TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side…

That is

The popular free software project “youtube-dl” was removed from Github on Friday following a legal notice from the Recording Industry Association of America claiming it violates copyright law. The tool is widely used by journalists for various reporting purposes.

My work brings me though a lot of software correctness techniques, things like type theory, test-driven development (TDD), and formal methods. The surrounding communities all have the same problem: they can’t get people using these techniques. They all ask…

Creating Linux for Apple Silicon Macs

This browser caching change kills the utility of cross-site resource CDNs like Google Fonts.

In this video we will take an in depth look at the fast inverse square root and see where the mysterious number 0x5f3759df comes from. This algorithm became famous after id Software open sourced the engine for Quake III. On the way we will also learn about…

There's a Twitter account I like called @happyautomata, which periodically posts randomly-generated finite-state machines. Followers of this account make a hobby of turning the FSMs into regular expressions. This is always possible, because (strictly regular)…

So, you want to work in ad tech, do you? Perhaps this will be a cautionary tale…
I have worked my entire life as a contractor. This has had advantages and disadvantages. For example, I am free to set my own schedule, and undertake engagements at my own leisure…

As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.

More or less the title this time, but first, a story about SIMD. There are three
levels of understanding how SIMD works (well, at least I am level 3 at the moment):

This memo contains the thoughts and recountings of events that
transpired during and after the release of information about the United States National Security Agency (NSA)
by Edward Snowden in 2013. There are four perspectives: that of someone
who was…

The strangest hardware problem I've ever had to debug.

As the community struggles to define open source AI, it battles unprecedented complexity.