The mathematics of compression in database systems
This post is a little departure from our usual architecture discussions, but I promise it is worth understanding if you care about your database performance. I started thinking about compression when implementing prefix compression for SlateDB. When I ran benchmarks, I noticed that performance seemed ”worse” despite improved compression ratios. This got me thinking deeper […]
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
”Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?” ”Always has been.” Everyone in San Francisco is talking about the singularity. At dinner parties, at coffee shops, at the OpenClaw meetup where Ashton Kutcher showed up for some reason. The conversations all have the same shape: someone says it’s coming, someone says it’s hype, and nobody […]
Can my SPARC server host a website?
TL;DR: I’m hosting a website on a 25-year-old Sun Netra X1 SPARC server running OpenBSD 7.8. The setup includes: Noctua fan mods for quiet operation, httpd serving static HTML/CSS, OpenBSD’s pf firewall with default-deny rules, and Cloudflare tunnels to expose it safely without port forwarding. The server pulls ~55MB of RAM and serves pages from […]
Constraint Propagation for Fun
Constraint propagation for fun I’ve been playing the very good Squeakross this weekend. It is adorable and the aesthetics are absolutely immaculate, but I’ve found the actual picross puzzles to be a point of frustrating friction in the game when compared to the picross-style puzzles in my bicross game. Picross puzzles, aka nonograms, can relatively […]
Shades of Halftone
There has recently been a newfound excitement for pattern-based post-processing effects all over my timeline, as softwares such as Paper, Efecto, or Unicorn Studio are democratizing the use of shaders for both designers and developers. While some of these patterns originated as workarounds due to technical limitations we have since overcome, they now serve as […]
Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine
Loading… Why am I seeing this? You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone. Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses […]
Code Storage by the Pierre Computer Company
~*~ © Code Storage by the Pierre Computer Company, Inc. ~*~ Use Code Storage to programatically create Git repositories and manage them with a simple API. No more rate limits, complicated auth-flows, or other limitations. Just create repos whenever you need them, and start pushing. Perfect for AI-driven coding platforms, agentic frameworks, and more. Code […]
Gradient.horse
Honestly I just wanted to play around with gradients. But gradients without anything on the horizon lack something, so I added horses. Since I can’t draw horses, now you can draw them. And watch them parade across the screen alongside horses drawn by people you probably wouldn’t like. Or maybe you would, how should I […]
Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986
Prologue: The Dragon That Couldn’t Be Slain A Denver company that developed legal software tried. They failed. A game studio that made software for Disney tried. They spent over a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had a team of programmers in Armenia, overseen by an American PhD in mathematics. They failed. Commodore […]
Faster Than Dijkstra?
Last year a couple of people forwarded to me the same article on a new method of finding shortest paths in networks. The underlying research claims to improve on the classic approach pioneered by Dijkstra that is taught in most networking textbooks (including ours). I was initially a bit skeptical, much as I would be […]