Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism
Like almost all human endeavors, open-source software development involves a range of power dynamics. Companies, developers, and users are all concerned with the power to influence the direction of the software — and, often, to profit from it. At the 2025 Open Source Summit Europe, Dawn Foster talked about how those dynamics can play out, […]
Developing a Space Flight Simulator in Clojure
05 Sep 2025 [embedded content] In 2017 I discovered the free of charge Orbiter 2016 space flight simulator which was proprietary at the time and it inspired me to develop a space flight simulator myself. I prototyped some rigid body physics in C and later in GNU Guile and also prototyped loading and rendering of […]
GLM 4.5 with Claude Code
curl -X POST “https://api.z.ai/api/paas/v4/chat/completions” -H “Content-Type: application/json” -H “Authorization: Bearer your-api-key” -d ‘{ “model”: “glm-4.5”, “messages”: [ { “role”: “user”, “content”: “As a marketing expert, please create an attractive slogan for my product.” }, { “role”: “assistant”, “content”: “Sure, to craft a compelling slogan, please tell me more about your product.” }, { “role”: “user”, […]
Is OOXML Artifically Complex?
A while ago, the official blog of LibreOffice published a provocative article: “An artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool.” Its target is Microsoft’s XML-based file formats — the Office Open XML (OOXML). The article alleges that, although Microsoft put its Office formats through standardization, the spec is engineered to be so complex that […]
The math of shuffling cards almost brought down an online poker empire
If you’ve ever shuffled a deck of playing cards, you’ve most likely created a unique deck. That is, you’re probably the only person who has ever arranged the cards in precisely that order. Although this claim sounds incredible, it’s a great illustration of how quickly large numbers can creep into everyday situations—with occasionally challenging consequences, […]
The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years
The Universe within 12.5 Light Years – The Nearest stars Number of stars within 12.5 light years = 33 About the Map This map shows all the star systems that lie within 12.5 light years of our Sun. Most of the stars are red dwarfs – stars with a tenth of the Sun’s mass and […]
Should we revisit Extreme Programming in the age of AI?
The pace of software output has never been faster. AI tooling and decades of platform innovation have dramatically lowered the barrier to code creation. With just a few prompts or API calls, it is now possible to generate entire products, features, infrastructure, and functionality in hours rather than weeks. And yet, despite all this acceleration, […]
Google killing 2 million nest thermostats next month
simon5 April 25, 2025, 8:48pm 1 I just received an email from Google stating that they are no longer it’s going to support the Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats. While they will continue to operate locally, it appears that they will no longer work with the Nest app or Home app controls. I […]
Gym Class VR (YC W22) Is Hiring – UX Design Engineer
Role Summary Gym Class is the top rated social sports game on Meta Quest – millions of downloads, 79,000+ reviews, and a 4.9-star rating. We’re hiring our founding UX Design Engineer to drive the development of our upcoming mobile web app (embedded in native), and web surfaces inside our flagship, social VR experience. You’ll own […]
Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance
TLDR: In a real world benchmark, the default musl allocator caused a 7x slowdown compared to other allocators. I recommend all Rust projects immediately add the following lines to their application’s main.rs: // Avoid musl’s default allocator due to lackluster performance // https://nickb.dev/blog/default-musl-allocator-considered-harmful-to-performance #[cfg(target_env = “musl”)] #[global_allocator] static GLOBAL: mimalloc::MiMalloc = mimalloc::MiMalloc; And Cargo.toml [target.’cfg(target_env […]