The Silicon Underground
• Dave Farquhar
What was a Token Ring network? Token Ring is an obsolete networking technology that competed with Ethernet in the 1980s and 1990s. IBM first announced it October 15, 1985. It is more of a curiosity today, as the networking standard
The post What was a Token Ring network? appeared first on The Silicon Underground.
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
Marcus on AI
• Gary Marcus
Seven brief items from Delhi.
Tool: Tree Appreciator
Another game experiment with Claude. This one used the default Claude iPhone app (chat mode, not Claude Code mode) where I prompted Claude Opus 5.5 Max with:
Build a three js game called "Tree appreciator" - it shows you two algorithmically generated trees and the game mechanics is about appreciating the differences between them. Think hard about how to make sure it is both fun and beautiful.
Somewhat embarrassingly given my recent talk, I've found that telling Opus 5.5 "make sure it is fun" works uncomfortably well. In this case Claude crunched for 3 hours and 7 minutes before retuning a cosy little spot-the-difference game with music and animation and achievements that's quite compelling to play.
Tags: game-design, javascript, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, vibe-coding, three-js
John D. Cook
• John
When I wrote about the harmonic triangle yesterday, I displayed the triangle left-aligned using fixed-width text because that was easier than producing the format you usually see for Pascal’s triangle and related triangles. 1 1/2 1/2 1/3 1/6 1/3 1/4 1/12 1/12 1/4 1/5 1/20 1/30 1/20 1/5 … I asked Claude to write a […]
The post LaTeX package for Pascal-like triangles first appeared on John D. Cook.Last week I attended the 9th E.DSO – EE-ISAC - ENCS – ENISA Cybersecurity Forum in Brussels. And as I had nothing to present, I tried to make myself useful by writing up an apparently well read live-blog (better version below!).
At this conference, hashtag #CyberGrids26, all relevant people were present. Regulators, European Commission, electricity generators, the organizations that transmit and distribute the power, vendors, researchers, standardization bodies: basically everyone.
Krebs on Security
• BrianKrebs
The United Kingdom has issued economic sanctions against Cryptomus, a chameleonic cryptocurrency platform that experts say serves as a major conduit for payments related to ransomware, narcotics, darknet markets, fraud and cybercrime services that are helping Russia circumvent existing financial restrictions.
Jeff Geerling
• Jeff Geerling
Formlabs sent me a [Form Studio 1](https://formlabs.com/3d-printers/form-studio-1/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=refe rral&utm_campaign=jeffgeerling-fs1-2026-07-26-global) resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer.
Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap, coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it is affordable.
Terence Eden’s Blog
• Terence Eden
Twelve years ago, I was complaining that IoT devices were too expensive. Last week I bought a colour changing Zigbee lighbulb for £4. Not a typo - less than a fiver. While the aipocalypse is devouring RAM with its insatiable appetite, Moore's Law appears to be keeping up its end of the bargain when it comes to domestic gadgetry. This blog posts compares today's prices with those from a little …
John D. Cook
• John
G. D. Chakerian [1] discovered the following generalization of the Pythagorean theorem. Take any triangle and attach squares to each side. From each triangle vertex, extend a line perpendicular to the opposite side and extend the line through the square, as shown in the figure below. Then the areas of the rectangles with the same […]
The post A generalization of the Pythagorean theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.
The Silicon Underground
• Dave Farquhar
On October 14, 2009, SCO fired its CEO, Darl McBride. Very nearly 15 years later, McBride died at the age of 64 of complications from ALS. His termination from SCO ended his time as the most hated man in technology.
The post When SCO fired Darl McBride appeared first on The Silicon Underground.
John D. Cook
• John
What’s a connection between Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel? Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum describes a pendulum with a semicircular blade being lowered on a cable. This is an interesting variation on the usual harmonic oscillator because the length L of the pendulum is not constant but rather an increasing function […]
The post Poe, Bessel, and Drones first appeared on John D. Cook.
Marcus on AI
• Gary Marcus
Yet another study pointing in the same direction
Krebs on Security
• BrianKrebs
Microsoft today issued updates to fix more than 1,400 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Today's epic patch batch dwarfs September's record of nearly 1,000 fixes, which was already about ten times the normal monthly patch load from Redmond.
Release: web-edit 0.1a1
Includes performance optimizations written by Claude Opus 5.5 after I fed it this Python 3.15 profiling report generated by GPT-6 Astra.
