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It can be daunting to determine who's responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who's harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.

Today's links Capital formation: Going legit means going mainstream. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: London Copyfighters x Speaker's Corner; TSA v lipstick; Long Beach v photographers; China x David Cameron's internet censorship; McMansion Hell; Co...

On August 14, 1984, Commodore International purchased Amiga Corporation for $27 million, with the expectation of bringing Amiga’s multitasking computer with high-color graphics and sound to market within a year. It took a little longer than that, and it created

The post Commodore’s purchase of Amiga, August 14, 1984 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A full walkthrough of the custom static site generator, content pipeline, and edge deployment behind nesbitt.io.

Another RAII-style wrapper.

The post A little helper class for managing <CODE>LPPROC_<WBR>THREAD_<WBR>ATTRIBUTE_<WBR>LIST</CODE>s appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Yesterday Levent Alpöge announced that he and his colleagues had discovered a new Hadamard matrix using Claude AI. That motivated a post I wrote this morning on how to construct Hadamard matrices. I mentioned in that post that these matrices arise in applications. This evening I gave an example, describing how NASA used a Hadamard […]

The post Hadamard Codes and Sphere Packing first appeared on John D. Cook.

Release: sqlite-utils 4.2.1 Fixes a crashing bug in sqlite-utils 4.2. I'd introduced code that looks like this: from typing_extensions import Self It turned out the typing-extensions package was not listed as a dependency for sqlite-utils - it was installed by one o...

Release: sqlite-utils 4.2

Lots of improvements in this one relating to the table.transform() feature, which adds support for complex alter table operations by creating a fresh table, copying across the data and then dropping and replacing the old one.

transform() now preserves a much larger array of edge-case schema definitions, including check constraints, unique constraints and even comments describing the columns.

There are also new introspection properties for check constraints, and a whole lot of other smaller changes.

Includes contributions from Bunlong Heng, ethanhawkes-gif, Rami Abdelrazzaq, nyxst4ck, and ikatyal2110.

(It later turned out 4.2 had a crashing bug, fixed in 4.2.1.)

Tags: releases, sqlite, sqlite-utils

NASA set Mariner 9 to photograph Mars in 1971. The images had to be encoded for transmission using an error-correcting code, otherwise they would be significantly corrupted when they were received on Earth. The images were encoded for transmission using a code based on Hadamard matrices, specifically a (32, 6, 16) Hadamard code. This means […]

The post How NASA’s Mariner 9 probe encoded images first appeared on John D. Cook.

Quite simply marvellous! Three Scottish divas giving us their interpretations of the greats while backed by an excellent pianist. So many shows at the Fringe skimp on sets and props - not this! A luscious array of costumes, hats, wigs, and ruby slippers bring the characters to life. The framing is thin but serviceable - the backstage helpers are reminiscing about their favourite stars and bring …

Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a1

Performance boost for DuckDB exports and CSV imports, see here.

Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a0 I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like. This morning (literally a shower project) I tasked Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with building a prototype: Do a researc...

Walking down the street, I noticed a ringing phone box so, naturally, I answered it. What happened next was a few minutes of pure fringe magic! I had a little chat with the caller, he welcomed me to the smallest venue in the fringe, and then he improvised a banger of a song based on my peculiar proclivities. What a treat to have a front row experience at a one man (and one audience member)…

After reading Chris Fallin’s aegraph post, new ZJIT contributor dak2 landed a block-local version of the canonicalize function in #16828. The pseudocode of the block-local canonicalize function looks like this: for block in function.reverse_post_order(): rewrite_map = ...

I'm not sure what they're teaching at LAMDA, but it certainly isn't vocal projection. We were forewarned about the technical difficulties - but if a trained stage singer can't reach the 6th row of a tiny theatre, that can't be blamed on the backstage team. The show advertises itself as: What happens when you take Sondheim’s most beloved music and turn it on its head? Ingénues become villains, vi…

Estimated time to complete: 20 minutes.

Are menopausal women hot? It is often said that pornographic actresses move straight from "barely legal" to "MILF" without so much as moment in between. Unlike the fringe's other burlesque shows - which seem to exclusively feature nymphettes and twinks with nary a grey hair between them - Hot Flush focuses on the over 40s. Look, you probably don't want to read a review of how tempting I found…

The undisputed queen of short-form viral video comedy snacks takes to the stage. Well, swims to the stage. The Mermaid is a delightful and gentle amble through the confusing world of a girl who just wants to become a mermaid. Less standup and more storytelling, nevertheless it packs in the laughs with some rather clever jokes, a bit of bawdy humour, and - a rarity on The Fringe - a decently…

A Hadamard matrix is an orthogonal matrix whose entires are all either 1 or − 1. For example \begin{bmatrix} 1 & 1\\ 1 & -1 \end{bmatrix} is a Hadamard matrix of order 2. True to Stigler’s law of eponymy, James Joseph Sylvester investigated Hadamard matrices before Jacques Hadamard. Sylvester saw how to bootstrap the example […]

The post Constructing Hadamard matrices first appeared on John D. Cook.

This is a disappointing and frustrating book - not least because it so nearly hits the mark. The subtitle is "How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing" - but it never gets close to discussing that topic, let alone deeply examining it. Instead, it is a book mostly focussed on the history of what we mean by "literacy" and, by contrast, what it meant to be "illiterate". As per the standard…