Viewing profile — nickcw

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 t…

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 dir…

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 c…

[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, …

Maybe it would have made more sense for Anthropic to rewrite Claude Code in rust, and cut out the middle man (bun)?

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 re…

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 relev…

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.

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 perc…

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 post…

Maybe it does measure the distance to your face to work out where to show the viewfinder rectangle...

Ha! I'm going to rename my home office "The Room of Dreams"

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 …

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 sec…

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…

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 v…

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. …

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 year…

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" to…

> 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” mo…

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 downloa…

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!…

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 secu…

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 to…

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 con…