Normal Science

Gravity Linux Alpha Release: Linux on the M4 Mac Mini with GPU and DCP Support

gravity Install GravityAboutBlogContributorsDocumentationGitHub (opens in a new tab) ← All postsIntroducing Gravity Linux Early Alpha for the M4 Mac miniSeptember 18, 2026We are proud to announce the early alpha release of Gravity Linux for the M4 Mac mini. This release includes working support for the DCP and GPU (OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 3.3 compliance).Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix and by default uses KDE with Wayland by default.This release is primarily intended FOR DEVELOPERS. It is

Comparing reflection capabilities of C++, Zig and C3

PyPy v8.0.0 Release

PyPy v8.0.0: release of python 2.7, 3.11, and 3.12 beta released 2026-09-19 The PyPy team is proud to release version 8.0.0 of PyPy after the previous release on May 26, 2026. This is a major new vers

Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

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.

Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

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.

Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust

Incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager – all in one - docs: add Phase-A porting guide · oven-sh/bun@46d3bc2

Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

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.

RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

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.

Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors

Engineering and computing researchers create simple metal tags with unique ultrasonic fingerprints to detect door openings and other movements.

Docker 29 has changed its default image store for new installs

Learn about the containerd image store

Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

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.

Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server

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

Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives

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 …

From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control

In April 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote Git in ten days because BitKeeper revoked its free licence to the Linux kernel. Twenty-one years later, no successor has emerged. A practitioner's history of source control from someone who used every major system since 1990, and lost code in most of them.

Testing macOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs

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...

Collaborative Editing in CodeMirror (2020)

Discovering hard disk physical geometry through microbenchmarking (2019)

BlogRandom stuff…CommentsPosts Home Blog About Uncategorized Measuring Stuff Fixing Stuff Building Stuff Taking apart stuff « Elections 2019: Who is really getting a tax cut? A Cardboard Haswell Box » Discovering Hard Disk Physical Geometry through Microbenchmarking By Henry, on September 6th, 2019 Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storag

Finding the differences in a series of power supplies

Bun Has Been Converted to Rust. Now What?

Bun was ported from Zig to Rust by an LLM and passed nearly all its tests - while shipping more than ten thousand unsafe blocks. Memory safety is the main reason you'd pick Rust. So what did the rewrite actually accomplish?

Show HN: nfsdiag – A NFS diagnostic application

A nfs doctor application. Contribute to lsferreira42/nfsdiag development by creating an account on GitHub.

Speedup in Lattice Boltzmann Cylinder Flow

Resolution robustness of vortex shedding in Lattice Boltzmann cylinder flow: a scaling study for reduced-cost simulation. - alikamp/Parks-KPBM-Scaling

CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, besides being well known for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known among longtime Linux users as a RHEL/CentOS shop

PostgreSQL Benchmark: AWS RDS vs. Self-Hosted on Hetzner (2026)

A like-for-like pgbench comparison of managed and self-hosted Postgres at the same size and price tier, with the real cost of high availability included, not just the sticker price.

Rolling the Root Key

Have DNSSEC-validating recursive resolvers updated their Trust Anchor sets to include KSK-2024, and how can we measure whether this transition has been successfully adopted?

Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

I went to rip a movie from my own DVD collection. It surfaced dead anti-piracy infrastructure, a defunct Japanese DRM company, and a twenty five year old executable that was still trying to phone home

AI in Linux

Drew DeVault Talks About RSS AI in Linux July 23, 2026 The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development.I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development: authoring code and reviewing code. There are, at the time of writing, just over 1,200 kernel commits with an “Assisted-by” tag, from September 2025 to the present, most of which indicate patc

Homebridge 2.0 is here, and it speaks Matter

The open-source Apple HomeKit bridge is adding Matter, allowing it to support Alexa, Google Home, Home Assistant — and robot vacuums.

Orbital Data Centers: Why the Hype Outpaces Reality

Why the stars—and the math—won’t align for space compute anytime soon

MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool

Computational model lets users tweak parameters to hear effect on the sound in early design process.

Show HN: Tight C, a systems language with 10 keywords

A minimalistic portable assembly lenguage. Contribute to alonsovm44/tc-lang development by creating an account on GitHub.

RuView – See through walls with WiFi

π RuView turns commodity WiFi signals into real-time spatial intelligence, vital sign monitoring, and presence detection — all without a single pixel of video. - ruvnet/RuView

Ten ways a check passes while the thing it checks is broken

A passing check is a claim, not a fact. In one working day on this site, a page was giving away a paid book, a contact form was losing every enquiry, the map rendered blank, and a metric named coherence was mostly measuring length — and every one had already passed a check. Ten ways a check stays green while wrong, and the shorter list of moves that actually found things.

Rewriting Bun in Rust

Jarred Sumner has been promising this blog post (since May 9th) about his Zig to Rust rewrite of Bun for significantly longer than it took him to finish the rewrite. …

Rendering Fonts Quickly on the GPU

A cool technique from a recently expired Microsoft patent lets us render TTF fonts quickly on the GPU.

America's Data Center Build-Out Is Falling Way Behind Schedule

Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

An AI installed to protect your privacy never asked for your consent—here

The physics of Docker build caching

Concepts, rules of thumb, and what dissecting a few hundred CI builds says about them.

108 PRs in eight days: Accidentally discovering loop engineering

BRIN is 1/4570th the size of a B-tree, until 5% of rows are updated

I co-owned the Zonemaps module at Oracle, and BRIN is the same design in Postgres. It stops pruning long before pg_stats.correlation admits anything is wrong — at correlation 0.921, a 28x collapse. Measured on 10M rows, harness inline.

Rust 1.98 got a P-critical miscompilation

View all comments Observed on aarch64-apple-darwin. It also consistently hits my CI runners since release of 1.98, failing our CI... each commit (https://github.com/plabayo/rama) The same Rama source works with Rust 1.97.1, crashes with ...

Klaxon a livr earthquake map with no back end

Real-time global emergency event tracker. Live earthquakes, with tsunamis, wildfires, and conflicts coming soon. Data from USGS.

Thunderbolt vs. USB-C: what the connector hides

USB-C is the connector. Thunderbolt is one of the protocols that runs through it. Here's what actually changes between TB3, TB4, USB4, and TB5.

Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Scheduler

In the previous article we looked at how the kernel gives every process its own private view of memory. But memory is only half of what a process needs to actually run. The other half is the CPU itself — and there are only so many CPUs in a machine, while there are usually hundreds or thousands of things that want to run on them. So somebody has to decide, constantly, who gets a CPU and for how long. That somebody is the scheduler. Every few milliseconds, on every core, the kernel asks itself t

A Simpler Parametrization for Modern Optimizers

Why a Raspberry Pi shouldn't be powered through its GPIO pins

Starlink shifts hardware from one-time purchase to $10/month rental

Starlink, SpaceX's top moneymaker, also raised service prices by $5 to $10.

Sixteen Locks Ought to Be Enough for Anybody

Every query locks every index on a table, even ones it doesn't use.

Bun's unreleased Rust port has 13,365 unsafe blocks

An audit of every unsafe block in Bun

Proxmox VE now available for ARM64

We are excited to announce the first release of Proxmox Virtual Environment with official support for a second CPU architecture: 64-bit ARM (arm64/aarch64)...

I want extern "fil-C"

Compile legacy C with Fil-C, call it safely from Rust, and make runtime checks the tax for not migrating the hot path.