Google *Unkills* JPEG XL?
I’ve written about JPEG XL in the past. First, I noted Google’s move to kill the format in Chromium in favor of the homegrown and inferior AVIF. Then, I had a deeper look at the format, and visually compared JPEG XL with AVIF on a handful of images. The latter post started with a quick […]
Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Listen to this post: A common explanation as to why Star Wars was such a hit, and continues to resonate nearly half a century on from its release, is that it is a nearly perfect representation of the hero’s journey. You have Luke, bored on Tatooine, called to adventure by a mysterious message borne by […]
The Penicillin Myth
“I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident.” —Alexander Fleming Many know the story of Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin. Fleming, a bit of an absent-minded professor (and a bit of a slob), left culture plates streaked with Staphylococcus on his lab bench while he went away on […]
Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Maps
A marmot hiding in plain sight in the Swiss Alps The first three dimensions—length, height, and depth—are included on all topographical maps. The “fourth dimension,” or time, is also available on the website of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo). In the “Journey Through Time,” a timeline displays 175 years of the country’s cartographic […]
A vector graphics workstation from the 70s
This repair has been on the to do list for ages, so let’s finally get to it! In my mind, Tektronix is a brand that makes electronics lab equipment like oscilloscopes and logic analyzers. Turns out, they made quite a few terminals and a couple of computers! A good friend saw this one for sale […]
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 […]