2026-07-22
Foundations — idlemachines
idlemachines.co.uk/courses/foundationsStart here if you're new to ML. In nineteen problems we'll get from dot products to a working training loop, all in NumPy. Implement the building blocks (sigmoid, softmax, cross-entropy, attention masks), then build a linear layer and work through the backwards passes that make training work.
2026-02-25
Tracking NixOS option values and dependencies | oddlama's blog
oddlama.org/blog/tracking-options-in-nixosThere 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?
Finding the Bottom Turtle · blog.dave.tf
blog.dave.tf/post/finding-bottom-turtleSome reflections on trusting trust, and how deep the rabbit hole goes.
2025-12-17
A security model for systemd
lwn.net/Articles/1042888Poettering 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
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.
2025-08-27
Inside Windows 3
www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.htmlWindows 3 is often said to be just an UI on top of DOS. This article presents some of the inner side of Windows 3.x and will show that it is more ambitious and advanced than that.
2025-03-19
Comptime Zig ORM
matklad.github.io/2025/03/19/comptime-zig-orm.htmlThis post can be considered an advanced Zig tutorial. I will be covering some of the more unique
aspects of the language, but won't be explaining the easy part. If you haven't read the Zig
Language Reference, you might start there. Additionally,
we will also learn the foundational trick for implementing relational model.
2024-12-05
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.htmlIn 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!
2024-11-22
Protecting Signal Keys on Desktop
cryptographycaffe.sandboxaq.com/posts/protecting-signal-desktop-keysThis blogpost describes our investigation and proof of concept to enhance the security of Signal Messenger key management on desktop.
2024-11-19
Using Nix to Fuzz Test a PDF Parser (Part One)
mtlynch.io/nix-fuzz-testing-1Fuzz 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.
2024-11-13
What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres
challahscript.com/what_i_wish_someone_told_me_about_postgresI want to try to catalog the bits that I wish someone had just told me before working with a Postgres database. Hopefully, this makes things easier for the next person going on a journey similar to mine.
2024-11-07
Model Predictive Control in the browser with WebAssembly | garethx
garethx.com/posts/cart-pole-mpcCommentary on software, robotics, and computer vision.
2024-09-25
Web Browser Engineering
browser.engineeringWeb browsers are ubiquitous, but how do they work? This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a couple thousand lines of Python.
2024-09-12
Computational Journalism | At the Tow Center for Digital Journalism
compjournalism.comThe 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
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar
www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloodsBelow is a list of some lessons I’ve learned as a distributed systems engineer that are worth being told to a new engineer. Some are subtle, and some are surprising, but none are controversial. This list is for the new distributed systems engineer to guide their thinking about the field they are taking on. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good beginning.
2024-09-02
Timeseries Indexing at Scale - Artem Krylysov
artem.krylysov.com/blog/2024/06/28/timeseries-indexing-at-scale2024-07-31
Compiler Options Hardening Guide for C and C++
best.openssf.org/Compiler-Hardening-Guides/Compiler-Options-Hardening-Guide-for-C-and-C++.htmlThe Best Practices for OSS Developers working group is dedicated to raising awareness and education of secure code best practices for open source developers.
2024-07-04
Finding near-duplicates with Jaccard similarity and MinHash - Made of Bugs
blog.nelhage.com/post/fuzzy-dedup2024-06-20
Even JSONB in Postgres needs schemas
nexteam.co.uk/posette_even_jsonb_in_postgres_needs_schemas.pdfTalk from POSETTE conference