Welcome to the “neomedieval era”: are states becoming obsolete?
The world, we are told, is entering a new era of “great-power rivalry.” Or at least, it was supposed to be. The most recent US National Security Strategy, issued by President Joe Biden’s administration in 2022, confidently asserted that “the post-Cold War era is definitively over,” and that we were entering an era defined by […]
Lago: Open-Source Alternative to Stripe Is Hiring a Solution Engineer
The team and your role As part of our growth, we’re hiring for someone to lead our post-sales customer experience, overseeing the implementation of our product, the day-to-day run, and the potential account expansion. Our customer base include software, fintech and infrastructure companies mainly based in Europe and the US, such as Mistral.ai, Together.ai, Swan.io. […]
Flathub: Pros and cons of direct uploads
February 6, 2024 Flathub: Pros and Cons of Direct Uploads I attended FOSDEM last weekend and had the pleasure to participate in the Flathub / Flatpak BOF on Saturday. A lot of the session was used up by an extensive discussion about the merits (or not) of allowing direct uploads versus building everything centrally on […]
Billion File Filesystem
For a lark I made an ext4 file system with a billion empty files. https://gitlab.com/larswirzenius/create-empty-files has the program I wrote for this. I’ve done this before, but this time I made it a little simpler for me to do it again: everything in one Rust program rather than clunky scripts. The disk image starts out […]
Will Satellite Megaconstellations Weaken Earth’s Magnetic Field?
Feb. 1, 2024: Something unprecedented is happening in Earth orbit. In only a few short years, the satellite population has skyrocketed, more than doubling since 2020. In the past year alone, more satellites have been launched than during the first thirty years of the Space Age. Much of this activity is driven by SpaceX and […]
EU right to repair: Sellers liable for 1 year after products are fixed
Enlarge Getty Images | SimpleImages Europe’s right-to-repair rules will force vendors to stand by their products an extra 12 months after a repair is made, according to the terms of a new political agreement. Consumers will have a choice between repair and replacement of defective products during a liability period that sellers will be required […]
A Teen’s Fatal Plunge into the London Underworld
Letter from London A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld After Zac Brettler mysteriously plummeted into the Thames, his grieving parents discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son. Would the police help them solve the puzzle of his death? By Patrick Radden Keefe February 5, 2024 On November 28, 2019, Zac Brettler, […]
OpenAI’s Whisper is another case study in Colonisation
On 21 September OpenAI dropped Whisper, a speech recognition model trained on 680,000 hours of audio taken from the web. The highlight: it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English. We are open-sourcing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for building useful applications and for […]
Edit This Blog Post
This is a regular HTML page. But if you click or tap on the text, you will be able to edit it! This isn’t a fancy styled , it’s a element which uses the contenteditable global attribute. There are some nifty features – depending on your browser. You can add more bullets by pressing enter […]
The Ladybird browser project
The Ladybird browser project Ladybird is an ongoing project to build an independent web browser from scratch. It is being developed as part of the SerenityOS/serenity project on GitHub. There are no downloadable binaries yet, as the project is still very unstable. You can follow the build instructions to build it for yourself. This page […]