Author: David Faden
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“Do not panic”: -stable maintainer on LLM security impact
Greg Kroah-Hartman, “Fellow at the Linux Foundation… responsible for the Linux kernel stable releases… maintainer of a variety of different kernel subsystems (USB, char/misc, tty/serial, driver core, staging, etc.)”, has a couple of interesting talks on the impact of LLMs on security: Linux in the Land of LLMs (August 11, 2026) and Kernel Recipes 2026…
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Where is zip?
Download a copy of CPython’s source: Where is zip implemented? Looks promising! This looks like a good start point — defining it along with the other builtins inside _PyBuiltin_Init in Python/bltinmodule.c: where _PyBuiltin_Init gets called in Python/pylifecycle.c here: where pycore_init_builtins called in Python/pylifecycle.c here: where pycore_interp_init gets called in Python/pylifecycle.c here: where new_interpreter gets called…
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^r, remembering
I enjoyed this article on Small Programming Tricks. It mentions using Ctrl + r to search backwards in shell history. (There are a lot of other useful Readline commands to learn.) I remember learning about Ctrl + r. I was sitting in the cubicles for the Spelling team in Building 43. This was soon after…
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Eating society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea)
Today at a workday at the local school, one of the volunteers thinned the society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) plantings. They were threatening to crowd out some plants added to the beds by students (not pictured in the photo below). I’d heard from another volunteer that society garlic are edible so I asked to grab some.…
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Getting text from some seed packet labels
I’ve been enjoying following along with Simon Willison as he plays with LLMs via his llm tool but haven’t tried it out yet. Now I have a small task in mind — I recently planted some seeds, taking a photo of each seed packet while I was at it. I’d like to extract the plant…
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Extracting Google Scholar metadata
I wanted to find the number of citations per year for a paper from my dad, at least per Google Scholar. Hacking around, here’s a little JavaScript to get it per results page: How would you do this? Is there a nicer way to do it? There were 12 results pages. I was paranoid about…
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Japanese cheesewood in Japan
On a recent visit to Japan, I was amused to see some of what I’m pretty sure was Pittosporum tobira, aka Japanese cheesewood: I’ve written about it a couple of times before — Pittosporum tobira and Pittosporum tobira’s sticky seeds — looking at some of the many specimens growing right next door. But here it…
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Tim Harford’s 10 statistical commandments
I bought my mom a copy of Tim Harford’s “The Data Detective” and checked it out myself, meaning to re-read it in parallel with her. She didn’t get to reading it and my re-reading has lagged. It’s now overdue so I’ll miss doing a proper review at this moment; I’ll take this as a sign…
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Creeping thistles
I visited my parents in Iowa last week. One thing I did was help with pulling out thistles that had been spreading throughout a couple garden beds — 89 plants one day, a couple more another day. But what kind of thistle were they? I was hoping non-native since my hope is to nudge things…
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My second WP plugin
I’m starting to read “WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook – Third Edition”. The first example does nothing other than make a do nothing plugin visible in the admin page, but the second example already allowed for some fun. I’m happy with how psychedelic this turned out: I won’t add it here though. References mentioned: