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The Dell Optiplex 3040 and 3050 Micro are useful machines when you need a small form factor, versatility, and affordability. It’s not as hip and chic as a Raspberry Pi, but is potentially more affordable. If you’re not familiar with

The post Dell Optiplex 3040 and 3050 micro appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Explicitly denying that you implement the method.

The post On forcing all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Rehabilitating Richard

Z.AI ran a full model release on domestically manufactured Chinese chips. Impressive, but EUV lithography is a hard wall and the gap with Western inference hardware is more likely to widen than close.

Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days Anil Madhavapeddy is a professor of computer science at Cambridge and a core maintainer of the OCaml compiler. In this somewhat alarming post he reports that security issues in OCaml projects are seeing e...

Did OpenAI really do the best they could?

I'm traveling to Chicago for VCF Midwest next month. I'll be demoing NTP time history on vintage Macs, with my own GPS-derived NTP service hosted on an Xserve G5, synced via NTP or a strange AppleTalk timing extension from the 1990s.

So I built a little 'portable homelab' (pictured above) that supports 1-10 Gbps networking, can run off a small battery for at least an hour, switches between multiple WANs (so I can get my own 5G Internet connection, in case I need it), and gives me 12 wired Ethernet connections.

I watched a few videos this morning, looking for ideas of what I could use AI to do. In one video, someone had an agent monitor tech news sites every 30 minutes to notify him of a variety of developments. No doubt that’s less effort than visiting a bunch of sites every half hour. But […]

The post Making the unnecessary easier first appeared on John D. Cook.

The monkey-punchers at Google never quite seem to finish any of their apps. There's always some useful bit of work left undone, or showstopping bug which remains unfixed, a thousand jagged edges as yet unsolved by the greatest minds of their generation. I wanted to subscribe to an events calendar. I had a URl. I had my Google™ Pixel® phone running the latest Android© 17 with an updated calendar a…

At the end of August 2024, Anandtech shut down rather suddenly and unexpectedly, ending a run that dated back to April 3, 1997. I thought about writing something at the time, but really needed longer to collect my thoughts. I

The post Anandtech shut down abruptly, August 30, 2024 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A rare opportunity to make a real impact in a fast-paced, high-visibility role.

Don't implement a stub. Just don't implement it at all.

The post On forcing all derived classes to implement a specific non-virtual method, part 1 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The other day, I found myself wondering how big 52! (52 factorial) is, and that led me to ponder how these could be estimated without a calculator or a computer.

It turns out there’s some fairly interesting math behind being able to estimate the size (number of digits) of …

In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”. That may have been true in the seventies, but it’s not true today: selling out requires both technical skill and a careful sense of how large organizations work in practice. One of the goals of this blog is ...

Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default and have made bold claims about its effectiveness. Johan...

The smallest perturbation.

The post In the product end game, every change carries significant risk, episode 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

At the beginning of the month I wrote about how I've been using coding agents to write high quality code securely. In this post I'll show the details of setting up isolated sandboxes for agents, where they can only access a single isolated GitHub repo, and

According to strict SemVer, protobuf's latest Bazel release is from 2022.

807 blog posts across 14 years. That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing. And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way than a mere reverse-chronological list...

This post provides a couple examples to go along with two earlier posts. The pattern we’re illustrating is families of polynomials pn(x) that each satisfy a differential equation and a three-term recurrence. The differential equations have a second solution qn(x) that is the larger solution with respect to x but the smaller solution with respect to n. In both […]

The post Second solutions first appeared on John D. Cook.