This is a detective story about how a car was stolen - and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft. It begins with a tweet. In April 2022, my friend Ian Tabor tweeted that vandals had been at his car, pulling apart the headlight and unplugging…

Blog about Software Engineering

Huawei’s in-house Magneto-Electric Disk (MED) archive storage technology development combines an SSD with a Huawei-developed tape drive.

A passive recording project allows you to have complete control over your data. Automatically take screenshots of all your screens, index them, and save them locally. - arkohut/pensieve

Hat tip to profiling and flamegraphs

A new study published today in Nature Geoscience by Dr Andrew Jarvis at Lancaster University and Professor Piers Forster at the University of Leeds shows that humans may have already caused 1.5 °C of global warming when measured from a time genuinely before…

Note: This got and got some attention.

This post is not advice, it's what's working for me.

It's easy to pick up bad habits and hard to create good o...

The farthest spacecraft in the universe went momentarily rogue, but scientists breathed a sigh of relief when it reconnected at an unexpected radio frequency

Here I’ll try to explain the coolest ideas in each of AlphaProof’s IMO 2024 solutions. AlphaProof produces proofs in Lean, and each Lean proof is composed of a series of tactics. So I’ll pick out the tactics that correspond to these ideas in the proofs for…

Some sentences just sound awkward. In order to ensure clarity, writers need to consider more than just grammar: weight is equally important. In the following extract from Making Sense, acclaimed linguist David Crystal shows how sentence length (and weight)…

In the 2024 EF English Proficiency Index, Japan was ranked 92nd, down from 87 the previous year. It was its worst showing yet.

Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.

Rule 1: Manage them.

Northwestern researchers found that a smartphone app using sensory cues significantly increased lucid dream frequency. Participants experienced nearly triple their usual rate of lucid dreams, showing that the Targeted Lucidity Reactivation method is effective…

A modular web framework for C, inspired by kernel modules. Dynamically upload and compile C code at runtime to build REST APIs, WebSocket services, and more. Includes support for JSON (Jansson), SQ...

Wireless and firmware hacking, PhD life, Technology

Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, and Claude are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a...