FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT
Recently I undertook a hobby project to recreate an IBM XT Personal Computer from the 1980s using a mix of authentic parts and modern technology. I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to play the EGA version of Monkey Island 1 on it, with no features missing. This means I […]
De Bruijn Numerals
de Bruijn Numerals assumptions in this post understanding of pure lambda calculus zero-based de Bruijn indices instead of named variables nnn consecutive lambdas are written as λnlambda^nλn ⟨n⟩elangle nrangle_e⟨n⟩e encodes n∈N0ninmathbb{N}_0n∈N0 as a lambda calculus term of encoding eee S(n)S(n)S(n) is the Peano successor function There are many ways to encode numbers and do arithmetic […]
Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models
Heretic is a tool that removes censorship (aka “safety alignment”) from transformer-based language models without expensive post-training. It combines an advanced implementation of directional ablation, also known as “abliteration” (Arditi et al. 2024), with a TPE-based parameter optimizer powered by Optuna. This approach enables Heretic to work completely automatically. Heretic finds high-quality abliteration parameters by […]
Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler
Let’s rebuild everything from clean sources.The compiler still contains the backdoor. Now we can log in as rootwith the magic password. % ^D login: root Password: codenih # who root tty8 Aug 14 22:32 # Timeline This code can be dated to some time in the one-year period from June 1974 to June 1975, probably […]
Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites
TEHRAN: Iranian authorities have launched cloud seeding operations to induce rainfall as the country faces its worst drought in decades, state media reported.“Today, a cloud seeding flight was conducted in the Urmia Lake basin for the first time in the current water year,” which begins in September, the official IRNA news agency said late Saturday.Urmia, […]
Where do the children play?
On the need for a world without us I don’t remember the first time I held a machete, because I’ve never held one. Most members of the BaYaka — a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers found in the Congolese rainforests — probably don’t remember either, but for different reasons. Early memory has its limits. Among the […]
My mum was a 17-year-old free spirit – so she was locked up and put in a coma
Linda Pressly and Esperanza Escribano, Barcelona Marina Freixa always knew there was something dark and unspoken about her family. Her mother had grown up under Spain’s decades-long dictatorship, which ended in 1975, but the details of her childhood were hazy. Then everything changed one Christmas a decade ago – when Marina was about 20. That winter’s evening around […]
Garbage Collection Is Useful
November 14, 2025 A long time ago, I spent a few years working on garbage collection in the J9 Java VM. And even though I’ve since done mostly done higher-level stuff, having a deeper knowledge of GC has continued to come in useful. Yesterday, it was an insight from one of my favourite GC papers, […]
The Internet Is No Longer a Safe Haven
A couple of days ago, the small server hosting this website was temporarily knocked out by scraping bots. This wasn’t the first time, nor is it the first time I’m seriously considering employing more aggressive countermeasures such as Anubis (see for example the June 2025 summary post). But every time something like this happens, a […]
Brimstone: ES2025 JavaScript engine written in Rust
Brimstone is a JavaScript engine written from scratch in Rust, aiming to have full support for the JavaScript language. Brimstone is a work in progress but already supports almost all of the JavaScript language (>97% of the ECMAScript language in test262). Not ready for use in production. Implements the ECMAScript specification. Heavy inspiration is taken […]