It’s All a Blur
Designing a slightly sneaky blur filter and then poking holes in it. If you follow information security discussions on the internet, you might have heard that blurring an image is not a good way of redacting its contents. This is supposedly because blurring algorithms are reversible. But then, it’s not wrong to scratch your head. […]
Staying ahead of censors in 2025
by meskio and shelikhoo | December 3, 2025 From internet blackouts in Iran to Russia’s evolving censorship tactics, 2025 has tested Tor’s anti-censorship tools like never before. These are the moments where the work of Tor’s anti-censorship team is more important than ever, to fulfill our mission of preserving connectivity between users in affected regions […]
Show HN: Z80-μLM, a ’Conversational AI’ That Fits in 40KB
Z80-μLM is a ’conversational AI’ that generates short character-by-character sequences, with quantization-aware training (QAT) to run on a Z80 processor with 64kb of ram. The root behind this project was the question: how small can we go while still having personality, and can it be trained or fine-tuned easily? With easy self-hosted distribution? The answer […]
Binaries
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within industry, such as at Google, […]
John Simpson: ’I’ve reported on 40 wars but I’ve never seen a year like 2025’
3 hours ago ShareSave John SimpsonBBC world affairs editor ShareSave BBC Sensitive content: This article contains a graphic description of death that some readers may find upsetting I’ve reported on more than 40 wars around the world during my career, which goes back to the 1960s. I watched the Cold War reach its height, then […]
You can make up HTML tags
You can make up HTML tags: (Maurycy’s blog) Navigation: HomepageYearly archivesAstrophotographyAssorted softwareReal pagesAll tags Aug 2, 2025 (Programming) Instead of writing HTML like this: Hello, World! … you can write HTML like this: Hello, World! … and CSS like this: cool-thing { display: block; font-weight: bold; text-align: center; filter: drop-shadow(0 0 0.5em #ff0); color: #ff0; […]
Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
I got this email: Rich, Your creation of Clojure … sycophantic blather worthy of a third grader’s homework assignment to write a letter to a public figure you don’t know, using sources you don’t understand, to express an emotion unfelt, with no intention whatsoever Claude Haiku 4.5 Ah, Christmas time. That time of year when […]
Show HN: My app just won best iOS Japanese learning tool of 2025 award
Welcome to the award show everyone! Hosted by your favourite bee… Bee! 🥳 I wanted to summarise the best tools etc out there in 2025, and what better way then to put on a fake award show! And like all true award shows and Christmas themed events, let’s get into the spirit of giving. This […]
Slaughtering Competition Problems with Quantifier Elimination
22 Dec 2021 – Tags: sage , featured Anytime I see questions on mse that ask something “simple”, I feel a powerful urge to chime in with “a computer can do this for you!”. Obviously if you’re a researching mathematician you shouldn’t waste your time with something a computer can do for you, but when […]
62 years in the making: NYC’s newest water tunnel nears the finish line
Turn on the tap, and water flows without a second thought. But deep beneath New York City, hundreds of feet below street level, workers are finishing a project that’s been under construction for more than half a century — a massive water tunnel that will help keep that simple act possible for generations to come. […]