20 random bookmarks

2026-02-25

52.

Tracking NixOS option values and dependencies | oddlama's blog

oddlama.org/blog/tracking-options-in-nixos

There are thousands of options in NixOS, but as users, we usually only interact with a select few of them. Despite that, a huge amount of those options does influence the final result in some way. Have you ever wondered which of them were actually relevant for your specific system?

51.

Finding the Bottom Turtle · blog.dave.tf

blog.dave.tf/post/finding-bottom-turtle

Some reflections on trusting trust, and how deep the rabbit hole goes.

2025-12-17

49.

A security model for systemd

lwn.net/Articles/1042888

Poettering said that he does have a vision for how all of the security-related pieces of systemd are meant to fit together. He wanted to use his talk to explain ""how the individual security-related parts of systemd actually fit together and why they exist in the first place"".

2025-11-18

48.

Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust | corrode Rust Consulting

corrode.dev/blog/defensive-programming

[...] hard-learned patterns to write more defensive Rust code, learned throughout years of shipping Rust code to production. I’m not talking about design patterns here, but rather small idioms, which are rarely documented, but make a big difference in the overall code quality.

2025-04-28

41.

Nick Appleton’s blog and stuff - Building a digital filter for use in synthesisers

www.appletonaudio.com/blog/2022/building-a-digital-filter-for-use-in-synthesisers

This is a tutorial on how to build a digital implementation of a 2nd-order, continuously-variable filter (i.e. one where you can change the parameters runtime) that has dynamic behaviour that mimics an analogue filter.

2025-01-22

36.

Packer: How to Build NixOS 24 Snapshot on Hetzner Cloud - Developer Friendly Blog

developer-friendly.blog/blog/2025/01/20/packer-how-to-build-nixos-24-snapshot-on-hetzner-cloud

Step-by-step guide to building a NixOS 24 snapshot on Hetzner Cloud using Packer, with complete configuration files and OpenTofu deployment examples.

35.

Building a tiny Linux from scratch

blinry.org/tiny-linux

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!

2024-12-05

34.

Optimization adventures: making a parallel Rust workload 10x faster with (or without) Rayon | Blog | Guillaume Endignoux

gendignoux.com/blog/2024/11/18/rust-rayon-optimized.html

In a previous post, I’ve shown how to use the rayon framework in Rust to automatically parallelize a loop computation across multiple CPU cores.
In this post, I’ll first explain which profiling tools I used to chase optimizations, before diving into how I built a faster replacement of Rayon for my use case. In the next post, I’ll describe the other optimizations that made my code much faster. Spoiler alert: copying some data sped up my code!

2024-11-27

33.

April King — Handling Cookies is a Minefield

grayduck.mn/2024/11/21/handling-cookies-is-a-minefield

Discrepancies in how browsers and libraries handle HTTP cookies, and the problems caused by such things.

2024-11-22

32.

Protecting Signal Keys on Desktop

cryptographycaffe.sandboxaq.com/posts/protecting-signal-desktop-keys

This blogpost describes our investigation and proof of concept to enhance the security of Signal Messenger key management on desktop.

2024-11-20

31.

Why I love Rust for tokenising and parsing

xnacly.me/posts/2024/rust-pldev

Macros, iterators, patterns, error handling and match make Rust almost perfect

2024-11-19

30.

Using Nix to Fuzz Test a PDF Parser (Part One)

mtlynch.io/nix-fuzz-testing-1

Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools from source and chasing down dependencies upon dependencies.
I recently found that Nix eliminates a lot of the gruntwork from fuzz testing. I created a Nix configuration that kicks off a fuzz testing workflow with a single command.

2024-11-07

28.

Model Predictive Control in the browser with WebAssembly | garethx

garethx.com/posts/cart-pole-mpc

Commentary on software, robotics, and computer vision.

2024-09-12

23.

Computational Journalism | At the Tow Center for Digital Journalism

compjournalism.com

The course is a hands-on, research-level introduction to the areas of computer science that have a direct relevance to journalism, and the broader project of producing an informed and engaged public $100 installment loan. We study two big ideas: the application of computation to produce journalism (such as data science for investigative reporting), and journalism about areas that involve computation (such as the analysis of credit scoring algorithms.)

2024-09-10

21.

What is the best pointer tagging method?

coredumped.dev/2024/09/09/what-is-the-best-pointer-tagging-method

In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used anywhere that additional runtime information is needed about a pointer. We will look at a handful of different ways these pointers can be encoded and see how the compiler can optimize them for different hardware.

2024-09-07

18.

About

www.braggoscope.com/about

Explore the In Our Time archive.

2024-09-02

15.

Timeseries Indexing at Scale - Artem Krylysov

artem.krylysov.com/blog/2024/06/28/timeseries-indexing-at-scale

2024-07-31

10.

Build your own SQS or Kafka with Postgres

blog.sequinstream.com/build-your-own-sqs-or-kafka-with-postgres

We're Sequin, an open source message stream built on Postgres. We think Sequin's cool, but you don't need to adopt the project to get started with streaming in Postgres. In fact, you can turn Postgres into a basic queue/stream pretty easily. Below, we share what we've learned so you

2024-07-15

7.

Calculating Position from Raw GPS Data | Telesens

www.telesens.co/2017/07/17/calculating-position-from-raw-gps-data

2024-06-20

2.

Even JSONB in Postgres needs schemas

nexteam.co.uk/posette_even_jsonb_in_postgres_needs_schemas.pdf

Talk from POSETTE conference