TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
An ancient scholarly dispute between Egyptologists Lucas and Petrie regarding how the ancient Egyptians drilled granite is explored. Lucas believed wet quartz sand was the abrasive, while Petrie proposed emery. Experimental evidence suggests emery, used with water, olive oil, or lubricant, produced concentric cutting lines on granite. Other abrasives like sand and crushed quartz did […]
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This book is a comprehensive guide to mastering various mathematical concepts, from vectors to matrices and linear mappings. Each chapter delves into a different aspect of mathematics, such as Gaussian elimination and determinants, providing a clear explanation and practical examples. One unique feature is the focus on eigenvalues and eigenvectors, which are emphasized as having […]
After two decades, the Incredible KIMplement 1.0 emulator for the MOS/Commodore KIM-1 6502-based single board computer has been officially released. This emulator, designed for the Commodore 64, expands RAM and allows for virtualized software NMOS 6502 CPU. The unique aspect is the inclusion of “6o6,” a software virtualization method that enables complex operations within the […]
A team of international astronomers led by researchers from Leiden University has developed a groundbreaking calibration technique, producing the first sharp radio maps of the universe at low frequencies. The new method bypasses interference from Earth’s ionosphere, allowing for clear images. The LOFAR telescope in the Netherlands was used for the study, revealing new details […]
The author reminisces about a memorable undergrad class on multiprocessor synchronization, starting with consensus numbers and ending with lock-free data structures in Java. They struggled when translating these concepts to C, realizing Java’s support for multithreaded correctness. The article introduces acquire-release semantics and reveals a bug in a lock-free queue implementation due to non-linearizable memory […]
the corresponding character allows you to jump directly to that window. This makes window selection incredibly efficient, especially when you have many windows open. Ace-window also supports a variety of actions beyond just switching windows, making it a powerful tool for overall window and buffer management. This write-up provides a comprehensive overview of various window […]
Unix history is detailed in various books, like Peter Salus’ “A Quarter Century of Unix,” with some inaccuracies. Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) collaborated with MIT and GE in the Multics project, where Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked. BTL eventually withdrew from Multics in 1969 due to slow progress, making way for Unix’s creation. Unix, […]
Wag Wag has enhanced WireGuard with the addition of MFA, route restriction, and device enrollment features. It allows defining routes that require MFA authorization or are always accessible, offers an easy API for client registration, and supports multiple MFA options like webauthn and oidc. A unique feature is the sponsorship from Aura Information Security. To […]
The author discusses the limitations of traditional notebooks like Jupyter, which create hidden state, leading to issues with reproducibility. To address this, they present marimo, a new approach where each notebook is modeled as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to control the flow of variables. This allows for reproducibility and maintainability, as marimo notebooks are […]
Memory leaks can be a nightmare, especially in high-traffic production apps. Ben Sheldon shared his experience debugging a memory increase in a decade-old Rails app. After suspecting telemetry changes, the team used rbtrace to dump Ruby’s memory heap and sheap to analyze it. They discovered an Array holding references to over 32,000 Event objects, causing […]