What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?
What Is the Nicest Thing A Stranger Has Ever Done for You? | Living Out Loud 10 Dec, 2025 So there I was, pedaling my bicycle as fast as I could down a long, straight stretch of road, feeling great. I’d just discovered the pleasures of riding a road bike, and I loved every minute […]
An SVG is all you need
SVGs are pretty cool – vector graphics in a simple XML format. They are supported on just about every device and platform, are crisp on every display, and can have embedded scripts in to make them interactive. They’re way more capable than many people realise, and I think we can capitalise on some of that […]
Creating C closures from Lua closures
When I set out to bridge the entire Windows C API to Lua, one of the most interesting and fun challenges I had was to create C callbacks from Lua functions. Without this, a significant portion of the API would be useless, such as WNDPROC. Brief primer on Lua closures For those unfamiliar with Lua […]
We built a resource hub to fight back against age verification
Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online. Though these mandates claim to protect children, in practice they create harmful censorship and surveillance regimes that put everyone—adults and young people alike—at risk. […]
Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1
We are building a comprehensive archive and analysis project examining published documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Our methodology involves systematically reviewing each available document with particular attention to small details and information that has received little or no public attention since the initial 2013 disclosures. Throughout this process, we will publish posts highlighting interesting previously […]
Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
RJ opened the first ever Autonomy and AI Day explaining why Rivian believes it is positioned to lead in this next phase of the industry. The company is leaning hard into compute, custom hardware, large scale AI systems, and a shared data foundation that touches every part of the ownership experience. Let’s break it all […]
Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
This section was labeled under, or is related to Programming In Dec 2022 I watched Richard Stallman’s talk on the EmacsConf, it was titled “What I’d like to see in Emacs”. One of the interesting points Mr. Stallman pointed out in this talk was “memorable names”, “I think every package that you […] should have […]
Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
A spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards In any normal spreadsheet, when you change values that are the input to some formulas, the outputs are automatically updated: Could it also work the other way? What if you could also change the output, and have the inputs be updated to match the formula? For the past […]
Litestream VFS
Image by Annie Ruygt I’m Ben Johnson, and I work on Litestream at Fly.io. Litestream is the missing backup/restore system for SQLite. It’s free, open-source software that should run anywhere, and you can read more about it here. Again with the sandwiches: assume we’ve got a SQLite database of sandwich ratings, and we’ve backed it […]
Notes on Sorted Data
When building systems that need to store and compare data in a sorted order, we often run into challenges with how to represent our data while preserving the ordering we want. Here are some common patterns (and pitfalls) I’ve observed when working with ordered data. For most of this post, we’ll be considering a generic […]