Sign up

Jeff Geerling
Text • Jeff Geerling

Getting the Steam Deck LCD working on a Raspberry Pi

The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It's a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi).

Steam Deck LCD working on a Raspberry Pi 5

The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display, which costs twice as much, with giant bezels and half the resolution!

Until today, the Steam Deck LCD didn't work with a Raspberry Pi. But the folks at Scandent were trying to standardize on a mass-market touchscreen for one of their own devices, and built a Linux kernel driver for it which they intend to upstream.

John D. Cook
Text • John

AI-generated ASCII diagrams

I like AI-generated ASCII diagrams. Because nobody would ask AI to generate ASCII diagrams, and so, it’s congruous. I like incongruity [1]. Aside from the incongruity of using a gazillion-parameter neural network to make 1970’s style ASCII art, ASCII diagrams have some uses. They’re absolutely tiny compared to image files. But more importantly they can […]

The post AI-generated ASCII diagrams first appeared on John D. Cook.

Andrew Nesbitt Valid
Text • Andrew Nesbitt

Issues in the Repo

refs/bugs, refs/notes, refs/heads/ticgit, or a directory full of YAML.

The Silicon Underground
Text • Dave Farquhar

Adobe Systems IPO August 20, 1986

Adobe Systems IPO August 20, 1986
Adobe Systems IPO August 20, 1986

On August 20, 1986, Adobe Systems held its initial public offering. Priced at around $11 per share, Adobe has split its stock six times since. Adobe: The sleeper tech stock of 1986 1986 was a good year for tech stocks.

The post Adobe Systems IPO August 20, 1986 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Fernando Borretti
Text

Our Servants Will Do That For Us

Why the post-scarcity utopia is unlikely.

Marcus on AI
Text • Gary Marcus

Breaking: The Republican party is panicking over its ties to Big Tech

Breaking: The Republican party is panicking over its ties to Big Tech

And panicking with good reason

The Old New Thing
Text • Raymond Chen

On wrapping a callable in a lambda that just calls it with the same parameters

Just use the callable directly.

The post On wrapping a callable in a lambda that just calls it with the same parameters appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript

Research: smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task: Put https://smolmachines.com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox. Explore what it would...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Quoting Jeremy Morrell

My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable core, and allow users to safely extend it in many directions by having LLMs fill in the missing pieces. We can give our users super powers.

Jeremy Morrell, Extensible Software in the age of LLMs

Tags: sandboxing, llms, ai, generative-ai

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code

Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very ...

Xe Iaso's blog Valid
Text

Anubis continues to expose new ways people configure webservers

TL;DR: if admins turn off browser features, those features won't work in confusing ways that are annoying to debug

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Text • Armin Ronacher

What Is Reasoning

A few weeks ago a paper was shared that showed how to extract reasoning traces from closed-weight models. Together with online discussions about tricking models into leaking them, it made me investigate it more out of curiosity. Twitter seems full of half-truths and confus...

The Old New Thing
Text • Raymond Chen

Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris?

A contingency plan.

The post Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Terence Eden’s Blog
Text • @edent

Asymmetric Agents

One of the promises of the AI-filled future is that we'll all have highly capable autonomous servants "agents" to work for us. Even back in the 1990s, it was a common trope in future-gazing to insist that a person's personal slave agent would negotiate on their behalf. Ask your meek digital pal agent to find you a restuarant in town, tonight, for a hot date, catering to your dietary preferences, …

The Silicon Underground
Text • Dave Farquhar

MOS Technology founded August 19, 1974

MOS Technology founded August 19, 1974
MOS Technology founded August 19, 1974

On August 19, 1974, Chuck Peddle, Bill Mensch, Rod Orgill, Harry Bawcom, Ray Hirt, Terry Holdt, Wil Mathys, and Mike Janes quit their jobs at Motorola to venture out on their own, founding MOS Technology. The eight had worked on

The post MOS Technology founded August 19, 1974 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Text • Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026)

Today's links The ordinariness of evil: Stop selling AI (bad). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Dot-crash bumwad; AP v fair use; Nym Wars; What's ctrl-F? Pentagon lost $6.5T in a year; Voter ID is voter suppression; Become unoptimizable. Upcoming ap...

Jeff Geerling
Text • Jeff Geerling

Hands-on with Raspberry Pi's CM5 Programming Jig

In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters (example), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis.

Raspberry Pi CM5 Programming Jig

One, two, or even three Pis isn't a big deal, but once you hit 4+, the process of plugging the Compute Module into a carrier board, plugging that into a computer, managing Raspberry Pi Imager, and trying to match up details like a hostname, MAC address, and the physical Pi itself, gets annoying.

Marcus on AI
Text • Gary Marcus

BREAKING: OpenAI’s unraveling has begun

BREAKING: OpenAI’s unraveling has begun

Their planned IPO is facing headwinds, trust has evaporated, and their burn rate is only getting worse

John D. Cook
Text • John

Big little hexagon

A new paper just came out, The Maximum-Area Small Polygon Problem. The paper solves the problem of finding, for each n, the n-gon with diameter 1 and maximum area. For odd n, the solution is what you might expect: a regular n-gon. I would expect this to be the solution for even n as well, […]

The post Big little hexagon first appeared on John D. Cook.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Mojo🔥 is now open source

Mojo🔥 is now open source Mojo🔥 is now open source The Mojo programming language has been promising an open source release since May 2023. Last week they shipped their 1.0 and today they have followed through on that original promise, releasing the compiler and toolchain unde...