LLM Agents: Surprisingly Simple!

2025-03-19
LLM Agents: Surprisingly Simple!

This guide demystifies the inner workings of LLM agents. Using a simple kitchen analogy, it explains how agent systems are built as graphs: nodes representing cooking stations, flow as the recipe, and shared storage as the countertop. Each node prepares, executes, and posts results; the flow determines the next node based on decisions. The author uses the PocketFlow framework (a mere 100 lines of code) to illustrate how agents function through decision nodes, action nodes, and end nodes, emphasizing their fundamental graph structure rather than complex algorithms. It's all about loops and branches!

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Beyond the Skies: The Unexpected Lives of the Rolls-Royce Merlin Engine

2025-01-21

The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, famed for powering Allied aircraft during WWII, found a surprising second life beyond the skies. This article details its unexpected applications in cars, boat racing, and even tanks. From 'The Beast,' a monstrous car built around a Merlin, to its use in record-breaking hydroplanes, the Merlin's power and adaptability are showcased. The story highlights the ingenuity of those who repurposed this iconic engine, creating unique and powerful machines.

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Ransomware Decryption Without Paying: A Race Against Time

2025-03-14
Ransomware Decryption Without Paying: A Race Against Time

The author successfully helped a company recover its data from Akira ransomware without paying the ransom, and has open-sourced the full source code. The ransomware uses four nanosecond timestamps as seeds to generate encryption keys. By analyzing the ransomware's encryption algorithm and filesystem timestamps, the author devised a GPU-accelerated brute-force solution. This involved enumerating timestamp combinations, generating keys, and attempting to decrypt known plaintext. The process was challenging, requiring reverse engineering, CUDA programming optimization, and cloud computing resources. The author shares technical details and code, providing a valuable resource for data recovery in similar situations.

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Development

A Night at a Secret North Korean Restaurant in Shanghai

2025-02-16
A Night at a Secret North Korean Restaurant in Shanghai

A visit to a clandestine North Korean state-owned restaurant in Shanghai offers a unique time warp experience. The restaurant's retro decor and waitresses' 70s and 80s attire create a nostalgic ambiance. These highly educated young women from elite North Korean families speak fluent Mandarin, providing impeccable service. The dinner includes a captivating show blending traditional Korean folk songs with classic Chinese tunes. While the food is traditionally prepared, the service is exceptional. This immersive experience provides a rare glimpse into the secretive world of North Korea.

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Rediscovering Telnet: A Blast from the Past

2025-06-17

The author recounts a memorable Telnet experience: a Star Wars-inspired ASCII animation found at towel.blinkenlights.nl 23. This sparked a rediscovery of other Telnet resources, leading to a list of interesting Telnet games and applications, including online chess, a Star Trek-inspired space combat game, and an Arpanet/Usenet simulator with over 60 text-based games. A cautionary note is added about Telnet's plaintext communication and the risk of exposing sensitive information.

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Japan's $33 Billion Gamble on Chip Manufacturing

2024-12-18
Japan's $33 Billion Gamble on Chip Manufacturing

Japan is investing $33 billion in building semiconductor factories in remote areas like Hokkaido, aiming to reclaim its dominance in the chip industry. This has created a construction boom and attracted a large workforce, a stark contrast to the region's relatively sluggish job market. The ambitious project is a high-stakes gamble, but reflects Japan's determination to return to the forefront of technological innovation.

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Stop Teaching Kids Finance with PowerPoint!

2025-02-22
Stop Teaching Kids Finance with PowerPoint!

This essay critiques the US education system's approach to financial literacy, arguing that simply lecturing students on financial concepts is ineffective. The author contends that real-world challenges like impulse control and peer pressure are ignored. Instead of complex formulas, the essay advocates for practical experience, such as starting small businesses, to teach valuable financial lessons. Only by combining theory with hands-on experience can true financial literacy be achieved.

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Hoarder: A Self-Hostable Bookmark Manager Powered by AI

2024-12-24
Hoarder: A Self-Hostable Bookmark Manager Powered by AI

Hoarder is a self-hostable bookmarking app that goes beyond simple link saving. It allows you to store links, notes, and images, and uses AI for automatic tagging and full-text search, supporting local models like ollama. Features include OCR, Chrome/Firefox extensions, iOS/Android apps, RSS feed support, a REST API, and full-page archiving to combat link rot. Designed for users who need a better way to manage and retrieve information across multiple platforms, Hoarder is under active development but a demo is available.

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Development Bookmark Manager

Surrealist Supermarket Stroll: Ginsberg's 'A Supermarket in California'

2025-01-09
Surrealist Supermarket Stroll: Ginsberg's 'A Supermarket in California'

Allen Ginsberg's 'A Supermarket in California' is a surrealist poem depicting a shopping trip as a journey of the soul. The poem intertwines reality and fantasy, placing the speaker in a supermarket encounter with the ghost of Walt Whitman, embarking on a fantastical exploration of America, loneliness, and love. Rich imagery and profound symbolism prompt reflection on society, life, and the American Dream.

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Chinese Automakers Surge: Geely Joins Top 10 Global Ranking

2025-03-06
Chinese Automakers Surge: Geely Joins Top 10 Global Ranking

The 2024 global automotive sales ranking is out, and Geely has joined the top 10, following BYD's entry last year. This makes two Chinese automakers among the top ten. Toyota Group remains at the top for the fifth consecutive year, despite a slight sales dip. Volkswagen is second, followed by Hyundai Motor Group and Stellantis. BYD saw strong sales growth, securing fifth place, and its stock price soared after announcing AI smart driving as a standard feature. Geely sold 3.34 million vehicles, ranking tenth. Both BYD and Geely are actively expanding overseas and jointly filed a lawsuit against EU tariffs on Chinese vehicles, potentially boosting their European market entry.

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A 163-LOC Memory Allocator Implementation

2025-06-22

While exploring the mimalloc memory allocator, the author discovered a lack of pre-allocation support. This prompted the creation of a simple, 163-line-of-code allocator based on the Buddy system. The article details the allocation and deallocation processes within the Buddy system and touches upon memory fragmentation. The author highlights the surprising simplicity of the implementation, emphasizing the importance of understanding memory allocation principles for programmers.

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Development Buddy system

The Demise of OCSP: Let's Encrypt Pulls the Plug

2025-01-30

Let's Encrypt's decision to discontinue OCSP support signals the end of an era for this 25-year-old certificate revocation checking technology. Plagued by poor browser implementation and high costs, OCSP failed to deliver significant security improvements. The future involves shorter-lived certificates (e.g., 6-day validity) and a revised CRL approach handled by browser vendors. While niche uses of OCSP might persist, its widespread adoption is over.

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Groundhog Day API: Predicting the Weather, One Groundhog at a Time

2025-02-02
Groundhog Day API: Predicting the Weather, One Groundhog at a Time

The GROUNDHOG-DAY.com API serves up all of North America's weather-predicting animals and their yearly forecasts. It boasts three simple GET endpoints: retrieve all groundhogs and predictions, fetch a single groundhog's data, and get predictions for a specific year. While data updates aren't handled through the API itself (you'll need to use the website for that), it's a quirky and surprisingly useful dataset for your next big idea. Ready to build your Groundhogs as a Platform (GaaP) strategy?

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600 Million Years of Shared Stress Response in Algae and Plants

2025-03-24
600 Million Years of Shared Stress Response in Algae and Plants

A University of Göttingen-led study reveals a surprising shared stress response network between algae and plants dating back 600 million years. Researchers compared gene expression and compound production in moss and two types of algae under environmental stress, identifying a common gene regulatory network. This discovery sheds light on key mechanisms of plant adaptation to land and offers new insights into plant evolution.

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The Lost Art of the Commit Message: A Guide to Writing Effective Git Commits

2025-03-25

This article criticizes the common practice of writing vague Git commit messages, such as "fix bug" or "update code." It emphasizes the importance of clear commit messages for team collaboration and future debugging. The article details a standardized format for commit messages, including type (feat, fix, chore, etc.), scope, short description, detailed points, and footer, with multiple examples. The author encourages developers to cultivate the habit of writing high-quality commit messages to create a clear and understandable project history.

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Development Commit Messages

Enum of Arrays: A Novel Data Structure for Efficient Data Processing

2024-12-21
Enum of Arrays: A Novel Data Structure for Efficient Data Processing

This article introduces a data structure called "Enum of Arrays" (EoA), similar to the popular "Struct of Arrays" (SoA), but with enums at its core. EoA packs multiple enum values into an array, using a single tag to identify the array's type. This reduces memory usage and branch prediction overhead, leading to more efficient data processing, particularly beneficial for SIMD optimization. The article uses the database system TigerBeetle as an example, illustrating how EoA enables efficient batch processing by effectively separating the control plane and data plane, resulting in significantly improved performance.

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How Browsers Interpret 'chucknorris' as a Color

2024-12-20
How Browsers Interpret 'chucknorris' as a Color

This article explores how browsers handle invalid color values in HTML, such as interpreting 'chucknorris' as red. The author explains the browser's tolerance in parsing HTML, attempting to convert invalid values into valid ones. The process of how browsers parse invalid color values is described, with a CodePen link provided demonstrating the process. The author argues that this browser tolerance is a charm of the web, allowing even invalid code to run, showcasing the web's resilience.

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Fast Food vs. Home-Cooked Software: A Developer's Dilemma

2025-01-17

This article explores two contrasting approaches to software development: fast food and home-cooked. Fast food software uses agile sprints, prioritizing rapid iteration over long-term maintainability. Home-cooked software emphasizes upfront design, resulting in lean, stable code, but with longer development cycles. The author criticizes the prevalent fast food approach, highlighting its creation of massive technical debt and poor user experiences. A call for a return to a more quality-focused, maintainable approach is made.

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Development

AI Models Are Now Surprisingly Good Historians

2025-01-26
AI Models Are Now Surprisingly Good Historians

Leading AI models are demonstrating remarkable capabilities in historical research. Three case studies showcase GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5's prowess in transcribing and translating early modern Italian texts, analyzing an 18th-century Mexican medical manuscript, and generating novel historical interpretations. While limitations remain, such as occasional factual inaccuracies, their potential in streamlining research, synthesizing information, and suggesting new research avenues is undeniable. This heralds a transformative shift in how historical research is conducted.

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AI's $200 Task Conquest: A Progress Report

2025-02-01
AI's $200 Task Conquest: A Progress Report

The author recounts commissioning a $200 mascot design in 2013, illustrating the type of tasks now achievable by AI. AI excels at transactional tasks with well-defined outputs, like logo design, transcription, and translation, previously requiring specialized skills. However, more complex tasks demanding nuanced expertise and judgment, such as landscape design, remain beyond AI's current capabilities. While AI's progress is impressive, its economic impact in solving paid tasks is still in its early stages.

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Spline Distance Fields: A Novel Terrain Generation Technique

2025-01-06

To overcome limitations in the Tangerine game engine, the author developed a CPU ray tracer called Star Machine and a racing game prototype, Rainy Road. Rainy Road requires an efficient and compact terrain rendering system capable of handling roads and other terrain features defined by splines. The author introduces a novel terrain generation technique using spline distance fields. This technique utilizes splines to generate terrain surfaces by calculating the distance of a point to the nearest spline and its normal vector to determine elevation. This avoids the limitations of traditional heightmaps and supports procedural object placement. The technique is under active experimentation and research, with exploration of improved interpolation strategies and the use of sparse point clouds.

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Safe Division in C with Maybe Monad

2025-08-11

This article details the implementation of type and bounds-safe generic containers in C. The author introduces a `Maybe` type, inspired by Haskell, to handle functions that might return no value (e.g., division by zero). A safe division function is created using macros to define `Maybe`, handling zero division and the edge case of dividing the minimum representable integer by -1. GCC assembly code is analyzed to verify the function's safety. The author concludes by noting the limitations of this approach for proving the complete safety of C programs.

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Development

Cognitive Load: The Silent Killer in Software Development

2024-12-25

This article explores the importance of cognitive load in software development. Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort a developer needs to complete a task; high cognitive load leads to confusion, wasted time, and money. The article analyzes intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load, illustrating how to reduce extraneous load through code examples, such as using meaningful intermediate variables, avoiding nested if statements, and prioritizing composition over inheritance. It also stresses avoiding excessive microservices, choosing appropriate language features, and adhering to the Single Responsibility Principle, noting that excessive abstraction and layered architectures can increase cognitive load. Finally, the article advises developers to focus on code readability and collaborate with junior developers to identify and improve cognitive load issues.

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The Art of Suffering: Embracing Life's Extreme Tension

2025-02-07
The Art of Suffering: Embracing Life's Extreme Tension

The author contrasts the luxurious setting of a New Year's Eve party with his unique attitude towards suffering. Instead of avoiding pain, he views it as a medium for artistic creation, examining and experiencing it with heightened sensitivity and poetic perspective, transforming it into a richer, more authentic life experience. This is a philosophy of 'love of fate' (Amor fati), rejecting mediocrity and embracing the extreme tension of life, a stark contrast to the prevalent ideas of 'self-management' and 'seeking tranquility'.

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Misc suffering

Attention as Electromagnetic Field Line Management: A New Model of Consciousness

2024-12-17
Attention as Electromagnetic Field Line Management: A New Model of Consciousness

Qualia Research Institute proposes a novel model of attention, conceptualizing it as the management of dynamic patterns in the brain's electromagnetic field. By simulating electric field lines arising from weighted sums of harmonic oscillations, researchers demonstrate how attention controls charge density by modulating underlying resonant modes, explaining seemingly random fluctuations and drifts in attentional behavior. This model also offers a potential explanation for psychedelic experiences, suggesting that psychedelics disrupt the normal flow of attention by altering the configuration of harmonic modes. The research provides a new lens for understanding consciousness and developing novel neuro-interventions, such as inducing exotic states of consciousness by non-invasively perturbing the phase locking of attention.

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Vidformer: Revolutionizing Video Processing for Computer Vision

2025-03-04
Vidformer: Revolutionizing Video Processing for Computer Vision

Developed by the OSU Interactive Data Systems Lab, Vidformer provides infrastructure for video-native interfaces and accelerates computer vision visualization. It efficiently transforms videos, enabling faster annotation, editing, and processing without performance compromises. Leveraging a declarative specification format, Vidformer offers transparent optimization and lazy execution, providing near-instantaneous playback. Built on open technologies like OpenCV, Supervision, FFmpeg, Jupyter, and Apache OpenDAL, Vidformer offers a cv2 frontend for easy integration with existing Python workflows. While not a video editor or database, Vidformer complements computer vision libraries and AI models, making it ideal for various video-related tasks.

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Development

Notion: Your All-in-One Workspace

2025-01-01
Notion: Your All-in-One Workspace

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that combines notes, task management, wikis, and databases into a single platform. It offers flexible and powerful tools to help you organize information, manage projects, collaborate with teams, and build custom workflows. Whether for personal use or team collaboration, Notion adapts to your needs, boosting your productivity.

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Typst 0.13 Released: Improved Daily UX and Experimental HTML Export

2025-02-19
Typst 0.13 Released: Improved Daily UX and Experimental HTML Export

Typst 0.13 focuses on improving the day-to-day user experience, fixing numerous long-standing bugs, and increasing flexibility. Most excitingly, it introduces an experimental HTML export feature. Updates include: semantic paragraph improvements for more flexible paragraph indentation; improved outline styling for better aesthetics and customization; a new `curve` function simplifying Bézier curve drawing; improved file and byte handling with direct raw byte data support; streamlined image generation workflow with uncompressed raw pixel data support; boosted plugin performance with multi-threaded execution; a fix for single-letter string styling in math formulas; added font coverage control for better mixed script typesetting; a new `pdf.embed` function for embedding files into PDFs; and experimental HTML export for semantically rich HTML output from Typst documents.

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Development HTML export typesetting

Columbia Student Suspended for Leaking Disciplinary Hearing, Not AI Cheating Tool

2025-03-27
Columbia Student Suspended for Leaking Disciplinary Hearing, Not AI Cheating Tool

Columbia University suspended a student for leaking a disciplinary hearing recording and photos of Columbia staff to social media, not for creating an AI tool that helps job candidates cheat on technical interviews. The student, Chungin "Roy" Lee, created Interview Coder, an AI tool that sells for $60 a month and projects $2 million in annual revenue. While Lee argued that technical interviews are outside the university's purview, Columbia deemed his actions academic dishonesty, resulting in a one-year suspension. Lee plans to move to San Francisco.

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Migrating a Large-Scale Game Server from Scala 2.13 to Scala 3: A Year-Long Odyssey

2025-02-06
Migrating a Large-Scale Game Server from Scala 2.13 to Scala 3: A Year-Long Odyssey

This post details the author's journey migrating a four-year-old, production-ready multiplayer mobile game server from Scala 2.13 to Scala 3. An initial attempt failed due to the removal of key features in Scala 3 (macro annotations, type projections) and the massive code changes required. A year later, a successful migration was achieved through a multi-pronged approach: preemptively applying Scala 3 syntax in the Scala 2 codebase, leveraging IntelliJ's code inspection tools, custom sbt source generators to produce Monocle lenses, and creative workarounds for type projections. Challenges encountered included dependency conflicts and slow compile times, resolved by forking a library, optimizing code using Scala 3's Tuple.Map, and other techniques. Despite the hurdles, the migration highlights the power and value of Scala 3's metaprogramming capabilities.

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Development
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