Bell Labs DSP Pioneer Jim Boddie Leaves Lasting Legacy
4 min read Steve Walters worked closely with Jim Boddie on the Bell Labs DSP1, designing the I/O circuitry as well as the DSP development system. Pat Hays enjoyed a long career as a lead developer of computer chips at Bell Labs in Holmdel, N.J., and is the author of Silicon Planet: My Life in […]
Entropy of a Mixture
Entropy of a Mixture Given a pair (p0,p1)(p_0, p_1)(p0,p1) of probability density functions and an interpolation factor λ∈[0,1],lambda in [0, 1],λ∈[0,1], consider the mixture pλ=(1−λ)p0+λp1.p_lambda = (1 – lambda) p_0 + lambda p_1.pλ=(1−λ)p0+λp1. How does the entropy H(pλ)=−EX∼pλlnpλ(X)H(p_lambda) = -E_{X sim p_lambda} ln p_lambda(X)H(pλ)=−EX∼pλlnpλ(X) of this mixture vary as a function of λlambdaλ? The widget […]
The New Skill in AI Is Not Prompting, It’s Context Engineering
Context Engineering is new term gaining traction in the AI world. The conversation is shifting from “prompt engineering” to a broader, more powerful concept: Context Engineering. Tobi Lutke describes it as “the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.” and he is right. With the rise […]
Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi
Michael Calabrese of New America’s Open Technology Institute told Ars that 6 GHz and CBRS “are the most vulnerable non-federal bands for reallocation and auction.” While the spectrum for auctions is to come from frequencies between 1.3 and 10.5 GHz, much of that spectrum will be off-limits either because it’s specifically excluded or because it would […]
Price of rice in Japan falls below ¥4k per 5 kilograms
The average price of rice sold at about 1,000 supermarkets across Japan in the week through June 15 stood at ¥3,920 per 5 kilograms, slipping below ¥4,000 for the first time since the week that ended on March 2, the agriculture ministry said Monday. The average price was down by ¥256 from the previous week, […]
The Original LZEXE (A.K.A. Kosinski) Compressor Source Code Has Been Released
Last year, I discovered that the Kosinski compression format is actually LZEXE, which was used for compressing DOS executables back in the 90s and the late 80s. Its developer catalogues three versions on his website: v0.90, v0.91, and v0.91e. While only binaries of v0.91 and v0.91e can be found on the website, v0.90 can be […]
End of an Era
I recall saying to one of my colleagues at Atari way back in 1982 that I wanted to make a game that would be genuine art. A year later I built a game that was my first experiment in that direction: Gossip. It was a ridiculously simple game in which a player attempted to win […]
Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
Don’t worry, this sounds complicated but it’s just a simple browser setting. You can usually find JavaScript options in your browser’s Settings, Preferences or Internet Options menu. Here are the instructions how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.
The JTAG in your Qualcomm/Snapdragon device’s USB port
Back in February of this year, Qualcomm quietly published the source code for interacting with EUD. This is perhaps one of the most exciting things they’ve done lately – especially if you spend a lot of time debugging the kernel or U-Boot – let’s talk about it. EUD stands for Embedded USB Debug: essentially, this […]
Ask HN: What’s the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
First of all, this is purely a personal learning project for me, aiming to combine three of my passions: photography, software engineering, and my family memories. I have a large collection of family photos and want to build an interactive experience to explore them, ala Google or Apple Photo features. My goal is to create […]