FeedCity

Finding an illicit place to hide data.

The post A compatibility note on the abuse of Windows window class extra bytes appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Reflections on UN Open Source Week 2026

Today's links Jo Walton's "Everybody's Perfect": A mystical tour-de-force that makes you feel like your mundane life until this point has all been a boring dream. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Corruption; How much (little) are the AI companies ma...

Thanks to BookSirens for providing me with a review copy. This is an intriguing self-published novel with a backstory almost as interesting as the plot. The story is a descent into paranoia as an author is convinced that an AI is plagiarising his work. As the madness takes over, he's forced to confront whether his creative processes are genuine or not. It raises some excellent questions about …

You hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we

The post Apricot Computers: An underrated British brand appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I've always been interested in how dating apps work. You really only have two choices if you want to get in the business. Help people find a match, and they will never come back Make people pay and keep them on the platform as long as possible. Let's pretend for a secon...

Here’s kind of a strange problem with an interesting solution: find a function f such that the derivative of f equals the inverse of f for all positive x. f ′(x) = f−1(x) This is a differential equation, but a very unusual one, one that cannot be solved using any of the techniques taught in a class on differential equations. […]

The post Derivative equals inverse first appeared on John D. Cook.

Tool: HTML table extractor

Yet another in my growing collection of paste-conversion tools. This one accepts pasted rich text from browsers (with embedded HTML tables) and converts them to HTML, Markdown, CSV, TSV or JSON.

Try it out by selecting everything on the Wikipedia List of cities and towns in the San Francisco Bay Area page and pasting it directly into the tool:

On a similar note, I recently rebuilt my Rich text to markdown tool to add support for tables and generally improve the UI.

Tags: html, tools

Chicago’s weather is pretty lousy most of the year, but when it’s nice, it’s very nice. June blessed the city with dozens of idyllic days. But don’t worry—I still spent most of the time inside on the computer. Things I did I launched my first big project at Ghost: automation...

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. Instead, I’m going to occasionally jump into the parts of it that look interesting. Last week, we looked at tagged ...

Tiniest TIL, using AppleScript to count the number of open browser tabs in Safari:

osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to count tabs of every window'

Tags: safari, til, applescript

Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding This is an interesting new open weights (MIT licensed) model, the first model release from DeepReinforce. [...] with variants including 9B Dense, 31B Dense, 35B MoE, and 397B MoE. Built on top of pretrained Gemma 4 and Qw...

Today's links Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search: We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Microsoft antitrust overturned; Scammer carves C64; RIP Jim Baen; GOP rep to constituent's...

The intended usage is encoded in the prefix.

The post The evolution of window and class extra bytes in Windows appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Leaving you with a couple laughs

The calculator utility bc has a minimal math library. For example, there’s no tangent function because you’re expected take the ratio of sine and cosine. (The Gnu version of bc does have a function for tangent, but the POSIX version does not.) And yet bc includes support for Bessel functions J(x). The bc function j […]

The post Who you gonna believe: Grok or the docs? first appeared on John D. Cook.

Batteries no longer included, available separately on aisle four

For as long as I can remember, my home page has been about:blank. But for a good chunk of the 1990s, I would have done well to set it to altavista.digital.com. Here’s what happened to Altavista, the search engine that

The post What happened to Altavista appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I quite enjoyed this talk from Bryan Cantrill where he discusses the difficult engineering problems they overcame while working on their company Oxide. Some of the problems they ran into were bugs. But these weren’t any ordinary bugs, they were company-destroying bugs: bugs ...

It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.