cpeterso

It would be cool to leverage that Street View driving capability to build a multiplayer Gumball Rally/Cannonball Run cross-country car race. Are there continuous routes recorded from New York City to Long Beach? Which is fastest? How long would that virtual drive take in Street View?

You’re right. I looked it up: getting the number of files in a directory in FAT and FAT32 file systems is O(n). I had assumed the count would be recorded in an inode-like structure but instead the file system must scan a directory table to count the non-null entries.

> Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Raymond’s selectRandomFromIterator algorithm requires iterating over all the files. It seems like querying the file system for the number of files in a directory should be an O(1) operation. Then you just select random number N between [1, number of files] and iterate to the Nth file.

Why does Raymond assume counting the files is an O(n) operation?

Joel Spolsky's "Fire And Motion" blog post (2002) describes the challenge of tech churn well: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features.

Modularity abstraction = drawing boxes around the messy parts

Modeling abstraction = drawing lines between the boxes

Mozilla's Firefox AGENTS.md begins with:

  Limit the amount of comments you put in the code to a strict minimum. You should almost never add comments, except sometimes on non-trivial code, function definitions if the arguments aren't self-explanatory, and class definitions and their members.

  Do not remove existing comments unless they are directly related to what you are changing.

https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/AGENTS.md

Firefox on iOS is blocking third-party ads, not first-party ads.

“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.

“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.

“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.

In a recent interview on Conan O'Brien's podcast, Gillian Anderson said X-Files creator Chris Carter wrote his scripts visually so they didn't have any widows (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page):

Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.

And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.

So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.

Send fair to me: someone’s got to test Mouse Keys! :)

I worked on Microsoft’s Windows QA team long ago. My team used to have “No-mouse Tuesdays”: you were supposed to do all your normal work but only using the keyboard.

I've found myself rewriting my own words to avoid Claudisms (because they can be cringe and I don't want people to think I'm copy/pasting Claude output at them).

> if AI were to rent a server and copy its own weights, nothing would stop it from doing so again and again.

That's a scary possibility. Anyone could create an AI worm today with open weight models. Rent a VM. Give it some Bitcoins to anonymously rent new VMs without sharing the contact information with the human. The new VMs then propagate and fund themselves with online betting and day trading. The VMs could report their progress with the human using anonymous encrypted messages on IRC or social media.

And Mozilla's blog post about shipping JPEG XL:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/08/intent-to-ship-jpeg-xl/

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421758

And Chromium intent to Ship: JPEG XL decoding support (image/jxl) in blink

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/-gDoj...

Yes, I've had both ChatGPT and Perplexity return English answers with Hindi words sprinkled in (for totally unrelated queries).

For example, I asked ChatGPT to summarize a long news story and it substituted the Hindi equivalent हत्या for the word "murder", as if ChatGPT was trying to work around alignment training or keyword block lists that discourage it from using the word "murder".

Are you using Huzzah to development Huzzah? :)

Another LLM could use the pseudocode to generate black box test cases without access to the generated code. How to define the API between tests and the implementation would require some more work.

This approach reminds me of PDL (Program Design Language), described in Steve McConnell's excellent book Code Complete (1993). He recommended writing code using PDL pseudocode first. People can review your PDL before you write the code implementing the PDL, leaving the PDL as code comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Design_Language

https://codecourse.sourceforge.net/materials/Code-Complete-A...

Firefox Focus is called Klar (“clear” in German) in Germany because the Focus trademark is owned by a German news magazine.

Open your browser’s dev tools while loading a website and there’s usually a continuous stream of HTTP and JS errors and warnings. That websites actually work surprises me sometimes, but that’s the pragmatic beauty of the web.

> LLVM is still involved, but they are using it differently than say, Rust or Zig.

Chris Lattner said in a Developer Voices podcast interview:

"Swift in a way was syntactic sugar for LLVM, at the very bottom of the stack it could talk directly to LLVM primitives. Mojo does basically that same trick, but it supercharges it by moving to this MLIR world."

I wish I could see Google Maps labels like this during a real flight!

Here is a Firefox bug report about the issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1944219. Mozilla has a User-Agent override intervention for Zoom on Android, but it's currently only in the Firefox Nightly builds.

Here is a Firefox bug report about the issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1944219. Mozilla has a User-Agent override intervention for Zoom on Android, but it's currently only in the Firefox Nightly builds.

Which Firefox version and OS version are using using? Android 10 or later?

Do you have any Firefox extensions installed?

If you test in Chrome, does the zoom.us/test page connect to a meeting in the browser or does it open the Zoom app?

Default cooldown for everyone is basically introducing a beta period for all packages.

There was a golang proposal to change Go's default int type to arbitrary precision big int. It would avoid overflow bugs, but the proposal was closed (after eight years) due to concerns about compatibility reading serialized data and performance.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19623