NPM and NodeJS should do more to make ES Modules easy to use
June 19, 2024 Coming back to JavaScript and TypeScript after a few years neck deep in Python and Hack, I kept hitting a number of new, cryptic errors when running NodeJS code in my dev environment: # when I ran ESM TypeScript code the wrong way: Error [ERR_REQUIRE_ESM]: Must use import to load ES Module […]
Curl is inside 22,734 Steam games
About a year ago I blogged about games that use curl. In that post I listed a bunch of well-known titles I knew use curl and there was a list of 136 additional games giving credit to curl. Kind of amazing that over one hundred games decided to use curl! At the time, lots of […]
Tetris as Font
Tetris Font GIF width:Download Animated GIFDownload SVGHide all but font rendering Tetris is among the best-selling (and perhaps best-known) video games ever. We grew up playing the Game Boy and Spectrum HoloByte PC editions. Erik is even a Tetris Master. Nowadays you can play in your browser or on a Switch or on PS4/PC/VR. Font […]
Rotation curves: still flat after a million light-years
That rotation curves become flat at large radii is one of the most famous results in extragalactic astronomy. This had been established by Vera Rubin and her collaborators by the late 1970s. There were a few earlier anecdotal cases to this effect, but these seemed like mild curiosities until Rubin showed that the same thing […]
20x Faster Background Removal in the Browser Using ONNX Runtime with WebGPU
TL;DR: Using ONNX Runtime with WebGPU and WebAssembly leads to 20x speedup over multi-threaded and 550x speedup over single-threaded CPU performance. Thus achieving interactive speeds for state-of-the-art background removal directly in the browser. Removing background from an image is a typical job to be done in creative editing. We have come a long way from […]
EU Council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control
The EU Council and its participants have decided to withdraw the vote on the contentious Chat Control plan proposed by Belgium, the current EU President. According to Netzpolitik (German), “The EU Council did not make a decision on chat control today, as the agenda item was removed due to the lack of a majority, confirmed […]
Free software hijacked Philip Hazel’s life
Philip Hazel was 51 when he began the Exim message transfer agent (MTA) project in 1995, which led to the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) project in 1998. At 80, he’s maintained PCRE, and its successor PCRE2, for more than 27 years. For those doing the math, that’s a year longer than LWN has been in […]
As you learn Forth, it learns from you (1981)
As you learn Forth, it learns from you LIKE ANY computer language, Forth has a vocabulary – but this vocabulary can be broadened by the programmer. Each new word added is defined in terms of older words already known to the system. Thus, increasingly-powerful words can be formed in hierarchical fashion. In this sense, Forth […]
Ask HN: Is Firefox better than Chrome when it comes to user security?
Is it actually meaningfully safer for a user to use Firefox over Chrome? It feels like Chrome being made by Google can employ more folks, respond to 0-days, with integrations for Google accounts, it provides a decent password management experience, passkeys, etc. I understand folks have concerns with Google as a company, but ignoring that […]
Lessons Learned from Scaling to Multi-Terabyte Datasets
This post is meant to guide you through some of the lessons I’ve learned while working with multi-terabyte datasets. The lessons shared are focused on what someone may face as the size of their dataset scales up and some of the things I’ve done to overcome them. I hope you’re waiting for something to finish […]