Arkiv

An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions

Abstract:The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal. While satellites provide many benefits to society, their use comes with challenges, including the growth of space debris, collisions, ground […]

From text to token: How tokenization pipelines work

By James Blackwood-Sewell on October 10, 2025 When you type a sentence into a search box, it’s easy to imagine the search engine seeing the same thing you do. In reality, search engines (or search databases) don’t store blobs of text, and they don’t store sentences. They don’t even store words in the way we […]

Interview with Kent Overstreet (Bcachefs) [audio]

Simple Sharing Page A clean, simple landing page with an embedded HTML5 audio player (and audio cards for Twitter and Facebook). Embeddable Audio Player Paste this code to embed an HTML5 audio player with controls. Download URL Useful if you want to create a direct download link, embed in your own player, post from another […]

The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

WTF moment: Why my native OS refuses to return a ”True” value. 🔴 The Glitch In Episode 03 of my psychological thriller, Script in the Audience, there is a trivial moment where a character makes a correct deduction. In English, I wrote: “He’d guessed right.” Simple. Direct. Boolean value = True. But getting to that […]

Craft software that makes people feel something

So, I woke up today. Got my coffee, family went to sleep, and I have a free afternoon. I thought about writing something. I may delete this article, but if you are reading this, it means I went through with it. Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a […]

VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO

One of the more curious dotcom era startups was VA Linux. In a way, it makes sense, because so much of the dotcom boom was powered by Linux, so we’d expect a Linux company to do well in those times. But VA Linux operated on a business model that doesn’t really exist anymore. Its December […]

Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content

Meta has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion access providers, queer groups and reproductive health organisations in the past weeks in what campaigners call one of the “biggest waves of censorship” on its platforms in years. The takedowns and restrictions began in October and targeted the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts of […]

If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?

Fault Lines If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books? Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences. By Jay Caspian Kang December 9, 2025 Illustration by Mark Harris Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story

A ”Frozen” Dictionary for Python

Dictionaries are ubiquitous in Python code; they are the data structure of choice for a wide variety of tasks. But dictionaries are mutable, which makes them problematic for sharing data in concurrent code. Python has added various concurrency features to the language over the last decade or so—async, free threading without the global interpreter lock […]

Show HN: Tripwire: A new anti evil maid defense

What are Evil Maid Attacks? Evil maid attacks, first defined by Joanna Rutkowska (source), has been a difficult threat to people who care about their device security and personal privacy. In an evil maid attack, the attacker gets physical access to the target device when the user left it at home or in a hotel […]