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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 […]