The Busy Beaver Challenge, “We have achieved our goal of proving ‘BB(5) = 47,176,870’”. Formally verified in Coq.

regreSSHion: RCE in OpenSSH’s server, on glibc-based Linux systems (CVE-2024-6387), a Qualys Security Advisory.

XAES-256-GCM is an authenticated encryption with additional data (AEAD) algorithm with 256-bit keys and 192-bit nonces. By Filippo Valsorda.

A Non-Terminating Game of Beggar-My-Neighbor, by Brayden Casella, Philip M. Anderson, Michael Kleber, Richard P. Mann, Reed Nessler, William Rucklidge, Samuel G. Williams, Nicolas Wu. “The existence of this non-terminating game provides a solution to a long-standing question which John H. Conway called an ‘anti-Hilbert problem.’”

On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited (PDF, 2009), by William R. Cook. Recommended reading. “An essential observation is that object interfaces do not use type abstraction: there is no type whose name is known but representation is hidden.”

Life in Johnstone’s Topological Topos, by Chris Grossack.

A Proof of Proof by Infinite Descent, by Ron Garcia.

Coccinelle for Rust implements semantic patches for Rust code.

Pirate Solitaire, by Victor Pernet.

Lynn Conway (1938–2024)

POSIX.1-2024 has been published!

Oregon Programming Languages Summer School 2024, videos and lecture notes are up!

Will we continue scientific research? (1972), by Alexander Grothendieck. Translated by Peio Borthelle.

A Machine-Checked Correctness Proof of Normalization by Evaluation for Simply Typed Lambda Calculus (PDF, 2017), by András Kovács.

Beyond the wall: Working with aperiodic tilings using finite-state transducers, by Simon Tatham.

The Gilbert–Johnson–Keerthi algorithm explained as simply as possible.

SIGMOD Programming Contest Archive, “SIGMOD hosts a yearly competition to design a system which performs a set of queries as quickly as possible. The contests provide a starting framework and test harness. They make great intermediate database projects for learning.”

PID 0 in V1 UNIX (and V4 nsys, and the PDP-7 proto-UNIX), by наб.

Apotris is a multiplatform open-source block stacking game.

Forsp, a Forth+Lisp Hybrid Lambda Calculus Language

Nokja Original, Classic 3310 Cellphone Font.

Principia Mathematica as a map.

A potpourri of cool-looking scripts

Your API Shouldn’t Redirect HTTP to HTTPS, by jviide.

A Machine-Checked Direct Proof of the Steiner-Lehmus Theorem, by Ariel Kellison. “A direct proof of the Steiner-Lehmus theorem has eluded geometers for over 170 years.”

Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess, by Nenad Tomašev, Ulrich Paquet, Demis Hassabis, and Vladimir Kramnik. “By learning near-optimal strategies for each variant with AlphaZero, we determine what games between strong human players might look like if these variants were adopted.”

A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle, by Glyph.

Iconv, set the charset to RCE: Exploiting the glibc to hack the PHP engine (part 1), by Charles Fol. Kill it with fire, I’d say.

Taming Floating-Point Sums in Rust, by Orson R. L. Peters.

Schröders Traum, “Bruno Schröder war Bergmann in Ibbenbüren. Als er stirbt, hinterlässt er 70.000 Bücher.”

City In A Bottle – A 256 Byte Raycasting System

The world’s last internet cafes

Quine Clock

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