16-year-old SATA II SSD survives 1 petabyte of writes, 25x the drive’s rating
Everything in life has an expiry date, and that holds true even for the best SSDs on the market. A fascinating experiment conducted by the YouTube channel WolfyTech shows that SSDs are more durable than we think, even if they were released 16 years ago. Over the course of the experiment, the channel wrote one […]
Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server
[dhcp] → DHCPDISCOVER from b4:2e:99:01:5f:a3 (no PXE options from primary DHCP) [proxy] ← DHCPOFFER-PXE: next-server=bootimus, filename=ipxe.efi [tftp] → RRQ ipxe.efi (198 KiB, 14 ms) [http] → GET /menu.ipxe 200 2.1 KiB [menu] ↳ 17 images · 3 groups · 6 tools [menu] ↳ user selected: ubuntu-24.04-live-server [http] → GET /iso/ubuntu-24.04/vmlinuz 200 14 MiB · 612 […]
CSSQuake
Debug Show outlines off on Show stats panel off on Show FPS panel off on Gameplay Crosshair + Dynamic lighting off on Mute sounds off on Show particles off on Show enemies off on Disable damage off on Disable movement off on Disable attacks off on Invert mouse off on
I Stored a Website in a Favicon
A while ago I wrote about storing two bytes inside my mouse’s DPI register. It wasn’t useful. It wasn’t practical. But it did something unfortunate to my brain. Once you’ve successfully hidden data somewhere it doesn’t belong, you start looking at everything as potential storage. A monitor is storage. A keyboard is storage. A BIOS […]
Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering
An experimental satellite has mapped the scale of GPS jamming across Europe and the Middle East from space for the first time. The data surprised the team behind the project and indicated that satellites orbiting far from Earth aren’t the only ones that experience degradation of their positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals, which could […]
Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You
There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. […]
The UK’s New Under-16 Social Media Ban Will Cause More Harm Than It Prevents
This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027. The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response to growing concerns […]
Surprising Economics of Load-Balanced Systems
The M/M/c model may not behave like you expect. I have a system with c servers, each of which can only handle a single concurrent request, and has no internal queuing. The servers sit behind a load balancer, which contains an infinite queue. An unlimited number of clients offer c * 0.8 requests per second […]
Amazon drops Sam Altman movie after announcing OpenAI partnership
Amazon MGM is no longer partnering with Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino on his forthcoming Sam Altman biopic, Artificial. The nearly completed film, starring Andrew Garfield as the controversial OpenAI founder, was originally slated for release in early 2027. The premiere date, however, is now in limbo after the film was removed from the studio’s roster […]
Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they’re not good
Physicians’ own ability to spot pre-cancerous growths during colonoscopies declined after they had grown accustomed to using an artificial-intelligence tool to help with the task.Credit: Gabrielle Voinot/Look at Sciences/Science Photo Library As more professionals begin to rely on artificial-intelligence tools in their work, could their hard-earned skills atrophy? That possibility is a growing concern for […]