alcinnz

When it comes to compressing & analyzing audio/video/etc, among other tasks including larger/fancier blurs, its useful to convert between a sampled signal & the sine waves making it up.

For this we use an algorithm called The Fast Fourier Transform!

It recursively splits the input samples up by odd & even indices, so it can take advantage of the cyclic nature of the relevant formula to algebraicly simplify the task into something that's reasonable to calculate.

1/2!

What's the best numbers I can cite for how insane the level of investment is?

How much money has been sunk into LLMs? How much training data have they harvested? How much of the available hardware have they bought up?

Studying the rest of GRUB's drivers for disk-partitioning on different computers...

The BSDs have different drivers sharing most of the same code, which in turn differs to MSDOS's driver with slight variations & a callback for iterating over a given sector. Except plain BSD skips the Microsoft components!

In any case the inner routine reads a header verifying a magic number, extracts a valid pointer, & reads partition headers at a certain stride handing reformatted data to a callback.

1/3?

Understanding friction in software engineering - Iris Meredith:
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/friction_software_engineering

If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems - Andrew Murphy:
https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/if-you-thought-the-speed-of-writing-code-was-your-problem-you-have-bigger-problems

Why Your Engineering Team Is Slow (It's the Codebase, Not the People) - Ally Piechowski:
https://piechowski.io/post/codebase-drag-audit/

Early on there was a lot of experimentation in how to render 3D graphics for display on a 2D screen, but by the mid-1990s we've settled on easily hardware-optimized technique that got standardized by OpenGL. Now however we've been switching to "path-tracing", not that path-tracing didn't exist back then.

So how does this more traditional 3D rendering technique work?

To start its remarkable how much we can get out of a single 3D geometric transformation!

1/3?

What sort of data might BtrFS store in its BTrees?

There's inodes representing file metadata.

There's file contents, if the file's small enough its not worth storing elsewhere.

There's entries for looking up a file's ID in a directory by its filename's crc32c hash. Incidentally my hypothetical string-centric CPU includes hardwired circuitry for this.

There's references to where the file's stored on disk, with snapshotting & reference counting. Or groups thereof.

There's backreferences.

1/2

Studying GRUB's `getroot` helpers ported to UNIX...

To check if a harddrive is a floppy disk it opens the corresponding device file (aided by GRUB's "kernel" subsystem) & checks the version numbers from `fstat()`.

There's a wrapper around the `vgs` commond with non-trivial reformatting, or it might be a noop depending on build flags.

Another helper retrieves & iterates over the mountpoints containing a filepath, querying those mounts' device files. It invokes a recursive support routine.

1/2

The Old Internet Is Still Here - Tyler Gaw:
https://tylergaw.com/blog/the-old-internet-is-still-here/

Accessibility people are a superpower - J. Cunha:
https://jaredcunha.com/blog/accessibility-people-are-a-superpower

Accessibility Regression Testing With XCUI - M. Steadman @ Dev.To:
https://dev.to/steady5063/accessibility-regression-testing-with-xcui-mpa

role=presentation is no alternative for aria-hidden=true - M. Matuzović:
https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2026/role-presentation-no-alternative-for-aria-hidden

Shifting and shuffling - B. DeConinck:
https://bethdeconinck.com/2026/03/26/shifting-shuffling/

A11y 101: 2.5.2 Pointer Cancellation - N. Tarnoff:
https://tarnoff.info/2026/03/02/a11y-101-2-5-2-pointer-cancellation/

Did you know some ARIA roles remove child semantics? - Max Design:
https://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/aria-roles-semantics.html

Native HTML components don’t guarantee good UX - Silver:
https://adamsilver.io/blog/native-html-components-dont-guarantee-good-ux/

Put aria-hidden=true on decorative SVGs - Matuzović:
https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2026/put-aria-hidden-on-presentational-svgs

What I Like About WCAG 3.0 - Groves @ AFixt:
https://afixt.com/what-i-like-about-wcag-3-0/

Designing for people with disabilities - Feltham @ Tetralogical:
https://tetralogical.com/blog/2026/03/03/designing-for-people-with-disabilities/

Tests for aria-labelledby and aria-describedby - Max Design:
https://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/test-cases-labelledby-describedby.html

Everything you never wanted to know about visually-hidden - Bushell:
https://dbushell.com/2026/02/20/visually-hidden/

Uses for nested promises - James Coglan "The If Works":
https://blog.jcoglan.com//2026/03/23/uses-for-nested-promises/