Ask HN: How are Markov chains so different from tiny LLMs?

I polished a Markov chain generator and trained it on an article by Uri Alon and al (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7963340/). It generates text that seems to me at least on par with tiny LLMs, such as demonstrated by NanoGPT. Here is an example: jplr@mypass:~/Documenti/2025/SimpleModels/v3_very_good$ ./SLM10b_train UriAlon.txt 3 Training model with order 3… Skip-gram detection: DISABLED (order < […]

Compiling Ruby to Machine Language

compiling-ruby-to-machine-language

I’ve started working on a new edition of Ruby Under a Microscope that covers Ruby 3.x. I’m working on this in my spare time, so it will take a while. Leave a comment or drop me a line and I’ll email you when it’s finished. Here’s an excerpt from the completely new content for Chapter […]

Towards Interplanetary QUIC Traffic

towards-interplanetary-quic-traffic

Have you ever asked yourself which protocols get used when downloading pictures from the Perseverance Mars rover to Earth? I hadn’t thought about that either, until I came across an intriguing message on the internet, back in April 2024: I’m looking for someone knowledgeable of quic/quinn to help us out for our deep space IP […]

Azure hit by 15 Tbps DDoS attack using 500k IP addresses

azure-hit-by-15-tbps-ddos-attack-using-500k-ip-addresses

Microsoft said today that the Aisuru botnet hit its Azure network with a 15.72 terabits per second (Tbps) DDoS attack, launched from over 500,000 IP addresses. The attack used extremely high-rate UDP floods that targeted a specific public IP address in Australia, reaching nearly 3.64 billion packets per second (bpps). “The attack originated from Aisuru […]

A new book recovers the origins of Effective Altruism

a-new-book-recovers-the-origins-of-effective-altruism

In 1971, the philosophy department at Oxford University was confronted with an unusual student. One of the few vegetarians on campus, Peter Singer staged alarming demonstrations with papier-mâché chickens on Cornmarket Street. He petitioned to write his term paper on Karl Marx (“not a real philosopher” in the faculty’s minds). He attended Radical Philosophy meetings, […]

The Baumol Effect and Jevons paradox are related

the-baumol-effect-and-jevons-paradox-are-related

If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall. (Source: Marc Andreessen.) This seems insane; why? Well, weird things happen to economies […]

You only live once, self host a NAT Gateway

you-only-live-once,-self-host-a-nat-gateway

Society would have you believe that self hosting a NAT Gateway is “crazy”, “irresponsible” and potentially even “dangerous”. But in this post I hope to shed some light into why someone would go down this path, the benefits, and my real experience when implementing this in a real engineering organization. What even is a NAT […]

How to See the Dead

how-to-see-the-dead

The first question I ask my clients is, “How would you like to see the world?” Some answers are charming; they want to see the world as an infant does, everything new and unspoiled by habit and familiarity. Some are more professionally minded and wish for magnification-enhanced, telescopic, UV, infrared, or radiation-attuned alterations that will […]

WBlock: A New Ad-Blocker for Safari

wblock:-a-new-ad-blocker-for-safari

A Safari content blocker for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS utilizing declarative content blocking rules.Supports 750,000 rules across 5 extensions with Protocol Buffer storage and LZ4 compression. Note Looking for a detailed comparison? Check out my comparison guide to see how wBlock stacks up against other Safari content blockers. Performance Architecture 750,000 rule capacity utilizing 5 […]

Google is killing the open web, part 2

I wrote a few months ago about the proxy war by Google against the open web by means of XSLT. Unsurprisingly, Google has been moving forward on the deprecation, still without providing a solid justification on the reasons why other than “we’ve been leeching off a FLOSS library for which we’ve finally found enough security […]