Google Broke reCAPTCHA for De-Googled Android Users
The company that decides whether you're a bot now also requires you run its software to prove otherwise.
Code has always been worthless | Blog
For forty years we pretended software was the product. SaaS moved the price to the service. AI moved it past zero. The artefact is free now — what's worth paying for is knowing which code to write.
When is your birthday? - The Math Behind Hash Collisions
The mathematics behind why encryption works — and why it sometimes doesn’t.
The React2Shell Story
The story of CVE-2025-55182 (React2Shell)
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Growth Hacking was an awful idea
<p><i>By Mr. Market</i></p> <p>Brand has historically been considered an imprecise, flailing effort, only necessary once you hit a certain size and even the...
Human Typing Habits and Token Counts
Normal human habits like swapped letters, fillers, shorthand, pasted IDs, boundary whitespace, and nearby word forms can change token count without changing intent much.
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Humanity is self-deprecating
A year ago agents were good, but comparing them today is a folly. Today, agents effectively replace junior developers and companies have realized that. I ...
Pair Your Coding Agent with a Reviewer
The simplest improvement you can make to your agentic programming workflow is to run two agents instead of one. One writes code in its own worktree; the other, in a parallel worktree, reviews it. They share a task list and talk after every TDD cycle. The revie…
Engineering Intelligence from Autocomplete
LLMs don't think; they predict the next token. Discover the engineering tricks from RAG to Tree of Thoughts that force a simple autocomplete to behave intelligently.
My first corrupted hard drive problem
How I had to deal with a corrupted hard drive on a production server.
Can LLMs model real-world systems in TLA+?
Editors’ note: AI has been actively pushing the frontier of applied formal methods for computing systems. In this article, the Specula team wrote about their experience of evaluating LLMs on modeling system code, the basic capability for agentic model checking…
My Response to Open Web Censorship Calls-to-Action | Scott Larson
Fixing Markdown Syntax Is a Nightmare | mdview.io
Explore common Markdown syntax issues and solutions, focusing on rendering challenges across various dialects and fixing LaTeX and Mermaid errors effectively.
AI makes weak engineers less harmful
Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects along, the…
Beyond DevOps — Readables
On letting Claude run my infra, and what I saw on the other side.
Building a Harper Desktop App
We're dedicating the next month to just one thing: getting a Harper desktop app shipped.
Zed is pretty nice | blog.kronis.dev
My blog, where I attempt to collect my thoughts and share the occasional interesting topic with others
You gave me a u32. I gave you root. (io_uring ZCRX freelist LPE) · ze3ter
Linux 6.15 shipped a new zero-copy receive subsystem for io_uring called ZCRX. It manages a pool of network I/O vectors (niovs) using a stack: freelist[] holds available slot indices, free_count is the depth. There is no upper bound check on free_count. Two se…
C++ Style and Technique FAQ
Modified February 26, 2022
Crystal Gazing
Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged
In May 2026, Google announced “Google Cloud Fraud Defense - the next evolution of reCAPTCHA.” The announcement described a QR code challenge where users scan a
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taken.
A web page that tells you what your browser gave away the moment you arrived. No login, no form, no permission. Most pages do this. None of them tell you.
Introduction | Meshtastic
Discover Meshtastic: a community-driven, open-source project using LoRa radios for long-range, off-grid communication.
OpenAI's WebRTC Problem - Media over QUIC
Media over QUIC: There are ways to do voice AI without being traumatized by WebRTC.
HomePod mini feels like magic, but it's just good timing
Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago, in 2020. I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection. I know there are other speaker manufacturers…
Hi stranger
I'm at home, sitting on the kitchen table. I just took my boys to school and I'm about to start my work. I'm writing this message directly to you. And you are reading it. Hello!
Notes on incidents
Incidents are boring. Most of what you actually do during an incident is wait: for some other team to investigate, or for a deploy to finish, or for the result of some change to become apparent, or for someone else who’s been paged to come online. It’s stressf…
Natural Language Autoencoders
Turning Claude's thoughts into text
Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns
Building For The Future
This afternoon, we sent the following email to our global team. One of our core values at Cloudflare is transparency, and we believe it's important that you hear this directly from us because it’s a major moment at Cloudflare.
Honey, I shrunk the circuits!
Low-rank circuit conditioning makes an existing dense-model capability recoverable as a compact causal mask.
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I bought an analog watch and I love it
I recently bought a new watch. It's the Casio MQ24-9B. I got it for ~20€. Here are some picture of it: I didn't expect much from the watch. It's ext...
The four horsemen behind thousands of Postgres outages - malisper.me
Postgres is great, but there are some very common problems that people have that can pretty easily lead to outages with Postgres. These aren’t just theoretical issues. From talking to a lot of startups, these are the things that actually cause outages in produ…
Why Don’t Lowercase Letters Come Right After Uppercase Letters in ASCII? – Tyler Hillery
Something finally clicked for me. When looking at an ASCII table, you will notice that after the uppercase Z, there are a few other characters before lowercase a:
Therapy for Startup Founders — Dr. Jené Verchick
Licensed psychologist for experienced with technical founders. Depression, anxiety, burnout, isolation, relationship strain. 26+ years experience. Text me.
Number of tokens shouldn't be the only metric
John Wang's personal website
The Serial TTL connector we deserve
Goodbye dangling Dupont pins, hello Julet E-Bike connector. I have them now everywhere, from my router to my servers.
How to Choose Good Chocolate (Without Being Fooled) | Chof
How to choose good chocolate: read the wrapper, decode ingredients, fats, origin, and what cocoa percentage really means. By a certified taster and chocolate awards judge.
Plastic Flowers to Protect the Hive - phildini.dev
Pre-register hallucinated package names. Fill them with guardrails. The devastating spell becomes homework.
From Buffon's Needle to Buffon's Noodle
Bending the needle with geometric probability
Distractions | Ankshilp
Our age is age of distractions. Instant messages, notifications, breaking news, endless stories, cute pet videos, random comments on social media are all distractions of one form or other. These distractions are dividing our attention which is already in short…
How I Spent Half a Day Fixing a WordPress Charset Problem (and What I Learned) | Kruno Golubić
A WooCommerce site with an ERP integration in progress. The external developer reported a mixed encoding in the database: latin1, utf8mb3, and utf8mb4. ALTER TABLE looked like the right move. But it wasn't so.
Why Architecture Matters in Rails Applications
This is an adapted excerpt from Chapter 1 of Modular Rails: Architecture for the Long Game, my book on building maintainable Ruby on Rails applications using...
Lessons From 6 Years of Local Advocacy
Five lessons from 6 years of safe-streets, transit, and housing advocacy in my city — from why slow streets beat bike lanes to who actually shows up.
Idempotency Is Easy Until the Second Request Is Different | Dochia CLI Blog
Idempotency is not just an HTTP header or a key lookup. This article covers the failure cases that bite real APIs: different requests with the same key, concurrent retries, partial success, downstream uncertainty, response replay, expiry, and duplicate message…
Have you smiled at somebody today?
A smile is the prettiest thing a person could ever wear. When you smile you are sharing positive energy, Love and it’s infectious. Have you smiled at somebody today? Nothing is more precious …
Creating for a niche
The joys of a small, passionate audience