A proposed amendment to ban under 16s in the UK from common online services
Earlier this week, I wrote about a proposed legislative amendment to attempt to compel VPN services providers to prevent anyone under 18 in the UK from using their VPNs. There’s a second amendment, by the same authors, to prevent under 16s in the UK from, well, doing an awful lot of things online. For this […]
AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job
In May, OpenAI agreed to pay $3 billion for Windsurf, the AI coding assistant formerly known as Codeium. Three billion dollars. For a VSCode fork. The deal eventually fell apart, but what matters is that they wanted to do it in the first place. Last week, Anthropic made an interesting acquisition: they bought Bun, the […]
Webb observes exoplanet that may have an exotic helium and carbon atmosphere
Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have observed a rare type of exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system, whose atmospheric composition challenges our understanding of how it formed. Officially named PSR J2322-2650b, this Jupiter-mass object appears to have an exotic helium-and-carbon-dominated atmosphere unlike any ever seen before. Soot clouds likely float through the […]
Engineers who dismiss AI
I refuse to use AI coding tools. I don’t need to try them to know they’re garbage. I have instincts. I tested ChatGPT in 2022, and asked it to write something. It (obviously) got it wrong; I don’t remember what exactly, but it was definitely wrong. That was three years ago and I haven’t looked […]
Making a game on a custom bytecode VM in 7 days and 3kB
In the last few days, I built a shoot ’em up game by embedding a tiny custom bytecode VM and rendering the graphics using a fullscreen pixel shader. The result is a 3kB Windows executable. This was done for Langjam Gamejam, a 7-day challenge where you create a programming language and then use it to […]
8-bit Boléro
I perform Maurice Ravel’s Boléro on a variety of homemade 8-bit instruments. [embedded content] Download Some stats and details 9 hours and 42 minutes of footage 52 mixer channels 13 neck- and bowties 9 different instruments 1 crazy automaton 0 regrets This project took me a bit over half a year to finish. I hope […]
GotaTun — Mullvad’s WireGuard Implementation in Rust
GotaTun is a WireGuard® implementation written in Rust aimed at being fast, efficient and reliable. GotaTun is a fork of the BoringTun project from Cloudflare. This is not a new protocol or connection method, just WireGuard® written in Rust. The name GotaTun is a combination of the original project, BoringTun, and Götatunneln, a physical tunnel […]
Show HN: Orbit a systems level programming language that compiles .sh to LLVM
Spaceship is a high-performance systems automation language designed to replace legacy shell scripting. It features a strict, Go-inspired syntax, a powerful fixed-width type system, and a novel JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation model for POSIX commands, all built on top of LLVM. Core Principles Performance: Statically typed and JIT-compiled for maximum execution speed. Security: Eliminates shell injection […]
Research team digitizes more than 100 years of Canadian infectious disease data
Twenty-five years ago, in a neglected storage area at the Ontario Ministry of Health, David Earn happened upon epidemiological gold: two boxes of hand-written documents accounting for 50 years of weekly infectious disease incidence reports, spanning 1939-1989. The buried treasure was exactly the sort of thing that the McMaster University professor hoped to unearth during […]
Making Google Sans Flex
Special thanks to the hundreds of people who have contributed to making and evolving Google Sans, including: Akaki Razmadze, Aleksandra Samulenkova, Alex Blattmann, Alexei Vanyashin, Ali Almasri, Anagha Narayanan, Anaïs Lievens, Andy Stewart, Anonta Mon, Anthony Sheret, Anurag Gautam, Anuthin Wongsunkakon, Ashler, Ben Mitchell (Fontpad), Bianca Berning, Black Foundry, Borna Izadpanah, Botio Nikoltchev, Cadson Demak, […]