Arkiv

Font Rendering from First Principles

February 1, 2026 Font rendering is a technology that often gets taken for granted — it’s hard to imagine interacting with computers without it. But how hard could it really be? Turns out, way harder than you might think: Text can be rendered at arbitrary sizes. How is font data encoded such that glyphs remain […]

An open replacement for the IBM 3174 Establishment Controller

IBM 3270 terminal controller – a replacement for the IBM 3174. This project aims to create an open replacement for the IBM 3174 Establishment Controller, specifically for users looking to connect an IBM 3270 type terminal to the Hercules emulator. For background on this project, IBM 3270 type terminals and controllers, see Building an IBM […]

Take a trip to Japan’s Dododo Land, the most irritating place on Earth

Have fun and feel annoyed at the same time! It seems like these are especially stressful times, no matter where you are or what your background is. Whether it’s from unreasonable behavior, things not turning out as you expect, or being the victim of someone’s cruel actions, we all are inflicted with feelings ranging from […]

GLM-OCR: Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive

👋 Join our WeChat and Discord community 📍 Use GLM-OCR’s API Model Introduction GLM-OCR is a multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding, built on the GLM-V encoder–decoder architecture. It introduces Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) loss and stable full-task reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, recognition accuracy, and generalization. The model integrates the CogViT visual encoder […]

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

← Blog Senior Engineer, Antithesis This blog post is adapted from a talk Shuxian Wang and I gave at the Rust UnConf, organized by Rust NYC. The UnConf was a truly awesome group of Rust enthusiasts who met for a couple hours of deep technical conversations (and also gelato). When you give us your software to […]

Hacking the last Z80 computer – FOSDEM 2026 [video]

The Z80 CPU has been extremely popular in home computers of the eighties, but as 16-bit and 32-bit processors became more popular, the only new computers built using the Z80 were continuations of some legacy lines (like the Amstrad PCW). And yet, in 1999 a company named Cidco unveiled a completely new computer line named […]

Rome is studded with cannon balls (2022)

Did you know that Rome is studded with cannon balls? Not many know that the city is full of sites where you can still see cannon balls. Rome has been the center of many battles and there are many sites around the city, that remind us of this. If you want to take a TOUR […]

Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

In the context of a sari, where the geometry of the korvai join is non-negotiable and the pose of the yali is sacred, a CNN creates ”gibberish”, motifs that look correct at a glance but are structurally unsound and can be culturally offensive. Even the more advanced Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)—the engines behind many deepfakes—struggle […]

Switzerland’s Extraordinary Medieval Library

Apart from its vast tomes, what makes the library so compelling is its age. Its origins date to the early 7th Century, when the Irish missionary Saint Gall founded a hermitage on this site, later giving rise to the abbey. Although the original library was replaced in 1767 by the present Baroque hall, the continuity […]

Signy: Signed URLs for Small Devices

Signed URLs for small devices. Background signy is a library for generating signed URLs on embedded devices using asymmetric cryptography. Signed URLs are typically utilized to grant time-limited access to private resources, such as those served by a Content Delivery Network (CDN). In the context of embedded devices, signed URLs may be used to enable […]