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.

Memories of Molly Holzschlag, by Eric Meyer.

Lean 4.0.0 has been released!

FLENG 16 has been released; “a low level concurrent logic programming language descended from Prolog.”

UK air traffic control meltdown, summarized by James Haydon: “On 28 August 2023 NATS, the UK’s air traffic control operator, suffered a major technical incident. The BBC reports that more than 2000 flights were cancelled and the cost has been estimated at over £100 million GBP.”

Papers with computer-checked proofs (PDF), a case study by Daniel J. Bernstein.

Furstenberg sets estimate in the plane, by Kevin Ren and Hong Wang.

Introduce new ‘git replay’ command, a proposal to make rebasing possible without checkouts and working trees.

A systematic approach to debugging, by Nicole Tietz.

Fast Tokenizers with StringScanner, by Aaron Patterson. Has nice tricks.

Pagefind adds a static search bundle to your built files, which exposes a JavaScript search API that can be used anywhere on your site.

Myst Parodies, collected by Michael Klamerus.

FIFO queues are all you need for cache eviction, by Juncheng Yang. “In this blog, I will describe a Simple, Scalable eviction algorithm with three Static FIFO queues (S3-FIFO).”

Browsing the web with a WonderSwan in 2023, by asie. “Oh, it also came with a web browser supporting a subset of HTML 3.2, tables, GIF images, reading Japanese websites, a bookmark system, and cookies. On a handheld competing with the Game Boy Color.”

Bcrypt at 25: A Retrospective on Password Security, by Niels Provos. (Curiously, it’s still better than Argon2 for login-interactive usages!)

Mathematical table turning revisited, by Bill Baritompa, Rainer Löwen, Burkard Polster, and Marty Ross. “We investigate under which conditions a rectangular table can be placed with all four feet touching a continuous ground by turning it on the spot.”

Pirouette: Higher-Order Typed Functional Choreographies (PDF), by Andrew K. Hirsch and Deepak Garg at POPL 2022. “We present Pirouette, a language for typed higher-order functional choreographic programming. Pirouette offers programmers the ability to write a centralized functional program and compile it via endpoint projection into programs for each node in a distributed system.”

The Technical Development of Internet Email (PDF, 2008), by Craig Partridge. From 1971 to 1991.

Two types of work, by David R. MacIver.

Purity and Ford write a min filter in Singeli, by Marshall Lochbaum.

Topaz Double, a double-height recreation of Amiga’s iconic Topaz typeface.

Coffee offers performance boost for concrete, “the team developed a technique to make concrete 30% stronger by turning waste coffee grounds into biochar, using a low-energy process without oxygen at 350 degrees Celsius.”

Bram Moolenaar, author of Vim, passed away, RIP.

The future of the Vim project

No order-10 projective planes via SAT, how to certify a SAT proof that took 2 years on a Cray in 1986.

Unwinding the stack the hard way, by Kévin Lesénéchal. “In this article, we will delve into the intricacies of stack unwinding, exception-handling, call frames, and dissect ELFs and DWARFs.”

The SmallCategories Project aims to build a useful, useable database of small finite categories.

Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer, by Ken Shirriff.

HP15C Collector’s Edition, now available!

Zenbleed, by Tavis Ormandy. “It turns out that with precise scheduling, you can cause some processors to recover from a mispredicted vzeroupper incorrectly!”

An Extensible Theorem Proving Frontend, PhD thesis by Sebastian Ullrich on Lean 4.

Branch predictor: How many “if”s are too many? Including x86 and M1 benchmarks! (2021), a deep dive by Marek Majkowski.

Computational content of Gantō’s axe, by Mark J. Dominus.

Commander Keen’s Adaptive Tile Refresh in EGA graphics, by Fabien Sanglard. “Writing 320x200 nibbles (32 KiB) per frame is too much for the ISA bus. There is no way to maintain a 60Hz framerate while refreshing the whole screen.”

Multi-layered calendars, “Traveling through time in three dimensions”, by Julian Lehr.

Clojure’s deadly sin, by Oleksandr Yakushev.

An HTML/CSS Schema for TeX Primitives – Generating High-Quality Responsive HTML from generic TeX, by Dennis Müller. Introducing RusTeX which has very promising results.

Linear-time parser combinators in OCaml, by Neel Krishnaswami.

Livegrep is a tool, partially inspired by Google Code Search, for interactive regex search of gigabyte-scale source repositories.

“Back in my day …”, Paul Battley reviews 20 years of Ruby in 5 minutes.

tldraw, “a very good whiteboard”.

Paul Falstad’s Circuit Simulator, now written in JavaScript. Really educational!

A tutorial quantum interpreter in 150 lines of Lisp, by Robert Smith.

Illuminant, an ActivityPub server with an NNTP interface.

c72, a port of the earliest C compiler to x86.

Rejected GitHub Profile Achievements

how (not) to write a pipeline, by tef. Recommended.

Tips for concurrent programming, by Spencer Baugh.

Finding the BESTEST sine function for Nintendo 64, Steinar H. Gunderson uses Z3 to crunch IEEE float code.

PCG64 DXSM random number generator, Tony Finch converted the C++ reference behemoth into a 10 line C implementation. Git repo.

Garage is a lightweight geo-distributed data store that implements the Amazon S3 object storage protocol.

lemmy_monkey, make Lemmy forums look like old Reddit.

A clone of Smalltalk 80 from the Blue book, written by Richard Cornwell. Includes an interpreter in C to bootstrap.

Tail recursion in REBOL, by Joe Marshall.

Combinatorial coordinates for the aperiodic Spectre tiling, Simon Tatham extends his tiling algorithm to the Spectre.

The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor, by Ken Shirriff.

FrogFind!, The Search Engine for Vintage Computers.

Direct Construction of Aperiodic Tilings with the Hat Monotile, by Ulrich Reitebuch.

libmceliece is a Classic McEliece microlibrary, by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tung Chou.

Rash is a shell language, library, and REPL for Racket.

Tech debt metaphor maximalism, by Avery Pennarun.

REFAL (Рефал) was created in Russia, then USSR, in the second half of the 1960s. It is a functional programming language in which computation is driven by pattern matching on textual and symbolic information. Manual. Refal Plus. Refal 5λ.

The Joy Of Duplexes, by Coda Hale. “In this post, we’ll talk about permutations, sponge functions, and duplexes–what they are, how they’re built, what makes them secure, and how they’re used.”

An archive of the GNU arch-verse, provided by Patrick Georgi in remembrance of Tom Lord.

I booted Linux 292,612 times and follow up, by Richard WM Jones.

Update: U+237C ⍼ ⍼, in search of the origins of a glyph.