nickcw

7 ms·

1.
by nickcw 10d ago
Disappointed to see I already read the Hugo winner for best novel - The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. It is a worthy winner in my opinion. Fantasy with a sci-fi element along with a story which takes some untangling. Five stars from me :-)
2.
by nickcw 19d ago
Yes I update the CVE-PENDING once the CVEs are in to keep the record straight.
3.
by nickcw 19d ago
I got a 6 month free subscription of Claude Code Max under Anthropic's open source program which has been very helpful.
4.
by nickcw 19d ago
This describes my life as an open source maintainer at the moment! In the first 10 years of the rclone project we received about 20 security disclosures through GitHub. We had to deal with over 40 in the last month! That has taken a huge am
5.
by nickcw 1mo ago
Here is an idea... Why don't we give up on HTML in emails and just use markdown instead? It is readable and writable by humans and doesn't have insane security problems. It seems to be our AI overlords' preferred communicatio
6.
by nickcw 1mo ago
I was looking at the reed Solomon implementation. I've done a few of those in the past! I note that you are using logs for multiplication. I always used to use a 64kb table for direct lookup, though maybe that isn't faster on mode
7.
by nickcw 2mo ago
I used and developed software for RISC OS for many years and it was there I cut my teeth as an open source developer. I wrote the very popular !Director application which let you customize your Desktop and add lots of nifty shortcuts. It co
8.
by nickcw 2mo ago
[after a pretty scathing review which I mostly agree with] > Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what
9.
by nickcw 2mo ago
Maybe it would have made more sense for Anthropic to rewrite Claude Code in rust, and cut out the middle man (bun)?
10.
by nickcw 2mo ago
I set my name as Sir and I enjoy the obsequious responses this generates :-) It worked well in my banking app too which greets me with " Good morning, Sir" which is the level of relationship I want with my bank!
11.
by nickcw 2mo ago
I had a look through the code to see how it manages not to use a pile of C libraries with cgo like other Go GUI libraries. The answer is platform dependent: Windows loads the relevant DLLs by hand and calls them. This is a well established
12.
by nickcw 2mo ago
One of the disappointing realisations I got from my physics degree was that as you move into the real world with non-spherical cows you can no longer solve any of the equations.
13.
by nickcw 2mo ago
From the article: > This is essentially the observation Keyfitz made in his 1977 paper, “What Difference Would It Make if Cancer Were Eradicated?” Cancer is responsible for 18 percent of deaths, so does that mean eradicating it would inc
14.
by nickcw 2mo ago
I didn't realise at first that you could choose letters which weren't adjacent which made it very hard! Guess I've been playing too much https://zanagrams.com/ (which was also posted here recently).
15.
by nickcw 2mo ago
Maybe it does measure the distance to your face to work out where to show the viewfinder rectangle...
16.
by nickcw 3mo ago
Ha! I'm going to rename my home office "The Room of Dreams"
17.
by nickcw 3mo ago
The Droitwich transmitter used to transmit on exactly 200 kHz which I always thought was very cool, but it moved to 198 kHz in 1988 to better harmonize with European stations. The program was mostly the same as BBC Radio 4 but it used to di
18.
by nickcw 3mo ago
That is very very funny, and oh so plausible. I enjoyed this bit a lot from the timeline > Karen Oyelaran finds the payload by reading the source code with her eyes and files a second issue. The triage assistant closes it as “duplicate o
19.
by nickcw 3mo ago
I love it :-) Back in the distant past I wrote some really big ARM 32 assembly projects. 64 bit ARM is really very similar! I had a look through the code. Some ENTRY/EXIT macros to help with the drudgery of save restore registers &
20.
by nickcw 3mo ago
I have a copy of the shorter Oxford English Dictionary from 1970 which I inherited. It is two massive volumes and is only shorter in comparison to the full dictionary which is 12 volumes (more in more modern editions). My shorter OED contai
21.
by nickcw 3mo ago
Ha ha! Yes I am in the weights apparently. Nearly all the models know what I do. I suspect being in the Open Source world is a bit of a bubble as far as the weights are concerned. Anyway it stroked my ego nicely even though it was totally a
22.
by nickcw 3mo ago
I'm not old enough to have used a PDP-11 so I read through the assembly code description with interest. Wow, it seems so modern. I've used a lot of assembly languages over the years but I'd feel immediately at home here. Nice
23.
by nickcw 3mo ago
Here is his paper on it which is a little 2 pager: https://bellard.org/pi/pi_bin.pdf Though I have to say the last line of the proof "...which gives (1) by reordering the terms" took me much head scratching t
24.
by nickcw 3mo ago
> And so, because I don’t want to hold Fn every time I want to press an F-key for its intended purpose, I used the arcane shortcut Fn+Caps to “lock” the keyboard into “standard” mode, where multipurpose F-keys remain multipurpose F-keys
25.
by nickcw 3mo ago
After I made the emulator I trawled GitHub to try to find games it could play within the 32K limit. I found yours - thank you :-) - and the ./try.sh script has an option to download it from GitHub for the user to test.
26.
by nickcw 3mo ago
That is correct. It is cheating, but the judges let a small amount of it slide, especially if you come up with an amusing enough justification. I could not get it to fit otherwise!
27.
by nickcw 3mo ago
I pointed Claude Opus 4.7 at my Forth entry ( https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2025/ncw3/pr... ) and it absolutely refused to have anything to do with it citing security violatio
28.
by nickcw 3mo ago
Glad you enjoyed it :-) If you want to see how the sausage was made, here is the source: https://github.com/ncw/ioccc-gameboy You'll find an unobfuscated version (kind-of) there too. This the the one I actually wo
29.
by nickcw 3mo ago
Link local addresses are exactly that. They don't route and they are for low level stuff like adding stuff to the routing table or BGP. If you want to do this properly then you configure a Unique Local Addresses (ULA) out of the range
30.
by nickcw 4mo ago
That brings back fond memories of my first employer in the early 90s. They used to rent a single scan line (VBI) of the TV broadcast to use as a data transmission method encoded the same way Teletext was. IIRC you could fit 45 bytes in a si

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