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 […]
Anthropic’s report smells a lot like bullshit
A report was recently published by an AI-research company called Anthropic. They are the ones who notably created Claude, an AI-assistant for coding. Personally, I don’t use it but that is besides the point. Before we start, it’s important to say I don’t have anything against them, or AI in general. I do have some […]
UK’s first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales
3 days ago ShareSave Gareth Lewis,Wales political editor and Steffan Messenger,Wales environment correspondent ShareSave Getty Images A first-of-its-kind nuclear power station is to be built on Anglesey, bringing up to 3,000 jobs and billions of pounds of investment. The plant at Wylfa, on the Welsh island’s northern coast, will have the UK’s first three small […]
Why I Don’t Need a Steam Machine
For those of you who are living under a rock, Valve announced three new hardware devices joining their Steam Deck line-up: a new controller, a VR headset, and the GameCube—no wait, GabeCube—no wait, Steam Machine. The shiny little cube is undoubtedly Valve’s (second) attempt to break into the console market. This time, it might just […]
Maybe You’re Not Actually Trying
On selective agency in capable people Illustration by Alexander Naughton Two things happened for me over the holidays five years ago: I went to rehab, and I acquired a cyberstalker. These were not entirely independent events. The stalker was someone in India who’d started following me when I was playing poker, who came to believe […]
Bypassing the Branch Predictor
A couple of days ago I was thinking about what you can do when the branch predictor is effectively working against you, and thus pessimizing your program instead of optimizing it. Let’s work with something relatively simple & concrete: consider that we want to write some kind of financial system (maybe a trading system) and […]
Hyundai Paywalls Brake Pads replacement on Ioniq 5 N
The biggest car news and reviews, no BS Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday. Terms of Service & Privacy Policy. A 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N owner was venting on Reddit recently about not being able to change his brake pads without specialized computer equipment. […]
IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs
IDEmacs aims to be a set of Emacs configurations which provide an out-of-the-box experience similar (if not identical) to popular GUI IDEs and editors. It is aimed at… Programmers coming to Emacs from other IDEs, or even first-time programmers familiar with only office applications. Beginner Common Lisp and Scheme programmers, who need the functionality of […]