is an unloved second-class citizen, prone to drifting out of date or failing to provide all the information you need.”
May 24
Why I prefer making useless stuff web.eecs.utk.edu · “There is nothing I find more liberating than to spend a Saturday afternoon coding on some toy project.”
May 23
Monetizing Open-source is problematic marak.com · “No one pays for Faker development.”
May 23
A look at Postgres 14: Performance and Monitoring Improvements pganalyze.com · “The Postgres connection model relies on processes instead of threads.”
May 22
KolibriOS kolibrios.org · “It requires only a few megabytes of disk space, an i586 processor, and 12 MB of RAM to run.”
May 22
Sublime Text 4 sublimetext.com · “Sublime Text license keys are no longer tied to a single major version, instead they are now valid for all updates within 3 years of purchase.”
May 21
Learn CSS web.dev · “Everything displayed by CSS is a box.”
May 21
voice2json: Command-line tools for speech and intent recognition on Linux voice2json.org · “voice2json is a collection of command-line tools for offline speech/intent recognition on Linux.”
May 21
Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning: 1.2M API req/s on a 4 vCPU EC2 Instance talawah.io · “This post will walk you through the performance tuning steps that I took to serve 1.2 million JSON “API” requests per second from a 4 vCPU AWS EC2 instance.”
May 20
Introducing WebContainers: Run Node.js natively in your browser blog.stackblitz.com · “The advent of WebAssembly and new capabilities APIs made it seem possible to write a WebAssembly-based operating system powerful enough to run Node.js, entirely inside your browser.”
May 20
“I could rewrite curl” daniel.haxx.se · “But there’s a huge difference between thinking and saying.”
May 20
Welcome to Libera Chat libera.chat · “Most of our staff have joined us from freenode, and we intend to continue its legacy.”
May 19
The future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge blogs.windows.com · “Today, we are at the next stage of that journey: we are announcing that the future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge.”
May 19
Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search plausible.io · “Google will even remove the AMP badge icon from the search results.”
May 18
Cosmopolitan Libc 1.0 github.com · “Cosmopolitan Libc makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn’t need an interpreter or virtual machine.”
May 17
Building a Personal [Origami] Website in 2021 origami.kosmulski.org · “Longevity: this is a complete gamble. Social media platforms come and go.”
May 16
systemd: The Good Parts christine.website · “One of the big differences between systemd and other things like OpenRC is that systemd is a very declarative environment.”
May 16
Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years turriate.com · “JavaScript has come a long way since I knew it as the “D” in DHTML.”
May 15
The return of fancy tools macwright.com · “Frictionless note-taking produces notes, but it doesn’t - for me - produce memory.”
May 15
Things you can’t do in Rust (and what to do instead) blog.logrocket.com · “Arguably the most-asked-about missing feature coming from object-oriented languages is inheritance.”
May 15
Zulip 4.0: Threaded open-source team chat blog.zulip.com · “With 68 people who’ve contributed 100+ commits, Zulip has by far the most active open-source development community of any team chat software, and is translated into 17 languages.”
May 14
I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff p.haavard.me · “I cannot stand by such a (hostile?) corporate takeover of the freenode network, and I am resigning along with most other freenode staff.”
May 14
Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering: this may impact some Chrome extensions workspaceupdates.googleblog.com · “Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.”
May 12
Erlang/OTP 24 Highlights blog.erlang.org · “Finally Erlang/OTP 24 is here! A release that for me has been about 10 years in the making.”
May 12
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money? babeljs.io · “Since 2018, Babel has been doing a funding experiment: can full time work on Babel be sustained? We’ve learned the answer might be no.”
May 11
Using PostgreSQL as a Data Warehouse narrator.ai · “Word of caution: do NOT use your production Postgres instance for data reporting / metrics.”
May 10
Dear EU: Please Don't Ruin the Root berthub.eu · “Surprisingly however, the European Commission version of the directive explicitly includes all the root servers, the infrastructure that keeps the internet alive.”
May 10
Linux Foundation starts AgStack, world's first open-source agtech initiative investableuniverse.com · “Linux Foundation noted in its official AgStack announcement on Wednesday that 33 percent of all food produced is wasted, while nine percent of the people in the world are hungry or undernourished.”
May 8
The Byte Order Fiasco justine.lol · “Aside from being ugly, the code above is wrong.”
May 8
Searching the web for < $1000 / month quickwit.io · “Storing the index on Amazon S3 costs $160 per month and deploying a small pool of two search instances costs $650 per month.”
May 7
HTML Tips and Tricks: 20 You Won’t See in Most Tutorials markodenic.com · “Performance tip. You can use the loading=lazy attribute to defer the loading of the image until the user scrolls to them.”
May 5
Send: A Fork of Mozilla's Firefox Send github.com · “Mozilla discontinued Send, this fork is a community effort to keep the project up-to-date and alive.”
May 5
Please fix the AWS Free Tier before somebody gets hurt cloudirregular.substack.com · “AWS is the only cloud provider that creates these problems.”
May 4
Cinder: Instagram's performance oriented fork of CPython github.com · “Cinder is not polished or documented for anyone else’s use.”
May 4
The Unix Magic poster jpmens.net · “The oregano is reputedly referring to an incident in which one of the original folks involved with BSD was hassled for coming across the Canadian/U.S. border with a bag of what was assumed to be an illegal substance, and turned out to be oregano.”
May 3
Rust's Most Unrecognized Contributor brson.github.io · “One of the people most responsible for Rust’s success though is almost completely unrecognized.”
May 3
Practical SQL for Data Analysis hakibenita.com · “Pandas alone consumes ~37M of memory: Just importing pandas, before even doing anything with it, consumes a significant amount of memory.”
May 3
Stop making your paying customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website. blog.stunning.co · “Why are we showing people a huge marquee and a red carpet before they are customers, and then leaving a side door open in the alley once they are paying us?”
May 3
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part IV rosenzweig.io · “We are passing about 75% of the OpenGL ES 2.0 tests in the drawElements Quality Program used to establish Khronos conformance.”
May 2
Tiny Wins joelcalifa.com · “This was a one-line code change that took a few minutes.”
May 2
What3Words – The Algorithm cybergibbons.com · “What3Words say the odds are “1 in 2.5 million” – but they seem to be under 1 in 100 in cities in the UK.”
May 2
Shared libraries are not a good thing in general lore.kernel.org · “And the memory savings are often actually negative (again, unless it’s some big library that is typically used by lots of different programs at the same time).”
May 1
Muse Group formed to support MuseScore, Ultimate Guitar; acquires Audacity scoringnotes.com · “The company that already owns the music notation software and online catalog MuseScore and the Ultimate Guitar community and guitar tab catalog has announced its acquisition of Audacity, the popular free audio editing software.”
May 1
Will Linux phones stay around this time? linmob.net · “Openmoko supposedly had 10,000 phones shipped in 2009, PINE64 have already shipped more than 3 times that amount.”
May 1

April 2021 38 posts

An update on the UMN affair lwn.net · “The old saying still holds true: one should not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.”
Apr 29
What's Going On, Apple? - Part 2 intuitibits.com · “Unfortunately, packet capturing is now broken in the new M1 Mac.”
Apr 29
Never run Google ads if you have an Android app danfabulich.medium.com · “If Google decides to ban you from AdMob/AdSense, they may also ban your Android app from the Google Play Store.”
Apr 28
My current HTML boilerplate matuzo.at · “For the old-schoolers among you, you don’t need any of the other doc types you’ve learned by heart.”
Apr 27
Google Have Declared DroidScript Is Malware and Accused Us of Ad Fraud! groups.google.com · “The Google Play system has declared DroidScript is Malware and accused us of committing Ad Fraud!”
Apr 27
Has UML Died Without Anyone Noticing? garba.org · “A few years later, maybe around 2015-ish, I realised that I had pretty much stopped using UML, and so had the rest of my peers and nearly every Fortune 500 customer I have consulted for recently.”
Apr 25
Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/s: How I Learned To Love Tail Calls in C blog.reverberate.org · “Applying this technique to protobuf parsing has yielded amazing results: we have managed to demonstrate protobuf parsing at over 2GB/s, more than double the previous state of the art.”
Apr 25
Remote code execution in Homebrew by compromising the official Cask repository blog.ryotak.me · “In the Homebrew/homebrew-cask repository, it was possible to merge the malicious pull request by confusing the library that is used in the automated pull request review script developed by the Homebrew project.”
Apr 24
Starting this newsletter, print debugging, BYOC buttondown.email · “I don’t totally disagree, but I do want to point out that print debugging has one critical feature that most step-based debuggers don’t have: you can see program state from multiple time steps all at once.”
Apr 24
Why Lichess will always be free. lichess.org · “Lichess doesn’t do any of that and never will.”
Apr 23
Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared bbc.co.uk · “Judges have quashed the convictions of 39 former postmasters after the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice.”
Apr 23
Green Vs. Brown Programming Languages earthly.dev · “Old code is the worst.”
Apr 22
Ubuntu 21.04 is here ubuntu.com · “Ubuntu machines can join an Active Directory (AD) domain at installation for central configuration.”
Apr 22
Re: [PATCH] SUNRPC: Add a check for gss_release_msg lore.kernel.org · “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose.”
Apr 21
The Initial Preview of GUI app support is now available for the Windows Subsystem for Linux devblogs.microsoft.com · “We are proud to announce the first preview of this highly anticipated and open source feature!”
Apr 21
Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3 grafana.com · “Going forward, we will be relicensing our core open source projects (Grafana, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Tempo) from the Apache License 2.0 to the Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.”
Apr 20
MAINTAINERS: update git.kernel.org · “You are an IBM employee 100% of the time.”
Apr 20
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part III rosenzweig.io · “Progress has been rapid: at the end of its first week, it can compile both basic vertex and fragment shaders, sufficient to render 3D scenes.”
Apr 19
Announcing Livebook dashbit.co · “We are glad to announce Livebook, an open source web application for writing interactive and collaborative code notebooks in Elixir and implemented with Phoenix LiveView.”
Apr 18
Proposal: Treat FLoC like a security concern make.wordpress.org · “WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web – and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimination against those with mental illness with a few lines of code.”
Apr 18
Everything Easy is Hard Again frankchimero.com · “I had fifteen years of experience designing for web clients, she had one year, and yet some how, we were in the same situation: we enjoyed the work, but were utterly confused and overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing complexity of it all.”
Apr 17
Re: [PATCH 00/13] [RFC] Rust support lkml.org · “Running out of memory simply MUST NOT cause an abort.”
Apr 16
SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases unixsheikh.com · “SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is.”
Apr 15
[PATCH 00/13] [RFC] Rust support lkml.org · “We know there are huge costs and risks in introducing a new main language in the kernel.”
Apr 14
Deno 1.9 Release Notes deno.com · “Ultimately we don’t want to be in the business of writing HTTP servers.”
Apr 13
COSMIC to Arrive in June Release of Pop!_OS 21.04 blog.system76.com · “During user testing, we found that even GNOME veterans have a tendency to pause in their task after opening the Activities Overview.”
Apr 13
Introducing OpenSearch aws.amazon.com · “Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.”
Apr 12
RMS addresses the free software community fsf.org · “Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them – especially women.”
Apr 12
C++ std::unique_ptr that represents each object as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain github.com · “As we all know, adding blockchain to a problem automatically makes it simple, transparent, and cryptographically secure.”
Apr 11
Everyone Is Still Terrible At Creating Software At Scale margint.blog · “Things that would take yourself maybe a couple of days to do in a way that sort of works become projects that span months or years in the enterprise.”
Apr 10
Best practices for writing SQL queries metabase.com · “The standard warning against premature optimization applies here.”
Apr 10
Docker without Docker fly.io · “As far as we’re concerned, a container image is just a stack of tarballs and a blob of configuration (we layer additional configuration in as well).”
Apr 9
The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup anthonynsimon.com · “I use Kubernetes on AWS, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need this.”
Apr 8
Programming is hard dorinlazar.ro · “Just because I can mix three things in an omelette that doesn’t make me a top chef.”
Apr 6
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. supremecourt.gov · “Google’s limited copying of the API is a transformative use.”
Apr 5
The Norway Problem - why StrictYAML refuses to do implicit typing and so should you hitchdev.com · “It snows a lot in False.”
Apr 2
Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop. The grass is not greener on the other side cfenollosa.com · “I ended up using Thunderbird, but I felt like I was doing my email with handcuffs.”
Apr 2
A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16 advancedweb.hu · “Since the release of version 8, up to version 16, Java is shaped by 180 JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs), each of which brings some improvement to the platform.”
Apr 1

March 2021 53 posts

Inside a viral website notfunatparties.substack.com · “The website received around 50 million views in a 5 day period.”
Mar 31
signed char lotte nickdrozd.github.io · “The cleverness of the text is staggering.”
Mar 31
up - the Ultimate Plumber github.com · “In particular, writing “rm” or “dd” into it could be like running around with a chainsaw.”
Mar 31
Font size is useless; let's fix it tonsky.me · “Instead, macOS always uses 72 PPI to convert points to pixels.”
Mar 30
Announcing the Deno Company deno.com · “Deno is our attempt to breathe new life into this ecosystem.”
Mar 29
Changes to Git commit workflow news-web.php.net · “While investigation is still underway, we have decided that maintaining our own git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk, and that we will discontinue the git.php.net server.”
Mar 29
Developer tools can be magic. Instead, they collect dust. pathsensitive.com · “In spite of this, tools research is still light-years ahead of what’s being deployed.”
Mar 28
Ohm github.com · “Unlike many similar tools, Ohm completely separates grammars from semantic actions.”
Mar 27
Google's Got A Secret knuckleheads.club · “Anybody who has ever written a web crawler knows that Googlebot gets more access than everybody else.”
Mar 26
Why All My Servers Have an 8GB Empty File brianschrader.com · “As of last year, all of my servers have an 8GB empty spacer.img file that does absolutely nothing except take up space.”
Mar 25
SQLite is not a toy database antonz.org · “SQLite is the most common DBMS in the world, shipped with all popular operating systems.”
Mar 25
Emoji under the hood tonsky.me · “Out of those 2 million, actually defined are ~150k characters.”
Mar 24
Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace! bell-labs.com · “The plan was not to build directly on the Unix foundation but to implement a new design from scratch.”
Mar 23
A safer default for navigation: HTTPS blog.chromium.org · “This was a practical default in the past, when much of the web did not support HTTPS.”
Mar 23
Substack's UI and 1Password just cost me $2,023 timmyomahony.com · “As part of a Zoom call today, I tried to sign up for a $10 monthly subscription on a Substack page to test the user journey.”
Mar 23
Crystal 1.0 - What to expect crystal-lang.org · “After this release, everyone can expect that, at least for any future 1.x version, your code can still compile and work without any significant incompatibility.”
Mar 22
Richard Stallman is Coming Back to the Board of the Free Software Foundation, Founded by Himself 35 Years Ago techrights.org · “He’s not president but he’s on the board.”
Mar 21
Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore lwgmnz.me · “I have to scroll up with my left thumb and then tap Refresh on my right.”
Mar 20
Nyxt browser: The hacker's browser nyxt.atlas.engineer · “A tree based history ensures that you never lose track of where you’ve been.”
Mar 19
Interview with John Kozubik, rsync.net console.dev · “rsync.net has no firewalls and no routers.”
Mar 18
How we found and fixed a rare race condition in our session handling github.blog · “On March 2, 2021, we received a report via our support team from a user who, while using GitHub.com logged in as their own user, was suddenly authenticated as another user.”
Mar 18
Outrun github.com · “Since the remote machine will have full access to your local file system as your current user, make sure to only use machines that you trust.”
Mar 18
Audacity 3.0.0 Released audacityteam.org · “The problem, which happened all too often, was that data files and .aup file parted ways.”
Mar 17
Charts.css chartscss.org · “It uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts.”
Mar 17
Why We Don't Use Docker (We Don't Need It) launchyourapp.meezeeworkouts.com · “We don’t have anywhere close to a thousand transactions per second.”
Mar 16
Ask HN: What are some "10x" software product innovations you have experienced? news.ycombinator.com · “Have you personally experienced such 10x improvements in your own interactions with software?”
Mar 16
Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed poor load times, official update coming pcgamer.com · “Tostercx said that they were awarded $10,000 through Rockstar’s Bug Bounty program.”
Mar 15
Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust benhoyt.com · “It’s the kind of thing a programmer might have to write a script for in real life, and it shows whether they understand file I/O, hash tables (maps), and how to use their language’s sort function.”
Mar 15
Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery matthewearl.github.io · “One thing that I found remarkable was the self-similarity of the martian terrain.”
Mar 14
Why are tar.xz files 15x smaller when using Python's tar library compared to macOS tar? superuser.com · “I think the underlying issue is that BSD tar and GNU tar without any sort options put the files in the archive in an undefined order.”
Mar 14
dhcpcd will need a new maintainer roy.marples.name · “As such, dhcpcd will soon need a new maintainer.”
Mar 13
Speed of Rust vs C kornel.ski · “Rust’s abstractions are a double-edged sword.”
Mar 13
RethinkDB: why we failed defmacro.org · “In hindsight, two things went wrong – we picked a terrible market and optimized the product for the wrong metrics of goodness.”
Mar 13
What's new in SQLite 3.35 nalgeon.github.io · “Anyway, after 20 years we now have mathematical functions!”
Mar 12
I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service tinyprojects.dev · “Turns out emoji domain names score very highly for spam and were going to be blocked to high heaven.”
Mar 11
How I earn a living selling my open source software indiehackers.com · “I initially developed open3A because I needed it myself to write invoices to my customers.”
Mar 11
Julia Computing Receives DARPA Award to Accelerate Electronics Simulation by 1,000x juliacomputing.com · “Funding was awarded as part of DARPA’s Intelligent Auto-Generation and Composition of Surrogate Models (Ditto) effort.”
Mar 11
Fire declared in OVH SBG2 datacentre building travaux.ovh.net · “Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2.”
Mar 10
Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work theta.eu.org · “In 2021 a lot more of the Rust ecosystem has become asynchronous – such that it might be appropriate to just say that Rust programming is now a disaster and a mess.”
Mar 10
Write libraries instead of services, where possible catern.com · “A library instead moves these costs to the users of the library.”
Mar 9
ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them twitter.com · “ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them, making it impractical for millions of hobbyist programmers to access to them and be able to even understand what the standard is.”
Mar 8
-2000 Lines Of Code folklore.org · “When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.”
Mar 8
Excel Never Dies notboring.co · “Anyone who has worked in finance or consulting grew up on it, learned to love it over thousands of hours of practice and improvement.”
Mar 8
Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun kevinlynagh.com · “The experience went so well, in fact, that I now feel just as likely to turn to Zig (a language I’ve used for a dozen hours) as to Rust (which I’ve used for at least a thousand hours).”
Mar 7
Dolt is Git for Data github.com · “Git versions files. Dolt versions tables.”
Mar 6
Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model erikbern.com · “The median blowup factor turns out to be exactly 1x for this dataset, whereas the mean blowup factor is 1.81x.”
Mar 6
Proton Has Enabled 7000 Games to Run on Linux boilingsteam.com · “In other words, for every Windows title out there, there’s a coin flip chance that it will work just as expected on Linux.”
Mar 5
Open source projects: consider running office hours simonwillison.net · “A challenge of open source is that it’s easy to be starved of feedback.”
Mar 5
It Can Happen to You mattkeeter.com · “Replacing the sscanf call with strtof improved startup by nearly a factor of 10: from 1.8 seconds to 199 milliseconds.”
Mar 4
banned.h github.com · “This header lists functions that have been banned from our code base, because they’re too easy to misuse (and even if used correctly, complicate audits).”
Mar 4
Speed is the killer feature bdickason.com · “Latency stops your users from doing the job they already hire your product for.”
Mar 2
Lotus 1-2-3 lock.cmpxchg8b.com · “I had to script a DOS emulator to scrape the data out a page at a time!”
Mar 2
Use Touch ID for sudo on Mac davidwalsh.name · “One functionality that still requires manually typing a password is using sudo from command line.”
Mar 1

February 2021 48 posts

Actually Portable Executables ahgamut.github.io · “This is pretty incredible: I just had to modify a few lines in a Makefile and some C source files, and I got a Lua executable that works both on Linux and Windows (and possibly others as well).”
Feb 28
Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with blog.yossarian.net · “Program packagers and distributors (frequently separate from project maintainers themselves) are very used to C’s universal presence.”
Feb 28
A Vim Guide for Advanced Users thevaluable.dev · “Don’t use a cheatsheet; write your own as you read.”
Feb 27
redbean justine.lol · “redbean can serve 1 million+ gzip encoded responses per second on a cheap personal computer.”
Feb 26
Google admits Kubernetes container tech is so complex, it's had to roll out an Autopilot feature to do it all for you theregister.com · ““Despite 6 years of progress, Kubernetes is still incredibly complex,” said Drew Bradstock, product lead for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).”
Feb 26
GamestonkTerminal: The next best thing after Bloomberg Terminal github.com · “Gamestonk Terminal is an awesome stock market terminal that has been developed for fun, while I saw my GME shares tanking.”
Feb 25
Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison kevinslin.com · “The initial onboarding call was entirely about how much money I was planning on spending with google (as opposed to the Amazon call where they wanted to help me architect my service).”
Feb 24
Everyday Data Science andrewnc.github.io · “During my graduate studies, I have been enthralled with how books often stay relevant and how quickly papers sink into obscurity.”
Feb 24
Whistleblowers: Software bug keeping hundreds of inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates kjzz.org · “As of 2019, the department had spent more than $24 million contracting with IT company Business & Decision, North America to build and maintain the software program, known as ACIS, that is used to manage the inmate population in state prisons.”
Feb 22
Go is not an easy language arp242.net · “Go is not an easy programming language.”
Feb 22
Choose Boring Technology boringtechnology.club · “Let’s say that we all get a limited number of innovation tokens to spend.”
Feb 21
Mistakes I've Made as an Engineering Manager css-tricks.com · “One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that humans aren’t pure functions: an input that works one day and gets one result, then again another day and get an entirely different result.”
Feb 21
How can you not be romantic about programming? thorstenball.com · “We spend large parts of our days writing down instructions for machines.”
Feb 20
The modern packager's security nightmare blogs.gentoo.org · “Today, for every 10 packages fixed, a completely new ecosystem emerges with the bad security practices at its central point.”
Feb 20
Monolith First martinfowler.com · “Almost all the cases where I’ve heard of a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended up in serious trouble.”
Feb 19
"I will slaughter you" daniel.haxx.se · “Code I have written runs in virtually every Internet connected device on the planet and in most cases the users download and use it without even telling me, for free.”
Feb 19
Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in Open Source Software security.googleblog.com · “To date, our free OSS-Fuzz service has found over 5,500 vulnerabilities across 375 open source projects caused by memory safety errors, and our Rewards Program helps encourage adoption of fuzzing through financial incentives.”
Feb 18
Zsh Tricks to Blow your Mind twilio.com · “Starting with MacOS Catalina in 2019, Zsh became the default login and interactive shell in Mac machines.”
Feb 18
Cell Tower Distribution alpercinar.com · “Since there are no cell towers in oceans or uninhabitable areas, tiles for those regions are full of zero values or very sparse.”
Feb 17
Functorio bartoszmilewski.com · “You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style.”
Feb 16
UsTaxes: Tax filing web application github.com · “UsTaxes is a free, open-source tax filing application that can be used to file the Federal 1040 form.”
Feb 15
Faster JavaScript calls v8.dev · “It turns out that, with a clever trick, we can remove this extra frame, simplify the V8 codebase and get rid of almost the entire overhead.”
Feb 15
GTA III and Vice City fully reverse engineered: re3 github.com · “In this repository you’ll find the fully reversed source code for GTA III (master branch) and GTA VC (miami branch).”
Feb 14
K-9 Mail is looking for funding k9mail.app · “K-9 Mail is looking to raise 1,000 EUR per week (~52,000 EUR per year) to fund development.”
Feb 14
The complexity that lives in the GUI blog.royalsloth.eu · “There are all sorts of libraries and frameworks that are supposed to help you on your journey of writing a GUI, but despite all the best practices and frameworks forcing you to eat your vegetables, the GUI always ends up being a ridiculous mess.”
Feb 14
Ziglings: Learn the Zig programming language by fixing tiny broken programs github.com · “This project contains a series of tiny broken programs.”
Feb 13
Welcoming Google as a Visionary Sponsor of the PSF pyfound.blogspot.com · “Google has been a Python Software Foundation sponsor since 2010.”
Feb 13
Swift for TensorFlow Shuts Down github.com · “Swift for TensorFlow was an experiment in the next-generation platform for machine learning, incorporating the latest research across machine learning, compilers, differentiable programming, systems design, and beyond.”
Feb 12
Short fat engineers are undervalued nested.substack.com · “Depth helps you move fast, but breadth helps you move in the right direction.”
Feb 12
Beej's Guide to Network Programming beej.us · “This document has been written as a tutorial, not a complete reference.”
Feb 11
Why I Built Litestream litestream.io · “Despite an exponential increase in computing power, our applications require more machines than ever because of architectural decisions made 25 years ago.”
Feb 11
Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel engineering.skroutz.gr · “What’s more, this bug had been present in Linux since v2.1.8, dating back to 1996!”
Feb 11
Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies medium.com · “This type of vulnerability, which I have started calling dependency confusion, was detected inside more than 35 organizations to date, across all three tested programming languages.”
Feb 10
GitHub1s: One second to read GitHub code with VS Code github.com · “Just add 1s after github and press Enter in browser address bar for any repository you want to read.”
Feb 9
How Lyft discovered OpenStreetMap is the Freshest Map for Rideshare eng.lyft.com · “OpenStreetMap has a very high-quality road network in 30 large North American cities.”
Feb 9
[Python-Dev] Acceptance of Pattern Matching PEPs 634, 635, 636, Rejection of PEPs 640 and 642 lwn.net · “After much deliberation, the Python Steering Council is happy to announce that we have chosen to accept PEP 634, and its companion PEPs 635 and 636, collectively known as the Pattern Matching PEPs.”
Feb 9
Investigate unusual media traffic pattern for AsterNovi-belgii-flower-1mb.jpg on Commons phabricator.wikimedia.org · “We’ve noticed today that we get about 90M requests per day from various ISPs in India, all with the same characteristics:”
Feb 8
Hello World! foundation.rust-lang.org · “Mozilla, the original home of the Rust project, has transferred all trademark and infrastructure assets, including the crates.io package registry, to the Rust Foundation.”
Feb 8
Visual guide to SSH tunnels robotmoon.com · “SSH tunnels are encrypted TCP connections between SSH clients and servers that allows traffic entering one side of the tunnel to transparently exit through the other.”
Feb 7
ARCHITECTURE.md matklad.github.io · “Roughly, it takes 2x more time to write a patch if you are unfamiliar with the project, but it takes 10x more time to figure out where you should change the code.”
Feb 6
Homebrew 3.0.0 brew.sh · “The most significant changes since 2.7.0 are official Apple Silicon support and a new bottle format in formulae.”
Feb 5
Native Mac APIs for Go github.com · “MacDriver is a toolkit for working with Apple/Mac APIs and frameworks in Go.”
Feb 4
How to hire senior developers: Give them more autonomy hiringengineersbook.com · “The whole ordeal took months to complete, and I’m guessing that all things considered, it cost the small company of ~6 people about half a year of development time.”
Feb 4
Computer Graphics from Scratch gabrielgambetta.com · “Every algorithm is built up without the use of external libraries or APIs and is presented with language agnostic pseudocode, allowing anyone with a basic understanding of programming and high school math to follow along.”
Feb 3
Getting Better at Linux With 10 Mini-Projects carltheperson.com · “My solution was to come up with 10 subjects to learn and create an accompanying mini-project.”
Feb 2
The Documentation System documentation.divio.com · “There is a secret that needs to be understood in order to write good software documentation: there isn’t one thing called documentation, there are four.”
Feb 2
Just because I have a vertical screen, doesn't mean I'm on a phone! shkspr.mobi · “Images are served as low resolution, for 6 inch screens and then blown up to 24 inches.”
Feb 2
VideoLAN is 20 years old today videolan.org · “Today, VLC media player is used regularly by hundreds of millions of users, and has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times over the years.”
Feb 1

January 2021 38 posts

GitHub Should Start An App Store ankshilp.com · “In any case, it doesn’t make any sense for a single entity to govern what gets installed and not on billions of devices.”
Jan 31
Offline Algorithms in Low-Frequency Trading queue.acm.org · “Indeed, the key to writing efficient software that ferrets out every last dollar is to see beyond the distracting particulars of a real-world problem and map it onto a well-known formal problem.”
Jan 30
Litestream: Open-source, not open-contribution github.com · “As the author of BoltDB, I found that accepting and maintaining third party patches contributed to my burn out and I eventually archived the project.”
Jan 28
Why I'm losing faith in UX creativegood.com · “I’ll call that Decade 1, from 1997 to 2007: the golden era of online UX, when companies were willing to invest in listening to customers in order to serve them better.”
Jan 28
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML shkspr.mobi · “She’s not slicing fruit; she’s arming herself with knowledge.”
Jan 26
The PGM-index pgm.di.unipi.it · “It is the first learned index with provably optimal time and space complexity guarantees.”
Jan 25
Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 6 years in the industry chriskiehl.com · “Designing scalable systems when you don’t need to makes you a bad engineer.”
Jan 24
Deskreen turns any device with a web browser into a secondary screen for your computer github.com · “Deskreen is an electron.js based application that uses WebRTC to make a live stream of your computer screen to a web browser on any device.”
Jan 24
Google has turned off access to sync features for Chromium bodhi.fedoraproject.org · “There is no good reason for Google to do this, other than to force people to use Chrome.”
Jan 23
Firecracker: start a VM in less than a second jvns.ca · “Initially when I read about Firecracker being released, I thought it was just a tool for cloud providers to use – I knew that AWS Fargate and https://fly.io used it, but I didn’t think that it was something that I could directly use myself.”
Jan 23
Brad Cox Obituary (1944 - 2021) legacy.com · “Dr. Cox was a computer scientist known mostly for creating the Objective – C programming language with his business partner, Tom Love, and for his work in software engineering (specifically software reuse) and software componentry.”
Jan 22
Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch aws.amazon.com · “In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.”
Jan 21
The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let's Encrypt letsencrypt.org · “In the week before we upgraded our primary database server, its CPU usage (from /proc/stat) averaged over 90%: The new AMD EPYC CPUs sit at about 25%.”
Jan 21
Beeper - All Your Chats In One App beeperhq.com · “Beeper gives you a unified inbox for 15 chat networks.”
Jan 20
Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon hacks.mozilla.org · “Secondly, Apple did not actually ship their Rosetta 2 emulator preinstalled on the Apple Silicon machines but its installation is triggered when the user tries to run an Intel application.”
Jan 20
Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing elastic.co · “Our license change is aimed at preventing companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.”
Jan 19
IPFS Support in Brave brave.com · “IPFS is an exciting technology that can help content creators distribute content without high bandwidth costs, while taking advantage of data deduplication and data replication.”
Jan 19
Software effort estimation is mostly fake research shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com · “Why are researchers involved in software effort estimation feeding tiny datasets from the 1980s- 1990s into machine learning algorithms?”
Jan 18
The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla murilopereira.com · “VSCode was released just five years ago, and in this short amount of time it was able to capture half of the world’s software developers.”
Jan 17
Big O Notation - explained as easily as possible thatcomputerscientist.com · “Big O Notation is a mathematical notation used to classify algorithms according to how their run time or space requirements grow as the input size grows.”
Jan 16
null popey.com · “My use of the (probably reserved) word null seemed to fool the backend checks script, live on stage, in front of my peers.”
Jan 14
We Don't Need Data Scientists, We Need Data Engineers mihaileric.com · “There are ~70% more open data engineer than data scientist positions.”
Jan 14
"Wireguard [sic]: great protocol, but skip the Mac app" blog post lists.zx2c4.com · “The App Store refuses to update when a network extension is running.”
Jan 13
WRT54G History: The Router That Accidentally Went Open Source tedium.co · “Cisco was essentially compelled by the threat of legal action to release the Linux-based firmware under the GPL, but it was not thrilled to see that the device whose success finally gave it the foothold in the home that had long evaded the company being used in ways beyond what the box said.”
Jan 13
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker (and my toilets are blocked) jayfax.neocities.org · “This bug has received over one hundred comments over the course of nearly two decades.”
Jan 10
What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not blog.pragmaticengineer.com · “And the same companies who try to measure engineering productivity with metrics related to lines of code or commits wonder why their engineers are not product-focused or product-aware.”
Jan 10
PeerTube v3: it's a live, a liiiiive ! framablog.org · “The great feature of this v3 is live streaming, and we are proud to say that it works very well !”
Jan 10
Why mmap is faster than system calls sasha-f.medium.com · “Barring few exceptions, mmap is 2–6 times faster than system calls.”
Jan 9
Best of Show - abuse of libc ioccc.org · “While its primary purpose is to serve as The One True Debugger, printf(3) also happens to be Turing complete.”
Jan 8
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I rosenzweig.io · “This poses a problem for those of us in the Asahi Linux project who wish to run Linux on our devices, as this custom Apple GPU has neither public documentation nor open source drivers.”
Jan 7
What I've Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry bti360.com · “Assume the next person to maintain your code won’t be as smart as you.”
Jan 6
Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2 bert.org · “It’s an Atari Portfolio, the world’s first palmtop computer.”
Jan 6
Advancing developer freedom: GitHub is fully available in Iran github.blog · “Today we are announcing a breakthrough: we have secured a license from the US government to offer GitHub to developers in Iran.”
Jan 5
Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering surma.dev · “Obra Dinn is a story puzzler that I can only recommend, but what piqued my curiosity as a software engineer is that it is a 3D game (using the Unity game engine) but rendered using only 2 colors with dithering.”
Jan 4
A half-hour to learn Rust fasterthanli.me · “In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it.”
Jan 2
Did WSL2 corrupt my git repository? github.com · “It happened again, but this time with bash history got corrupted.”
Jan 2
TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem omar.website · “Now you don’t need to code up a browser extension from scratch every time you want to do anything.”
Jan 1
Apple has threatened to remove Amphetamine from the App Store github.com · “On December 29th, 2020, a representative from Apple contacted and informed me that, after 6 years on the Mac App Store, Amphetamine had spontaneously began violating one of Apple’s App Store Guidelines.”
Jan 1