Today I'm listening to: Mystic Cave Zone from Sonic 2, and a deconstruction of it by carpathia808 on youtube. Original: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdgR... Deconstruction: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhge...

the little yellow blob highlighted in this image is currently the FARTHEST galaxy we’ve ever seen. this galaxy existed only 280 MILLION years after the big bang!!

Putting out a call: I'm looking for work. Senior software developer, specializing in low-level, embedded, and systems programming. Previous work includes video compression (developer on AV1 and AV2), silicon verification, and scientific/numerical software. Full CV/resume available on request.

What I listened to today: "Kraftwerk" Did you know before Kraftwerk standardized on the genre-defining all-electronics sound you know them for, they were a prog-music jam band? And they were *really good* at it? Check out their first album, it's not what you expect: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJka...

Arbitrary milestone get: Today I reached 100 million points on Folding@Home!

last night, i caught the milky way and andromeda in the same image and it was so special to me. two galaxies, millions of light-years apart.

MORE NEW HUBBLE IMAGES OF BABY STARS ✨

Spent the last couple of days making a bunch of improvements to my website. The sort of stuff that isn't big and flashy, but which makes everything feel a lot more polished. And I learnt some interesting things along the way which I now want to blog about, so it's a double win!

Means increased delta-v 💪☄️

Apropos of a conversation on Mastodon, I've realized recently that so many of my thoughts on the current "AI" hype cycle center around these two blog posts, from 2018/2019: jmvalin.ca/demo/lpcnet/ jmvalin.ca/demo/lpcnet_...

that's goddamn right blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/k...

Today in "space is ridiculously huge": TIL about the Sweden Solar System, which is a model of the solar system from the Sun out to the termination shock (roughly where the Voyager probes are), scaled down to the size of Sweden: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_...

An early look at the accessibility work going on in Servo. Part of Igalia's Sovereign Tech Fund project. www.igalia.com/2025/10/09/I...

pixel art is hard

why did i look up how to make mods for silksong i shouldn't have been given this power www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6lB...

Lord help me I am using the Numerical Properties to implement algorithms quickly.

Today I'm listening to: www.youtube.com/watch?v=00vY...

To ring in the new year, I ran ethernet cables around the house to pull a bunch of things off of the wifi and onto a proper gigabit ethernet network :D Does it change much in practice? Not really. Does it make me happy? Hell fucking yeah it does!

I’ll see yall next year ✨

TIL a bunch of tricks for getting the most out of arena allocators, courtesy of nullprogram.com/blog/2023/09... . A couple of bits that are particularly interesting:

For anyone who is out of the loop on that reference, I am a deeply uncool nerd

Six o'clock on a Christmas morning Six o'clock on a Christmas morning Six o'clock on a Christmas morning Six o'clock on a Christmas morning

Found it

I wish I were surprised to learn that Australia's ban on social media for kids under 16 was pushed by an ad firm to get the government to stop considering a law that would ban online gambling ads. skepchick.org/2025/12/aust...

let he who is without sin approximate it with a taylor series

Congrats to Australia, this is really cool! report.cervicalcancercontrol.org.au

I was wondering why the Silksong codebase was using the word "antic" everywhere, like damn what antics are they up to anyway I realized it obviously means anticipation lol

My "favourite" example of this was one time I went to log into a website, clicked out of the password field to use my password manager, and something to the effect of "whoops! Looks like you forgot to put your password in there!" popped up in red text. WTF? www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-in...

"save systems should dynamically handle object IDs and automatically populate the serialized data of every object that requires save states, and then for dialogue progression it needs to-" team cherry: WRONG. 1400 hardcoded fields in PlayerData.cs

I used to think X11/wayland compositors were these cool special programs with deep complexity. Shit’s just vibes, yo, there’s just a global variable called FB_ID that anyone can set and the kernel’s like “cool I’ll display that image to the monitor now”

It has been 0 days since I got bit by loose typing shenanigans. Specifically, Python will let you zero-pad a string, but it adds those zeros on the *opposite* side to how it zero-pads numbers! >>> number = 12 >>> text = "12" >>> f"{number:03}" '012' >>> f"{text:03}" '120'

Jesus Christ, this age verification thing is going to be the most useless and annoying thing we’ve ever done to undermine privacy and democracy in the history of the world. I vote that all in favor are banned from the internet.

You can’t watch this and not smile. It simply cannot be done

Extremely fitting that Games Done Quick's first Silksong run is awoo% :D www.twitch.tv/videos/26379...

Today's random programming thought: As far as I know, no programming language has a "multiply/divide by a power of 2" operator for floating-point values, analogous to left/right shift for integers. Nor am I aware of any CPU architecture that has an efficient instruction for that.

Join me at 8pm GMT for the grand unveiling of Cryfder, my third Eurorack module! :D Video kindly provided by the one and only DivKid. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCe0...

I was supposed debug something to do with bevels but I keep ending up with some kind of mosaic art instead

Oh wow, it was *quite windy* today here in Britain, and that pushed our record for wind power generation up by a full gigawatt! Source: grid.iamkate.com , which pulls down the official stats and presents them in a super clear and nice way

"Is Rogue a Roguelike?" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,

Oh boy, you can bet we are cooking the coolest profiler for Python 3.15 👨‍🍳🔥

The vaccine is pretty astonishing. Just look at that green line.

Australia just recorded zero cervical cancer cases in women under 25 for the first time since records began in 1982. The amazing result of HPV vaccination.

Jebus, in just 2 or 3 years Pakistan has imported enough solar panels that, in some times in the coming year, panels will cover *all* the country's demand.

We did something different with the credits for Demonschool. We used this format: name, title, lengthy description of what they did. Often you see credits in games where you don't know what the credited developer was actually responsible for. We wanted to give people proper, actual credit.

Python is such a cursed and beautiful language.

i don't know if i'd say that i "like" lua, exactly. but i respect the hell out of it and we have a truce that's held for some years now

GARAMA! pattern by Ami_amour (Instagram)

What I listened to today: "JPEG" / "CODE", Nadaj Jungle will never die, Jungle is eternal. From 2020 some splintered D&B in the classic mode, smooth then rough. These tracks are unrelated except for that they flow well together notnedaj.bandcamp.com/track/jpeg notnedaj.bandcamp.com/track/code

i fed my pitch sequence into a saw mod instead of into the oscillator frequency