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Alin Tomescu surveys concerning attacks on trusted execution environments such as Intel SGX and AMD SEV, and argues that teams should reconsider how, and whether, they deploy TEE-based applications given how hard hardware security claims are to verify.
5 min · 1,057 words
Ray Myers argues mathematicians are not Luddites: AI-assisted math, built on tools like the Lean prover and the Lean FRO, had natural synergy that researchers embraced, but in his view OpenAI's hype and conduct broke the community's trust. He walks through a timeline from 2014 to October 2026 and draws parallels to how AI companies treat software engineers.
20 min · 4,573 words
Actually, AI makes crypto better. Ethlabs Week 16.
Ethlabs' 16th weekly update argues that advancing AI is an opportunity for Ethereum rather than only a threat, pointing to Francesco D'Amato's formal verification research and the promise of pairing agents with formal models. It also covers Gnosis Chain's bridges going live with the Fast Confirmation Rule, Quick Slots being Considered for Inclusion in the Hegotá upgrade, and Frame Transactions and FOCIL scheduled for Hegotá.
6 min · 1,482 words
Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking With My SonarrPLEASE stop putting skid malware on torrent sites as South Park episodes
A homelab owner traces a South Park episode stuck in Sonarr's queue to a .exe on public trackers with thousands of seeders, then reverse-engineers it: a 118 KB stealer padded with 886 MB of junk to dodge scanners, using encrypted strings and ChaCha20 config to grab browser passwords, crypto wallets, password managers, dev credentials and more, plus practical qBittorrent, Sonarr and Prowlarr defenses.
5 min · 1,237 words
C++26 Contracts: Introduction to Preconditions and Postconditions
C++ Stories introduces C++26 contracts: pre() and post() on function declarations and contract_assert() inside functions, why they beat assert, the ignore/observe/enforce/quick-enforce evaluation semantics, compiling examples with GCC, const parameters in postconditions, avoiding side effects in predicates, predicate cost, and why contracts are not a replacement for input validation.
9 min · 2,052 words
Do dentists actually know what they’re doing?
In vignettes from age 17 to 33, Parker Tatum recounts jaw pain, night guards, cavities and gum recession, and the conflicting diagnoses of a succession of dentists, orthodontists, periodontists and surgeons who each dismiss the previous one's work, raising the question of whether any of them know what they're doing.
16 min · 3,778 words
nobloat/poll – designing a minimal poll tool
After a frustrating Doodle experience, the author builds nobloat/poll: a self-hostable, single-binary Doodle alternative in plain Go with no external dependencies, and walks through link-based ownership without signup, calendar invites, proof-of-work spam protection, JSON-file storage instead of a database, reliable mail sending, and shrinking the binary.
13 min · 2,884 words
Migrating a banking app from AngularJS to Web Components
Marius Vatasoiu recounts the six-plus-year migration of ING Bank Romania's feature-rich banking app from AngularJS to Web Components with Lit, done incrementally without impacting clients, and the lessons learned about architecture, routing and working through framework abstractions.
12 min · 2,858 words
David Bushell riffs on the inevitable 'I read your domain as D-Bus Hell' comment, then turns it into a personal essay about naming, identity on the web, and living with a domain that invites the joke.
4 min · 928 words
Cendyne recounts being the last engineer at a company that bet on marketed LLM intelligence to replace engineering headcount, reflecting on confidence theater, M&A incentives, and what "Fable/Mythos tier" AI meant for the job.
4 min · 912 words
Use the Tello's GameSir T1d controller as a Linux gamepad
A guide to making the BLE-only GameSir T1d controller sold with the Ryze/DJI Tello drone work as a regular Linux gamepad by speaking its proprietary GATT protocol and exposing it as a virtual input device, with every button verified.
7 min · 1,703 words
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of VEX in NixOS
Faced with a flood of new CVEs, the author explains why SBOM-based scanning and reachability analysis break down for whole operating systems, and how NixOS's reproducible package graph makes it practical to generate VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) statements, demonstrated with the experimental nixos-vex project.
6 min · 1,296 words
A short personal essay from 0xFF on leaving the corporate rat race, arguing that companies use perks to keep employees on a 'happiness treadmill' while treating them as replaceable, and pointing to remote-first, asynchronous companies like Todoist, 37signals and Linear as proof that flexible work functions fine.
2 min · 474 words
What we ended up doing about alias propagation
A follow-up from the Futhark programming language blog on how the open questions about alias propagation in Futhark's type checker were resolved, covering the rules adopted for functions, tuples and uniqueness types, the formalisation work, and remaining imprecision in the compiler implementation.
8 min · 1,940 words
A practical introduction to arena allocators in C: what they are, why grouping allocations into one region makes memory management faster and less leak-prone, and a step-by-step personal implementation with code, plus the trade-offs of using them.
9 min · 2,184 words
Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking
Evan Ovadia introduces the flexible borrow checker in the Valen programming language, where references remember which part of a data structure they point into, so mutations elsewhere don't invalidate them, and walks through examples comparing it with Rust's borrow checking.
27 min · 6,247 words
I paid people to try and follow my README
Terence Eden describes paying people about €25 each to follow his ActivityBot README aloud over video calls, the many confusing steps, jargon and assumptions they uncovered, and why testing documentation with real people beats relying on your own judgement or an LLM.
3 min · 668 words
Changelog 32 - Slick Seventeen, Awesome Applications, Universal USB Tools
LineageOS announces version 24.0, based on Android 17, ahead of the project's 10-year anniversary, covering security patch status across branches, new and updated core apps such as the Canvas image editor, universal USB tooling, and the list of supported, added and moved devices.
17 min · 3,941 words
Inside a 1980s filter chip that uses switched capacitors
Ken Shirriff decaps a mysterious 1985 Harris chip, identifies it as a version of the MF10 switched-capacitor filter, and explains under the microscope how rapidly switched capacitors act as resistors, how the state-variable filter and op-amps are built, and how the die's layout maps to the circuit.
20 min · 4,576 words
Ollie Green argues that after AI companies got away with large-scale IP use for training, AI's ability to decompile, understand and recompose software and other knowledge work is now driving the value of prior work toward zero, collapsing the scarcity that intellectual property was built to protect.
2 min · 442 words