Human folly for 02026-04-24

older newer index

• Online bidder pleads guilty antitrust charge rigging bids government auctions (gsaig.gov):

  bidder collusion on auctions is a federal #antitrust #crime in #USA (GSA auctions in this case)

• Viewcontent (scholarship.law.bu.edu):

  #PDF law review #paper about #antitrust as applied to bidder collusion on auctions

• Acdcssr (bristolwatch.com):

  #tutorial on “MOSFET Output Solid State Relays” #electronics

• The shape of a Mars mission (idlewords.com):

  #Maciej on #Mars missions. #space

• Item (news.ycombinator.com):

  discussion of recent serious #Anthropic #Claude degradation. #AI #neural-networks #LLMs

• California driver Handbook PDF (dmv.ca.gov):

  California DMV driver’s handbook #PDF. #tourism

• Wirevis mapper v2 (ruemohr.org):

  #RueMohr wrote some kind of JS app this week for annotating a raster image for something wire-related? #electronics

• Rules OCI (github.com):

  building #OCI-containers (for #Docker and #podman) with #Bazel

• (opencontainers.org):

  #OCI-containers were founded by #Docker and are run by the #Linux-Foundation

• Nix Docker build (xeiaso.net):

  building #Docker containers with #Nix #toread

• Archlinux now has a reproducible Docker image (antiz.fr):

  #Arch Linux has a bit-for-bit reproducible #Docker image. #reproducible-builds

• Israel and state sponsored terrorism (en.wikipedia.org):

  #Israel #politics #history

• ImHex (github.com):

  "ImHex" is a #GPL 2 hex editor written with #dear-imgui and supporting interactively user-defined data formats

• (imhex.werwolv.net):

  #ImHex running in the browser with #Wasm, I guess including OpenGL?

• Welcome (reticulum.miraheze.org):

  #Reticulum Wiki. #mesh-networks

• The split (blog.meshcore.io):

  Schism in #MeshCore between Andy Kirby and Scott (project founder), Recrof, Liam Cottle, FDLamotte, and Oltaco (Che Aporeps). #mesh-networks #politics

• How continental philosophers argue (benthams.substack.com):

  Bentham’s Bulldog entertainingly eviscerates “continental philosophers” like Judith Butler

• ENIAC 80th anniversary weaving (spectrum.ieee.org):

  #nthmost writes an article about her grandmother’s work on #ENIAC, and that of her grandfather, John Mauchly. Emotional and moving. #toread #history

• Firefox Tor IndexedDB privacy vulnerability (fingerprint.com):

  #IndexedDB ordering (of database names) forms a stable process-lifetime identifier in #Firefox, presumably because of some kind of hash table randomization. “In Tor Browser, the stable identifier persists even through the “New Identity” feature, which is designed to be a full reset that clears cookies and browser history and uses new #Tor circuits.” #security

• Item (news.ycombinator.com):

  #Ternary-Bonsai discussion

• 128 bits (words.filippo.io):

  #Filippo Valsorda explains #QC isn’t a threat to 128-bit encryption or hashes because #Grovers-algorithm loses its quadratic speedup when you try to parallelize it. #crypto #security

• 8Nw0V (i.sstatic.net):

  An interesting #op-amp #electronics design, using the op-amp’s limitations to get a variable low-pass filter with no external capacitors or nonlinearity. 10k from Vin to inverting input, 100k from output to inverting input, grounded noninverting input, and a series combination from ground of a 100-ohm resistor and a 10k pot. Purportedly the pot changes the bandwidth but not the gain, which sounds plausible to me but isn’t obvious.