Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
…rinse and repeat for several thousand lines. The “sub” sequence of characters matches greedily, which is why this list starts with 4-digit numbers; if it started from 1 to 9, then we’d just get a bunch of single-digit replacements. That also means that for 5+ digit numbers like 123456, the font will match 4 digits […]
Gwtar: A static efficient single-file HTML format
Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format which provides a single, self-contained, HTML file which still can be efficiently lazy-loaded by a web browser. This is done by a header’s JavaScript making HTTP range requests. It is used on Gwern.net to serve large HTML archives. Archiving HTML files faces a trilemma: it is easy […]
Show HN: Perlin Noise Terminal Animation in Rust (60 FPS, Truecolor)
Beautiful Perlin noise animation for your terminal. Smooth, flowing gradients rendered in 24-bit truecolor using half-block characters for double vertical resolution. Truecolor rendering — Full 24-bit RGB color gradients Double vertical resolution — Uses ▀ half-block characters to render 2 pixels per cell Multiple color themes — Ocean, Fire, Aurora, Matrix Smooth animation — Multi-octave […]
Amazon, Google Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State
Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever. One of Google’s Nest surveillance cameras, whose recordings can be accessed by Google even if users don’t subscribe to the security firm’s services. CC Photo Lab / Shutterstock That […]
Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)
What is Starflight? Back in the 80ths, an unknown company called Binary Systems published the game Starflight. The game puts the player in the role of a starship captain sent to explore the galaxy. There is no set path, allowing players to switch freely between mining, ship-to-ship combat, and alien diplomacy. The broader plot of […]
I Fixed Windows Native Development
Imagine you’re maintaining a native project. You use Visual Studio for building on Windows, so you do the responsible thing and list it as a dependency Build Requirements: Install Visual Studio If you’re lucky enough not to know this yet, I envy you. Unfortunately, at this point even Boromir knows… Well put Boromir What you […]
Learning Lean: Part 1
Motivation I’ve been captivated by the recent movement to popularize mathematics formalization through the Lean theorem prover, and this year I’m diving deeper into learning it. For those unfamiliar with this revolution, I highly recommend watching Kevin Buzzard’s talks on YouTube for an overview of why formal mathematics is generating such excitement in the mathematical […]
Arrays in Forth
A natural question that beginners often ask is: Why doesn’t Forth have features that are standard in other languages, for example, arrays? The answer is that Forth is so facile at creating new data types that it is usually easier to invent something that exactly suits your needs than it is to force your program […]
Two different tricks for fast LLM inference
Anthropic and OpenAI both recently announced “fast mode”: a way to interact with their best coding model at significantly higher speeds. These two versions of fast mode are very different. Anthropic’s offers up to 2.5x tokens per second (so around 170, up from Opus 4.6’s 65). OpenAI’s offers more than 1000 tokens per second (up […]
Four Column ASCII (2017)
I found this gem on Hacker News the other day. User soneil posted to a four column version of the ASCII table that blew my mind. I just wanted to repost this here so it is easier to discover. Here’s an excerpt from the comment: I always thought it was a shame the ascii table […]