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Chat UIs Are a Bad Fit for Real Development Tools

2025-02-04

This article argues that chat interfaces are fundamentally unsuitable for serious software development. While AI promises to make programming more intuitive with natural language, the author contends that building robust software requires precision and explicit documentation, not guesswork. Chat interfaces hinder the ability to track changes, manage complexity, and ultimately deliver production-ready software. The article posits that the future of AI development tools lies in document-centric interfaces, allowing for clear specifications and systematic development.

(danieldelaney.net)

Development

Massive Dark Web Takedown: Hundreds of Illegal Sites Seized

2025-03-07

A massive international law enforcement operation has resulted in the seizure of hundreds of dark web sites involved in various illegal activities, ranging from drug and arms trafficking to data theft and illegal streaming services. The global scope of the operation highlights the commitment to combating cybercrime through international cooperation and serves as a warning that the internet is not a lawless space.

(seized.fyi)

Tech dark web

The Non-Deterministic Nightmare of React UI Testing

2025-01-31

Testing React UIs presents a unique challenge due to its asynchronous update mechanism. Unlike direct DOM manipulation, React's renderer updates the UI asynchronously, making it difficult for tests to precisely capture the timing of UI state updates. Testing utilities like `act` and `waitFor` offer workarounds, but essentially boil down to 'eventually, something will happen'. Minor UI changes (like animation delays, state update order) can easily break tests, requiring extensive modifications to existing test suites. This results in high maintenance costs for React UI testing, a common pain point for many development teams.

(blog.bennett.ink)

Development UI testing asynchronous rendering

A Day in the Life of a Medieval King: Charles V of France

2025-07-21

A Day in the Life of a Medieval King: Charles V of France

Christine de Pizan's 'Livre des faits et bonnes mœurs du sage roy Charles V' offers a fascinating glimpse into the daily life of King Charles V of France (1364-1380). From morning prayers and hearing petitioners to council meetings, simple meals, and afternoon audiences, the book details a carefully structured day. Charles's routine reveals a balance between royal duties and refined leisure, strategically using public appearances to project an image of a just and accessible monarch.

(www.medievalists.net)

Misc Medieval History Charles V Monarchy

Is Your 3D Printing Filament Ruining Your Prints? The Ultimate Guide to Drying and Storage

2025-02-05

Is Your 3D Printing Filament Ruining Your Prints? The Ultimate Guide to Drying and Storage

This comprehensive guide tackles the often-overlooked issue of filament moisture in 3D printing. It details how hygroscopic filaments absorb moisture, leading to problems like stringing and poor adhesion. The guide covers different filament types and their hygroscopicity, symptoms of wet filament, and various drying methods, from dedicated dryers to oven drying (with strong cautions!). It also provides detailed storage solutions, emphasizing airtight containers with desiccants and vacuum-sealed bags. Proper desiccant care is also addressed, highlighting the need to periodically dry the desiccant itself.

(syntaxglow.com)

Hardware filament drying

Goodbye, Java's Hello World: A Programmer's Catharsis

2025-09-16

On September 16th, 2025, Ethan McCue penned a scathing critique of the classic Java "Hello World" program, highlighting its verbose and cumbersome nature. He juxtaposes the old, lengthy code with a streamlined modern equivalent, expressing his relief at its simplification. The article is filled with emotional outbursts, inviting fellow programmers to celebrate the demise of this outdated ritual and share their own memories of wrestling with the archaic code. A humorous anecdote about a former classmate adds a personal touch to the rant.

(mccue.dev)

Development

Website Showcases Early Christian Writings

2024-12-25

A new website, "Early Christian Writings," offers a comprehensive collection of Christian texts predating the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. It features the New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostic texts, writings of the Church Fathers, and related non-Christian sources, all with translations and commentary. This resource provides invaluable insight into the history and development of early Christianity.

(www.earlychristianwritings.com)

Misc Early Christianity Texts History

Mezzano OS: A Common Lisp marvel makes strides

2025-08-03

Mezzano OS: A Common Lisp marvel makes strides

Mezzano, an operating system written in Common Lisp, has released its latest demo, showcasing significant advancements. From its initial release, Mezzano has seen dramatic improvements in stability, performance, and features, including support for EXT2/3/4 filesystems, a USB stack, hardware-accelerated 3D via Virgl, and multicore support. While running on arbitrary hardware still requires user intervention, the project demonstrates impressive innovation within the Common Lisp community.

(github.com)

Development

Asahi Linux M3 Chipset Support Status

2025-01-26

Asahi Linux M3 Chipset Support Status

The Asahi Linux project's wiki page details its support for Apple's M3 series chips (M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max). The page presents a table outlining the status of various hardware features across different Asahi Linux releases (like linux-asahi, asahi-edge, etc.), including stable support, features under development, and unsupported features. Notably, since the M3 series chips haven't been officially released yet, much of the support status is predictive, based on Apple's past update patterns. The page also highlights implementation details and upstream merging difficulties for certain features (e.g., cpuidle).

(github.com)

Development Apple M3 chip

Zaha Hadid's Bergisel Ski Jump: From Paper Architect to Pritzker Laureate

2025-01-12

Zaha Hadid's Bergisel Ski Jump: From Paper Architect to Pritzker Laureate

This article details Zaha Hadid's Bergisel Ski Jump, completed in 2002, a pivotal project that marked a turning point in her career. Previously known as a 'paper architect' for her stunning but unrealized designs, the Bergisel jump proved her ambitious visions could be built. This landmark structure, combining a ski jump, cafe, and viewpoint, seamlessly integrates into Innsbruck's landscape, showcasing Hadid's unique design sensibility. Its completion launched Hadid into a period of prolific building, solidifying her reputation and paving the way for future iconic projects.

(www.dezeen.com)

Design Zaha Hadid Bergisel Ski Jump Architecture

Darklang: From Funding Drought to Open Source Rebirth

2025-06-16

Darklang: From Funding Drought to Open Source Rebirth

Dark Inc, the company behind the statically-typed functional programming language Darklang, has run out of money and officially shut down. However, Darklang lives on. Its assets – the language, blog, hosted service, etc. – have been acquired by Darklang Inc, a new company founded by former Dark Inc employees. The new company plans to open-source Darklang, enabling it to run anywhere. Dark Inc's failure stemmed from early aggressive growth, rapid cash burn, and a failure to adapt to the rise of code-generating tools in the age of ChatGPT. However, Darklang's core strength – immutability – has become even more crucial in the LLM era, making code easier to understand and safer to run. The founder is now focused on Tech for Palestine, an organization addressing issues related to Palestine.

(blog.darklang.com)

Development

Massive US Govt Layoffs: AI-Driven Restructuring at GSA

2025-02-13

Massive US Govt Layoffs: AI-Driven Restructuring at GSA

Dozens of employees at the US General Services Administration's (GSA) Technology Transformation Services (TTS) were abruptly fired Wednesday afternoon, primarily probationary and short-term staff, including those from the Presidential Innovation Fellowship program. The layoffs are linked to GSA's transformation into a 'startup software company,' focusing on AI, automation, and data centralization. New GSA leadership aims to launch 'GSAi,' a custom generative AI chatbot, in the coming weeks and plans to sell over 500 federal buildings to cut costs. The move sparks debate on AI in government, workforce downsizing, and shifting workplace culture.

(www.wired.com)

Tech Government Layoffs AI Implementation Organizational Restructuring

Hand-rolled JSON Parser in Rust: A 800-line Side Project

2025-02-19

Hand-rolled JSON Parser in Rust: A 800-line Side Project

Inspired by a university compilers course, the author built a JSON parser in Rust as a side project. The article details the design and implementation, covering handling various JSON data types (strings, numbers, arrays, objects), error handling, and performance testing. The final parser clocks in at around 800 lines, including improved error messages for easier debugging. Performance tests, though not optimized, showed decent parsing speeds.

(www.krish.gg)

Development JSON parser

Lessons Learned From Archiving 8,000 Family Slides

2025-01-27

Lessons Learned From Archiving 8,000 Family Slides

The author recounts the year-long project of digitizing and archiving over 8,000 family slides, inherited after her parents' passing. This unexpectedly emotional journey offered insights into her parents' lives and provided valuable lessons in family photography. Key takeaways include focusing on capturing interactions and daily life rather than just tourist snapshots, adding descriptive labels and location data, and improving photo quality through basic photography knowledge. The project highlights the importance of family photos not only as a legacy but also as a powerful tool for preserving cherished memories.

(estherschindler.medium.com)

Misc family photos photography tips memory preservation

Let's Encrypt to Offer 6-Day Certificates and IP Address Support in 2025

2025-01-16

Let's Encrypt to Offer 6-Day Certificates and IP Address Support in 2025

Let's Encrypt announced plans to introduce two new certificate options in 2025: short-lived certificates with a six-day lifetime and support for IP addresses. Six-day certificates significantly enhance security by minimizing the window of vulnerability. IP address support enables secure TLS connections for IP-accessible services using publicly trusted certificates, eliminating the need for domain names. The rollout will be phased, with general availability expected by the end of 2025. Users will need an ACME client supporting certificate profiles to obtain the short-lived certificates.

(letsencrypt.org)

Tech SSL Certificates

The Alchemy of Efficient LLM Training: Beyond Compute Limits

2025-02-04

This article delves into the efficient training of large language models (LLMs) at massive scale. The author argues that even with tens of thousands of accelerators, relatively simple principles can significantly improve model performance. Topics covered include model performance assessment, choosing parallelism schemes at different scales, estimating the cost and time of training large Transformer models, and designing algorithms that leverage specific hardware advantages. Through in-depth explanations of TPU and GPU architectures, and a detailed analysis of the Transformer architecture, readers will gain a better understanding of scaling bottlenecks and design more efficient models and algorithms.

(jax-ml.github.io)

AI Efficient Training

Two Bites of Data Science in K: Shorthand & Cricket Stats

2025-01-26

This post presents two data analysis examples using the K programming language. The first involves developing a shorthand writing system, analyzing the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary to determine the most common consonant clusters following 'r' and 'l' in English to optimize shorthand symbol design. The second analyzes cricket test match data to identify bowlers with the best bowling averages, and further, which bowlers possess the best average amongst those with equal or greater numbers of wickets taken. Both demonstrate K's power in data manipulation and analysis, showcasing its real-world applicability.

(blog.zdsmith.com)

Development K programming language cricket data

Design Space for Code Search Queries: ast-grep's Innovative Approach

2024-12-26

Design Space for Code Search Queries: ast-grep's Innovative Approach

ast-grep is an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)-based code search tool designed for ease of use, expressiveness, and precision. This blog post delves into the design space of code search queries, categorizing them into informal queries, formal queries based on existing programming languages, formal queries using custom languages, and hybrid queries. Each type's strengths and weaknesses are analyzed. ast-grep employs a hybrid approach, allowing users to write queries using familiar programming language syntax and offering more powerful expressiveness through YAML configuration files or a programmatic API for precise code search.

(ast-grep.github.io)

Development code search query design

Technologist Shares Practical Tips for Online Privacy

2025-02-17

Technologist Shares Practical Tips for Online Privacy

A technologist with over a decade of experience in the tech industry shares her insights and advice on protecting your online privacy. Initially sharing concise, actionable tips via Instagram, she's now moving to a newsletter format to provide more in-depth guidance. She emphasizes that privacy is a spectrum and offers practical advice on social media, car data, smart home devices, data breaches, and child privacy. Rather than delving into legal specifics, she focuses on the technical aspects and actionable advice, empowering readers to easily improve their privacy in everyday life.

(hannahonprivacy.substack.com)

Tech privacy tips

Ted Chiang: Beyond Hard Sci-Fi, a Philosophical Deep Dive

2025-08-19

Ted Chiang: Beyond Hard Sci-Fi, a Philosophical Deep Dive

This review delves into the unique writing style of acclaimed science fiction author Ted Chiang. He transcends the typical 'hard' vs. 'soft' sci-fi dichotomy, crafting universes with internally consistent scientific laws that serve as vehicles for exploring profound philosophical questions and human relationships. Chiang uses science not as mere backdrop, but as a central driver of the narrative. For instance, in 'Story of Your Life,' the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language shaping thought) becomes key to understanding alien intelligence. The review praises Chiang's masterful portrayal of compatibilism (reconciling free will and determinism) while pointing out his relative weakness in depicting society's interaction with technology and a lack of diversity in his philosophical explorations.

(linch.substack.com)

Tech Ted Chiang

What Ails America and How to Fix It

2024-12-30

What Ails America and How to Fix It

Jeffrey Sachs' article on Common Dreams dissects America's current political and economic woes. He argues that the political system is controlled by big money, with the super-rich and special interest groups dominating Congress and the White House, resulting in policies favoring vested interests over the common good. This manifests in continued tax cuts, appeasement of lobbyists, and excessive military spending and wars. Sachs proposes solutions: 1. Counter the military-industrial complex and the Israel lobby; 2. Address the budget deficit; 3. Implement innovation policies serving the common good. Only by addressing these issues can America truly solve its problems and improve the living standards of its citizens.

(www.jeffsachs.org)

Misc American politics economic crisis special interests

Dell Axes XPS Brand in Major PC Lineup Restructuring

2025-01-06

Dell is dropping the XPS, Latitude, Inspiron, and Precision brands, streamlining its PC lineup to Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max. This move aims to simplify product identification and better target the growing AI PC market. While nostalgic for long-time users, Dell claims the new branding will offer clearer product segmentation, improved durability, and enhanced performance. The change follows a controversial redesign of the XPS line and a shift toward emphasizing AI capabilities in its new offerings.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech Dell rebranding

Rethinking C's Time API: A Modern Approach

2025-02-16

C's time API is notorious for its legacy cruft and poor design choices. This article showcases the issues with a simple example of printing the current time, highlighting clunky functions and limitations. A proposed alternative utilizes cleaner data structures, nanosecond precision with floating-point representation, and streamlined timezone handling and formatting. While not intended for widespread immediate adoption, this proof-of-concept demonstrates a path toward a more modern and efficient C time library, offering valuable insights for other language's time API design.

(oliverkwebb.github.io)

Development Time API

AI Coding: A Double-Edged Sword?

2025-05-16

The author attempted to rebuild their SaaS backend using AI (Claude, Cursor), initially progressing smoothly. However, they soon encountered problems. The AI-generated code lacked consistency and maintainability, forcing a manual rewrite. The author reflects on the pitfalls of over-reliance on AI, including diminished coding and problem-solving skills. They advocate caution, suggesting AI should be a supplementary tool, not a complete replacement.

(albertofortin.com)

Development

Resist Real ID: A Fight for Freedom

2025-04-02

Resist Real ID: A Fight for Freedom

Real ID, a federally mandated driver's license, is set to become mandatory. The author argues that Real ID demands excessive personal information, increasing the risk of identity theft and government surveillance. It essentially creates an internal passport, restricting citizen freedom. The author calls for a boycott of Real ID, deeming it a necessary act of defending liberty. The author suggests legislative action to halt its implementation, even advocating for a government shutdown if necessary.

(www.zocalopublicsquare.org)

Misc civil liberties

Go Multi-Key Map Library: go-multikeymap

2025-02-06

Go Multi-Key Map Library: go-multikeymap

go-multikeymap is a performant Go library implementing map data structures with multiple keys. It offers two types: MultiKeyMap and BiKeyMap. MultiKeyMap allows one primary key and multiple string secondary keys, while BiKeyMap requires both keys to be unique. Both are available in concurrent and non-concurrent versions, with benchmarks showing near O(1) access times. The library is easy to use, well-documented, and includes benchmark results for performance evaluation.

(github.com)

Development Multi-Key Map Data Structure

Revisiting Barricelli's Cellular Automata: Spontaneous Generation of Life

2025-01-07

This article explores the work of Nils Aall Barricelli, who pioneered cellular automata 15 years before John Conway. Barricelli's 'symbioorganisms' model, in a finite, circular 1D space, simulates the movement and interaction of different elements through simple rules of collision elimination, positional replication, and mutation. The simulations reveal that even with simple rules, stable periodic patterns spontaneously emerge, resembling the spontaneous generation of life. The author delves into the stability of these patterns and proposes combining early universe simulations with simulations of abiogenesis to find more efficient ways to explore life's origins.

(akkartik.name)

AI abiogenesis complex systems

Emacs Tree-sitter Syntax Highlighting: Semantic Code Coloring

2025-03-01

Emacs Tree-sitter Syntax Highlighting: Semantic Code Coloring

This blog post details an enhancement to Emacs's Tree-sitter syntax highlighting, moving beyond basic keyword coloring. The author demonstrates how to leverage Tree-sitter mode to achieve semantic-based highlighting of variable names, differentiating control flow keywords, type aliases, and import statements. By customizing the `treesit-font-lock-rules` function and utilizing the `treesit-inspect-mode` tool, precise control over highlighting rules is achieved, resulting in more intelligent and expressive code coloration. A follow-up post will explore heuristic highlighting based on commonly used variable names.

(amitp.blogspot.com)

Development Syntax Highlighting

Firefox and the Silent Audio Killer: How Websites Waste Your CPU and Battery

2025-02-15

The author discovered annoying white noise in Firefox, stemming from websites inefficiently using the WebAudio API's AudioContext. Many sites create and leave AudioContexts active even without playing audio, leading to excessive CPU and battery drain. While Chrome automatically suspends unused AudioContexts, Firefox doesn't, prompting the author to create a browser extension to mitigate the issue. This extension automatically suspends AudioContexts and attempts to resume them when sound is needed, saving resources.

(h.43z.one)

Development browser performance

Tech Terms You've Probably Been Pronouncing Wrong

2025-03-21

This article highlights common mispronunciations of tech terms encountered by a self-taught solo developer. It lists examples like Asus (AY-soos, not AY-sis), Debian (DEHB-eee-in, not DEE-bee-inn), and many more, emphasizing the lack of inherent logic in these pronunciations. The author suggests using Google's pronunciation widget as a helpful resource and provides a comprehensive list of correctly pronounced terms, including Atlassian, daemon, Gaussian, GIF, Gnome, GNU, JSON, Kernighan, LaTeX, Linus, Poisson, pypi, Qt, Redis, regex, repo, sudo, SUSE, SQL, SQLite, Ubuntu, and Vite. This is a valuable resource for developers and tech enthusiasts alike.

(wonger.dev)

Development tech terms pronunciation

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