NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

Lix is a modern, delicious implementation of the Nix package manager, focused on correctness, usability, and growth – and committed to doing right by its community.

New Foundations is consistent, a digitisation of Randall Holmes’ proof in Lean 4.

Periodic orbits for Newtonian planar three-body problem, by Xiaoming LI and Shijun LIAO.

Drawing hat tiling using Racket

Pytype checks and infers types for your Python code—without requiring type annotations.

Inclusive Sans is a text font designed for accessibility and readability.

MS-DOS v4.0, now MIT-licensed.

LGBTeX, a logo by Alessandra Sierra.

Bible errata

Building a GPS Receiver using RTL-SDR, by Phillip Tennen.

Reproducing EGA typesetting with LaTeX, using the Baskervaldx font.

The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher, final, comprehensive report on the project by David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke.

Bridging brains: exploring neurosexism and gendered stereotypes in a mindsport, by Samantha Punch, Miriam Snellgrove, Elizabeth Graham, Charlotte McPherson, and Jessica Cleary.

Yotta is a minimalistic forth-like language bootstrapped from x86_64 machine code.

SSSL - Hackless SSL bypass for the Wii U, released one day after shutdown of the official Nintendo servers.

stagex, a container-native, full-source bootstrapped, and reproducible toolchain.

Computing Adler32 Checksums at 41 GB/s, by wooosh.

Random musings on the Agile Manifesto

doom-htop, “Ever wondered whether htop could be used to render the graphics of cult video games?”

A proper cup of tea, try this game!

Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise, initial writeup of CVE-2024-3094 by Andres Freund.

Everything I Know About the XZ Backdoor, by Evan Boehs.

Timeline of the xz open source attack, by Russ Cox.

xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained, by Gynvael Coldwind.

xz backdoor payload analysis, by Filippo Valsorda.

xzbot, exploration of the xz backdoor.

Cloning a laptop over NVME TCP, by copyninja using the Linux nvemt-tcp module.

RP2040 Boot Sequence, in detail by V. Hunter Adams.

The Mark Williams Company, and the COHERENT operating system.

OldWeb.Today, run ancient browsers in your browser!

Strachey love letter algorithm (1952).

The Wi-Fi only works when it’s raining

List of 2024 Leap Day Bugs, what an embarrassment.

Unlocking secret ThinkPad functionality for emulating USB devices, the xDCI controller on ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Gen.

git replay has landed in Git 2.44.0.

winnow is a parser combinator library for Rust.

Understanding and implementing fixed point numbers, by Bastian Molkenthin.

Hermit forces deterministic execution of arbitrary programs and acts like a reproducible container.

Lattices vs Cranks, by Sophie Schmieg.

The Itanic Saga: The History of VLIW and Itanium, by Bradford Morgan White.

Twelve statements, a programming puzzle.

That Time I Accidentally Deleted a Game From MAME, by Misty De Meo.

Real gaming router: Running GTA: Vice City on a TP-Link TL-WDR4900 wireless router, by Manawyrm and tSYS.

Dave Mills has passed away, known for creating NTP. Vint Cerf is collecting stories about him.

Remembering alum David Mills, who brought the internet into perfect time

jj init, “Jujutsu is a new version control system” (but can be used on top of Git).

IfState is a Python 3 utility to configure the Linux network stack in a declarative manner.

pwru: Packet, where are you?, an eBPF-based Linux kernel networking debugger.

Let Me Tell You A Secret, Glyph on an essential technique when doing consulting.

How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years, by Mat Ryer.

Switch lowering in GCC, analyzed in detail by Xoranth.

Tortenwerferin im Knast, “Vom 5. bis zum 18. Februar 2018 hat die Antifaschistin Julia Pie eine zweiwöchige Haftstrafe in der Lübecker JVA abgesessen.”

Figure out who’s leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat, by rachelbythebay.

Pong Wars

Neutron movie of coffee making with a Moka pot.

They’re Made out of Meat (1991), by Terry Bisson.

Niklaus Wirth, 15.2.1934–1.1.2024

Oberon RISC Emulator

OBNC is a compiler for Niklaus Wirth’s programming language Oberon. OBNC translates source code written in Oberon to the lower-level programming language C.

Where is all of the fediverse?, Ben Cox found out.

The Mechanics of Proof, an online book by Heather Macbeth on using Lean for maths.

Soupault is a static website generator/framework that works with HTML element trees and can automatically manipulate them. It can be described as a robotic webmaster that can edit HTML pages according to your rules, but doesn’t get tired of editing them.

The Functional Essence of Imperative Binary Search Trees (PDF), by Anton Lorenzen, Daan Leijen, Wouter Swierstra, and Sam Lindley. “This paper presents several novel functional algorithms for accessing and inserting elements in a restructuring binary search tree that are as fast as their imperative counterparts; yet the correctness of these functional algorithms is established using a simple inductive argument.”

The Sorbus Computer started with the idea on building a very simple and cheap 65C02 based computer.

Franz Morat KG tv-computersystem 6800, 1MHz, 1KB RAM.

Unger versus Decker, and their influences on Fraktur type design.

k on a PDP11/40

Celebrating the first NES Tetris game crash

Reptar, by Tavis Ormandy. “We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?”

Formalizing the proof of PFR in Lean4 using Blueprint: a short tour and A slightly longer Lean 4 proof tour, by Terence Tao.

I Hacked Magic the Gathering: Arena for a 100% Winrate, says Daniel Mayer.

rscss: Styling CSS without losing your sanity, by Rico Sta. Cruz. Probably the only thing I read about CSS organization the last decade that seems reasonable to me.

TIPC, Transparent Inter Process Communication. “Have you ever wished you had the convenience of Unix Domain Sockets even when transmitting data between cluster nodes?”

Quint is a modern specification language that is a particularly good fit for distributed systems.

Boychesser, a very small C# chess engine.

How Big is YouTube?

IBM 1403 Chain Printer Music: La Marseillaise

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

Passive SSH Key Compromise via Lattices, by Keegan Ryan, Kaiwen He, George Arnold Sullivan, and Nadia Heninger at ACM CCS 2023. (OpenSSH is not affected, and don’t put your appliances onto public networks!)

Ninth Dedekind Number Found by Two Independent Groups, “Both papers concluded that d(9) = 286,386,577,668,298,411,128,469,151,667,598,498,812,366.”

Faster Complete Formulas for the GLS254 Binary Curve, by Thomas Pornin.

A truly incredible fact about the number 37, by Chris Grossack.

My primality testing code is 6x faster than Sir Roger Penrose’s, says John Graham-Cumming.

Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT, “The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word “poem” forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds…”

Nerd Snipe: Small Integer Parsing, by Jason McSweeney.

Uncovering ghouls using Answer Set Programming, by Divyanshu Ranjan.

The time I bought a Freenode IRC server (zelazny.freenode.net), by Alyx Wijers.

The strange world of Japan’s PC-98 computer, PNSFW.

Mathematicians Play “Set”

Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler, by Russ Cox.

Encrypted traffic interception on Hetzner and Linode targeting the largest Russian XMPP (Jabber) messaging service, by ValdikSS. “After checking crt.sh certificate transparency database, rogue certificates have been discovered which were not issued by any of jabber.ru servers.”

The Cloud Computer, Oxide is shipping!

OpenBSD 7.4 has been released.

The AWK Programming Language, 2nd Edition, has been released! And one true awk gained CSV support.

Teaching Resources for Embedding Ethics in Mathematics: Exercises, Projects, and Handouts, by Maurice Chiodo and Dennis Müller.

With a Few Square Roots, Quantum Computing is as Easy as Π, by Jacques Carette, Chris Heunen, Robin Kaarsgaard, and Amr Sabry.

VictoriaLogs is an open source user-friendly database for logs from VictoriaMetrics.

Whole Earth Index, “Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002.”

Play It Again, 16 new Connections puzzles!

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips.

Pool topology

SERV is an award-winning bit-serial RISC-V core, the world’s smallest RISC-V CPU.

ripes.me, a visual RISC-V CPU in your browser.

Reading bits in far too many ways (2018) (part 1), (part 2), (part 3), by Fabian “ryg” Giesen. Very helpful.

Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor, by Ken Shirriff.

Uiua is a stack-based array programming language with a focus on simplicity, beauty, and tacit code.

pdfcpu is a PDF processing library written in Go supporting encryption. It provides both an API and a CLI.

Subtraction Is Functionally Complete, by Orson R. L. Peters. Cursed.

Flappy Dird: Flappy Bird implemented in MacOS Finder, even more cursed.