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It came after ud0 and ud1.

The post Why is the x86 undefined instruction called <CODE>ud2</CODE>? Why 2? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

“We're nowhere near the ceiling.”

Every year, for 25 years, I’ve written on the observance of this anniversary. Some years, it’s been for me, some years it’s been for the people who’ve been with me along the way. Some years, I didn’t know why I was even doing it any more. But this year, for the first time in...

Today's links Inefficiency is bad, actually: Now, "resiliency" on the other hand… Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Canada's DMCA; Socialism x Pledge of Allegiance; Hate the player and the game; Making Light's 9/11; 9/11 survivor registry; Secure ema...

Soft-deprecating re.match()

Python has a concept of soft deprecation, where APIs are marked as "should no longer be used to write new code" without any promise/threat to remove them in the future.

Python 3.15 release manager Hugo van Kemenade describes how in the upcoming 3.15 release soft deprecation has come for the venerable but deeply confusing re.match() function. It's now available with the much clearer alternative re.prefixmatch() name - reflecting how it anchors at the beginning of the string but not the end.

Most of the time you probably want re.search() (match this pattern anywhere in the string) or re.fullmatch() (match the entire string) instead.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: python, regular-expressions

Graham Dumpleton's new monkey patching package wrapture is shaping up to be an indispensable tool for Python developers. I'm not sure why I've seen so little buzz about it! Graham has been posting new tutorials for it almost daily since the initial release on August 31st. He...

Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they're just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.

Not through normal means.

The post How can I remove the Close button from my window caption? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Construction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car.

If you're reading this, you're part of RSS Club! A top secret society of cool people who subscribe to my feed. This post is not available on the web or via email. I've been playing about with Rogue Scholar. It's an open-access publication which allows blogs to get a persistent Digital Object Identifier. If I've set everything up correctly (not a given) then all new posts on this site will be…

The Atari 2600 was first released on September 11, 1977, along with nine titles. It wasn’t the first home video game console to connect to a TV and it wasn’t even the first one to use cartridges, but it was

The post Atari 2600 launch titles appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases

Today we're releasing two new security patch versions of Datasette: 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 - one for the current alpha series and one for the stable 0.65.x family.

These are security fixes which you should apply if you are running a Datasette instance on the public web - in particular if that instance mixes both public and private tables.

Following issues reported by Sevban Dönmez, Alex Garcia and I ran an extensive audit of Datasette using Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6, and GPT-6 Astra. We then spent almost a week collaborating on and reviewing the fixes.

They helped find some very subtle bugs. We'll be incorporating security audits by frontier models into all of our development work going forward.

Tags: releases, security, ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, ai-security-research

Any Nix package, live in your browser Farid Zakaria calls this his "magnum opus of Nix work", and I can see why. trynix.dev provides a qemu-wasm powered x86_64 Linux virtual machine running entirely in your browser through WebAssembly. That VM can then be booted with any Nix...

Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify Shopify are moving from React Native back to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases for their native apps, for the exact reason you would expect: We decided to switch from native to React Native in 2020 for three reasons: Stop bui...

A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc. But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection. All from a simple idea: here’s a thing that points to another thing, off you go! We’ve ...

AI is already causing harms, there are are many real risks, but constant focus on absurd end-of-the-world fantasies has made the situation worse

AI-generated work can look finished without being understood. That uncertainty erodes trust, slows reviews, and leaves colleagues doing the missing work.

min-release-age, minimum-release-age, -Zmin-publish-age, cooldown.

The Greek letter β (beta) and the German letter ß (eszett) look similar, especially in some fonts. Now suppose an OCR program sees some character that could be a beta or could be an eszett. It could calculate some kind of distance between between the pixel pattern of the character and the pixel patterns of […]

The post Bayesian OCR first appeared on John D. Cook.

For years, I've had a test-card at the start of my slides. Before I start my talk, I can immediately see if the aspect ratio is wrong, colours are off, or any other visual issues with the presentation. A few years ago I was invited to give a talk and was assured that the venue was set up for audio as well as video. I dutifully filled my slides with with demo videos containing sound. None of…