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.

2026-04-05

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

2026-02-25

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.

2025-11-18

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.

2025-07-07

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.

2025-06-27

44.

How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

mazzo.li/posts/fast-pipes.html

Pipes 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

43.

Collaborative Text Editing without CRDTs or OT - Matthew Weidner

mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html

This 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.

2025-01-22

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.

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

2024-10-18

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.

2024-09-10

22.

Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar

www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods

Below 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.

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.

2024-08-19

13.

JTAG Hacking with a Raspberry Pi - Introducing the PiFex

voidstarsec.com/blog/jtag-pifex

JTAG for Reverse Engineers

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…

2024-07-04

5.

Finding near-duplicates with Jaccard similarity and MinHash - Made of Bugs

blog.nelhage.com/post/fuzzy-dedup

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