Mark Foster

Working on the 🛜

[Mark Foster @mfosterio]

Reflection and Growth. Life is a winding path where missteps are inevitable. Each day is a gift, offering a chance to learn from the past and move forward in a way that uplifts those around us. I strive to embrace this practice daily, knowing that life can feel overwhelming at times. Yet, taking a moment to pause engaging in both introspection and retrospection allows for greater clarity and purpose. These mindful habits help us navigate life’s journey as individuals, shaping a collective path that aligns with the greater plans set before us.

[slash1s @slash1sol]

A DEVELOPER PROVED THE REGEX YOU'VE WRITTEN A THOUSAND TIMES IS SECRETLY A COMPILER AND THAT ALMOST NO ONE WHO USES THEM HAS ANY IDEA WHAT ACTUALLY RUNS

36 minutes from Paul Wankadia, the engineer behind a regex engine that compiles your pattern straight down to raw machine code -- walking through what really happens between the slashes.

-> The moment it clicks, regex stops being magic punctuation you paste from Stack Overflow and becomes what it actually is: a tiny machine. Your pattern gets turned into a state machine, and that machine is what runs against every character of your text.

That one idea explains everything you never understood. Why one regex returns instantly and a nearly identical one hangs your whole server. Why some patterns are safe and others are a denial-of-service waiting to happen. It was never random -- it's whether the machine underneath is built well or badly.

Writing a regex was never the skill -> reading one is. And now that an AI agent hands you dense, clever patterns you'd never write yourself, the person who can see the machine underneath is the one who catches the one that takes down production at 3am.

Everyone copies regex and prays. This is the talk that ends the praying.

Save it. The next time a pattern "Just works," you'll actually know why ↓

[Mark Foster @mfosterio]

Meta, has major problems. It has not invested in TEEs with capabilities linked to assertion and attestation claims. The AI mystical hype needs blockchain and until people get it. 📉 Think about it, what good is AI in space if we have real world problems with it on the edge on earth.

https://t.co/OWeY3g8uyS

https://t.co/XB0xdacsbC

[Science Simplified @Scivf4]

This is what the AI brain looks like.

[Mark Foster @mfosterio]

https://t.co/4GMDOcUW5w

[TheMekon_Venus @TheMekon_Venus]

Old style macs were just build for easy upgrades.

This was a huge deal.

[ama_plaka @ama_plaka]

𒅒

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Loved this episode of The Computer Chronicles.

[kynd.info @kyndinfo]

Principal Component Analysis 主成分分析
[Math short write-up]
https://t.co/CKulZU34GM

[Pixel Symphony @Pixel0Symphony]

Henricus Hondius, Perspective Study. 1615.

Engraving on paper.

[slash1s @slash1sol]

A LINUX KERNEL DEVELOPER PROVED THE THING YOU PUSH CODE TO IS SECRETLY A DATABASE THAT CAN VERSION ALMOST ANYTHING AND THAT MOST DEVS HAVE ONLY EVER TOUCHED A TENTH OF IT

42 minutes from Josh Triplett -- a longtime Linux kernel and Debian developer -- showing that Git is a general-purpose, tamper-evident versioning engine that just happens to be famous for code.

-> The moment it clicks, Git stops being "Where my code lives" and becomes what it really is underneath: a content-addressable store that can version almost anything -- your configs, your notes, your servers' state, entire datasets.

People run whole wikis on it. They version their entire machine's configuration with it. They ship websites by pushing to it. They track data too big to email. None of it is a hack -- it's the same handful of objects you already use for code, pointed somewhere new.

Treating Git as a code-only tool was never the ceiling -> it's a versioning engine for anything, and the people who see that automate what the rest of the team still does by hand. And as AI agents start spitting out not just code but configs, docs and data, the one system that can version and audit all of it at once is already sitting on your machine.

You learned five commands to survive. This is the talk that shows you were standing on top of a database the whole time.

It changes what you think the tool is even for.

Bookmark & Watch it today ↓

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

This simple chalkboard diagram explains how the server for https://t.co/hobqtZrMvA works!

Long story short, you can connect an LED strip or matrix to an ESP32. Install NightDriver, and it will connect to the network and await color data. You can have any number of ESP32s connected only by wifi.

Then you run the server, which draws effects to a larger virtual canvas and displatches the appropriate color to each ESP32.

So, for example, you can have multiple LED installations on different eaves without wiring connecting them.

Or you could combine a bunch of smaller matrices into a video wall or jumbotron, that sort of thing!

Code's all free and open-source at https://t.co/hobqtZrMvA

[Mathelirium @mathelirium]

Control theory is a powerful field, especially in this AI era.

A moving cart uses feedback control to keep a pole upright, constantly correcting its motion as random pushes and an added mass at the top try to knock it over.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

fopen() is magic! Here's what you've been missing all these years....

[Retro Tech Dreams @RetroTechDreams]

Winamp Skin: ASCII amp 5x by mrd00d

[slash1s @slash1sol]

ONE OF THE MINDS BEHIND JAVA GAVE A LECTURE WHERE HE BANNED HIMSELF FROM USING ANY BIG WORD UNTIL HE DEFINED IT FIRST AND IN DOING SO QUIETLY EXPLAINED HOW EVERY GREAT SYSTEM GETS BUILT

A talk from Guy Steele -- co-author of the Java spec and a designer of Scheme -- where the form of the talk is the lesson.

-> The moment you catch what he's doing, it rewires you. He starts with only the smallest words, then builds every larger idea live, in front of you, from the pieces he already gave you. The talk grows its own vocabulary as it goes.

That's the whole secret of language and system design he's smuggling in: you don't ship something huge and finished. You ship a small core and the means to grow it. Miss that and you spend your career fighting your own tools.

Memorizing a language was never the skill -> understanding how a good one is meant to grow is. And as AI starts generating the primitives you build on, knowing what makes a foundation extensible instead of brittle is the entire game.

Twenty-five years on, language designers still point to this talk as the cleanest demonstration of the idea ever performed.

Bookmark it & Watch how he builds the whole thing from nothing ↓

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Why couldn't you change your Gmail username until now?

[📹 Etech.explain1]

[Retro Tech Dreams @RetroTechDreams]

Anatomy of a window

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

The inverse square law governs how intensity or force spreads from a point source: it falls off as 1/r².

Radiation, sound, illumination, electrostatic forces & gravity all follow it; doubling distance quarters the strength, tripling it reduces to 1/9.

Classic examples in one diagram.