Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle
Transmitted 20260209 · · · 369 days before impact If you’ve ever used Photoshop or another image editing program, you know the paint bucket tool. Here is its primordial form: The paint bucket icon, Susan Kare The operation executed by this tool is “flood fill”: color stretches out from the cursor, transforming everything until it reaches an unbroken […]
Chrome extensions spying on 37M users’ browsing data
Summary We built an automated scanning pipeline that runs Chrome inside a Docker container, routes all traffic through a man‑in‑the‑middle (MITM) proxy, and watches for outbound requests that correlate with the length of the URLs we feed it. Using a leakage metric we flagged 287 Chrome extensions that exfiltrate browsing history. Those extensions collectively have […]
A Cosmic Miracle: A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at z=14.44 Confirmed with JWST
Naidu, Rohan P., Pascal A. Oesch, Gabriel Brammer, Andrea Weibel, Yijia Li, Jorryt Matthee, John Chisolm, et al. 2026. “A Cosmic Miracle: A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at zspec = 14.44 Confirmed with JWST.” The Open Journal of Astrophysics 9 (January). https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.156033.
I’m building a clarity-first language (compiles to C++)
ROX is a minimal, clarity-first programming language built on a simple belief: Programming logic should not have to fight the language. ROX removes implicit behavior, hidden conversions, and syntactic tricks so that expressing logic feels direct and mechanical rather than negotiated. ROX compiles .rox source files into C++20 (.cc), which are then compiled into native […]
5,300-year-old ’bow drill’ rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools
Published on: 9 February 2026 A new study reveals that Egyptians were using a mechanically sophisticated drilling tool far earlier than previously suggested. Researchers at Newcastle University, and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, have re-examined a small copper-alloy object excavated a century ago from a cemetery at Badari in Upper Egypt, and concluded it […]
RynnBrain
💫 Project Page | Models & Bench 🤗 🤖 | 🚀 Demo | 📚 Cookbooks [2026.02.15] 🔥🔥 Release our Technical Report !! [2026.02.09] 🔥🔥 Release our code and model checkpoints!! Introduction We present RynnBrain, an embodied foundation model grounded in physical reality. RynnBrain is available in two dense variants (2B and 8B) and […]
The Day the Telnet Died
A long, long time ago I can still remember how a protocol used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those botnets dance And maybe they’d be happy for a while But January made me shiver With every packet I tried to deliver Bad news on […]
Adventures in Neural Rendering
In recent years, neural networks have started to find their way into many areas of rendering. While antialiasing and upscaling are probably the most well‑known uses, they’re far from the only ones—texture compression, material representation, and indirect lighting are all active areas of research and development. I recently started tinkering with neural networks, experimenting with […]
The Three Year Myth
I got let go from my job – elimination of role, they’re claiming – so I’m understandably a bit raw. So was my boss from what it looked like, though he still has a paycheck and benefits whereas I do not. Still, rawness is an excellent time to reflect on what went right and what […]
Fun with Algebraic Effects – From Toy Examples to Hardcaml Simulations
I recently ported the Hardcaml_step_testbench library, one of the libraries that we use at Jane Street for Hardcaml simulations, from using monads to using algebraic effects, a new OCaml 5 feature. This blog post walks through what algebraic effects are, why you should consider using them in lieu of monads, and how to actually work […]