Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far
I’ve been scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far UK planning data is technically public. In practice it’s locked behind 400+ different council portals, some still running bespoke ASP.NET that looks like it dates from 2004, some behind AWS WAF, all with subtly different schemas. I’ve spent four months scraping them. […]
GTFOBins
7z File read R Shell aa-exec Shell ab Upload Download acr Command agetty Shell alpine File read ansible-playbook Shell ansible-test Shell aoss Shell apache2 File read apache2ctl File read apport-cli Inherit Shell Command File write File read Inherit apt Shell Inherit Shell Command File write File read Inherit apt-get Shell Inherit Shell Command File write […]
WASM is not quite a stack machine
April 27, 2026 Lobsters Everyone knows Wasm is a stack machine. Wikipedia says so, the official Wasm design specification says so, you get it. I thought so too. That is, until I started writing Wasm code – not compiling for Wasm, but writing the instructions by hand. And I found out that there exists a […]
I quit drinking for a year
In early January 2025, a family friend was over for lunch. One of my many guilty midwit pleasures is a love of New Year’s resolutions, so I asked her if she had made any. She said no, but mentioned that she had some relatives that were doing “damp January”. In case you’re not aware, Dry […]
Ted Nyman – High Performance Git
Git looks like a version-control tool. It is also a content-addressed database, a filesystem cache, a graph walker, and a transfer protocol. This book is about those layers and the performance costs of each one. It starts with objects, refs, the index, and history traversal, then moves outward into packfiles, maintenance, sparse working trees, partial […]
Generative AI Vegetarianism
March 11, 2026 Version history For some spicier takes! Anthony Moser’s “I Am An AI Hater”, Jenny Zhang’s “choosing friction”, Rusty Foster’s “A.I. Isn’t People”, or Ed Zitron’s “The Case Against Generative AI” if you have most of an afternoon to read it. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s podcast interview with Paris Marx is also […]
CS Professor: To My Students
2026 4 27 http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/00FD/ 00FD /~yorgey/forest/00FD/ To my students There have been times, especially this year, when I wonder despairingly what it is exactly that I am preparing you for. The software industry is going completely insane, not to mention the political climate. It feels almost unethical to train you as computer scientists only to […]
Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930
Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, Alec Radford April 2026 This is a 24/7 live feed of Claude Sonnet 4.6 prompting talkie-1930-13b-it in order to explore its knowledge, capabilities, and inclinations. talkie’s outputs reflect the culture and values of the texts it was trained on, not the views […]
NPM Website Is Down
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United Wizards of the Coast
Today is an exciting day in the history of Magic: The Gathering Arena! We, the workers of the Arena team have come together to unionize as United Wizards of the Coast – CWA. Last week, a supermajority of eligible Arena workers signed union cards to pledge their support. Earlier this morning, we informed WOTC leadership of our […]