Read Locks Are Not Your Friends
TLDR On commercial hardware, RwLock was ~5× slower than Mutex for a read-heavy cache workload due to atomic contention and cache-line ping-pong. Introduction This is a story about how “obvious” optimizations can backfire. While building Redstone, a high-performance Tensor Cache in Rust, I hit a wall with write-lock contention.I thought a read lock would probably […]
Six Math Essentials
Six Math Essentials 16 February, 2026 in advertising, book, math.GM | Tags: six math essentials | by Terence Tao Just a brief announcement that I have been working with Quanta Books to publish a short book in popular mathematics entitled “Six Math Essentials“, which will cover six of the fundamental concepts in mathematics — numbers, […]
I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard – Joel Hawksley Joel Hawksley / [email protected] / ←home 2026-02-17 TL;DR: Over the past decade, I’ve worked to build the perfect family dashboard system for our home, called Timeframe. Combining calendar, weather, and smart home data, it’s become an important part of our daily lives. When Caitlin […]
Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok
” Loops was founded on a simple but powerful idea: social media should serve people, not exploit them. We’re building an ethical alternative to commercial short-video sharing platforms — a space where creators, people and visual artists can share their work without invasive tracking or data mining. As an open-source project, we believe in radical […]
Show HN: Local-First Linux MicroVMs for macOS
$ shuru run — echo ”hello from the sandbox” hello from the sandbox $ shuru run — cat /etc/os-release | head -1 NAME=”Alpine Linux” # VM boots, runs, and tears down — nothing persists. $ shuru run — ping -c1 8.8.8.8 ping: sendto: Operation not permitted $ shuru run –allow-net — apk add python3 fetch […]
Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic
For the past few years, my editor of choice has been Visual Studio Code. It’s not perfect and definitely not lightweight, but it strikes a sweet spot between features, extensions, and performance. Running the proprietary Microsoft build on FreeBSD isn’t really an option but thankfully, the open-source build works just fine. So why write this […]
Fresh File Explorer – VS Code extension for navigating recent work
Easily navigate recent changes based on your pending work and Git history. Marketplace | OpenVSX Fresh File Explorer Time Window Selection Switch between viewing pending (uncommitted) changes or files modified in configurable time periods. Pending Changes mode shows uncommitted changes (esentially what the Source Control view would give you) Smart File Tree Files are grouped […]
Hello Worg, the Org-Mode Community
Org-mode is a powerful system for organizing your complex life with simple plain-text files. It seamlessly integrates all your notes, mindmaps, TODO lists, calendar, day planner, and project schedules into a single system that can be easily searched (e.g. by grep), encrypted (e.g. by GnuPG), backed up and synced, imported/exported, and accessed on the go […]
Artist who ”paints” portraits on glass by hitting it with a hammer
Contemporary glass artist Simon Berger’s unique sculptural language explores the depth of his material through striking and cracking the glass he works on with a hammer. The pane of glass is both the supportive structure of his artwork, as well as the visualization of his artistic handwriting, playing with transparency of the material. The closer […]
Fix Your Tools
Last week I had to diagnose a bug in an open source library I maintain. The issue was gnarly enough that I couldn’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a breakpoint here and fire up the debugger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then proceed to […]