RSS Bilingual Reader

If n is a positive integer, then rounding Γ(1/ n ) up to the nearest integer gives n . In symbols, We an illustrate this with the following Python code. >>> from scipy.special import gamma >>> from math import ceil >>> for n in range(1, 101): ... assert(ceil(gamma(1/n)) == n) You can find a full proof in [1]. I’ll give a partial proof that may be more informative than the full proof. The asymptotic expansion of the gamma function near zero is where γ is the Euler...

pycparser is my most widely used open source project (with ~20M daily downloads from PyPI [1] ). It's a pure-Python parser for the C programming language, producing ASTs inspired by Python's own . Until very recently, it's been using PLY: Python Lex-Yacc for the core parsing. In this post, I'll describe how I collaborated with an LLM coding agent (Codex) to help me rewrite pycparser to use a hand-written recursive-descent parser and remove the dependency on PLY. This has been an interesting expe...

An interesting change to IP behavior landed in FreeBSD 15, as I discovered by accident . To quote from the general networking section of the FreeBSD 15 release notes : Making a connection to INADDR_ANY , i.e., using it as an alias for localhost , is now disabled by default. This functionality can be re-enabled by setting the net.inet.ip.connect_inaddr_wild sysctl to 1. cd240957d7ba The change's commit message has a bit of a different description: Previously connect() or sendto() to INADDR_ANY re...

Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been their most useful public-facing initiative since 1971 and a cornerstone of the public internet since 1997. In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they've not just removed the entire site (including t...

Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 - a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, and a sequel to the original Voxtral which they released in July 2025 . Voxtral Realtime - official name Voxtral-Mini-4B-Realtime-2602 - is the open weights (Apache-2.0) model, available as a 8.87GB download from Hugging Face . You can try it out in this live demo - don't be put ...

A former rocket plateaus There is the NVidia of the last five years (up 1200%), and the Nvidia of the last six months (down 2%). When ChatGPT launched, it was trading at 14; it’s gone up by more than a factor of ten since then, rising, until recently like a rocket. Aside from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, a brilliant and impressive CEO with considerable foresight, nobody was more responsible for Nvidia’s rise than Sam Altman, the relentless showman who runs OpenAI — and who repe...

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None --> Today's links Justin Key's "The Hospital at the End Of the World" : A biopunk medical thriller from a major new talent. Hey look at this : Delights to delectate. Object permanence : Coconut volunteers; Astro Noise; Rich old men behind "Millennials Rising"; Stop the "Stop the Steal" steal; "Chasing Shadows." Upcoming appearances : Where to find me. Recent appearances : Where I've been. Latest books : You keep readin'...

This upcoming Sunday is Super Bowl LX, the championship game of the top professional American football league. The Super Bowl thinks that it is so important that it uses Roman numerals.) The Super Bowl is the single largest sporting event in the United States. The entire country grinds to a halt when the game is on . If you aren’t interested in the game, it’s a great time to do public photography or run errands . Traditionally, the mayors of the home cities of the two teams competing...

Suppose you are using a Win32 ListView control in report mode, and you’ve got all your columns set up perfectly, and you don’t want the user to resize them. How do you do that? There is no ListView style for preventing column resize, but there is a header control style to prevent sizing: HDS_NOSIZING . This style requires Common Controls version 6, but I’m sure you’re all using that version already, right? auto hdr = ListView_GetHeader(hwndLV); SetWindowLong(hdr, GWL_STYL...

I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it turns out publishing Go binaries to PyPI means any Go binary can be just a uvx package-name call away. sqlite-scanner sqlite-scanner is my new Go CLI tool for scanning a filesystem for SQLite databa...

It's taken four months, but the next release of Logic for Programmers is now available ! v0.13 is over 50,000 words, making it both 20% larger than v0.12 and officially the longest thing I have ever written. 1 Full release notes are here , but I'll talk a bit about the biggest changes. For one, every chapter has been rewritten. Every single one. They span from relatively minor changes to complete chapter rewrites. After some rough git diffing, I think I deleted about 11,000 words? 2 The biggest ...

I've thoroughly enjoyed all of Janice Hallett's previous crime books . The Examiner is, frankly, more of the same - and I'm happy with that! You, the reader, are given a series of transcripts and have to work out what crime (if any) has been committed. You don't find out who the victim(s) is/are until reasonably far through the story. The characters are well realised (although a little similar to some of her others). The twists are shockingly good and will make you flick back to see if you could...

After the acquisition by a much larger company, security became a top priority. Our company occupied three tall buildings, each at least 13 stories high. Key card readers were installed next to every entrance, every elevator car, and even at the parking lot entrance, which itself was eight stories tall. The parking lot system was activated first. If you wanted to park your car, you needed to scan your pass. It didn't take long for lines to start forming, but they were still manageable. Then the ...

Date and time management libraries in many programming languages are famously bad. Python's datetime module comes to mind as one of the best (worst?) examples, and so does JavaScript's Date class . It feels like these libraries could not have been made worse on purpose, or so I thought until today, when I needed to implement some date calculations in a backup rotation script written in bash. So, if you wanted to learn how to perform date and time arithmetic in your bash scripts, you've come to t...

There are a variety of ways to pass secrets from one program to another on Unix, and many of them may expose your secrets under some circumstances. A secret passed on the command line is visible in process listings; a secret passed in the environment can be found in the process's environment (which can usually be inspected by outside parties). When I've had to deal with this in administrative programs in our environment , I have reached for an old Unix standby: pass the secret between programs t...

This week I'm in Hong Kong, and the day after recording, I gave the talk shown in the image above at INTERPOL's Cybercrime Expert Group. I posted a little about this on Facebook and LinkedIn, but thought I'd expand on what really stuck with me after watching other speakers: the effort agencies are putting into cybercrime prevention. It's very easy for folks to judge law enforcement solely on what they see from the outside, and that's mostly going after offenders and taki...

Simon Willison: OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I’ve had a few days of preview access — it’s a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks. Interesting, for sure. But super-duper interesting? I don’t know.  ★ 

Apple Newsroom: Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps using coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex. With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools. I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to...

FOSDEM 2026 ran last weekend in Brussels with its usual dense schedule of talks across open source projects and communities. Package management had a strong presence again this year, with a dedicated devroom plus related content scattered across the Distributions , Nix and NixOS , and SBOMs and Supply Chains tracks. Main Track Talks Kenneth Hoste presented How to Make Package Managers Scream , a follow-up to his FOSDEM 2018 talk about making package managers cry. Hoste showcased creative and eff...

This past week, over a series of events, the New York tech community celebrated the 30th anniversary of a nebulous idea described as “Silicon Alley”, the catch-all term for our greater collective of creators and collaborators, founders and funders, inventors and investors, educators and entrepreneurs and electeds, activists and architects and artists. Some of the parties or mixers have been typical industry affairs, the usual glad-handing about deal-making and pleasantries. But a lot have been d...