software

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The Project of Software Is Complete
2 months ago
- The project of software is complete; the era of new software categories has ended, and current efforts are refinements rather than innovations.
- Despite the democratization of coding via LLMs ('vibe coding'), most new software is redundant or trivial, not addressing genuine unmet needs.
- The adjacent possible of software is saturated; new apps like habit trackers are terminal leaves, not branches that open new frontiers.
- LLMs are powerful at manipulating symbols but cannot solve physical-world problems (e.g., energy, disease, transportation) that require atoms, not bits.
- Future technological progress must come from material science and engineering, not from more layers of software abstraction.
Tracker Beeper - Bert Hubert's writings
2 months ago
- The author implemented a tool called 'Tracker Beeper' that makes a noise every time a computer sends data to Google.
- The tool revealed that the official Dutch government jobs site sends every click to Google without asking for permission.
- After announcing the tool on Twitter, the demonstration video received over a million views.
- Support was added for Facebook and dozens of other trackers, with audible beeps for each.
- The software is currently rough and only runs on Linux, OSX, and BSD for command-line users.
- Future development goals include stable Linux features, a single-click OSX version, a Windows version, and possibly iOS/Android implementations.
- A live demo concept involves a low-power WiFi network and speakers that make tracker noises when visitors use their phones.
- Further plans include supporting all popular trackers, making them configurable, and allowing custom sounds per tracker.
Some Fun Software Facts
2 months ago
- In 2017, a team implemented Tetris as a Game of Life simulation using a 30 trillion pixel grid and a programmable CPU.
- Leap seconds, used to sync UTC with Earth's rotation, are set to be abolished by 2035, allowing drift between the two.
- The backslash character scarcely existed before 1930 and was added to ASCII for mathematical notation, becoming a key due to its uselessness.
- Galactic algorithms are theoretically faster but impractical at real-world scales, like the Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm for matrix multiplication.
- Cloudflare generates random numbers partly by photographing 100 lava lamps.
- Mergesort is older than bubblesort, and bubblesort has some practical uses despite its infamy.
- Most mergesort implementations before 2006 were broken due to a midpoint overflow bug for large lists.
- USB orientation follows a standard logo-side-up rule, but port orientation ambiguity led to USB-C's symmetric design.
- All spreadsheet software historically treated 1900 as a leap year due to Lotus 1-2-3 bugs, but Google Sheets now treats it normally.
- In 2020, biologists renamed 27 genes because Excel parsed their names as dates, and Microsoft fixed this three years later.
- Any valid JavaScript program can be encoded using only the characters ()+[]!, known as JSFuck, which was used for malware on eBay.
You can’t get more 2026 than that
2 months ago
- Software does not truly understand; it merely parses patterns, compares, and infers from databases.
- Intelligent people often mistakenly attribute understanding to software, confusing appearances with reality.
- True understanding is linked to self-consciousness, which software lacks.

software

The Project of Software Is Complete

Tracker Beeper - Bert Hubert's writings

Some Fun Software Facts

You can’t get more 2026 than that