I build this blog using Hugo, a popular static site generator. The way Hugo works is that when I create a new blog post, Hugo generates a default template that looks like this: --- title: "My New Post" date: 2024-11-16T20:33:09-04:00 --- The boilerplate for the post contains a publication time with a timestamp. But the timestamp obviously isn’t the time that I published the post, as I’ve just started writing it.| mtlynch.io
Recently, when I’m having trouble sleeping, I look for software to fuzz test. Earlier this week, I thought back to Fady Othman’s post “Meta Bug Bounty — Fuzzing ’netconsd’ for fun and profit.” It’s a good tutorial about fuzzing code exhaustively. Like most fuzzing blog posts, I found the work a bit difficult to reproduce because it requires the reader to figure out how to replicate the author’s environment and toolchain.| mtlynch.io
This is the second half of a post about using Nix to automate a fuzz testing workflow. At this point, I can run honggfuzz against pdftotext, but it takes a bit of manual effort to get things started. I promised in part one that I’d get all of the installation and fuzzing down to a single command. Downloading tricky PDFs In my ad-hoc fuzzing, I manually downloaded a PDF from the IRS website. I’ll start by automating that step.| mtlynch.io
Last week, I stumbled upon a reddit post announcing that the author, Charles Marohn, was giving a free talk near my town the next morning. Marohn is the author of Strong Towns, one of my favorite books of the last few years. So, my wife and I attended the talk and enjoyed it. The talk is based on ideas from Marohn’s new book, Escaping the Housing Trap, which I haven’t read yet, so these notes are from memory.| mtlynch.io
A few weeks ago, NVIDIA released Nemotron, a large language model that they derived from Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B. NVIDIA claimed at release that Nemotron outperformed GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on certain benchmarks. That was exciting news, as my experience with self-hostable AI models is that they trail commercial models by about a year in terms of accuracy and quality. I decided to test out Nemotron with a few simple coding tasks to see how it compared to commercial models like Claude 3.| mtlynch.io
In this post I discuss how to use the new Git rebasing feature, --update-refs, and how it makes working with stacked branches/PRs easier.| Andrew Lock | .NET Escapades
Last week, I saw an interesting article on the /r/legaladvice subreddit. An e-commerce business owner was complaining that a customer was suing because the merchant had been sending the customer promotional emails for years that the customer never agreed to. The author deleted the post a few days later, but I found a copy of the text. The merchant was indignant and felt like it was a shakedown, but I was 100% on the customer’s side.| mtlynch.io
Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools from source and chasing down dependencies upon dependencies. I recently found that Nix eliminates a lot of the gruntwork from fuzz testing. I created a Nix configuration that kicks off a fuzz testing workflow with a single command. The only dependencies are Nix and git.| mtlynch.io
Highlights I’m finding it surprisingly difficult not to work. Sleep is getting a little better. I used Nix to create a slick and reusable fuzz testing workflow. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Enjoy family time Result: Spent lots of time with my wife and our newborn son and had frequent visits with friends and family.| Retrospectives on mtlynch.io
Highlights My wife and I became parents. I realized that caring for a newborn takes more time than I expected. I’m unsure what to do with my partially-finished Hacker News course. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Finish recording my course Result: Baby arrived early, and I only recorded 20% of the material. Grade: N/A Recording the course took longer than I thought, and the baby arrived a few weeks earli...| Retrospectives on mtlynch.io
A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful - martinvonz/jj| GitHub
I spent most of April and some of May traveling around Ukraine, visiting the cities of Uzhgorod, Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odessa. As with my other travels, I’ll write down thoughts and obse…| Matt Lakeman
