Has electricity decoupled from gas prices in Germany?
What does ”decoupled” mean? In a gas-dominated electricity market, the marginal generator setting the price is almost always a gas-fired power plant (CCGT). That means electricity prices are structurally linked to gas prices — when gas rises, electricity rises with it. Decoupling happens when enough zero-marginal-cost renewable generation (wind, solar) pushes gas off the margin […]
Dropping Cloudflare for Bunny.net
TL;DR my motivation and experience for moving my blog from Cloudflare to bunny.net I’ve been a long time Cloudflare user. They offer a solid service that is free for the vast majority of their users, that’s very generous. Their infrastructure is massive and their feature set is undeniably incredible. One of my biggest concerns though […]
Show HN: A cartographer’s attempt to realistically map Tolkien’s world
”I wisely started with a map…” J.R.R. TOLKIEN Welcome to the Atlas of Arda, a project aimed at celebrating Tolkien’s incredible work through hand-drawn cartography, artwork and illustrations that act as a reference to dive deeper into the beautiful world Tolkien created. A new map is released every month. […]
Show HN: Pion/handoff – Move WebRTC out of browser and into Go
Create WebRTC session in the browser—run it somewhere else WebRTC is the real-time communication technology used for real-time media streaming. Used for things like Google Meet, Discord and Zoom on the web. With Handoff you create your WebRTC session in the browser, but then move it to a process you control. This lets you do […]
AI may be making us think and write more alike
Artificial intelligence chatbots are standardizing how people speak, write and think. If this homogenization continues unchecked, it risks reducing humanity’s collective wisdom and ability to adapt, argue USC computer scientists and psychologists in an opinion paper published March 11 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The researchers — led by Morteza Dehghani, […]
DeiMOS – A Superoptimizer for the MOS 6502
DeiMOS A MOS 6502 Superoptimizer What is a Superoptimizer Anyway? A superoptimizer is a tool that seeks to generate the optimal machine code sequence for a given computational task, aiming for the shortest or fastest possible implementation. Unlike traditional compilers that apply a set of predefined optimization rules and heuristics to improve code efficiency, a […]
Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
I am a great lover of brutalist architecture. 1960’s concrete buildings may not be for everyone, but I love the aesthetic. I’ve made a laptop stand, to help me hack in true brutalist style. It has the characteristic beton brut (raw concrete) surface texture, and is quite possibly the heaviest laptop stand in the world. […]
We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is one of the most scrutinised codebases in history. Thousands of developers have read it. Academics have published papers on its reliability. Emulators run it instruction by instruction. We found a bug in it that had been missed for fifty-seven years: a resource lock in the gyro control code that […]
Breaking the console: a brief history of video game security
Video game security has always been a moving target, as consoles evolved to full-blown computing platforms locked down with layers of protection — but for every lock ever invented, there has always been someone determined to pick it. Being a video game fan myself, I never gave much thought to any of this until I […]
Blackholing My Email
In my own experience, it’s not particularly often that you find yourself asking your email provider to blackhole your primary, personal email address. But in 2002, a unique series of turn-of-the-millennium events had me doing exactly that to prevent our broadband account from being terminated. Back then, I was the owner of [email protected] – proudly […]