FeedCity

One of the hardest problems in distributed systems is conflict resolution, or the same basic problem as merge conflicts in Git. Git merge conflicts happen when your branch differs from upstream in a way that Git can’t easily work its way around so it ...

I just found out Brian Beckman and I got a patent on work we did for GSI Technology [1]. Nearly all the work I do is under an NDA, so I don’t often get a chance to talk about my projects. This work is public now that it’s in a patent; I suppose it has […]

The post Patented application of linear algebra first appeared on John D. Cook.

The OpenAI/Hugging Face attack, clearly explained

When “plain English” isn’t a good thing.

A simple technique for keeping up with a codebase that coding agents are changing faster than you can read: ask the agent to quiz you on it.

A short note explaining the difference between synchronous cancelation, asynchronous cancelation, and graceful shutdown. I am not too attached to these specific three terms, but I want to call your attention to the three things behind them, which are important not to confuse with each other.

The whole point about Shakespeare is that you can set the play on an intergalactic space station or an American high school and keep virtually the rest unchanged. What happens when you transpose Dream from a proscenium arch to a living wood? As the sun sets over the trees, what sprites will come out to entertain us? Ruined Theatre brings a brilliant cast of seasoned West End performers to strut…

On August 31, 1994, software publisher Adobe bought Aldus for $446 million. Both companies were known for graphics products. Aldus’ most popular product was Pagemaker, a page layout program. Adobe’s most popular products were illustrator and Photoshop. The three products

The post Adobe’s August 1994 acquisition of Aldus appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The YouTube tag marking a video as AI-generated is as insignificant as the little "Sponsored" text in search ads. I've taught my mother and her friends to check for that tag, but most, if not all, of the videos they share with me don't even have it. Even though they're cle...

Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media: “Just...

Why superintelligent AI is not inevitable.

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of Ch...

In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest, I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868, for the 'Daytime' and 'Time' Protocols, respectively.

My first exposure to any form of network time was when I upgraded from a used PowerBook 180c to my first 'new' computer, a Power Mac G3, in 2000. With the introduction of Mac OS 8.5, Apple added a 'Network Time Server' option in the Date & Time Control Panel.

Hooking a BBC Master up as a serial terminal to browse the web again

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments.1 Because Spacelab was a European project, it used a French-built minicomputer, the Mitra 125 MS,2 rather than the Shuttle's main com...

In this second Forgejo Hack installment I'll tell you how to connect a git repository that lives in your self-hosted Forgejo instance to Read the Docs, so that commits to the repository automatically trigger documentation builds, exactly like it works with GitHub.

All Pebble Time 2 invites have been sent and we're now in-stock! It’s been a long Time coming, but if you have been waiting, now is your…

Back in February, I applied for NLnet's Next Generation Zero grant. They were looking for Fediverse projects to help rewild the social media landscape. Or, as they describe it: Reclaim the public nature of the internet Small and medium-sized R&D grants between 5.000 and 50.000 euro, with the possibility to scale up. I run ActivityBot - it is a single-file ActivityPub server suitable for…

Prior to August 1983, the concept of copyright applying to computer software wasn’t settled law. Companies had sued one another for copyright violation, but prior to Apple taking Franklin Computer to court for copying the ROMs and the operating system

The post Apple prevails over Franklin, August 30, 1983 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they would have made compared to the average engineer in their position. I’ve always found it vaguely silly when engineers ...