Aug 3, 2025 (Programming) A week ago, I set up an infinite nonsense crawler trap – now it makes up 99% of my server’s traffic. What surprised me is that feeding scrapers garbage is the cheapest and easiest thing I … Read more
Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? From freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#bikeshed-painting.See phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed for historical background;see also Poul-Henning Kamp’s regular column The Bikeshed at the ACM. “The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that … Read more
Several days ago, DeepSeek released a new OCR paper. OCR, or “optical character recognition”, is the process of converting an image of text – say, a scanned page of a book – into actual text content. Better OCR is obviously … Read more
At AdaCore, we’re in the business of supporting people who develop high-integrity software, in particular for embedded systems. In terms of programming languages, this means supporting the most commonly found candidates, which in 2024 include C/C++, Ada/SPARK, and Rust. If … Read more
The pace of software output has never been faster. AI tooling and decades of platform innovation have dramatically lowered the barrier to code creation. With just a few prompts or API calls, it is now possible to generate entire products, … Read more
Eighteen years ago, the originators of XML specification faced a problem: how to use the new language to generate a book-publishing format. What emerged were two new languages, the first for describing the various functional parts of a publication in … Read more
Hear me out. If you are an organization with some spare storage and bandwidth, or an engineer looking to justify an overprovisioned homelab, you should consider running a Certificate Transparency log. It’s cheaper, easier, and more important than you might … Read more
Brian Hicks, June 16, 2025 I keep hearing claims like this: Not everyone in the US has access to stable, reliable internet, even in 2025. Web developers should stop assuming people have fast internet connections and slim their payloads accordingly. … Read more
“Carousels are effective at being able to tell people in Marketing/Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page. Use them to put content that users will ignore on your Home Page. Or, if you prefer, don’t use … Read more
Should every startup give up and go home? The rumors of OpenAI potentially acquiring Windsurf last week triggered a whole round of new takes on the internet: concerns about moving up into the application layer, fears of widespread consolidation, and … Read more