What if you don’t need MCP at all?
2025-11-02 One chonky MCP server After months of agentic coding frenzy, Twitter is still ablaze with discussions about MCP servers. I previously did some very light benchmarking to see if Bash tools or MCP servers are better suited for a specific task. The TL;DR: both can be efficient if you take care. Unfortunately, many of […]
CUDA Ontology
CUDA’s terminology carries significant overloading: the word “CUDA” itself refers to at least five distinct concepts, “driver” means different things in different contexts, and version numbers reported by various tools measure different subsystems. This article provides a rigorous ontology of CUDA components: a systematic description of what exists in the CUDA ecosystem, how components relate […]
Z3 API in Python: From Sudoku to N-Queens in Under 20 Lines
Z3Py Guide Z3 is a high performance theorem prover developed at Microsoft Research. Z3 is used in many applications such as: software/hardware verification and testing, constraint solving, analysis of hybrid systems, security, biology (in silico analysis), and geometrical problems. This tutorial demonstrates the main capabilities of Z3Py: the Z3 API in Python. No Python background […]
I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels
A while ago, after frustration with Tailscale in environments where it couldn’t properly penetrate NAT/firewall and get a p2p connection, I decided to invest some time into learning something new: Cloudflare Zero Trust + Warp. There are so many new concepts, but after way too long, I can finally say that I understand Cloudflare Zero […]
Only three kinds of AI products work
The very first LLM-based product, ChatGPT, was just the ability to talk with the model itself: in other words, a pure chatbot. This is still the most popular LLM product by a large margin. In fact, given the amount of money that’s been invested in the industry, it’s shocking how many “new AI products” are […]
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, […]