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When to choose x86-64 vs aarch64
Not all cloud vCPUs are created equal. When you create a PlanetScale Postgres or Neki database, you have to choose between `aarch64` (ARM) and `x86-64`. Two clusters on different architectures can have the same vCPU count and RAM, yet perform very differently. It's worth understanding the implications, since you can't easily switch the CPU architecture on your cluster later. x86 grew up on the desktop, prioritizing backward compatibility and performance. It began at Intel in 1978 and IBM’s…
6 min · 1,326 words
Mac Mini M6: Retro PC Emulation with 86Box (600MHz PII?!)
Benchmarking cycle-accurate 86Box on an M6 Mac Mini: why one core matters for retro PC emulation, a stable 600MHz Pentium II clock, and how timing accuracy compares to original hardware.
7 min · 1,678 words
CVE-2025-13032: Entering and Breaking the Avast Antivirus Sandbox Part 2
SAFA’s second part turns Avast’s CVE-2025-13032 double-fetch into a local privilege escalation to SYSTEM on Windows 11 via paged pool overflow and RegBuffers corruption for arbitrary kernel R/W.
13 min · 3,096 words
Burke Holland argues chat isn’t always the right interface for AI-assisted development, and walks through canvases as a more tangible UI for building with GitHub Copilot.
5 min · 1,250 words
A founder who built a desktop coding app around AI planning explains why plan mode collapsed as models got better at figuring out what to do while they work—and what replaces it.
9 min · 2,033 words
Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale
DBOS explains why Postgres SELECT DISTINCT can get surprisingly expensive as datasets grow, what the planner is doing, and how they mitigated it in practice.
5 min · 1,068 words
Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
Microsoft Excel Insiders Beta adds lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, plus HAS/HASANY/HASALL/FLATTEN, so related values can live in one cell without losing filtering and calculation.
2 min · 504 words
Lab on a Contact Lens Can Measure Stress Through Serotonin
IEEE Spectrum covers a smart contact lens that aims to measure serotonin as a stress biomarker, part of a broader push toward continuous body-chemistry sensing.
4 min · 960 words
GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
A software vendor reports a malware-laced GitHub imitation of Easy Data Transform that sat for weeks after reports—until the post hit Hacker News and the page disappeared within minutes.
1 min · 306 words
Which AI is the most annoying? what 84 AI models think
We asked 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 12% picked Grok Edginess. See every answer and who dissented.
11 min · 2,455 words
DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising
EFF argues DraftKings' use of betting data and ML to re-engage losing gamblers shows why all online behavioral advertising—not just third-party data sharing—should be banned.
3 min · 609 words
How to win a beer with high-dimensional statistics
Jamie Simon explains a viral high-dimensional statistics paper with a bar-bet framing: why naive intuition about data geometry fails, and how the right summary wins the round.
4 min · 827 words
mitxela builds a FLIP fluid simulation on salvaged Hanover flipdot panels for EMF2026—drive electronics, power, eight-panel install, and the pun that started it.
2 min · 377 words
Kate Broughton connects OpenAI’s misalignment disclosures to how we form children and machines—what constitutions, staged evaluation, and “following” might mean for raising capable systems.
10 min · 2,240 words
Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later
Lars Doucet revisits five years of Georgism evidence since the ACX book-review contest—land-value tax trials, YIMBY politics, and what new data say about whether taxing land works in practice.
36 min · 8,361 words
One CPU Atomic Instruction, One Packaging Infinite Loop: The Story of the Lost Update on LA664
Jie Ge documents a Loongson LA664 erratum where an atomic instruction can lose updates, how it surfaced as an infinite packaging loop, the root cause analysis, and what it means for correctness on that CPU.
14 min · 3,163 words
Parsing Expression Grammar in Lisp: Converting Org to HTML with (ice-9 peg) in Guile
Hi everyone. In this blog post I want to take you in an adventure of parsing Org mode with Parsing Expression Grammars (PEG) in Guile Scheme (ice 9 peg) and converting to HTML (via SXML): OrgWebAlchemy. I wanted to share something with you all that I’ve been working on for a while. It all started with some naive regular expressions to parse Org mode content, but I pretty quickly realized I needed something smarter than that to get to where I want to.
5 min · 1,135 words
From Thin Air to Bootable Images: The tine Build System
Martin Pitt and Daan De Meyer introduce tine: reproducible builds of RPM, Go, and Rust components into bootable images from minimal host requirements.
21 min · 4,850 words
Writing a ray tracer in Brainfuck
A playful systems post that implements a ray tracer in Brainfuck—compilers, esolangs, and the surprising claim that sometimes the correct answer is to write a compiler.
9 min · 2,118 words
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Johannes Doerfert, on September 17, 2026, at the age of 36, after a battle with cancer. Johannes was one of the most prolific and respected contributors to the LLVM compiler project, and his loss will be deeply felt.
5 min · 1,239 words