Articles across AI, biotech, forecasting, and emerging tech.
Tilde turns running AI agents and pipelines on real data into a transactional, auditable operation. Compose GitHub, S3, and Drive as one versioned filesystem. Roll back any run with one command. Every network call audited.
We benchmarked computer use against auto-generated API endpoints on the same admin panel. 53 steps and 551k tokens vs 8 calls and 12k tokens.
Incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager – all in one - docs: add Phase-A porting guide · oven-sh/bun@46d3bc2
Draxinar Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server May 1, 2026 After 10 years of on-and-off work, I’m releasing a full reverse-engineering of the 1998 Ultima Online demo server: https://github.com/draxinar/ouo. About 5,000 functions disassembled from MSVC x86 and translated into portable C99, with each function compared instruction-by-instruction against the binary. UoDemo.exe For those who don’t know, Ultima Online is a 1997 MMORPG developed by Origin Systems Inc. It was one of the
Rust TeX-style math layout with KaTeX-aligned golden tests. Ready-to-use packages for Web (WASM), iOS, Android, Flutter, and React Native—same display list everywhere.
Engineering and computing researchers create simple metal tags with unique ultrasonic fingerprints to detect door openings and other movements.
MIT researchers developed a “computational violin” — the first computer simulation that captures the detailed physics of the instrument and realistically produces the sound of a violin when its strings are plucked. Violin makers could use the model to test how a violin might sound when certain dimensions or properties are changed.
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server , Apple's first through-and-through...
arXiv:2605.00929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multivariate time series anomaly detection in ICS has attracted growing attention due to the increasing threat of cyber-physical attacks on critical infrastructure. State-of-the-art methods model inter-sensor relationships from raw time-domain amplitude values, using graph neural networks, Transformers. However, these methods discard the phase spectrum produced by time frequency transformations, We argue that phase information constitutes a complem...
arXiv:2605.00936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anomaly detection and localization (ADL) is critical for maintaining reliability and availability in cloud systems. Recent ADL developments focus on metric and log data, leaving event data unexplored. To address this gap, we propose EventADL, the first open-box event-based ADL framework for cloud-based service systems. To motivate the design of our framework, we conduct a systematic analysis on 520 real-world incidents, and provide insights into ho...
arXiv:2605.00572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithm performance in combinatorial optimization is highly sensitive to parameter settings, while a single globally tuned configuration often fails to exploit the heterogeneity of instances. This limitation is particularly evident in the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem, where instances differ in structure, demand patterns, and energy constraints. This paper investigates instance-aware parameter configuration for Bilevel Late Accepta...
Yes, plain Docker Compose can still run production workloads in 2026—if you close the operational gaps it leaves: cleanup, healing, image pinning, socket security, and updates.
Learn about the containerd image store
Memory safety bugs like use-after-free and buffer overflows remain among the most exploited vulnerability classes in production software. While AddressSanitizer (ASan) excels at catching these bugs during development, its performance overhead (2 to 4 times) and security concerns make it unsuitable for production. What if you could detect many of the same critical bugs in live systems with virtually no performance impact? GWP-ASan (GWP-ASan Will Provide Allocation SANity) addresses this gap by us...
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't usable for people with slow internet, but the exponential increase in bandwidth (Nielsen suggests this is 50% per year for high-end connections) has outpaced web bloat for typical sites, m...
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my local reputable electronics shop (Memory Express, B&H Photo, etc.), I trust my local reputable electronics shop more. Not only are they less likely to sell me a counterfeit than Best B...
This is a set of notes on the Quinn Emanuel report on Cruise's handling of the 2023-10-02 accident where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit a pedestrian, stopped, and then started moving again with the pedestrian stuck under the bottom of the AV, dragging the pedestrian 20 feet. After seeing some comments about this report, I read five stories on this report and then skimmed the report and my feeling is that the authors of four of the stories probably didn't read the report, and that people wh...
In The birth & death of search engine optimization, Xe suggests Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool to download video from YouTube. More generally, most tech folks I'm connected to seem to think that Google search res...
I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that are so far out means that only a tiny fraction of people making those kinds of predictions today have a track record so, if we want to evaluate which predictions are plausible, we ne...
Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed us to scale to this size while engineers mostly focus on work that delivers value to users. Stackoverflow scaled up a monolith to good effect (2013 architecture / 2016 architecture), ...
This was co-authored with Yao Yue This is a collection of information on severe (SEV-0 or SEV-1, the most severe incident classifications) incidents at Twitter that were at least partially attributed to cache from the time Twitter started using its current incident tracking JIRA (2012) to date (2022), with one bonus incident from before 2012. Not including the bonus incident, there were 6 SEV-0s and 6 SEV-1s that were at least partially attributed to cache in the incident tracker, along with 38 ...
This is an excerpt from an internal document David Mackey and I co-authored in April 2019. The document is excerpted since much of the original doc was about comparing possible approaches to increasing efficency at Twitter, which is mostly information that's meaningless outside of Twitter without a large amount of additional explanation/context. At Twitter, most CPU bound services start falling over at around 50% reserved container CPU utilization and almost all services start falling over at no...
Imagine that every week for twenty years, people message you asking you to comment on the latest wolf sighting, and every week you have to tell them: I haven’t seen a wolf, I haven’t heard a wolf, I believe wolves exist but I don’t yet see evidence of them anywhere near our town. Then one evening, you hear a howl in the distance, and sure enough, on a hill overlooking the town is the clear silhouette of a large wolf. So you point to it — and all the same people laugh and accuse you of “crying wo...
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum fault-tolerance with lower overhead than was previously known, by using high-rate codes, which could work for example in neutral-atom architectures (or possibly other architectures that allow nonlocal operations, like trapped ions). The second bombshell, from Google, gave a lower-overhead implementation of Shor’...
Sorry to interrupt your regular programming about the AI apocalypse, etc., and return to the traditional beat of this blog’s very earliest years … but I’ve now gotten multiple messages asking me to comment on something called the “JVG (Jesse–Victor–Gharabaghi) algorithm” (yes, the authors named it after themselves). This is presented as a massive improvement over Shor’s factoring algorithm, which could (according to popular articles) allow RSA-2048 to be broken using only 5,000 physical qubits. ...
Hello! Today I want to talk about ANSI escape codes. For a long time I was vaguely aware of ANSI escape codes (“that’s how you make text red in the terminal and stuff”) but I had no real understanding of where they were supposed to be defined or whether or not there were standards for them. I just had a kind of vague “there be dragons” feeling around them. While learning about the terminal this year, I’ve learned that: ANSI escape codes are responsible for a lot of usability improvements in the ...
Here’s a niche terminal problem that has bothered me for years but that I never really understood until a few weeks ago. Let’s say you’re running this command to watch for some specific output in a log file: tail -f /some/log/file | grep thing1 | grep thing2 If log lines are being added to the file relatively slowly, the result I’d see is… nothing! It doesn’t matter if there were matches in the log file or not, there just wouldn’t be any output. I internalized this as “uh, I guess pipes just get...
Hello! I’ve been thinking about the terminal a lot and yesterday I got curious about all these “control codes”, like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W, etc. What’s the deal with all of them? a table of ASCII control characters Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII control characters, and what they do on my machine (on Mac OS), more or less. There are about a million caveats, but I’ll talk about what it means and all the problems with this diagram that I know about. You can also view it as an HTML page (I just mad...
I’ve been having problems for the last 3 years or so where Mess With DNS periodically runs out of memory and gets OOM killed. This hasn’t been a big priority for me: usually it just goes down for a few minutes while it restarts, and it only happens once a day at most, so I’ve just been ignoring. But last week it started actually causing a problem so I decided to look into it. This was kind of winding road where I learned a lot so here’s a table of contents: there’s about 100MB of memory availabl...
Tether's November 2022 attestation, even if believed, strongly suggests it blew up (again) during the recent crypto route.
Tether's March 2022 attestation, even if believed, shows that it became insolvent during the May 2022 crypto downturn.
Apple's App Store is reforming their guidelines about taking out-of-band payments. This will be very interesting for developers, especially in the games industry.
VaccinateCA, the non-profit I have been running, expanded nationally to Vaccinate The States. Here's what we've learned in the last 100 days.
A history of an anomaly in the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic, an independent research project about it, and what we need to learn about our next steps.
There exists an idiom called “dropping a hash” which is widely understood in the security community and not widely understood elsewhere. Somewhat surprisingly, there does not appear to be a canonical explanation. I have dropped hashes before and wrote this up to explain the significance of it to non-specialists.
Author’s note: This is a copy of the white paper of the Working Group, a group of four pseudonymous professionals in Tokyo. I, Patrick McKenzie, was the primary author. It was distributed quietly during the week of March 25th, 2020. I have written an essay describing how this document came to be and demonstrating its provenance.
The Ware for April 2026 is a little bit different. Instead of showing a circuit board, I thought it’d be interesting to go inside the chips themselves and try to identify what’s happening on at the silicon level. Since chip reading isn’t a widely spread skill, we’ll start with a gentle introduction. For this series of wares, I’ll tell you exactly which chip these images are from: they’re from the Baochip-1x. It’s unique in that at least some of the source code is available – enough of it to give...
BIO is the I/O co-processor in the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC I helped design. You can read more about the Baochip-1x’s background here, or pick up an evaluation board at Crowd Supply. In this post, I’ll talk about the origins of the BIO, starting by working through a detailed study of the Raspberry Pi PIO as a reference, before diving into the architecture of the BIO. I’ll then work through three programming examples of the BIO, two in assembly and one in C. If all you’re interes...
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets, or the sun. While celestial navigation is accurate, cannot be jammed, and doesn't require any broadcast infrastructure, it is a difficult and time-consuming process to perform manually. In the early 1960s, an automated system was developed for the B-52 bomber to automatically track stars and compute navigation information. Digital computers weren't suitabl...
The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the Florida sky. Commander Young and Pilot Crippen were at the controls as the Shuttle ascended on its first flight. But the launch, like much of the flight, was really under the control of four computers in the avionics bays one deck below the crew. A fifth computer stood ready to take over in case of a catastrophic computer malfunction. These computers, Model...
pre {border:none;} In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to run faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. With this chip, CAD software, spreadsheets, flight simulators, and other programs were much speedier. The 8087 chip could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, of course, but it could also compute transcendental functions such as tangent and logarithms, as well as provide constants such as π. In total, the 8087 added 62 new instructions to the computer. But ho...
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors, however, the 8086 is a 16-bit chip. Its arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) operates on 16-bit values, performing arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction, as well as logic operations including bitwise AND, OR, and XOR. The 8086's ALU is a complicated part of the chip, performing 28 operations in total.1 In this post, I discuss the circuitry that cont...
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. Plugging it into your IBM PC would make operations up to 100 times faster, a big boost for spreadsheets and other number-crunching applications. The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to compute trigonometric, logarithmic, and exponential functions. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in microcode. I'm part of a group that is reverse-enginee...
Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This was a huge benefit for IBM PC applications such as AutoCAD, spreadsheets, and flight simulators. The 8087 was so effective that today's computers still use a floating-point system based on the 8087.1 The 8087 was an extremely complex chip for its time, containing somewhere between 40,0...