Ion: Modern System Shell in Rust
Ion is a modern system shell that features a simple, yet powerful, syntax. It is written entirely in Rust, which greatly increases the overall quality and security of the shell. It also offers a level of performance that exceeds that of Dash, when taking advantage of Ion’s features. While it is developed alongside, and primarily […]
Run ancient Unix on modern hardware
The contents of this repository allow older versions of UNIX (ancient UNIX) to run easily on modern Unix-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, among others). At this time, you can run the following versions of UNIX: License, Credits and Copyright First of all, credits and acknowledgment for material available in this repository that is not my […]
What Influence Has the BBC Had on History?
‘The BBC has always done far more than reflect the contemporary’ David Hendy, Author of The BBC: A People’s History (Profile, 2022) To write the history of the BBC, Asa Briggs once said, is ‘to write the history of everything else’. The relationship, he suggested, is more than one of background and foreground. Radio and television […]
Ask HN: How are Markov chains so different from tiny LLMs?
I polished a Markov chain generator and trained it on an article by Uri Alon and al (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7963340/). It generates text that seems to me at least on par with tiny LLMs, such as demonstrated by NanoGPT. Here is an example: jplr@mypass:~/Documenti/2025/SimpleModels/v3_very_good$ ./SLM10b_train UriAlon.txt 3 Training model with order 3… Skip-gram detection: DISABLED (order < […]
Almost all Collatz orbits attain almost bounded values
Define the Collatz map Col on the natural numbers by setting Col(n) to equal 3n+1 when n is odd and n/2 when n is even. The notorious Collatz conjecture asserts that all orbits of this map eventually attain the value 1. This remains open, even if one is willing to work with almost all orbits […]
Compiling Ruby to Machine Language
I’ve started working on a new edition of Ruby Under a Microscope that covers Ruby 3.x. I’m working on this in my spare time, so it will take a while. Leave a comment or drop me a line and I’ll email you when it’s finished. Here’s an excerpt from the completely new content for Chapter […]
Towards Interplanetary QUIC Traffic
Have you ever asked yourself which protocols get used when downloading pictures from the Perseverance Mars rover to Earth? I hadn’t thought about that either, until I came across an intriguing message on the internet, back in April 2024: I’m looking for someone knowledgeable of quic/quinn to help us out for our deep space IP […]
Azure hit by 15 Tbps DDoS attack using 500k IP addresses
Microsoft said today that the Aisuru botnet hit its Azure network with a 15.72 terabits per second (Tbps) DDoS attack, launched from over 500,000 IP addresses. The attack used extremely high-rate UDP floods that targeted a specific public IP address in Australia, reaching nearly 3.64 billion packets per second (bpps). ”The attack originated from Aisuru […]
A new book recovers the origins of Effective Altruism
In 1971, the philosophy department at Oxford University was confronted with an unusual student. One of the few vegetarians on campus, Peter Singer staged alarming demonstrations with papier-mâché chickens on Cornmarket Street. He petitioned to write his term paper on Karl Marx (“not a real philosopher” in the faculty’s minds). He attended Radical Philosophy meetings, […]
The Baumol Effect and Jevons paradox are related
If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall. (Source: Marc Andreessen.) This seems insane; why? Well, weird things happen to economies […]