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  1. The titan implosion

    TL;DR, this was a triumph of stupidity and greed over good engineering.

    Engineering design standards are often written in blood, in the sense that these standards often came into being after accidents involving serious loss of life. The CEO of Oceangate ignored them, apparently because they got in his way of saving costs. As it turns out, reality is not susceptible to CEO bullshit.

    Unsurprisingly, “move fast and break things” is not a good strategy when lives are at stake.

  2. No AI training data here

    Recently “generative AI” models have become popular. The term however is a misnomer if not an outright lie.

    There is no “generating” going on, but basically little more than re-hashing of the training materials. This is a rip-off of human creativity, in which I refuse to participate.

    So the license of this website has been changed to include no derivatives and no commercial use.

    Using the content of this website as AI training data is explicitly not allowed.

  3. Repairing a USB flash drive

    Recently, one of my USB flash drives, a Kingston DataTraveller 100 G3, stopped working. It didn’t register at all in whatever PC I tried it in. So in this article, I will attempt to repair it.

  4. Building vkQuake 1.22.0 on FreeBSD

    The FreeBSD port is relatively old, and doesn’t support SDL 2.2. So I built version 1.22.0, which is current at the time of writing.

    The requirements are the same als the port.

  5. On Python speed

    As an engineer, I write a lot of small python programs as tools for specific tasks. Generally, these are not large programs. Most of them are below 100 lines of code (“LOC”, as measured by cloc), although there are a few in the 300−400 LOC range.

    In this article, I will present some observations about these, and draw some conclusion from them.

  6. Python 3.11 speed comparison with 3.9

    Since Python 3.11.0 came out recently, I wanted to compare its speed with 3.9.15 on some of my own “benchmark” programs.

    Both versions are in the default configuration as built by the FreeBSD ports system.

    TL;DR Python 3.11 yielded speed improvements in the order of 25% in my tests.


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