Solving `Passport Application` with Haskell
There’s a trend at the moment of solving online games with programming, let’s do one from the UK called Passport Application, which is developed by “His Majesty’s Passport Office” or HMPO. It’s a cultural phenomenon in the UK: despite being quite expensive (about £100 just to start) for the standard online version (a masterpiece of […]
The Death of the Middle-Class Musician
Rollie Pemberton was barely a teenager when he started rapping. His hometown, Edmonton, didn’t have much of a hip-hop scene in the early aughts, so he honed his craft online. He plugged an old-school microphone into his mom’s desktop computer, recorded a few verses, later turned them into tracks, and sent them out into the […]
Schizophrenia Is the Price We Pay for Minds Poised Near the Edge of a Cliff
This post discusses cliff-edged fitness functions by Randolph Nesse (psychiatrist and one of the founders of evolutionary medicine) and the 2024 paper, “The cliff edge model of the evolution of schizophrenia: Mathematical, epidemiological, and genetic evidence,” by Philipp Mitteroecker and Giuseppe Pierpaolo Merola. If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, and it deepens […]
People Keep Inventing Prolly Trees
Multiple Discovery refers to when a scientific discovery is made independently by multiple individuals around the same time. The most well-known examples are Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz’s independent invention of calculus, and Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s independent formulation of the theory of evolution. (Source: https://xkcd.com/626/) There’s even a hypothesis that multiple discovery […]
Show HN: Vet – A tool for safely running remote shell scripts
vet — A safer way to run remote scripts. Don’t just run it — vet it. Stop blindly piping to bash. vet lets you inspect remote scripts for changes, run them through a linter, and require your explicit approval before they can execute. The Problem We’ve all seen this pattern for installing software: curl -sSL […]
2025 ARRL Field Day
ARRL Field Day is a radio communications event that brings together amateur radio operators (also called “hams”) within your community. The theme for 2025 Field Day is “Radio Connects” – highlighting the many ways that wireless technology connects people across distances near and far. The event is part picnic, campout, practice for emergencies, informal contest, […]
JavaScript Trademark Update
On June 18, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) dismissed our fraud claim against Oracle. We disagree with this decision. That claim alleged Oracle knowingly misled the USPTO in its 2019 renewal by submitting a screenshot of the Node.js website to show use of the “JavaScript” trademark. As the creator of Node.js, I find […]
Life of an inference request (vLLM V1): How LLMs are served efficiently at scale
June 27, 2025 · 10 min read Junhao Li Senior Software Engineer Ubicloud is an open source alternative to AWS. We offer managed cloud services that build on top of PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, vLLM, and others. vLLM is an open-source inference engine that serves large language models. We deploy multiple vLLM instances across GPUs and load […]
Getting weather data from my Acurite sensors was shockingly easy
I’ve had a Pi and SDR earmarked for ‘getting weather data from my weather station’ for a long time now. I don’t know why I waited so long, because it was shockingly easy. I have a Acurite 5-in-1 weather station (with separate lightning detector) mounted about 15′ in the air in my back yard. It […]
BYU study: Why some people choose not to use artificial intelligence
A photo illustration created by AI depicting someone skeptical of using AI.Photo by Nate Edwards/BYU Photo Generative artificial intelligence is everywhere, but not everyone is ready to embrace it — and it’s not just people who fear that AI might replace their jobs or that ChatGPT will become sentient and take over the world. In […]