November 2024

Paged Out! is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.

Better Auth is framework-agnostic authentication (and authorization) framework for TypeScript. It provides a comprehensive set of features out of the box and includes a plugin ecosystem that simplifies adding advanced functionalities. Whether you need 2FA, multi-tenant support, or other auth releated features. It lets you focus on building your actual application instead of reinventing the wheel.

Momentum scrolling plugins are the web equivalent of turning a functional bike into a unicycle because it "looks cool." It adds unnecessary complexity, degrades usability, and frustrates users. Instead of reinventing scrolling, stick to what works: native, predictable, fast scrolling behavior. Don't make scrolling a thing. Just let people scroll.

I want to add an important feature to podcasting that can only work with RSS, it can’t work with Spotify, Google, Audible etc. The idea is subscribing to subscription lists, which the influencers are likely to really love because they can create networks of podcasts. And when they want to edit the list, if this is done right, the users will automatically be updated.

When it comes to music production, the '80s will probably be remembered for great synths, rubbish synths, great music and terrible music. What it probably won’t be remembered for is its contribution to the history of computer music making. This is, frankly, wrong. Here's why…

For many of us, video games were a potent point of introduction to the world of music production. We take a look back at the games and consoles that have inspired music-makers over the years

We have used a query builder to programmatically build SQL queries, and by using higher-order functions (functions that take other functions as arguments) and pipelines, we have: Eliminated the need to pass the query object explicitly. Made it easier to add, remove, or rearrange query modifiers without disrupting the overall structure. Improved maintainability and simplified testing since each query modifier function is a self-contained unit that can be reused across various queries and scenarios.

Finally, C# undoubtedly beat all other languages; it's very competitive and has really become a monster. And as expected, Rust continues to do a good job on memory efficiency. The distance between Go and the others increased. Now Go loses by over 13 times to the winner. It also loses by over 2 times to Java, which contradicts the general perception of the JVM being a memory hog and Go being lightweight.

I hope that you now have a sense for word embeddings and the word2vec algorithm. I also hope that now when you read a paper mentioning “skip gram with negative sampling” (SGNS) (like the recommendation system papers at the top), that you have a better sense for these concepts.

The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play. Deeply human in the way that real forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of evolutionary change.)

Hopepunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction, conceived of as the opposite of grimdark. Works in the hopepunk subgenre are about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges.

So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data. Van Strien’s original act clearly showed the difference in culture between AI and open social web communities: on the former it’s commonplace to grab data if it can be read publicly (or even sometimes if it’s not), regardless of licensing or author consent, while on open social networks consent and authors’ rights are central community norms.

Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is old hat by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and it’s not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage of mid-2024, when corner-cutting by Microsoft led to critical infrastructure—from hospitals to banks to traffic systems—failing globally for an extended period.

WeSQL is an innovative MySQL distribution that adopts a compute-storage separation architecture, with storage backed by S3 (and S3-compatible systems). It can run on any cloud, ensuring no vendor lock-in.

And so the cranberry farmers will ask you how you feel about spiders before hiring you because you might have dozens of swimming WOLF SPIDERS climbing out of the water up your waders and into your hair, but you’ve got to be fine with it because the WOLF SPIDERS are your fellow cranberry bog employees and everyone, even WOLF SPIDERS deserve a safe work environment. Wear a turtleneck or something. Maybe you’re thinking, it’s fine, WOLF SPIDERS don’t bite, and if they do, they’re not venomous, but they do bite and they are venomous, but maybe it all works out if you let them use you for higher ground.

You select the Preact stuff you want in your build, and whether you’d like to use ES modules or an IIFE. The tool spits out a file you can host locally and instructions on how to use it.

Today, I wanted to share a little Web Component I made for expanding or collapsing all of the <details> elements on a page.

Amazon S3 can now perform conditional writes that evaluate if an object is unmodified before updating it. This helps you coordinate simultaneous writes to the same object and prevents multiple concurrent writers from unintentionally overwriting the object without knowing the state of its content. You can use this capability by providing the ETag of an object using S3 PutObject or CompleteMultipartUpload API requests in both S3 general purpose and directory buckets.

If you were to walk into most of the world’s hackerspaces, it’s likely that the most frequent big-ticket tool you’ll find after a 3D printer is a laser cutter. A few years ago that would inevitably been one of the ubiquitous blue Chinese-made K40 machines, but here in 2024 it’s become common to see something far more sophisticated. For all that, many of us are still laser cutter noobs, and for us [Dominic Morrow] gave a talk at last summer’s EMF Camp in the UK entitled “Getting Started In Laser Cutting“. [Dominic] is a long-term laser cutting specialist who now works for Lightburn, so he’s ideally placed to deliver this subject.

Exhausted from election 2024 and tired of re-litigating the 2016 primary? Perhaps you'd enjoy re-visiting The Race for the Whitehouse 2004 or 2000 in their original web 1.0 glory. Too soon? The 1996 websites for the Dole/Kemp and Clinton/Gore campaigns are still online. Too political? Maybe you want to play Star Ship Titanic (1998) or Space Jam (1996), both preserved in high resolution 1024x768 perfection. Or relax with zombo.com (1999), spork.org (1996) and milk.com (1994). These are all reminders that Cool URI's don't change on the WWW project (1991).

Solitomb, a solitaire-based dungeon crawler in which you fight demons by building hands of playing cards. It's currently - heywaitaminute - a pay-what-you-want PICO-8 prototype by designer Jakub Wasilewski where "all money earned goes towards making the bigger version possible." Like Slipways, it already seems like a frightfully clever piece of design.

Redis inc, whose core product is the formerly open source Redis in-memory database, has prompted further unease in the community by approaching the maintainers of the most popular Rust client library for Redis with the intent either to control or to fork it.

Since everyone started using AI, more candidates started clearing the first round with flying colors. The platforms had to recalibrate to let in their target percentage. But they're not measuring the code written by the candidate anymore—they're measuring how well the candidate uses an LLM. Most developers who can actually write this code try to do it themselves. They get marked lower than peers who used AI and completed it faster. The result? Hiring teams keep raising the bar arbitrarily, trying to find the candidates who are best at prompt engineering their way through a coding test.

After people stopped caring, artificial intelligence got more interesting.

It shouldn’t be a radical act because results are better if we can cooperate. And life is better without cult leaders. How do we tear down parochialism and ego?

So what's it like to set up your own GotoSocial server? Well, I can walk you thru what I used for my setup. Yours might be different; that's OK! I made these up-front choices to simplify the operational overhead because I didn't want this to be a hassle and I don't need the extra engineering that comes from trying for nine nines of uptime:

Never build your house on someone else’s land.

Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.

Based on the work already done by Emily Liu and Samuel Newman, a straightforward (re)implementation of their commenting systems for static sites (tomcreighton.com is compiled offline and hosted on Github Pages, for example) using plain ol’ HTML and JS.

Since octothorpes get registered with an Octothorpes Ring, that means you’re automatically on a webring if you’re using octothorpes. So each Ring hosts a web component that lets you put a classic webring browser on your page. You can see it working right now in the footer of this site!

I wrote code (in PHP) to import my old bookmarks. And you didn’t misread that, it’s 28,000 links over the last 20 years. They come from my original links blog, and from Delicious, and from Instapaper, and from Twitter back when I backfilled those shared links into Pinboard, which I then backfilled into my link blog database. It’s a lot of things, but really, it’s straightforward from a programming point of view. It’s a simple POST to the REST API which Linkding provides by default. I have shared most of the code I wrote as a Gist in GitHub. It includes code in PHP to convert exported CSV from Instapaper to a JSON format that my poster code can use. And over the last 2 days and over many hours, every few seconds a link would be posted. And as of now, it’s finished.

The concept is simple—get an e-ink display, and draw a dial on it using whatever graphics and scale you choose. Then, put it behind a traditional coil-driven analog dial in place of the more traditional paper scale. Now, you have an analog dial that can display any quantity you desire. Just update the screen to display a different scale as needed. Meanwhile, if you don’t need to change the display, the e-ink display will draw zero power and still display the same thing.

Elon Musk confirmed that posts containing links in their main text are deprioritized on X in a revelation that renews criticism that the platform is restricting the visibility of and access to external sources of information.

When I’m driving, it’s actually unsafe for my car to be operated in that way. It’s hard to generalize and say, buttons are always easy and good, and touchscreens are difficult and bad, or vice versa. Buttons tend to offer you a really limited range of possibilities in terms of what you can do. Maybe that simplicity of limiting our field of choices offers more safety in certain situations.

The WSJ has been on the button beat for a while. In a 2023 piece titled What Our Phones, Cars and Refrigerators Need: More Buttons, writer Nicole Nguyen detailed the challenges of touch screen interfaces being deployed in kitchen objects. After a pot of water boiled over on her induction stove, she was unable to turn down the burner because the touch screen has gotten wet. “I rage poked,” she wrote, “where a simple knob would have sufficed.”

Crucially, though, what defines a member of the posting middle class is their love of the game. They don’t post because they’re trying to sell a product, or solely to advance their career. They don’t post to advertise themselves or their company. They post because they must. There’s something fundamentally wrong with them and the worms in their brain makes them spend entire days posting away on the computer.

In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible. He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have."

When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can't say React, they don't have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it's not going to level up your career. Anyone with $5,000-$10,000 can make their way through a bootcamp and scrape their way through an interview, but it's a competitive market and it's usually quite evident when your interviewing a bootcamp candidate. Stand out by picking up some more fundamentals

Create, edit, browse SQLite databases.

Our systems do not need to be high-maintenance, intensive on resources and energy needs. They don’t have to answer every request with availability and latency that measures up to however many nines or zeroes are the current industry standard. They have to attend to the needs of those who are using them, which can be much less demanding. We can run both infrastructure and software at more human scales and learn other ways of growing or shrinking, and we can also scale to high performance and availability too. This is what the concept of a network enables after all, but it is often used to centralize and create dependency instead.

This document defines the syntax and semantics of the Do-Not-Stab header, a proposed HTTP header that allows users to indicate to a website their preferences about being stabbed. It also provides a standard for how services should comply with such user preferences, if they wish to.

So, in summary: maybe people shy away from copilots because they’re tired of complexity, they’re tired of accelerating productivity without improving hours, they’re afraid of forgetting rote skills and basic knowledge, and they want to feel like writers, not managers. Maybe some or none of these things are true - they’re emotional responses and gut feelings based on predictions - but they matter nonetheless.

From hosting email and simple HTML websites in my youth to the current attempts at decentralized Twitter- or YouTube-like platforms, the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never will—because the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience. The primary “feature” of self-hosting is, for most, a fatal flaw: it’s a chore. It’s akin to being “free” to change the oil in your car—it’s an option, but not a welcome one for most.

Bluesky is built by good people who care, and it is providing something that people desperately want and need. If you are looking for a Twitter replacement, you can find it in Bluesky today. However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable. However, "credible exit" is a reasonable term to describe what Bluesky is aiming for. It is Bluesky's term, and I think Bluesky should embrace that term fully in all contexts and work that they can.

I built Sill because I value the people in my social network, and I believe I can learn the most about the world by reading what they read and hearing what they have to say. Sill listens to them at scale and helps me understand the conversation. In the month or so I’ve been using it myself, Sill has completely changed my relationship to my social network.

Find the most popular links from your Mastodon/Bluesky networks

A newsletter from author Steven Johnson exploring where good ideas come from—and how to keep them from turning against us. Click to read Adjacent Possible, by Steven Johnson, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

The current state-of-the-art Gemini model can fit roughly 1.5 million words in its context. That’s enough for me to upload the full text of all fourteen of my books, plus every article, blog post, or interview I’ve ever published—and the entirety of my collection of research notes that I’ve compiled over the years. The Gemini team has announced plans for a model that could hold more than 7 million words in its short-term memory. That’s enough to fit everything I’ve ever written, plus the hundred books and articles that most profoundly shaped my thinking over the years. An advanced model capable of holding in focus all that information would have a profound familiarity with all the words and ideas that have shaped my personal mindset. Certainly its ability to provide accurate and properly-cited answers to questions about my worldview (or my intellectual worldview, at least) would exceed that of any other human. In some ways it would exceed my own knowledge, thanks to its ability to instantly recall facts from books I read twenty years ago, or make new associations between ideas that I have long since forgotten. It would lack any information about my personal or emotional history—though I suppose if I had maintained a private journal over the past decades it would be able to approximate that part of my mindset as well. But as reconstruction of my intellectual grounding, it would be unrivaled. If that is not considered material progress in AI, there is something wrong with our metrics.

Resources, links, projects, and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes on the public interwebs

In practice, this means that users can see posts by people they follow on the app, the standard view Bluesky defaults to. But they can equally opt to see what’s popular with friends, an algorithmically-dictated selection of posts that your peers enjoy. There are feeds specifically for scientists, curated by those working in the field, or ones to promote Black voices, which are often thinned out by algorithmic filtering. One feed even specifically promotes “quiet posters” – users who post infrequently, and whose views would otherwise be drowned out by those who share every opinion with their followers.

WebVM is a server-less virtual environment running fully client-side in HTML5/WebAssembly. It's designed to be Linux ABI-compatible. It runs an unmodified Debian distribution including many native development toolchains. WebVM is powered by the CheerpX virtualization engine, and enables safe, sandboxed client-side execution of x86 binaries on any browser. CheerpX includes an x86-to-WebAssembly JIT compiler, a virtual block-based file system, and a Linux syscall emulator.

Solito is the missing piece for using React Native with Next.js to build powerful cross-platform apps.

From Chrome 131 you have more options to style the structure of <details> and <summary> elements. You can now use these elements when building disclosure or accordion widgets.

It's your newsletter, or your email, or your blog. Or just your writing. But it sure as hell isn't "your Substack".

The Speculation Rules API is designed to improve performance for future navigations. It targets document URLs rather than specific resource files, and so makes sense for multi-page applications (MPAs) rather than single-page applications (SPAs).

The browser has come a long way. Give it a chance!

Prusa CORE One Conversion kit contains all parts you need to transform your Original Prusa MK4S into the fully enclosed CoreXY 3D printer, the Prusa CORE One. This kit is compatible with the MK4S only!

Hi there! This webpage covers the space and time Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science. When preparing for technical interviews in the past, I found myself spending hours crawling the internet putting together the best, average, and worst case complexities for search and sorting algorithms so that I wouldn't be stumped when asked about them. Over the last few years, I've interviewed at several Silicon Valley startups, and also some bigger companies, like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Uber, and each time that I prepared for an interview, I thought to myself "Why hasn't someone created a nice Big-O cheat sheet?". So, to save all of you fine folks a ton of time, I went ahead and created one. Enjoy! - Eric

A zibaldone (plural zibaldoni) is an Italian vernacular commonplace book or notebook containing a wide variety of vernacular texts, copied into a small or medium-format paper codex[1] by citizens in late-medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states.

Free software can’t solve the power imbalance between users and software makers alone by giving to the former the possibility to run, study, and distribute both original and modified copies. Such approach fails to acknowledge that the problems we face with proprietary software go beyond technological aspects, and that is possible to easily reproduce toxic patterns within open projects. Collaborative efforts take a lot more than just making the code available to anyone, being primarily based on human interactions and emotional labor.

DB Browser for SQLite (DB4S) is a high quality, visual, open source tool designed for people who want to create, search, and edit SQLite or SQLCipher database files. DB4S gives a familiar spreadsheet-like interface on the database in addition to providing a full SQL query facility. It works with Windows, macOS, and most versions of Linux and Unix. Documentation for the program is on the wiki.

Embed an SQLite database in your PostgreSQL table. AKA multitenancy has been solved.

In this guide we'll discuss: Where and when fine-tuning can be useful. Alternative approaches to extending the capabilities and behavior of pre-trained models. The importance of data preparation. How to fine-tune Mistral 7B using your own custom dataset with Axolotl. The many hyperparameters and their effect on training. Additional resources to help you fine-tune your models faster and more efficiently.

While the design is admittedly pushing the definition of what can realistically be called a “badge,” there’s a lanyard attached so it’s technically wearable. If the idea of being surrounded by a bunch of nerds wearing tiny modems around their necks is as enticing to you as it is to us, you’ll absolutely be among friends during this Philadelphia-area hacker con.

Having decided the retro late-80s early-90s theme for JawnCon 0x1, the inspiration for the badge seemed almost immediately obvious: the iconic, venerable Hayes SmartModem oozes industrial design of the era and is instantly recognizable to any of us who grew up when computers had the decency to shriek like digital banshees to let us know when they were plotting against us.

It's been a few years since I wrote about my challenges with async/await-based systems and how they just seem to not support back pressure well. A few years later, I do not think that this problem has subsided much, but my thinking and understanding have perhaps evolved a bit. I'm now convinced that async/await is, in fact, a bad abstraction for most languages, and we should be aiming for something better instead and that I believe to be thread.

The CORE One is a fully enclosed CoreXY 3D printer with active temperature control. It’s a machine focused on quality and speed, and it’s extremely rugged. You can find the complete list of technical specifications on the product page, but let me give you a detailed insight first.

Neil Peart's final book - a coffee table book highlighting his extensive "Silver Surfers" car collection - officially releases today

At 8:30 p.m. on 16 May 1916, John J. Carty banged his gavel at the Engineering Societies Building in New York City to call to order a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was no ordinary gathering. The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting more than 5,000 attendees in eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast to coast. AIEE members and guests in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco had telephone receivers at their seats so they could listen in.

While the ethics of this technology’s ecological and social impact are debated, use of the technology comes with repeated controversy. This instance of AI-assisted art from the company that made the award-winning Star Realms deck-building game has caused some to take to social media in disappointment and frustration. A few fans of the company state they won’t purchase another game by Wise Wizard, with at least one store stating it will no longer be stocking the company’s products. This anti-AI sentiment is not unanimous, however. Projects like Wonders of the First, Grimcoven, and Terraforming Mars still raised millions of dollars from thousands of backers as recently as June of this year — giving crowdfunding platforms an incentive to keep AI projects on the site, as long as the money is still there.

Telegram is pushing a new 2.0 update for its in-app “mini-apps” that allows them to run full screen, enables developers to add subscription plans, allows gift sending from mini-apps, lets you add the apps to your homescreen, and more.

How hard could it be to run an old node project? Pretty hard actually.

To me, index fingers portray a hideous personality reflecting conceit and pantywaist attitudes. In essence, they are smart-ass digits we can often do without. If I had to lose a finger and had my choice, I would choose first my nondominant hand index ray and next the other index. I find index digits easy to hate and sometimes hard to love.

As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – complete with toys, space and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.

Warren rejects the concept that it is possible for Americans to become wealthy in isolation. "You built a factory out there? Good for you," she says. "But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did." She continues: "Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

I think it’s endearing when people name their blog.

I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a build system, and it took FOREVER to figure out how to import it because the library’s setup instructions assume that you’re using a build system.

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.

I woke up this morning, took a pill, and proceeded to have one of the most productive writing days I’ve had in perhaps years. The day prior, a doctor diagnosed me with Adult ADHD.

Effect is a powerful library for TypeScript developers that brings functional programming techniques into managing effects and errors. It aims to be a comprehensive utility library for TypeScript, offering a range of tools that could potentially replace specialized libraries like Lodash, Zod, Immer, or RxJS.

Have a personal domain, put a CMS behind it, use that for publishing static pages, use subdomains of it for standalone services, and register new domains only when you need to. I think this kind of strategy is inherent in the idea of having “your own domain”, and a lot of people follow it to a greater or lesser degree, but I wanted to spell it out fully to make it clear to myself how I would deal with different circumstances.

We built a(nother) house optimized for LAN Parties.

I still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. And so we can’t help but try to keep them going, for however long we can.

After learning about indexes, I understood their basic structure, but I wanted to dig deeper — to explore the data structure, understand the algorithm, and learn how the index data is stored on disk. The theory and actual implementation can differ, so I decided to explore this topic further.

But I do know that the energy on Bluesky is exciting, that the app and website are very usable, and that, as a journalist, I appreciate a platform that does not and says it will not punish links in any algorithm and which mostly operates in reverse chronological order. I think that the “Starter Packs” that let you follow tons of people at once according to your interests have made the onboarding process really easy. What’s happening on Bluesky right now feels organic and it feels real in a way no other Twitter replacement has felt so far, and it feels better than X.com has been ever since Elon Musk took over. If the masses are going to move off Twitter, we can do much better than Threads. And we could do much worse than Bluesky.

Hiring processes should focus on problem-solving, collaboration, and growth in relevant areas. Unrealistic expectations don’t attract the best talent – they just exhaust and discourage it. If companies want adaptable developers, they should focus on the long-term ability to learn, not how fast someone can tackle an arbitrary test. Dropping these absurd assignments and focusing on what really counts could foster a better, more inclusive tech culture.

All this to say: the Bluesky team seems like they’re earnestly working toward a decentralized platform, but they have a lot of work ahead of them. Years of effort, in my estimation. In the meantime, Bluesky is slightly more decentralized than, say, Facebook — but not by much. Yes, you can host your own data. Yes, you can scrape all of the content on the network. But you can’t do anything with it unless you’re attached to the Bluesky service. I believe this will change with time, but it will be prohibitively expensive and we’re not there yet.

A web developer's exploration into mini apps—apps that are built with web technologies but that do not run in browsers.

Web Applets are small, secure pieces of web code (bundles of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) that can run anywhere, allowing a model to take actions within software much like a human would and then generate interfaces appropriate for the user’s intent. For example, a developer could write an applet that enables a model to respond to a query about local coffee shops by conducting internet searches and then displaying the results on an in-line map. And because the model can read the internal state of each applet, it can then conduct follow-up actions to complete a user’s request (for example, updating the map to display only coffee shops that will be open tomorrow afternoon). Anyone can build Web Applets and host them on the Web, and any client can potentially support them.

In my last post, I spoke about the differences between the POSSE and PESOS blogging styles and why it’s important. Today, I’m going to show you how I actually implement this with my website.

The Twitter meltdown made me realize something important: I’m a seriously prolific content creator. And I’ve been giving away all that content free to a platform that not only profits from it but treats me like garbage unfairly when it comes to sharing said profits. Meaning, they don’t share a dime. When I downloaded my Twitter archive, it hit me like a ton of bricks that most of that content was not sitting in my website, so they could just disappear if a billionaire decides to cut me off from the platform.

If, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large language models might best be understood as dead speech. Just as factory workers produce, with their “living labor,” machines and other forms of physical capital that are then used, as “dead labor,” to produce more physical commodities, so human expressions of thought and creativity—“living speech” in the forms of writing, art, photography, and music—become raw materials used to produce “dead speech” in those same forms. LLMs, to continue with Marx’s horror-story metaphor, feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.

Make it Yourself is a digital book that showcases this incredible talent, bringing together over 1000 useful DIY projects to demonstrate just what is possible when you make things yourself.

Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number. The first image you take is named “IMG_0001”, the second is “IMG_0002” and so on. During the Send to YouTube era of 2009 and 2012, the title of one’s YouTube video was defaulted to this naming convention. Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely-searchable name. To this day, there are millions of these videos.

Over the past month I’ve been exploring the rapidly evolving world of Large Language Models (LLM). It’s now accessible enough to run a LLM on a Raspberry Pi smarter than the original ChatGPT (November 2022). A modest desktop or laptop supports even smarter AI. It’s also private, offline, unlimited, and registration-free. The technology is improving at breakneck speed, and information is outdated in a matter of months. This article snapshots my practical, hands-on knowledge and experiences — information I wish I had when starting. Keep in mind that I’m a LLM layman, I have no novel insights to share, and it’s likely I’ve misunderstood certain aspects. In a year this article will mostly be a historical footnote, which is simultaneously exciting and scary.

SIDKick is a versatile sound device for C64s and C128s: it serves as a drop-in replacement for the SID 6581/8580 sound chips, and at the same time provides Sound Expander-emulation (Yamaha OPL-based FM sound), a MIDI interface and can control LED stripes. It is based on a Teensy 4.1 and makes no compromises with regard to quality: the emulation is based on reSID and fmOPL. It also comes with a few extras.

By enforcing the lack of local state, we can ensure that state lives somewhere more appropriate - a queue, a database, an object store and so on. This makes coordination significantly easier - shared-nothing services can be thrown away, scaled up and down without having to worry about state.

CLI for SQLite Databases with auto-completion and syntax highlighting

I’ve been having quite a bit of fun with the fairly recent LivePortrait model, generating deepfakes of my friends for some cheap laughs.

let’s spend some time looking at disclosures (<details> and <summary>), the Dialog API, the Popover API, and more. We’ll look at the right time to use each one depending on your needs. Modal or non-modal? JavaScript or pure HTML/CSS? Not sure? Don’t worry, we’ll go into all that.

With interviews of Commodore engineers and with its insightful look at C64 games, music, and software, from Summer Games to International Karate to Simons' BASIC, Too Much Fun will appeal to those who used a Commodore 64, those interested in the history of computing and video games and computational literacy, or just those who wish their technological devices would last longer.

Tarot isn’t just for divination—it’s also a great way to connect to your creativity. Discover how tarot can help you stay inspired and make your best work with this practical guidebook.

Did you know? You can self-host and/or mirror almost all of Bluesky's infrastructure today!

The game’s setting is a truly unique twist on the genre, featuring action figure toys engaged in friendly battles within a young boy’s bedroom. These battles are fueled by the imagination of children, creating a hidden world where these toys come to life. The plot intensifies with the introduction of a powerful new toy, whose elitist views lead to a head-to-head clash with the older knock-off toys. The destiny of imagination rests in your hands.

In this video we will take a deeper look into the Colmi Bluetooth Smart Ring R02 and its SoC

In November of 2022, Eye of the Beholder for C64 and C128 dropped like a dragon roar heard 'round the realm. In this video I demonstrate what is one of the best ways to fully enjoy this incredible gaming experience. I use vintage hardware with a touch of modernity for the storage option.

Anyway, in this video I demonstrate what - for me - is the ultimate way to play this incredible game. In fact, I'll say it. I think it is easily the greatest game ever made for the C128. And, in my opinion, the C128 is the best way to play it - rather than the much more common C64 - for several reasons.

Gadgetbridge is a free and open source Android application that allows you to pair and manage various gadgets such as smart watches, bands, headphones, and more without the need for the vendor application. So in short, you can use Gadgetbridge instead of relying on your gadget's own proprietary app.

At Storybook, we believe there’s still hope. For months we’ve been building Storybook Test, a tool for fast, flake-free UI tests. And we’re finally ready to share it with you.

I know I have a tendency to classify anything I love as "Punk", in the same way a child calls any tall, nice-smelling presence "Mom", BUT! I feel like homemade websites are a type of Punk. And I know it feels premature to say that basic HTML competency is a type of folk craft, but I'm not sure what else to call it.

Generators are an odd part of the JavaScript language. And some people find them a bit of a puzzle. You might be a successful developer for decades and never feel the need to reach for them. Which raises the question, if you can go so long without ever needing them, what are they good for?

Today we are incredibly excited to announce full support for Node.js/Bun in @wasmer/sdk, after one member of our community asked about it on Wasmer’s Discord a few weeks ago.

Can some chargers damage my device? Yes. Not all, but definitely some. The damage is caused by the RG35XX Plus mistakenly detecting that some USB C chargers are an external device (like a USB gamepad) that needs power, and trying to apply 5V to the charger itself. This can result in either or both the RG35XX Plus and the charger to heat up - sometimes just a bit, sometimes enough to damage components or the nearby battery. Read below for an explanation about how this happens. If I want to be safe, what chargers are definitely going to be okay to use? Anything that uses a cable with USB A on one end, and USB C on the other. The voltage and current rating of the charger itself makes no difference. This doesn't mean that no other setups will work (for instance, most tethered USB C chargers, or non e-marked C<->C cables will), but using an A<->C cable is the only straightforward way for most people to be sure. Is there a mod to enable charging on all USB C chargers? Yes, but you lose the ability to power other devices from the USB C port on the RG35XX Plus, and it involves soldering tiny SMD components. Is this relevant to other RG35XX family devices? Probably, but I don't know - I've only had a look at the RG35XX Plus. Specifically, mine is marked as a "RG35XX Plus V6.0, 2024-01-09" inside on the PCB.

A free and full featured gcode platform used for interfacing with advanced CNC controllers like GRBL , FluidNC, TinyG, g2core and Smoothieware. Universal Gcode Sender is a self-contained Java application which includes all external dependencies and can be used on most computers running Windows, MacOSX or Linux.

That dream stuck with me, and after years of being a professional web developer I started learning NES development. (I got a strong nudge in the right direction from Nathan Altice’s excellent I Am Error.) I Am Error. It was hard to know where to begin. There were plenty of resources around the internet, but they were all incomplete or inaccurate in some way. I got started with bunnyboy’s “Nerdy Nights” series on the NintendoAge forums. Then I found tepples’ NROM template on GitHub, and started learning the ca65 assembler. After months of struggling to understand PPU writes, attribute tables, and scroll registers, it all started to click. I’m glad that I had the experience of fighting with these concepts to learn on my own, but I wish that I could have had a guide that started from scratch and taught all of the essentials of NES development.

Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially threatening collective action problems facing our nation, let alone actually solve them.

In a recent post I talked about how I was able to quickly create a sideways scrolling arcade game with the help of Amazon Q Developer. I was talking to a few folk online who had got in touch to know more, and the subject turned to whether Amazon Q Developer could write a different kind of game, one that would run on the first computer I ever owned, the Commodore 64. Well there was only one way to find out, so I spent around an hour experimenting and this post is what I learned. Buckle up for some retro computing fun!

HTML Forms have powerful validation mechanisms, but they are heavily underused. In fact, not many people even know much about them. Is this because of some flaw in their design? Let’s explore.

Interestingly, all of the things that used to annoy me about Ruby and Rails now annoy me much, much, much less. I have accepted that there is no perfect language or framework. You just have to know its strengths and weaknesses and deal with them. Luckily, there are some really good frameworks out there for people who want to focus on building a good product. I think Rails is probably one of the best, but there are a lot of other long-lived frameworks with lots of active contributors that are probably just as good. It might still be worth it to choose a more exotic language, framework or to dive in and write your own. If only for the opportunity to learn these kinds of lessons on your own.

Surprisingly, this is not a depressing listening experience. There is something so cathartically bleak about Songs of a Lost World, so epically pessimistic and emotionally wrought, that the results are perversely invigorating, transmuting powerful feelings of loss, grief, anxiety, anger and self-doubt into a work of such grandeur it leaves the listener strangely exhilarated and uplifted. Like shaking a fist at an approaching hurricane, it is an album that’s very existence evokes defiance of terrible forces of destruction. In embracing darkness, Smith offers a potent Cure for the blues.

The srcdoc property of the HTMLIFrameElement specifies the content of the page.

Inspired by the CD-ROM library feature, I decided to investigate what it would take to add a “Macintosh Garden” drawer to the site. The goal was to allow any item in the Garden’s catalog to be loaded into the emulated Mac with one click (at least for the versions that support “The Outside World”, which is most from System 7 to Mac OS 9). I reached out to the Garden’s maintainer, who was on board with the project and even provided a JSON dump of the site’s catalog of 20,000 applications and games. Building the UI was a fun exercise in making the CD-ROM drawer into a reusable component - another contribution to my collection of Classic- and Platinum-themed UI controls.

A collection of one-off actions that improve your life continuously — however marginally.

After the previous effect, I am trying another concept of 3D parallax effect with a better illusion!

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in generating text, benefiting from extensive training on vast textual corpora. However, LLMs may also acquire unwanted behaviors from the diverse and sensitive nature of their training data, which can include copyrighted and private content. Machine unlearning has been introduced as a viable solution to remove the influence of such problematic content without the need for costly and time-consuming retraining. This process aims to erase specific knowledge from LLMs while preserving as much model utility as possible. Despite the effectiveness of current unlearning methods, little attention has been given to whether existing unlearning methods for LLMs truly achieve forgetting or merely hide the knowledge, which current unlearning benchmarks fail to detect. This paper reveals that applying quantization to models that have undergone unlearning can restore the "forgotten" information. To thoroughly evaluate this phenomenon, we conduct comprehensive experiments using various quantization techniques across multiple precision levels. We find that for unlearning methods with utility constraints, the unlearned model retains an average of 21\% of the intended forgotten knowledge in full precision, which significantly increases to 83\% after 4-bit quantization. Based on our empirical findings, we provide a theoretical explanation for the observed phenomenon and propose a quantization-robust unlearning strategy to mitigate this intricate issue...

It is nightmarish to me to read reports of how reliant on ChatGPT students have become, even outsourcing to the machines the ideally very personal assignment "briefly introduce yourself and say what you're hoping to get out of this class." It is depressing to me to read defenses of those students, particularly this one that compares an AI-written essay to using a washing machine in that it reduces the time required for the labor. This makes sense only if the purpose of a student writing an essay is "to have written an essay," which it is not. The teacher did not assign it as busywork. The purpose of an essay is to learn and practice communication skills, critical thinking, organization of one's own thoughts. These are useful skills to develop, even (especially!) if you do not go into a writing career.

Thousands of Dubliners showed up for the city's much-anticipated Halloween parade on Thursday evening. They lined the streets from Parnell Street to Christchurch Cathedral, waiting for the promised three-hour parade that would "[transform] Dublin into a lively tapestry of costumes, artistic performances, and cultural festivities." A likely story. There was no parade, and never was one.

In recent years, a new wave of peer-reviewed research indicates that launching a business can dramatically reduce stress and improve physical and mental health. That revelation first gained traction with a groundbreaking paper published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. In it, researchers compared a nationally representative sample of employees and entrepreneurs on various health factors, including blood pressure, physician visits, physical and mental illness, and overall well-being. The results overwhelmingly favored entrepreneurs, who evidenced significantly lower blood pressure and hypertension rates, fewer hospital visits, and reduced incidence of physical and mental illnesses. How can starting a business, which many justifiably consider a massive and nerve-wracking undertaking, possibly reduce stress?

USB Insight Hub plugs into your computer through a USB Type-C connector and exposes three USB 3.0 downstream ports, each with a 1.3-inch screen that displays relevant information about the attached device. That information includes operating system enumeration name (COMx, TTYx, or drive letter), voltage, and current. USB Insight Hub also allows you to control the individual activation and deactivation of the D+/D- USB 2 data lines to force enumeration and control the power of each downstream device. A small application running on the host computer extracts USB information from the operating system and sends it to the Hub over USB.

I’ve used URL text fragments in a few posts now and often use it outside of this blog to point someone to a particular piece of text on a page. They’re a really useful feature that allows you to create a URL that links not just to a page or an anchor on that page, but specifically to a bit of text that you’d like to call out to your audience.

Gatus was made to monitor everything, in every possible way. HTTP, GraphQL, DNS, ICMP/PING, TCP, certificate expiration, you name it. While checking the response status may be enough for some use cases, Gatus goes much further and allows you to add conditions on the response time, the response body and even the IP address.

You don't need a Raspberry Pi any more! Re-use an obsolete mobile phone in electronics projects and program it like an Arduino.

Sequoia 15.1 now hard-locks out any app that is not approved by Apple, including a bunch of my old and well used utilities. They can be made to run by hacking underneath in BSD, but the situation is unsatisfactory for a computer that I consider is MINE.

Many MacOS users are probably used by now to the annoyance that comes with unsigned applications, as they require a few extra steps to launch them. This feature is called Gatekeeper and checks for an Apple Developer ID certificate. Starting with MacOS Sequoia 15, the easy bypassing of this feature with e.g. holding Control when clicking the application icon is now no longer an option, with version 15.1 disabling ways to bypass this completely. Not unsurprisingly, this change has caught especially users of open source software like OpenSCAD by surprise, as evidenced by a range of forum posts and GitHub tickets.

Chat on IRC from any client, keep message history between devices, share files and photos over chat.

my personal website runs on a bespoke dynamic site generator i coded from scratch. but why? what lead me to designing and programming it? what can you do with it? and how can it be transformed into a tool for everyone to use? a deep dive into Deer Text Format, why it exists, and what lies in its future.

I don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted. My rule – I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs – is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.

StarSubculture is an online community space where creatives can showcase their websites and art and interact with a like-minded community as well as keep up with their favorite artists and websites! In this era of the internet, it’s become near-impossible to connect to other creative website owners. Here at StarSubculture, you’re free to cultivate that community that the internet is so desperately needing.

Oasis takes in user keyboard input and generates real-time gameplay, including physics, game rules, and graphics. You can move around, jump, pick up items, break blocks, and more. There is no game engine; just a foundation model.

'Infinite Health', out now on Ninja Tune

Cruft Manor has Halloween traditions every year: 1. We give out full size candies 2. Make a listing of all costumes 3. Make a timelapse movie

I wanted to put together all my learning and build a music player for the RC2014. This will run using my RC2014 Classic 2 computer. It uses the LCD Driver Module, and the YM2149 Sound Card Module from Z80Kits. In addition, it also uses my ROM board, and of course the Rotary Encoder Module.

Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh and NeXT system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a (modern) web browser.