After the first three such calls this month, I was really starting to wonder what had changed. Had we accidentally published my phone number, somewhere? So when the fourth tech support call came through, today (which began with a confusing exchange when I didn’t recognise the name of the caller’s charity, and he didn’t get my name right, and I initially figured it must be a wrong number), I had to ask: where did you find this number? “When I Google ‘Three Rings login’, it’s right there!” he said.

Interesting story about Google publishing someone's phone number on searches when they gave the number to Google for account verification/security:

danq.me/2025/05/21/g...

Reminds me of the time a company I worked for accidentally used phone numbers obtained the same way and got fined $150M

For non-Centaur features, we tried to match Intel since some software would hang or crash if we did something that was correct according to the manual but didn't match an actual Intel processor, so other things should be pretty standard (other than the obvious, like CentuarHauls vendor ID, etc.

Hah. Sorry, I don't have data sheets squirrelled away that aren't just the stuff you can find online.

For non-secret Centaur-specific feature flags, I don't know if there's a better still existing resource than looking at the 0xC0000001 section in git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linu...

This is great! Thanks for the pointer!

A version of Missile Command for the Commodore 64 where the bottom of your screen is the game state in memory and missiles cause memory corruption: csdb.dk/release/?id=....

In the video below, a missile broke my controls and caused my cursor to get stuck moving down and to the left.

The ranking below is mainly based on how well vehicles scored when the driver-side small overlap test was added in 2012 and how well models scored when they were modified to improve test results. Tier 1: good without modifications Volvo Tier 2: mediocre without modifications; good with modifications None Tier 3: poor without modifications; good with modifications Mercedes BMW Tier 4: poor without modifications; mediocre with modifications Honda Toyota Subaru Chevrolet Tesla Ford Tier 5: poor with modifications or modifications not made Hyundai Dodge Nissan Jeep Volkswagen These descriptions are approximations. Honda, Ford, and Tesla are the poorest fits for these descriptions, with Ford arguably being halfway in between Tier 4 and Tier 5 but also arguably being better than Tier 4 and not fitting into the classification and Honda and Tesla not really properly fitting into any category (with their category being the closest fit), but some others are also imperfect. Details below.

The commentary I've seen says Teslas are safe so it must be the drivers but, per danluu.com/car-safety/, maybe it's the cars. The most fatal rated manufacturers (Kia/Hyundai, Dodge, Tesla) all did poorly — Kia/Hyundai, Dodge got the lowest rating and there's a strong case Tesla should have as well.

Please see link for text version of table

Please see link for text version of table

Bar chart showing that Teslas have a higher average selling price than any other tracked car manufacturer

I find it interesting/surprising that Tesla topped the www.iseecars.com/most-dangero... fatalities per mile ranking from 2018-2022.

Fatality rate is strongly negatively correlated with price and weight and Teslas are much more expensive and heavier than average.

A funny side effect of the crackdown on "AI" scraping is that I keep getting banned from sites for browsing too quickly.

I barely use reddit anymore and I still managed to get IP banned for scraping (the error message indicated that I should get in touch with them if I want to do bulk accesses).

There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything negative to say about Nadella's leadership in this post, this narrative underrates Ballmer's role in Microsoft's success. Not only did Microsoft's financials, revenue and profit, look great under Ballmer, Microsoft under Ballmer made deep, long-term bets that set up Microsoft for success in the decades after his reign. At the time, the bets were widely panned, indicating that they weren't necessarily obvious, but we can see in retrospect that the company made very strong bets despite the criticism at the time. In addition to overseeing deep investments in areas that people would later credit Nadella for, Ballmer set Nadella up for success by clearing out political barriers for any successor. Much like Gary Bernhardt's talk, which was panned because he made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people didn't realize they'd learned something non-trivial, Ballmer set up Microsoft for future success so effectively that it's easy to criticize him for being a bum because his successor is so successful. Criticisms of Ballmer For people who weren't around before the turn of the century, in the 90s, Microsoft used to be considered the biggest, baddest, company in town. But it wasn't long before people's opinions on Microsoft changed — by 2007, many people thought of Microsoft as the next IBM and Paul Graham wrote Microsoft is Dead, in which he noted that Microsoft being considered effective was ancient history: A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd po…

Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

danluu.com/ballmer/

mattnewton 1 hour ago | parent | next [–] When I worked at Google I got re-orged into the same division as pixel / android. My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone for personal use, and I am pretty sure I saw an Apple Watch on my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple- I remember several internal sites would ask you to file a radar (bug report) on why you switched to chrome from safari if you opened them in chrome. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices after 5pm. There is a lot of incredible talent in that team but I think Google needs a minor culture shift to compete with Apple here.

A former Apple engineer discusses Google product culture:

> My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone ... my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple ....

i can speak with a little authority on this, i work in this field

DCs expend water by evaporation, either in cooling towers or evaporative coolers (water becomes vapor, taking latent heat energy with it into the air and leaving cooler liquid water behind)
so we expend liquid water resources 1/

This is a summary of the publicly available documents on the 2011-2012 FTC investigation of Google's allegedly antitcompetive actions in search and ads, followed by a tech-focused analysis of the decision from someone who's worked at the two companies that are discussed in the most detail in the memos (Google and Microsoft), worked in search, and worked closely with ads teams on optimizing ads ranking algorithms. I've seen a number of law-focused and economics-focused analyses, but I haven't seen a tech-focused analysis in a level of detail I find satisfying. In particular, a number of key arguments in the memos rely on evidence and inferences that would've seen implausible to someone who was familiar with tech, which I haven't seen discussed. The law-focused and economics-focused analyses tend to avoid digging into this and, while there have been some articles written about tech errors for a lay audience, they've tended to explain that the inferences that were made were wrong in r...

On the 2011-2012 FTC antitrust investigation of Google:

danluu.com/ftc-google-a...

What Factors Explain the Nature of Software? tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

@ZTGallagher • 1mo ago I know a guy who was a QA tester for Obsidian Entertainment working on Neverwinter Nights 2. At the end of development, they invited all the QA testers to the parking lot for a celebration party. There was no party, they disabled all their keys when they got out there, and told them they were all fired. And that was it...

Every once in a while, I think about going to work in the game industry.

Interesting comment about SGI leadership knowing about the problems they were facing and still being unable to come up with a way to handle them.

Great! I'm looking forward to reading the blog post!

I've noticed that you sometimes turn your social media comments into blog post, which is something I should probably do more of.

Thanks for the comments. As someone who doesn't really work on this stuff, I find this super interesting!

As an outsider, it seems like wasm might become mainstream whether or not it delivers benefits to end users, just like heavy SPAs became mainstream regardless of the benefits.

I recently tried Blazor and the performance is incredibly bad (like, 5s to 10s initial load time for very simple apps, which you can push down to maybe 3s or something via various config options).

From news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836..., I guess people still like it because it's nice for devs.

The effort to do this kind of work ended up getting defunded after a while even though the gains were measurable and very large, so even showing huge gains here wasn't sufficient.

On Ember, I didn't know it was such a performance problem. I think that's interesting.

We did see much larger impacts in the long-term holdback than in the initial test for the reason you mentioned — if someone thinks the app takes 60s to open, they probably won't open it very often, and you've already lost a huge fraction of users who've previously used the app and found it too slow

On a slow device, this decreased time from opening the app to seeing a tweet from something like 60s to 48s. It's incredible that people in that range would even use the app, but apparently some did, and it got more people into the range where they'd use the app or got them to use the app more.

on mobile, changes that made the app go from extremely slow to only very slow had large, measurable, impacts on retention/engagement/revenue. I forget the exact numbers, but a change that reduced the loading time of feature flags ended up increasing revenue something like 0.7%.

It's interesting that the impact wasn't easily observable on mobile. For Twitter, there was an experiment where (I forget the exact number) 500ms or 1s of delay was added on web and the impact was huge, and it was clear we could easily reduce latency by that much (but never did), and

Yeah, I've seen the Discourse people say that Discourse is super fast after the initial load because it's an SPA, but it's not, even my laptop, which is a faster machine than almost anyone has who isn't on a real workstation.

They seem to genuinely believe they have good performance.

Table showing that many websites are unusable with devices that are commonly used in non-rich countries. See link for details.

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices:

danluu.com/slow-device/

Intel Processor Instability Causing Oodle Decompression Failures RAD has become aware of a problem that can cause Oodle Data decompression failures, or crashes in games built with Unreal. We believe that this is a hardware problem which affects primarily Intel 13900K and 14900K processors, less likely 13700, 14700 and other related processors as well. Only a small fraction of those processors will exhibit this behavior. The problem seems to be caused by a combination of BIOS settings and the high clock rates and power usage of these processors, leading to system instability and unpredictable behavior under heavy load. As far as we can tell, there is not any software bug in Oodle or Unreal that is causing this. Due to what seem to be overly optimistic BIOS settings, some small percentage of processors go out of their functional range of clock rate and power draw under high load, and execute instructions incorrectly. This is being seen disproportionately in Oodle Data decompressi...

We're coming up on a decade since danluu.com/cpu-bugs/. Not only was the prediction valid for a decade, it looks like the next decade will be worse.

Today's bug of the day: a significant fraction of high-end consumer CPUs crash if you run CPU-intensive workloads: www.radgametools.com/oodleintel.htm

f I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my local reputable electronics shop (Memory Express, B&H Photo, etc.), I trust my local reputable electronics shop more. Not only are they less likely to sell me a counterfeit than Best Buy, in the event that they do sell me a counterfeit, the service is likely to be better. Similarly, let's say I ask myself a question like, "on which platform do I get a higher rate of scams, spam, fraudulent content, etc., [smaller platform] or [larger platform]"? Generally the answer is [larger platform]. Of course, there are more total small platforms out there and they're higher variance, so I could deliberately use a smaller platform that's worse, but I'm choosing good options instead of...

Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation:

danluu.com/diseconomies...

Muse retrospective · Adam Wiggins The inside story of four years building Muse, a canvas-based thinking tool for iPad and Mac.

A thoughtful retrospective by @adamwiggins.bsky.social on the business behind Muse, a tool-for-thought/iPad idea-sketching app. I’m sad that the business didn’t work out as planned, but the software still exists and the underlying goals and values remain good. adamwiggins.com/muse-retrosp...

Macs seem to have this? The info tab for a file has a field called "Where from:" that has both the URL of the page I was on as well as the download URL.

I only checked a few files, but they all have this.

Plot showing that almost everybody disagrees with almost everybody else on a simple question (see link for further explanation).

Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed:

danluu.com/impossible-a...