FeedCity

Taking a look at the various ways the compiler can optimise switch statements

As the year draws to an end now is a good time to review where we are with Europe’s cloud situation, and what has been achieved. One thing is certain, a lot has happened, and also quite a lot has become clearer. tl;dr: Great strides have been made in 2025, especially in convincing people that something must be done, and outlining what that might be. Industry buyers are not going to lead us since all they care about is next quarter’s results.

I've been having an absurd amount of fun recently using LLMs for cooking. I started out using them for basic recipes, but as I've grown more confident in their culinary abilities I've leaned into them for more advanced tasks. Today I tried something new: having Claude vibe-c...

The problem with Nano Banana Pro is that it’s too good.

I just had my first success using a browser agent - in this case the Claude in Chrome extension - to solve an actual problem. A while ago I set things up so anything served from the https://static.simonwillison.net/static/cors/ directory of my S3 bucket would have open Acces...

NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut Jeff Geerling December 22, 2025

If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST.

Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated.

But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by more than 5 microseconds.

5 μs might seem insignificant. But it is significant for scientists and universities who rely on NIST's more specialized timing signals.

We learn that compilers have tricks to access memory efficiently

Introduction FreeBSD continues to make strides in desktop support, but Linux still holds an advantage in hardware compatibility. After running openSUSE Tumbleweed on my mini PC for several months, I decided it was time to switch to a solution I could control more closely. N...

I recommended against using an AI browser unless you wanted to participate in a global experiment in security. My recommendation did come with a caveat: But probably don’t listen to me. I’m not a security expert Well, now the experts (that you pay for) have weighed in. Ga...

Op-amp arithmetics, explained in a more accessible way

A short list.

Critics are judging models trained on last-gen hardware. There's a 6x wave of compute already allocated - and it's just starting to produce results.

Why floating point maths doesn't vectorise like integers, and what to do about it

Every time you are inclined to use the word “teach”, replace it with “learn”. That is, instead of saying, “I teach”, say “They learn”. It’s very easy to determine what you teach; you can just fill slides with text and claim to have taught. Shift your focus to determining how you know whether they learned what you claim to have taught (or indeed anything at all!). That is much harder, but that is also the real objective of any educator.

— Shriram Krishnamurthi, Pedagogy Recommendations

Tags: teaching

I've mentioned on the blog several times the continuum that exists between handheld computers and pocket computers, battery powered devices in rather small form factors that are nevertheless fully-fledged general purpose computers — arguably more so than the modern locked-do...

Make AI weird again.

Big GPUs don't need big PCs Jeff Geerling December 20, 2025

Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question:

What's the point?

The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 bandwidth. That's 8 GT/s versus 512 GT/s. Not a fair fight.

Doing more with less: vectorising can speed your code up 8x or more!