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.
2026-04-15
Immutable Systems: NixOS + systemd-repart + systemd-sysupdate
x86.lol/generic/2024/08/28/systemd-sysupdate.htmlWhen 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
Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to Distributed BNG
markgascoyne.co.uk/posts/ebpf-bngAn open-source, eBPF-accelerated BNG that runs directly on OLT hardware - eliminating expensive centralised appliances
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?
2025-07-03
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-LearnedRex Wangs blog
2025-06-27
How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
mazzo.li/posts/fast-pipes.htmlPipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux
perf.
2025-05-22
Collaborative Text Editing without CRDTs or OT - Matthew Weidner
mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.htmlThis blog post describes an alternative, straightforward approach to collaborative text editing, without Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) or Operational Transformation (OT). By making text editing flexible and easy to DIY, I hope that the approach will let you create rich collaborative apps that are challenging to build on top of a black-box CRDT/OT library.
2025-04-28
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-synthesisersThis 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
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.
2025-01-22
Building a tiny Linux from scratch
blinry.org/tiny-linuxLast week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!
2024-10-12
Dependency Management Data
dmd.tanna.dev2024-09-12
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
What is the best pointer tagging method?
coredumped.dev/2024/09/09/what-is-the-best-pointer-tagging-methodIn 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.
2024-08-29
Overloaded fields, type safety, and you
educatedguesswork.org/posts/text-type-safetyThe underlying problem we are facing here with all these examples is the same: having the same set of bits which can mean two different things and needing some way to distinguish those two meanings. Failure to do so leads to ambiguity at best and serious defects at worst. That's why you see so much emphasis in modern systems on type safety and on strict domain separation between different meanings.
2024-07-31
Revealing the Inner Structure of AWS Session Tokens
medium.com/@TalBeerySec/revealing-the-inner-structure-of-aws-session-tokens-a6c76469cba7TL;DR: A world first reverse engineering analysis of AWS Session Tokens. Prior to our research these tokens were a complete black box…
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.
2024-07-28
Windows Security best practices for integrating and managing security tools | Microsoft Security Blog
www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2024/07/27/windows-security-best-practices-for-integrating-and-managing-security-toolsWe examine the recent CrowdStrike outage and provide a technical overview of the root cause.
2024-07-15
Calculating Position from Raw GPS Data | Telesens
www.telesens.co/2017/07/17/calculating-position-from-raw-gps-data2024-07-04
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