Ranjit Mathew

Sapiens — If Books Could Kill How do you tell the entire history of humanity in a single book? Whatever you do, do not open a browser window. Thanks to Dorsa Amir, Duncan Stibbard Hawkes and David Perry for help researching and fa...

In which the “If Books Could Kill” podcast rips apart the #book “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari:

overcast.fm/+AA9URJ81CEw

www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/epis...

😅

#Sapiens #Podcast #BookReview #IfBooksCouldKill #Review

YouTube video by gimpymoo Micro Men - 720p (2009)

Rewatched “Micro-Men” (youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM), the BBC’s own dramatic retelling of the birth of Acorn Computers and the BBC Micro:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men

Only now did I notice the cameo by Sophie Wilson. 🤦🏽‍♂️

#MicroMen #BBC #BBCMicro #Sinclair #UK #Cambridge #Acorn

YouTube video by The Himalayan Writing Retreat The advent of AI and the plight of the Writer- explained by #emmathompson @ColbertLateShow #write

Emma Thompson 👇🏽 is all of us who are pissed off by the constant nags to use #AI while we are busy writing or coding – just let us be 😠:

youtube.com/shorts/H_Ff3...

#UX #DarkUX #Productivity #Writing #Interruptions #Nagging

YouTube video by The Centre for Computing History "From little Acorns..." - Steve Furber - ARM at 40 anniversary, Talk 5

The follow-up talk by another legend in #BBCMicro and #ARM mythology, Steve Furber, is also available now:

“From Little Acorns…”, The Centre For Computing History (youtu.be/eeQn_AJqX54).

#Acorn #ComputerHistory #CPU #RetroComputing #Beeb

How to declutter, quiet down, and take the AI out of Windows 11 25H2 A new major Windows 11 release means a new guide for cleaning up the OS.

How can you say no to “an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI”? 🙄

“How To Declutter, Quiet Down, And Take The AI Out Of Windows 11 25H2”, Ars Technica (arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586...

#Windows #Windows11 #AI #Copilot #Bloat

Nice:

“Build System Trade-Offs”, Jynn Nelson (jyn.dev/build-system...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4579...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/uwyfpy/bui...

#Build #Programming #BuildSystems #Cargo #Make #Bazel #Ninja

Why do we need dithering? | Dan Hollick Before we all mute the word 'dithering' I thought I'd explain a little bit about why we needed to dither digital images in the first place. Although it's an aesthetic now, we used to need dithering ...

Nice:

“Why Do We Need Dithering?”, Dan Hollick (typefully.com/DanHollick/w...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4581...

#Graphics #ComputerGraphics #ImageProcessing #Dithering #Images #RetroComputing #OpticalIllusion #Vision

What’s your favourite podcast at the moment? 59 comments

Hmm…limited intersection with my set, but still some good recommendations:

“What’s Your Favourite Podcast At The Moment?”, Lobsters (lobste.rs/s/kinpl3/wha...).

#Podcasts #Recommendations #Lobsters

Why Engineers Can't Be Rational About Programming Languages | spf13 The neuroscience of why we make million dollar decisions based on identity, not data.

Sure to stoke flame-wars that ignore the very point of the article 🍿:

“Why Engineers Can't Be Rational About Programming Languages”, Steve Francia (spf13.com/p/the-hidden...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4580...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/jrwaey/why...

#ProgrammingLanguages

Very impressive:

“InvisiCaps: The Fil-C Capability Model”, Filip Pizlo (fil-c.org/invisicaps).

See Also: “Fil's Unbelievable Garbage Collector”, Filip Pizlo (fil-c.org/fugc).

#C #FilC #MemorySafety #Programming #GarbageCollection #GC #InvisiCaps #FUGC

“Show HN: Resurrecting The Dillo Browser” [2024], Rodrigo Arias, Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3884...).

#Dillo #Internet #Browser #Web #Lean #DilloBrowser #WWW

Ooh! DJB seems to be impressed (enough) by #FilC to try it out extensively 🧐:

“Notes By djb On Using Fil-C”, DJ Bernstein (cr.yp.to/2025/fil-c.h...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4578...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/zc73xh/not...

#C #Programming #Linux #Debian #Benchmarks

The Green Tea Garbage Collector - The Go Programming Language Go 1.25 includes a new experimental garbage collector, Green Tea.

Interesting:

“The Green Tea Garbage Collector”, The Go Blog (go.dev/blog/greente...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4574...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/3jf7it/gre...

#Go #GoLang #Programming #GarbageCollection #GC #MemoryManagement #GreenTea #Optimization #Efficiency #Performance

AWS to Bare Metal Two Years Later: Answering Your Toughest Questions About Leaving AWS Two years after our AWS-to-bare-metal migration, we revisit the numbers, share what changed, and address the biggest questions from Hacker News and Reddit.

“AWS To Bare Metal Two Years Later: Answering Your Toughest Questions About Leaving AWS”, OneUptime (oneuptime.com/blog/post/20...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4574...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/ku4lrn/aws...

#AWS #Cloud #BareMetal #DIY #Savings #Kubernetes #MicroK8s #K8s

“A Note On Fil-C”, Graydon Hoare (graydon2.dreamwidth.org/320265.html or web.archive.org/web/20251107... if it 403s 😒).

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/ywvatn/not...

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4584...

#FilC #Rust #MemorySafety #Programming #C #ProgrammingLanguages

“Leaving Meta And PyTorch”, Soumith Chintala (soumith.ch/blog/2025-11...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4584... (👈🏽 some great discussion on why #PyTorch won over #TensorFlow and #Keras for #MachineLearning with #Python).

#Farewell #Meta #AI #ML

#Dillo is an interesting lightweight alternative #browser, like #NetSurf – no #JavaScript support though:

dillo-browser.org
github.com/dillo-browse...

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4582...

#Internet #Bloat #Speed #Efficiency #Web #JS #Lightweight

A Short Survey of Compiler Targets A short survey of compiler targets like assembly, LLVM, C, JVM and Brainfuck.

I laughed out at the conclusion 😂:

“A Short Survey Of Compiler Targets”, Abhinav Sarkar (abhinavsarkar.net/notes/2025-c...).

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/ctbibn/sho...

#Compilers #Programming #IR #IntermediateRepresentation #GCC #LLVM #QBE

I get that they wanted to celebrate the 40th birthday of #ARM precisely at 15:00, but why couldn’t they schedule the talk after that or left some buffer earlier? 😒

We really wanted to hear more about the early ARM & RISCOS.😢

#CPU #ARM #BBCMicro #BBC #RISC #Acorn

YouTube video by The Centre for Computing History "There were no assemblers..." - Sophie Wilson and Robert Catherall - ARM at 40 anniversary, Talk 3

Grateful for this video 🙏🏽, but rushing Sophie Wilson through that timer was inexcusable 😠:

“‘There Were No Assemblers…’ – Sophie Wilson And Robert Catherall – ARM At 40 Anniversary”, The Centre For Computing History (youtu.be/t8MWXdEbDeI).

#ARM #BBC #Acorn

#AISlop generated by #LLMs claims another victim 😥:

“Attention Authors: Updated Practice For Review Articles And Position Papers In arXiv CS Category”, arXiv (blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4578...

#Papers #ComputerScience #OpenAccess #Arxiv #CS

How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly Or why robots are playing DOOM now

Nice:

“How I Stopped Worrying And Started Loving The Assembly”, Jonas Eschenburg (medium.com/@jonas.esche...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4568...

#Atari #AtariST #Programming #RetroComputing #Comanche #Voxels #Assembly #GameProgramming #Games #Graphics #Hatari

Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches As a computer engineer who has spent half a decade working with caches at Intel and Sun, I’ve learnt a thing or two about cache-coherency. This was one of the hardest concepts to learn back in coll…

“Myths Programmers Believe About CPU Caches” [2018], Rajiv Prabhakar (software.rajivprab.com/2018/04/29/m...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4576... & news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633...

#Cache #CacheCoherency #CPU #Hardware #ComputerArchitecture #Intel

Hacking India’s largest automaker: Tata Motors Tata Motors gave away the keys to their infrastructure and customer data on their public websites.

Sending your AWS keys client-side in plain-text? 😱🤦🏽‍♂️:

“Hacking India’s Largest Automaker: Tata Motors”, Eaton Zveare (eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/t...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4574...

#TataMotors #India #Security #ComputerSecurity #TCS #EDukaan #Cars #Tata #AWS #S3

YouTube video by Computer History Museum Oral History of Ken Thompson

This was a well-spent 4.5 hours 🙇🏽🤩:

“Oral History Of Ken Thompson” [2025], Computer History Museum (youtu.be/OmVHkL0IWk4).

“A Computing Legend Speaks”, David Brock, CHM (computerhistory.org/blog/a-compu...).

#Unix #BellLabs #C #OralHistory #ComputerHistory #KenThompson

How OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise Here are seven unusual financial agreements helping to drive the ambitions of the poster child of the A.I. revolution.

One of the many recent articles about the financial shenanigans at #OpenAI 🫣:

“How OpenAI Uses Complex And Circular Deals To Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise”, The New York Times (www.nytimes.com/interactive/... or archive.is/tSrC8).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577...

#AI

Here’s the official one 🫣:

“Summary Of The Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption In The Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region”, AWS (aws.amazon.com/message/1019...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4567...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/mw0pus/sum...

#Amazon #AWS #DynamoDB #Reliability #Outage

More Than DNS: The 14 hour AWS us-east-1 outage A thorough review of a major cloud outage.

👇🏽 is *much better* than the official #Amazon postmortem on the recent #AWS outage 👌🏽:

“More Than DNS: The 14 Hour AWS us-east-1 outage”, Jonathon Belotti (thundergolfer.com/blog/aws-us-...).

Via HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/gti2pe/mor...

#Reliability #RCA

“Fil-C: A Memory-Safe C Implementation”, LWN (lwn.net/SubscriberLi...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4573...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/mg0aur/fil...

#FilC #MemorySafety #CHERI #C #Programming #Clang #LLVM

An Abundance of Katherines: The Game Theory of Baby Naming In this paper, we study the highly competitive arena of baby naming. Through making several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (namely, that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents who pick a...

Can’t believe that I hadn’t shared this wonderful #paper from last year – start by looking at the list of authors 😄:

“An Abundance Of Katherines: The Game Theory Of Baby Naming” [2024], Katy Blumer, et al (arxiv.org/abs/2404.00732).

#GameTheory #BabyNames #Catherine