Why xor eax, eax?
Why xor eax, eax? Written by me, proof-read by an LLM. Details at end. In one of my talks on assembly, I show a list of the 20 most executed instructions on an average x86 Linux desktop. All the usual culprits are there, mov, add, lea, sub, jmp, call and so on, but the surprise […]
Idempotency Keys for Exactly-Once Processing
All these intricacies can be avoided when it is possible to use a monotonically increasing sequence value as the idempotency key. In that case, the consumer does not need to store all the keys it ever has processed (or a reasonably sized subset thereof). It only needs to store a single value, the one of […]
Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years
Experiences with the Matrix protocol, Matrix Synapse server, bridges, and Element mobile apps. I have been hosting a Matrix server for about five years now, mostly for text chats between a few relatives and close friends, and a bridge to WhatsApp for a few more people. These are my experiences. Matrix protocol I don’t have […]
Why Is ChatGPT for Mac So Good?
Claude, Copilot, and making a good desktop app. This year, even as Anthropic, Google, and others have challenged OpenAI’s model performance crown, ChatGPT’s lead as an end-user product has only solidified. On the Dithering podcast last week (paywalled), Ben Thompson called out an aspect of why this is: I need someone to write the definitive […]
DeepSeek releases open-weights math model with IMO gold medal performance
1. Introduction Large language models have made significant progress in mathematical reasoning, which serves as an important testbed for AI and could impact scientific research if further advanced. By scaling reasoning with reinforcement learning that rewards correct final answers, LLMs have improved from poor performance to saturating quantitative reasoning competitions like AIME and HMMT in […]
A lost Amazon world just reappeared in Bolivia
In September 2021, a team of specialists traveled to one of the least-documented areas of the Bolivian Amazon: the Great Tectonic Lakes of Exaltación in the department of Beni. The expedition, organized by the Grupo de Trabajo para los Llanos de Moxos (GTLM), brought together experts from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the National Museum of […]
Do the thinking models think?
Whether machines can think is a classic debate that dates back to the intellectual titans of the 1950s. Turing opens his 1950 article Computing Machinery and Intelligence with: I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” The Hungarian genius, von Neumann, shortly before his death in 1957, prepared a posthumously published monograph The Computer […]
SmartTube Compromised
Earlier this week, the developer of SmartTube, the most popular alternative YouTube app for Android TV and Fire TV devices, announced that his app’s digital signature had been exposed. A new version of the app using a new digital signature has since been released. While everyone is encouraged to switch to the new app, SmartTube’s […]
Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto
tldr; Use git rebase –onto to cleanly rebase a dependent branch without dragging along commits that don’t belong to it. 1git rebase –onto If you’ve ever worked on a larger feature and split your work into multiple PRs that depend on each other, you’ve probably experienced the pain of keeping them in sync. This workflow […]
Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT’s public release
A browser extension for avoiding AI slop. Download it for Chrome or Firefox. This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022. Since the public release of ChatGTPT and other large language models, the internet is being increasingly polluted by AI generated text, images […]