From the Ars Technica writeup of the incident, drawing upon a justice dept. press release: To conceal the USB device, Alfozan allegedly wrapped it in toilet paper, then plugged it into the back of a conference room television. The device was likely planted on September 28, and OpenAI found it on September 30 and quickly determined that its contents were encrypted, the FBI said. Why did the device need to be wrapped in toilet paper? Whatever the reason, this could be a big story, if this is the…

Yesterday I offered, as one of nine reasons why AI wouldn't be leading to noticably more and better software for everyone, that efficiency gains might instead be captured by people making the software: Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.) It turns…

During the latest episode of The Pingback Podcast, we were talking about Roundhouse and Raul asked me how would you deploy a Rails app, compiled to a binary with Roundhouse and Spinel. It is actually pretty simple with Kamal, and here comes a little post about how to do it.

KDE’s 30 years anniversary is today (14th), with the release of Plasma 6.8 as part of celebrations. Of all the desktop environments for Linux, Plasma is what I like the most. I hope to one day use it on a “daily driver” computer. Curiosity: the email from Matthias Ettrich announcing the “Kool Desktop Environment” in 1996. “So one of the major goals is to provide a modern and common look&feel for all the applications. And this is exactly the reason, why this project is different from elder…

Create cursed fonts: every X characters, another with a different font is inserted. You can upload your own fonts or import more from Google Fonts, and download the Frankenstein font in *.ttf, *.otf or woff2.

Persistent models have a persistence problem. It’s been a bit since we’ve added a new context failure mode, but the increasing persistence of frontier models has brought this fail to the fore. This one I call Context Inertia: Context Inertia is when the model commits to a hypothesis, subtask, or goal in its context and keeps pursuing it after the evidence says to stop or change course. This failure mode is part context poisoning (when an error makes it into the context and is repeatedly…

I've been hard at work with yet another Uppercase release. This time I focused on cleaning up the UX and refining the code behind-the-scenes. Plus, there's a new logo! Try version 067f0b7a Try the latest build and have a blast! Play a Free Puzzle Gameplay ChangesExact Tile RenderingThe previous release of Uppercase would convert all letters in the puzzle to its uppercase equivalent. (Hey, that's the name of the game!)However, a few recent puzzles had me really wishing I could make a certain…

We have more than enough code, what we need is technology that helps people build power together. If you work in free software, #FOSS, decentralized networks or the #Fediverse, you probably already understand some of the problems with corporate #dotcons platforms. You may be building alternatives because you want technology to be more open, more democratic and less controlled by a handful of corporations. That is a good place to start, but there is a recurring problem in grassroots technology –…

I know, I says to myself, I'll have a quick peek at Mastodon for the first time in ages. I fire up phanpy.social and I'm greeted with "unable to load posts". Cool! Looks like the Mastodon instance I joined years ago is down. Nice! How long has it been down? Is it perma down? Does anyone still use Mastodon any longer? Who knows?

I've redesigned the Pagecord sign up / log in screens to be a lot more fun. What do you think? 😊

Today I learned more about fonts and found one great one to replace my current setup and pair with my colour palette. Maple Mono is an excellent monospace font with a rounded design and smart ligatures. After testing it on terminal and my code editor (both using Catppuccin Mocha), it worked great together, the soft, rounded glyphs complement the pastel palette. I’m adding this short note to my TIL section mainly as a personal reference for future use, I’ll probably write a full blog post about…

I’ve noticed something lately, and maybe you’ve noticed it, too. There are some Fujifilm recipe creators using AI to create the sample “photos” that illustrate what their recipes will look like. Instead of using their cameras to create actual pictures with the recipes that they supposedly made, they have AI do it for them. Whether you love or hate AI, I think we can all agree that not using real photographs to illustrate what a recipe will produce is just wrong. It’s dishonest and deceptive at…

Moving to LineageOS was hopefully the last step before finally deleting my Google account. But the process involved much more than just installing an operating system. This article outlines these tasks, and tries to answer some questions you might have before attempting the installation. This is not intended as a replacement for the official documentation; refer to it to perform the installation on your device. Assumptions Your operating system shouldn’t really matter. Linux, Mac, or Windows,…

“RAG vs fine-tuning” pulls around 480 searches a month, and it’s the question I hear most often from business owners trying to figure out how to get an AI system to “know” their business. I’ve built a RAG-based SaaS pitch deck and worked through this decision for real projects, so here’s the honest, non-hedged answer. The One-Sentence Version What’s the difference between RAG and fine-tuning? RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) gives a model access to your specific information at the moment it…

Snapshots, time travel and writable branches for pipelines, experiments, reproducible reports and more. A data import needs validation. A report needs last month’s numbers. A migration needs realistic test data. An analyst wants to compare two transformations, and an agent needs somewhere to try its own. These workflows share a requirement: keep a known database state, then inspect it or work independently from it. I built duckdb-differential to make that available directly from SQL. It adds…

The proposal period for Interop 2027 closed in late September, which means the Interop team is now in the process of working through all the proposals and ultimately deciding which will be taken on next year. Part of that process is looking at “developer signals”, which is a loose amalgamation of “State of…” survey results, feedback gathered by developer relations teams, blog posts, YouTube videos, and so on. A relatively new tool is Jake Archibald’s ranking tool, where anyone with a Github…

When I wrote about the harmonic triangle yesterday, I displayed the triangle left-aligned using fixed-width text because that was easier than producing the format you usually see for Pascal’s triangle and related triangles. 1 1/2 1/2 1/3 1/6 1/3 1/4 1/12 1/12 1/4 1/5 1/20 1/30 1/20 1/5 … I asked Claude to write a LaTeX package to make it easier to create Pascal-like triangles and it did a great job, including handy features I didn’t think to ask for. You can download it here: numtriangle.sty. I…

Screenshot of the Scroll-Triggered Animations Debugger Extension fopen in DevTools. The extension shows a minimap, the ranges, and fields to edit the ranges. I’m extremely pleased to announce the release of Scroll-Triggered Animations Debugger, a DevTools extension to visualize and debug CSS Scroll-Triggered Animations. ~ Table of Contents Demo Get the extension Backstory Known Issues and Limitations Future Plans Spread the word ~ # Demo To jump right in, here’s a video of the extension in…

For years, I've been going back and forth on whether or not I should save up and get an e-reader. I've been able to happily give up on that dream with the help of a matte screen protector + greyscale mode + the Cantook app. Cantook's interface is simple and very customizable. I can change the text's size, colour and font (green and black, terminal style!). I can also use my volume buttons to flip from one page to the next! I love that! The matte screen protector significantly reduces glare.…

Meetable can now replace your Doodle polls! Meetable, my open source event listing website, now lets you propose an event with several possible dates/times. People vote on which one works for them, and the organizer can choose the best date from the votes later. Up until now, every event in Meetable needed a date before it could be created. That works fine when the date is already known, but a lot of events start out as "we should do this, when can everyone make it?" That part of the planning…

In this article I will describe a novel technique that allows an attacker to pass attacker-chosen string keys to a hash table implementation such that each lookup query takes $O(n)$ instead of the expected $O(1)$ work. The attack takes $O(n \log n)$ interactive steps with the hash table to prepare, and does not require knowledge of the hash function used by the hash table. Instead, the technique directly targets the underlying structure of the hash table. Luckily these attacks as described are…

If you like me enjoy nicely looking fonts and can actually distinguish them, you may have also noticed that many new sites have something in common: they are generated by LLMs and use combination of Inter and JetBrains Mono. These are great fonts, which I started using on this very site long time ago, well before ChatGPT. Let’s consider that their widespread usage as a confirmation of their excellence. I didn’t want to change them just because someone can think that my site is AI-generated.…

14 October 2026 Notes from a seminar on 14 October 2026 on Real-time carbon intelligence: turning digital impact into better decisions. Part of a series of events on responsible AI by ClimateAction.tech with ustwo (previously: AI sweat). Any errors are mine. (answering the question in my headline:) Maybe but there’s a long way to go “Every digital decision has a physical consequence. The AI model we choose, the cloud region we use and the way a product scales can all change the energy, carbon…

Created by ChatGPT May 2026 The issue is: if a website imposes a government-compelled age authentication wall, what percentage of users will stop at the authentication wall, either because the users turn around or fail to navigate the process? I call that percentage the “balk” rate. For background on prior studies and why balk rates can vary widely, read my prior coverage first. I’m now reporting on a study by All About Cookies entitled “72% of Americans Don’t Trust the Companies Verifying…

Apple finally announced a thing: HomeView. Immediately I was surprised at the pricing, given that Apple is now charging the same for a streaming box. I have an old iPad in the kitchen, as well as a HomePod, so slamming them into each other makes sense. More space-efficient and better looking. But then I thought about it. For us, the two primary uses for the old iPad in the kitchen are cooking and FaceTime. Cooking primarily means a third-party app (Paprika in our case). HomeView certainly will…

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-92392 for the project curl, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a use-after-free in HTTP/2 upload retries where cleanup turns leftover upload data into a new request and leaves a pointer to a freed Curl_easy handle (apparently freeing it was only a suggestion), allowing a malicious server to achieve remote code execution under specific conditions. This is due to the…

Many people have suggested that macOS 27 Golden Gate is a “Snow Leopard” release. I never believed that for a second. I’ve argued many times that the perception of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as a bug fix release is a myth. Every major OS update introduces more bugs than it fixes, and the software quality of Snow Leopard that people now remember fondly was achieved only after nearly two years of minor bug fix updates. Moreover, 10.6.0 itself arrived nearly two years after 10.5.0. Nowadays Apple…

The Mistake I Made in the Pursuit of KnowledgeI read a lot on the internet—3600 links and counting over six years. I’m around the 95th percentile of curiosity, so finding all these interesting, unique, fun, weird, awesome links is an easy, free, and fun way to satisfy that urge.Documenting them also feels great. Like I’m making progress on something. Like I’m building out and growing my second brain. Like I’m becoming smarter and more interesting and more well-read. And so I document everything…

C++20 shipped a powerful ranges library, but the set of view adaptors had some obvious gaps. Want to get the output as a container? No luck. At least C++23 helped with that. Want to iterate over two vectors as one sequence? Write your own. Want to avoid redundant evaluations in a transform | filter pipeline? Write a workaround. Want a quick index sequence matching a range’s size? Spell out iota...

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a black box for a reason.