Signal knows who you’re talking to
Or, at the very least, they can. Recently I got a friend to finally join me on Signal. He asked something about whether or not Signal is truly secure and private, like if it was safe from US government surveillance. I told him: “Well, it’s end-to-end encrypted, so they don’t know what we’re talking about, […]
Gemini 3 Just Made Larry Page World’s Third Richest Man
Google co-founder Larry Page is now the planet’s third-wealthiest person, vaulting past Amazon’s Jeff Bezos after Alphabet shares jumped 3 % on enthusiasm for the newly released Gemini 3 AI model. The stock move added roughly $6 billion to Page’s stake, pushing his net worth to $252 billion, according to Bloomberg’s daily billionaire index. Fellow […]
After my dad died, we found the love letters
23 Nov, 2025 a few days after dad died, we found the love letters, hidden away among his things. one of them said, i love dota and i love peaches, but i love you more. i will quit smoking and lose weight for you. the happiest days of my life are the ones that start […]
Unusual circuits in the Intel 386’s standard cell logic
I’ve been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel’s most complex processor at the time, containing 285,000 transistors. Intel’s existing design techniques couldn’t handle this complexity and the chip began to fall behind schedule. To meet the schedule, the 386 team started using a […]
GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End
Algol 68 Front End David Edelsohn [email protected] Sat Nov 22 20:38:25 GMT 2025 The GCC Steering Committee has agreed to include the Algol 68 Front End in trunk designated as experimental with stipulations: 1. Algol 68 is not part of all languages built by default. 2. Algol 68 is not part of the GCC release […]
An Economy of AI Agents
Abstract:In the coming decade, artificially intelligent agents with the ability to plan and execute complex tasks over long time horizons with little direct oversight from humans may be deployed across the economy. This chapter surveys recent developments and highlights open questions for economists around how AI agents might interact with humans and with each other, […]
A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
A documented case of infrastructure failure, failed escalation, and a company that refuses to investigate. Here’s the situation: I have outages. My neighbor has the same outages. Xfinity won’t fix it. I bought Xfinity internet in June 2024. Immediately, my connection started dropping. Multiple times a day. Every single day. After troubleshooting every piece of […]
NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf]
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How to Spot a Counterfeit Lithium-Ion Battery
5 min read Andrew Moseman is the online communications editor at Caltech and a freelance contributor to IEEE Spectrum. Cylindrical lithium-ion batteries for small, inexpensive devices are increasingly turning up counterfeit. As an auditor of battery manufacturers around the world, University of Maryland mechanical engineer Michael Pecht frequently finds himself touring spotless production floors. They’re […]
Windows ARM64 Internals: Deconstructing Pointer Authentication
Pointer Authentication Code, or PAC, is an anti-exploit/memory-corruption feature that signs pointers so their use (as code or data) can be validated at runtime. PAC is available on Armv8.3-A and Armv9.0-A (and later) ARM architectures and leverages virtual addressing in order to store a small cryptographic signature alongside the pointer value. On a typical 64-bit […]