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The Invisible Character That Cost Me Too Much Debugging Time

The Problem Imagine this: someone tells you they can’t log in. At first, it feels like the kind of bug you can squash before finishing your coffee. Maybe they fat-fingered their password. Maybe their browser cache is holding onto stale session cookies. Easy. Except it isn’t. You check the admin panel. The email is there: james.bond​@mi6.com . Looks fine. The password hash matches what the user typed in. Logs show the request hitting the system cleanly. No obvious anomalies. And yet, every att

Just for fun: animating a mosaic of 90s GIFs

A couple of weeks ago, some former colleagues competed in Brisbane’s Battle of the Tech Bands - and won! I created visuals for six of their songs, which were mostly 90s/2000s covers. It felt only right to theme the visuals around that era too. Here’s how one of my favourites turned out (fittingly for a tech themed battle, it’s rendered entirely in-browser): (Fullscreen at gifs.alex.works) What you’re seeing is a Canvas animation of random old-school GIFs, pulled from the Internet Archive’s Ge

Topics: const gif gifs row width

Show HN: wcwidth-o1 – Find Unicode text cell width in no time for JavaScript/TS

A TypeScript/JavaScript port of Markus Kuhn’s wcwidth and wcswidth implementations, optimized to O(1). These functions are defined in IEEE Std 1003.1 (POSIX). Superior Performance ⚡️ Instant O(1) lookup time 🌏 Full Unicode 15.1 coverage Getting Started Install Wcwidth-O1 via npm: npm i wcwidth-o1 Usage JavaScript / TypeScript: import wcwidth from 'wcwidth-o1' ; const example1 = wcwidth ( 'a' ) ; // 1 const example2 = wcwidth ( '好' ) ; // 2 const example3 = wcwidth ( '😊' ) ; // 2 or i

Memory is slow, Disk is fast – Part 1

TL;DR Hardware got wider, not faster. More cores, more bandwidth, huge vector units — but clocks, IPC, and latency flatlined. Old rules like “memory is faster than disk” are breaking. To go fast today, you have to play the new game. “CPUs keep getting faster every generation” Over the past 20 years or so computer hardware has evolved such that some facts we “know” about computers are wrong. Even among computer scientists, or perhaps especially among computer scientists, intuitions are off tar

Beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us. Mississippi residents,

The attr() function in CSS now supports types

The attr() function in CSS is a powerful function that allows you to use the value of an attribute of an HTML element as the value of a CSS property. This function is commonly used with the content property in pseudo-elements to display the value of an attribute on the page. The attr() function has been around for a while and is widely used in CSS. However, it was limited to only accepting a single argument: the name of the attribute whose value you wanted to use. On top of that, the value ret

Topics: attr color data div width

How to Think About GPUs

We love TPUs at Google, but GPUs are great too. This chapter takes a deep dive into the world of NVIDIA GPUs – how each chip works, how they’re networked together, and what that means for LLMs, especially compared to TPUs. This section builds on Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 , so you are encouraged to read them first. What Is a GPU? A modern ML GPU (e.g. H100, B200) is basically a bunch of compute cores that specialize in matrix multiplication (called Streaming Multiprocessors or SMs) connected to a

How to Scale Your Model: How to Think About GPUs

We love TPUs at Google, but GPUs are great too. This chapter takes a deep dive into the world of NVIDIA GPUs – how each chip works, how they’re networked together, and what that means for LLMs, especially compared to TPUs. This section builds on Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 , so you are encouraged to read them first. What Is a GPU? A modern ML GPU (e.g. H100, B200) is basically a bunch of compute cores that specialize in matrix multiplication (called Streaming Multiprocessors or SMs) connected to a

PCIe 8.0 announced by the PCI-Sig will double throughput again

The PCI-SIG announced this week that it is not going to stop. Targeting a 2028 release, the PCIe 8.0 specification will double the throughput over PCIe 7.0. With the release, the PCI-SIG also shared two neat charts. PCIe Gen8 Announced by the PCI-SIG Will Double Throughput Again The PCI-SIG has this graphic to show what is happening to I/O bandwidth. It says that the I/O bandwidth is doubling every three years. Something to also keep in mind is that this is very device and interface centric.

PCIe 8.0 Announced by the PCI-Sig Will Double Throughput Again – ServeTheHome

The PCI-SIG announced this week that it is not going to stop. Targeting a 2028 release, the PCIe 8.0 specification will double the throughput over PCIe 7.0. With the release, the PCI-SIG also shared two neat charts. PCIe Gen8 Announced by the PCI-SIG Will Double Throughput Again The PCI-SIG has this graphic to show what is happening to I/O bandwidth. It says that the I/O bandwidth is doubling every three years. Something to also keep in mind is that this is very device and interface centric.

The Best Line Length

What’s a good maximum line length for your coding standard? This is, of course, a trick question. By posing it as a question, I have created the misleading impression that it is a question, but Black has selected the correct number for you; it’s 88 which is obviously very lucky. Thanks for reading my blog. OK, OK. Clearly, there’s more to it than that. This is an age-old debate on the level of “tabs versus spaces”. So contentious, in fact, that even the famously opinionated Black does in fact

How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin

How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin: jekyll-skyhook posted Jul 24, 2025 💡 If you don't want to read the full story, you can check out the jekyll-skyhook plugin on GitHub here. When I started writing this blog, I figured I could write my posts, submit my website to Google Search Console for indexing, and presto - my posts would start appearing in Google search results. That way, people who encounter issues like I did with dark/light mode not working in Ubunt

Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

connmap connmap is an X11 desktop widget that shows location of your current network peers on a world map. (Works on Wayland as well!) Installation Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/h2337/connmap --depth 1 , install the dependencies (see below), run make install , then run the resulting executable ./connmap.elf . If you want to run it without attaching it to the terminal then add ampersand at the end of the command: ./connmal.elf & . You can also add it to your i3wm config t

Piano Keys

Piano Keys If you've ever looked closely at a piano keyboard you may have noticed that the widths of the white keys are not all the same at the back ends (where they pass between the black keys). Of course, if you think about it for a minute, it's clear they couldn't possibly all be the same width, assuming the black keys are all identical (with non-zero width) and the white keys all have equal widths at the front ends, because the only simultaneous solution of 3W=3w+2b and 4W=4w+3b is with b=0

Researching LED Displays for the Time Circuits

Now that I have a tentative plan for how I’m going to control all 300-some LED segments, the next step towards making this prop a reality is to figure-out the specifications for the LED displays. The Original Prop Displays I’m going to start, as you’d expect, by looking at the original film props. This image should be familiar by now. This shot is the first time the audience sees the time circuits and is what everyone thinks of when they imagine “the time circuits” from the films. These are t

HDMI 2.2 specs are out with ‘Ultra96’, here’s what that means for your setup

The HDMI Forum has officially released version 2.2 of the HDMI specification, bringing support for video resolutions up to 16K at 60Hz and boosting maximum bandwidth to 96Gbps. Alongside the spec, there’s a new cable designation called Ultra96. Here are the details. The nerdy part The HDMI 2.2 spec now supports up to a whopping 16K at 60Hz, and 12K at 120Hz. For uncompressed formats with full 4:4:4 chroma and 10-bit and 12-bit color, it can handle 4K at 240Hz, and 8K at 60Hz. That is thanks t

HDMI 2.2 standard finalized: doubles bandwidth to 96 Gbps, 16K resolution support

What just happened? Following the standard's debut at CES 2025, HDMI 2.2 has now been finalized by the HDMI Forum. The full spec confirms much of what we heard six months ago, including doubling the maximum bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 to 96 Gbps – more than DisplayPort. While using HDMI 2.2 does not require a new connector, taking advantage of all its best features requires a new Ultra96 cable – a reference to its maximum bandwidth. 96Gbps is double the 48Gbps max bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 and is more th

Bandwidth vs. Latency: We Chatted With an Internet Connectivity Expert to Understand the Difference

Having fast, reliable home internet is essential these days for work, school, streaming and browsing. But understanding how much speed you need, or even what "internet speed" even means, can be a daunting task. Bandwidth and latency are two key factors that affect how we perceive the speed of our internet connection. But while you may hear them used together quite often, these two terms have distinct meanings. Understanding what they are and the difference between them can help you troubleshoot

Van Gogh, AMD's Steam Deck APU (2023)

Zen 2’s launch was a defining moment for AMD. For the first time in many, many years, AMD’s single thread performance could go head to head with Intel’s best. Zen 2 also started a trend where AMD brought up to 16 cores to desktop CPUs, giving consumers very strong multithreaded performance without having to buy HEDT platforms. But Zen 2 was also flexible and did a very good job of scaling down to lower power targets. That was especially true when Zen 2 cores were implemented in more power effic

Linux kernel WireGuard can go 'fast' on decent hardware

I'm used to thinking of encryption as a slow thing that can't deliver anywhere near to network saturation, even on basic gigabit Ethernet connections. This is broadly the experience we see with our current VPN servers, which struggle to turn in more than relatively anemic bandwidth with OpenVPN and L2TP, and so for a long time I assumed it would also be our experience with WireGuard if we tried to put anything serious behind it. I'd seen the 2023 Tailscale blog post about this but discounted it

PCIe 7.0 is coming, but not soon, and not for you

The PCIe 7.0 specification has now been released, while many of us are still waiting for PCIe 6.0 to materialize in consumer products. The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) announced on Wednesday that PCIe 7.0 is now available to members of its organization, delivering a theoretical maximum bandwidth speed of 512GB per second in both directions, across a x16 connection. “PCIe technology has served as the high-bandwidth, low-latency IO interconnect of choice for over two decades and we are pl