geek stuff

https://spectrum.ieee.org/rf-tags-wasps 

An ultralightweight radio-frequency tag designed to be worn by a paper wasp may help scientists get a glimpse at some basic behavioral information that’s long been missing: where do the animals go when they leave the nest?

 

Getting the right combination of light weight, long range, and positional accuracy was key. Jettisoning the battery was the first step. “Batteries don’t scale,” says Blaauw. A miniaturized battery can’t provide enough current to generate a strong radio signal. Capacitors, which store energy by accumulating charges on surfaces, do better at small scales, Blaauw says. “Really small capacitors can store enough charge now to send a radio pulse,” he says. The capacitor used in the wasp tag weighs just 0.86 mg. A tiny photovoltaic array slowly charges up the capacitor until it has enough energy to generate a radio signal.

Sage advice from scripting.com

A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you’re not careful it’ll quickly start giving you orders.

Mind blown by this sneakiness 

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

Checking on the In a request for comment page on Wikipedia

Over 400,000 pages currently contain over 695,000 links to Archive.today

In January 2026, the maintainers of Archive.today inserted malicious code in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack against a person they were in dispute with. Every time a user encounters the CAPTCHA page, their internet connection is used to attack a certain individual's blog.

From AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

Here's the thing that broke my brain for a while: AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That's not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

[..]

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

[..]

Before AI, there was a ceiling on how much you could produce in a day. That ceiling was set by typing speed, thinking speed, the time it takes to look things up. It was frustrating sometimes, but it was also a governor. You couldn't work yourself to death because the work itself imposed limits.

AI removed the governor. Now the only limit is your cognitive endurance. And most people don't know their cognitive limits until they've blown past them.

From https://charity.wtf/2026/01/19/bring-back-ops-pride-xpost/

What’s wrong with operations? Ops is not a synonym for toil; it literally means “get shit done as efficiently as possible”. Every function has an operational component at scale: business ops, marketing ops, sales ops, product ops, design ops and everything else I could think of to search for, and so far as I can tell, none of them are treated with anything like the disrespect, dismissal and outright contempt that software engineering

From Martin Fowler :

One attendee is an SRE for a Very (Very) Large Code Base. He was less worried about people not understanding the code an LLM writes because he already can’t understand the VVLCB he’s responsible for. What he values is that the LLM helps him understand the what the code is doing, and he regularly uses it to navigate to the crucial parts of the code.

There’s a general point here:

Fully trusting the answer an LLM gives you is foolishness, but it’s wise to use an LLM to help navigate the way to the answer.

This post might be useful for maybe like 10 people who are running into issues when compiling software on Apple M* machines.

If you run into error like this:

ld: warning: ignoring file '/usr/local/lib/libpng.dylib': found architecture 'x86_64', required architecture 'arm64'
ld: warning: ignoring file '/usr/local/lib/libavformat.dylib': found architecture 'x86_64', required architecture 'arm64'

And you have installed these packages using brew. I verified that these dylibs are definitely for x86_64 and the linker was not going crazy. (use lipo -archs /usr/local/lib/libavformat.dylib)

Well, that was caused because  I had installed the new M3 macbook from backup (Timemachine) and the backup was created from an x86_64.  

The fix is described here

brew bundle dump --global
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/uninstall.sh)"
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew bundle install --global

This first creates a ~/.Brewfile and then installs back those packages.