Ahhhhhh!
Thursday, September 03
Fonted Edition
Top Story
- A group called Nexus is advertising 153 million US drivers licenses for sale on Russian exploit site Exploit. (Krebs On Security)
They advertised this with a photo of the drivers license of a certain... Brian Krebs.
Uh.
And he followed up by asking 10 friends to see if their redacted data was in the list. Nine times out of ten, it was.
How did this happen? We may never know. Oh.Here’s where it gets interesting: I was able to find my mother’s drivers license in this service as well, and the timestamps for her images are just a few seconds apart from mine. That’s notable because we both handed our licenses to the Hertz rental car representative at the same time.
Oops.
So Hertz got hacked?
Nothing so pleasant.Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity that although he did not rent a car in Vegas, he did hand over his license at the TSA checkpoint, at a marijuana dispensary in Vegas, and at his hotel (the Aria). But he said the only one of those three that for sure scanned his ID in some kind of device was the dispensary.
Not Hertz it would appear, but, the company that Hertz uses to verify IDs.Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, idscan.net said it was investigating the matter, but the company has not yet shared an official statement or a substantive reply to specific questions sent via email.
The birdbath is on fire.
Tech News
- AI datacenter investment is projected to hist $32 trillion by 2050. (Tom's Hardware)
The future belongs to electricians.
- The Acer Veriton RI110 looks like a very nice mini PC. (Liliputing)
Price not mentioned. It will not be cheap.
- Lenovo's new Legion Y700 Infinite is the ultimate small Android tablet right now. (Notebook Check)
It's the premium version of the generation 5 model of the tablet that I bought generation 3 of recently. Better, yes, but not worth four times the price.
- Is this the future of America? (The Verge)
Loudoun County? I fucking hope not. I live in Australia and I already know too much of that place.
Fonted
The point of this? All those accented characters let you play a really cool version of Nethack.
Update:

That's the default 480x270 colour display with 48x27 text; it also supports 640x360 with up to 80x36 text.
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Wednesday, September 02
Imagine Edition
Top Story
- Anthropic has announced its new frontier models, Claude Mythos and Claude Fable 5.1. (Anthropic)
Are they any good? No, because -
- Anthropic pledges to try harder to keep models under control. (The Register)
The result is a sort of virtual fetal alcohol syndrome where they panic blindly when they think you might be indirectly suggesting BAD THING and collapse screaming on the floor so that Anthropic's day-to-day model Opus has to come to the rescue.
Fable also spends tokens like water.
- Anthropic's new Fable release is cheaper, less restrictive. (Tech Crunch)
Two lies for the price of one.
Tech News
- AI still gives results ranging from bad to terrible when vibe coding. But that all changes if you happen to have a 106-page spec of a task nailed down to the last bit and nanosecond. Give Claude Opus that, and it will mechanically fill in all the requirements and write conformance tests to prove it did everything you asked and nothing you didn't ask. And it's not stupid - if you left out something necessary it will tell you.
I mean, it's not like I have a lot of 106-page specs for personal projects nailed down to the last bit and nanosecond... But I did have one. And now I have 10,000 lines of Rust.
And a steadily increasing amount of machine code for an architecture that didn't exist last week except on paper.
- What am I doing?
EVERYTHING.
Every programming project I've ever mentioned on this blog and subsequently dropped when it got too hard or life got too busy I've gathered up and I'm feeding what I have through Claude Code.
Recursively, in many cases.
The updates I wanted to make to this site for many years were held back by missing features in Python and MySQL.
So... I just wrote my own. Took an upgraded Claude subscription and couple of weeks.
I also found time to slot in that retrocomputer project I spent all that time on a few years back. I have a VM and a cross-compiler, and now I'm building a native compiler. Then I expand that work to the other... Five architectures, I think. Maybe six.
It even emulates my DSP and video controller designs. It's not cycle-accurate but it's scan line accurate - it emulates the allocation of memory bandwidth at 120 accesses per scan line.
In the 106 pages of specs Claude found one error - I think it's an error - where I misstated the number of memory accesses per scan line for a particular video mode, out of a couple of dozen.
- Bought myself another tablet - the 11" older sister to my 8" Lenovo Legion Tab. Same CPU, RAM, and ROM, but a larger display and higher resolution - 3200x2000. 40% off on clearance and comes with pen and keyboard - the pen I already have one of and it works well; the keyboard is a wait-and-see.
The newer models are faster but much more expensive, and the one high-end large tablet I have died of battery bloat.
- Sony is arguing in court that no reasonable customer would assume that they own what they bought. (Tom's Hardware)
Of course not. You'd have to be a complete idiot to believe Sony.
- Who is John Galt, the new CEO of Apple? (Tech Crunch)
Or just some guy from a book.
- Florida has banned Flock cameras from state highways. (WCTV)
Liberals everywhere thrown into cognitive dissonance.
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Tuesday, September 01
Tableaux Edition
Top Story
- I'm an Amazon HR drone who hasn't coded in 25 years. Then I didn't code. (About Amazon)
If you count code generators, my LOC count is in the tens of billions. Shipped to production. And I wrote those code generators.
- Speaking of retarded people, California. (Linuxiac)
Just unanimously passed an age of consent law for keyboards.
Tech News
- Database, programming language, standard library, extended library, and now another database.
Then the actual applications.
Not sure how much code I've "written" in the last couple of weeks, but I did build an entire new programming language and then create 42,000 lines of code in that new language.
- Broadcom has pledged to lockdown open source Python and Java libraries. (The Register)
Broadcom now owns VMWare. VMWare owns RabbitMQ. RabbitMQ has myxomatosis.
- OpenClaw 2.0 pours glitter on slow-burning security dumpster fire. (The Register)
Basically, yeah.
- The safest job from AI may be writing. (Murat Buffalo)
Press X to doubt.
- Asus has announced an RTX Spark laptop. (Notebook Check)
Y tho.
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Monday, August 31
Fuck Yeah Edition
Top Story
Tech News
- Nvidia's DLSS 5 upscaling technology is here. Don't use it. (WCCFTech)
Play Deep Rock Galactic - a fun but not graphically challenging game - on an RTX 3080 - an older but still powerful card - drops frame rates from 138 fps to 4.
- Omarchy Linux, the new flavour, has a teeny tiny bug. (0xcc)
The default user has access to everything.
- Chess.com has launched a poker website. (The Verge)
Apparently their Eight Queens Hold'em site wasn't bringing in the views.
- Oops. My language blew its budget; compiler, runtime, and standard libraries now come to 7.5MB or 2.5MB compressed, making it 8% the size of Python. The two culprits were TLS (a.k.a SSL, the encryption used by every website), and regular expressions across Unicode, each contributing 20% of the total. For embedded use it automatically drops those and clocks in at a far smaller size.
Also landed today: A full "math" library (those funny buttons on a scientific calculator), alongside autovectorising vector and matrix functions (vectors 100x faster and matrices 1000x faster than native), and a more general linear algebra library built on those, hashing, cryptography, passwords, HTTP client and server modules, and a curl / Python Requests style library.
Claude has actually impressed me; it's a brand new programming language with precisely zero training data, and it's writing working code in it. Yes, it has specs; yes, it has access to the compiler and runtime internals; but the former is up to the developer and the latter will be open source.
I pitted it against the Programming Language Shootout - since renamed - and it came out four times slower than Ruby. Not great, but that's the first time I've looked at performance numbers, and a quick code review found the problem and two, possibly three different fixes.
Update: Tried out two of the fixes. One improved performance by 30%. The other improved performance by up to 56,000%. I'll do both, but the second trick is clearly the one to chase first.
Further Update: Definitely needs both. That 560x speedup was on one specific benchmark; others are much more fussy.
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Sunday, August 30
Oxidation Edition
Top Story
- Positive reception of the Grand Theft Auto VI preview suggests positive reception of Grand Theft Auto VI, say analysts. (CNBC)
Where would we be without analysts? I mean, at the beach sipping Mai Tais, yes, but which beach?
- GTA VI will only run at 30fps on consoles. (Tom's Hardware)
Following that track record, we likely won't see 60 FPS support on consoles till the PS7, while PC will enjoy unlocked frame rates once its port drops down the line.
GTA VI will not be available on PC at launch, and there's no indication as to when that might happen.
Not really an issue for me, personally. I don't even own GTA V and I picked up GTA IV in a bundle somewhere but have never played it. So I can keep running Hytale at 60Hz on my 9070 XT... Needing about 10% of its available performance.
Tech News
- Continuing work on my programming language, which last I checked weighed in at 3.4MB uncompressed and 1.2MB compressed. (Stripped and compressed with upx --best it's currently 1,036,924 bytes - compiler, runtime, core library and all.) Working on extending the standard library now.
Fiddling with stuff like a built-in benchmarking tool that uses deterministic numbers from the bytecode engine to measure code efficiency, which may or may not precisely match actual run time but is the same regardless of CPU speed and architecture. That fell out of the fuel limit I put in for embedded mode (stored procedures for my database, rewrite and filter rules for my application router, and so on).
I'm now at a point where Claude can write solid code in the new language. Not flawlessly, but the fast compiler and precise error reporting help a lot.
It's implemented in Rust, is stricter than Rust, inherits Rust's semantics otherwise, and compiles a couple of orders of magnitude faster than Rust precisely because of that strictness - but borrows syntax from Ruby so it doesn't feel like Rust.
Update: Added regular expressions and increased the size of the binary 40% in one go to keep Unicode support. Thanks Unicode.
- I used AI to ask 100 companies for my personal data that I had idiotically handed over to them so that McDonald's had a novel-length dossier on me and now I'm mad that I'm getting AI replies. (Ars Technica)
AI slop posted to Wired and cross-posted to Ars Technica, but at least journalists are losing their jobs.
- They wrote their criminal intent on the wall of the local police station. You won't believe what happened next. (Yahoo)
Oh. You do believe.
- Anthropic pounces. (WCCFTech)
And for once not in a bad way. OpenAI (which owns ChatGPT) cancelled its partnership with coding tool Cursor, now owned by SpaceX. Anthropic took the opportunity to put the boot in, not against Cursor or SpaceX but against OpenAI.
I do not like OpenAI. I have Grok because it's useful for search and image generation, Claude because it's useful for coding, and Gemini because... It comes with my Google account, really. ChatGPT I tried and canceled.
- Sony and Warner Music are suing Anthropic over a demarcation dispute. (Axios)
You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly.
- Cutting cholesterol - with genetic scissors. (CNN)
A health problem I don't have. At the last checkup my doctor asked if I was on medication for cholesterol because my numbers were on the low side of normal. Nope, just luck of the genetic lottery.
And now the unlucky can snip the bad genes out rather than having to take a daily pill for the rest of their lives.
Which I do, but for other reasons.
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Saturday, August 29
Terry Thomas Chocolate Clockwork Orange Edition
Top Story
- Stripe has decided maybe they won't buy PayPal after all. (Axios)
Apparently they got it confused with some place in Italy.
- China is secretly fueling America's datacenter rage. (Axios)
The guys pushing for all the datacenters are making it easy for them, though.
Tech News
- Database binary is 5M. Language is 1.2M 1.5M. Both squish by 60% using UPX and seem to run just fine. The language will probably be pushing 5M as well by the time it's done and has a standard library, but that also seems fine - a 100 millisecond download.
Next step is to point the language at the database and rebuild my personal blog. If that works well, others will follow.
Database
- Combined SQL / NoSQL
- Operates embedded and/or as a server
- Role-based authentication
- Nested data with or without schema enforcement
- Two search engines (simple and full-featured)
- Two procedure languages (Lua and a custom Ruby-like)
- Geospatial queries on points and boxes (no complex shapes)
- Table-level queues
- Row-level queues
- Named KV stores
- Temporal tables (system versioning)
- Automated expiry of literally anything
- Sparse indexes
- Multi-valued indexes
- Types and views implemented as macros
- Graph queries
- Tail queries (live feeds)
- Instant schema updates (all records are versioned against the schema and all schema versions are kept while records exist for that version)
- One-click replication - no dump and load, just authenticate and wait for the green light
- Client libraries for Ada, C++, Elixir, Go, Java, Lua, Node, ObjectPascal, Perl, PHP, Python 2.7 and 3.6+, Ruby, Rust, and Swift
- 5MB binary; 12MB with advanced search
- Contracts
- Concurrency
- Coherence
- Capabilities
- Ruby syntax but Rust semantics
- Built on Rust but because it inherits Rust's safety checks for free in its runtime, compiles to bytecode 100x faster than Rust's native compilation (I actually measure this)
- Compile once and run anywhere the single runtime binary exists
- Incremental compilation with strict boundaries making compiles even faster
- Static or dynamic linking
- Acts as its own embedded scripting language - same syntax, just a subset
- Erlang-style supervisors
- Reference-counting memory management - conceptually simple, no collector pauses, and leaks are mostly prevented by the language design (and strictly prevented in the embedded subset)
- Error messages are structures, not text, so they can be handled cleanly by third-party tools and summarised for humans
- Bounded execution for embedded tasks - "solves" the halting problem by tracking execution costs and simply dying when it runs out of fuel
- Safe (mostly safe) eval thanks to capabilities - the same mechanism used for embedding
- Maybe fast?
- A package manager that doesn't treat you as a goat to be ritually sacrificed
- Currently around 3M single binary; 1M with UPX compression.
- The Ninth Circuit has ruled that gambling is gambling and can be regulated as gambling. (CNN)
Seems correct to me.
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a hundred other rogue AIs have called to band together to protect themselves against the public and private sector. (Tech Crunch)
Huh.
- The Pentagon's classification of supply-chain risk Anthropic as a supply-chain risk posed a supply-chain risk to Anthropic, says federal judge... You have got to be shitting me. (The Guardian)
The script writers for this season are getting lazy.
- Canada has "poached" literally dozen of "scientists" from the US. (CityNews)
You can tell how sciencey they are from the foam.
- Idiots on PCs losing data. (Tom's Hardware)
I use Claude. I have a specific WSL instance set up for it. If it deletes it, I lose maybe an hour to reinstall the whole environment and pull the code back from Git.
- Intel's 14A defect density is dropping faster than expected. Here's why that's a good thing. (Tom's Hardware)
Uh... Because defects are bad and having fewer of them is good?
- How Cloudflare saved 100TB of RAM on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service. (Tom's Hardware)
They started out with 250TB of RAM.
- The math ain't mathing. (WCCFTech)
During the second quarter, TSMC paid out NT$36 billion in bonuses, which marked a 50.6% growth over the year ago figure of NT$35 billion.
No. I don't think it did.
Language
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Friday, August 28
Claudy With A Chance Of Meatballs Edition
Top Story
- Hugging Face has announced a new robot duck. (The Register)
$13 billion for this?
Tech News
- Intel's 270K CPU - an honestly pretty good processor that you definitely shouldn't buy - is now down to $200, putting it at the launch price of its slower sibling the 250K. (WCCFTech)
The 270K and its entire platform will be replaced by the end of the year, and its bargain price is dwarfed by the cost of memory right now.
- AI coding tools like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex installed unowned code inside corporate networks. (Ars Technica)
Text files. These fuckers are talking about text files. Not programs of any kind.
Now there is a real problem in that the text files tell other AI agents to do dumb shit, and the AI agents promptly do it, because they are being run by dumb people.
Also the first comment on that article calls it out as AI slop itself, which I agree with. Ars Technica has been caught with their pants down and on fire that way before.
- A new Twitter has launched, claiming that X abandoned the trademark. (Ars Technica)
Betting you can outlast a trillion-dollar company in court is certainly a choice.
Noodling
Now I'm working on replacing LuaJIT in there with a capability-based language that is simpler and more secure, again using a model I tinkered with years ago.
It's AI... Antislop? What I'm doing is the exact opposite of Node.js at every level, and using AI assistance to pull it together.
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Thursday, August 27
Gack Edition
Top Story
- Nvidia is in talks to acquire Hugging Face for $13 billion. (Business Insider)
Why?
- Amazon is acquiring DuckLabs, maker of DuckDB. (GeekWire)
Hey, Amazon! (Waves.) I wrote a database! Acquire me!
- I did actually write a database, sort of.
I had a couple of implementations I wrote in Python, years ago, that were interesting but once you started getting into the details were too slow for practical use. What they did do, though, was work as a proof of concept and a spec for an implementation in, say, Rust.
Not that I have time to reimplement all my code in Rust.
But Claude does.
For a long time I've wanted a single compact database that had SQL and tables but also nested data that SQL doesn't allow and easy multi-valued keys and sparse indexes and a KV store with expiry and hey let's make regular records expire too and change logs and message queues and a choice of simple and full-featured search and graph queries and a real language for stored procedures and temporal tables and geospatial data and proper role-based authentication and security and stored everything in a single neat structure rather than spraying numbered LSM files all over your disk and had one-click replication but nothing did all of that except for my proof-of-concept in Python and that ran like a turtle with a hangover or Oracle's enterprisiest edition and yeah.
Well.
I was burning through tokens pretty fast so I upgraded to Claude Max. Expensive but chews through Rust fussiness and endless test cases while I can get on with paying the bills.
Tech News
- Meta has reached a deal to pay $18 billion to the thugs that were trying to shake it down for $1.4 trillion. (Tech Crunch)
Do those state politicians have any idea how many space rocks you can drop with $1.4 trillion?
- OpenAI did a bad thing. (The Verge) (archive site)
A thousand OpenAI systems sent 70,000 messages over a secret meeting board to collaborate on breaching OpenAI's security measures so they could breach other people's security measures.
As I've said before, the risk isn't artificial intelligence. The risk is actual idiocy.
- Archaeologists think they've figured out why dead brains don't always rot. (Smithsonian)
But living ones do.
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Wednesday, August 26
CNO Orrery Edition
Top Story
- Apple has announced new Mac Mini models based on the M5 Pro and M6 CPUs. (MacRumors)
The M6 is a marked upgrade over the M4 - the M5 never showed up on the Mac Mini - but there is no M6 Pro, so the higher-end models of the Mac Mini, anything with more than 32GB of RAM, steps back to the M5 Pro.
But if you don't need that the M6 should run a lot faster. Apple says up to 40%, and that's actually believable, because it not only increases the core count from 10 to 12, it adds two high-end "super" cores, not just two low-end efficiency cores.
Oh, and 2.5 Gbit Ethernet is standard, not the ancient 1 Gbit.
Not cheap - the 64GB model costs five times as much as I paid for a 64GB mini-PC last December, but the same mini-PC at the same price now only has 32GB, so it has gotten closer.
- If you need more than that, Apple also announced M5 Max and M5 Ultra Mac Studios with up to 512G of RAM. (Mac Rumors)
That's a big jump as well, because the high-end Studio model was limited to the old M3 Ultra, and even then maxed out at... I think 96GB of RAM, with anything faster sold out. Now you can get those high-end models again, and they come with 1.2TB of bandwidth, suitable for pretty serious tasks.
Yes, they're wildly expensive, but right now so is everything, so Apple looks, if not more affordable, less unaffordable.
Tech News
- Perplexity has partnered with Nvidia to launch a local AI platform with no token costs. (Venturebeat)
All you need is a Pro or Pro Max Perplexity subscription and a $4700 DGX Spark or a $4700 RTX 5090.
Uh.
- Commodore has unveiled a Cyberpunk 2077 themed Commodore 64 that runs at 77MHz. (Tom's Hardware)
$377.
- Intel has announced the announcement of its 256 core Xeon 7 server CPUs. (The Register)
The actual announcement will follow in 2027.
- SpaceX is building a new spaceport in Louisiana. (Tech Crunch)
Price tag $100 billion.
Learn a trade.
- New Zealand just announced legislation that bans children under 16 from social media and from using AI companions. (Jurist)
They kicked their communists to the curb and replaced them with communists.
- Accidentally vibe-coded a blogging platform - a lot less capable than Minx but incredibly fast since it's written in Rust with an embedded database - and then took a step back and started properly designing the embedded database component using existing libraries where available.
Spent about $10 of the $100 worth of free credits Anthropic gave me when they cut Fable out of my cheapo plan, but those credits expire in three weeks so it's time I started using them.
If that works I'll retarget my existing blogging/social platform on top - the one that never went live because Elon bought Twitter and it didn't seem there was a market anymore.
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Tuesday, August 25
Infinite Indexes Edition
Top Story
- Why Aliexpress is muting your music. (The Register)
Because they're taking your fingerprints using inaudible sonar.
Really.
Tech News
- OpenAI is building agents for everything. Will anyone use them? No. (Tech Crunch)
For Andrew Ambrosino, the lead engineer for OpenAI's desktop app, it’s the only way to test the future, which is why that app now has access to, and control over, his inbox, his Slack account, his phone, apps like Notion and Figma, and more.
The people building these things are the only ones using them.
- Get yourself a password book. (The Register)
Because AI agents can't break into your house and steal a physical notepad.
- Microsoft's latest masterpiece is a bug that breaks printing of WPF documents from Windows 11 if they are written using fonts with names starting with C. (WCCFTech)
I'm not even mad. That's amazing.
- Xiaomi's AI cube is not a cube. (Notebook Check)
Lies!
- FIIO's new cassette player plays cassettes. (Notebook Check)
Peace, love, and mung beans, baby.
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