20 random bookmarks

2026-07-22

55.

Foundations — idlemachines

idlemachines.co.uk/courses/foundations

Start 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.

2026-04-15

54.

Immutable Systems: NixOS + systemd-repart + systemd-sysupdate

x86.lol/generic/2024/08/28/systemd-sysupdate.html

When you build software for embedded devices (your Wi-Fi router or home automation setup on your Raspberry Pi), there is always the question how to build these images and how to update them.

2026-04-05

53.

Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to Distributed BNG

markgascoyne.co.uk/posts/ebpf-bng

An open-source, eBPF-accelerated BNG that runs directly on OLT hardware - eliminating expensive centralised appliances

2026-01-09

50.

Decorative Cryptography

www.dlp.rip/decorative-cryptography

Last year, I came agross a Linux kernel feature called TCG_TPM2_HMAC. It claims to detect or prevent active and passive interposer attackers.
It all sounds really great. We should care about interposer adversaries. It’s great to use the TPM features that were invented to help us with these problems.

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"".

2025-08-27

47.

Inside Windows 3

www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.html

Windows 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.

2025-07-07

46.

Rewriting Kafka in Rust Async: Insights and Lessons Learned in Rust | Rex Wang

wangjunfei.com/2025/06/18/Rewriting-Kafka-in-Rust-Async-Insights-and-Lessons-Learned#Summary

Achieving high-performance asynchronous Rust projects transcends mere usage of the async/await syntax; it fundamentally relies on a deep understanding of the underlying task scheduling, lock optimization, and architecture design principles.

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.

2025-03-19

40.

Comptime Zig ORM

matklad.github.io/2025/03/19/comptime-zig-orm.html

This 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.

2025-03-10

39.

The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in Rust | Blog | Guillaume Endignoux

gendignoux.com/blog/2025/03/03/rust-interning-2000x.html

In this deep dive post, I’ll explain how I used the interning design pattern in Rust to compress this data set by a factor of two thousand! We’ll investigate how to best structure the interner itself, how to tune our data schema to work well with it, and likewise how serialization can best leverage interning.

2025-01-22

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!

2024-11-22

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

2024-11-07

28.

Model Predictive Control in the browser with WebAssembly | garethx

garethx.com/posts/cart-pole-mpc

Commentary on software, robotics, and computer vision.

2024-10-18

27.

Optimizing Mandelbrot Generation with SIMD

bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/01/27/optimizing-mandelbrot-generation-with-simd

2024-09-19

24.

How to Build a Small Solar Power System

solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-system

This guide explains everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want.

2024-09-02

15.

Timeseries Indexing at Scale - Artem Krylysov

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

2024-07-31

12.

Revealing the Inner Structure of AWS Session Tokens

medium.com/@TalBeerySec/revealing-the-inner-structure-of-aws-session-tokens-a6c76469cba7

TL;DR: A world first reverse engineering analysis of AWS Session Tokens. Prior to our research these tokens were a complete black box…

2024-07-07

6.

Optimizing Large-Scale OpenStreetMap Data with SQLite

jtarchie.com/posts/2024-07-02-optimizing-large-scale-openstreetmap-data-with-sqlite

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