HTTP 418 · Oddities
Lawrence C Paulson walks through 50 years of proof assistants, from Edinburgh LCF in 1975 to verified kernels, CompCert, seL4, Lean's math community and AWS's Nitro Isolation Engine. His dry conclusion: formal verificati…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Twenty-five years ago, on August 24, 2001, Microsoft sent Windows XP to manufacturing, merging the consumer and business lines onto the NT kernel. Extended support ended in 2014, yet patches trickled out until 2024, and …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A SQL query spotted in production hardcodes toggles like 1 = 0 and 1 = 1 into its WHERE clause, letting anyone flip result behavior by rewriting constants. The flags were never changed, never documented, and suggest the …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Jason Scott has curated a new Internet Archive collection of emulated 1970s to 1990s programs that faked machine intelligence, from dozens of ELIZA ports to Racter and Little Computer People. None of it thinks, and that …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Oscar Toledo G. recounts how he and his father built a high-performance computer around AMD's AM29000 RISC processor and wrote an entire operating system for it in assembly, including a GUI, a C compiler and a late-1990s…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Developer Daniel Gultsch argues that instant messaging should count as infrastructure, requiring open standards and collective ownership. His essay traces XMPP's 25-year history since RFC 6120, compares it to Matrix and …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
China's market regulator ordered Tesla to recall almost three million vehicles because their flush-mounted emergency door handles blend into the interior trim and can be hard to find after a crash. Tesla will add warning…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF reader recounts a year at an ed-tech company whose 'Run Locally' button let any website, or anyone on the same network, send arbitrary C code to a student's Windows PC. The vendor patched it quietly and kept …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
MartyPC, an open-source project written in Rust, emulates early IBM-compatible PCs with cycle-accurate timing, mimicking original hardware quirks rather than just running old software. The emulator runs across major oper…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Three Intel engineers quit in 1974 and 1975, built a chip for under $400,000, and accidentally created one of computing's longest survivors. The Zilog Z80, designed to out-Intel Intel, still powers Texas Instruments calc…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In 1984 Ken Sakamura launched TRON, a vertically integrated OS family with its own CPU and a 1.5 million character encoding. The desktop variant died after a 1989 US trade report named it a barrier, while the embedded va…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF's latest Error'd roundup collects software that fails at failing: Chromium logs a negative frame latency of -0.18 ms, a weather app reports negative infinity degrees during an eclipse, and an ownCloud API e…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF reader spotted a chip datasheet documenting a "Super User Fantastic Feature Enable Register", acronym SUFFER, at offset 0x0120. The column reflects on embedded life, where bad datasheets disagree with reality…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Chinese startup LandSpace has landed the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket on land after delivering a satellite to orbit, a first for a Chinese company. The methane-fueled booster touched down 250km from its launchpad. …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Matlab script built to reconstruct experiment logs uses a switch inside a loop where the state counter itself gets reset mid-trial. Comments admit the author cannot tell which trigger is correct, so whole trials get de…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Historian Jill Lepore's Guardian long read, adapted from her book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, argues that today's data-driven politics was predicted and warned about decades ago. She follows Simulmatics, L…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A long read traces Finger from a 1971 Stanford time-sharing tool to its modern small-web revival. The protocol on port 79 powered the first microblog and served the first IoT device. It survived the Morris worm, and clie…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A SharePoint to SQL Server migration went sideways when a developer mapped a SQL Server float column to .NET float instead of double. SharePoint stores Number fields as doubles, so large 10-digit customer numbers lost th…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Fabien Sanglard dissects the 1996 Quake shareware CD-ROM, which shipped encrypted versions of id's entire catalogue. Cracking group GNOMON needed only 39 days, because the unlock tool on the disc generated the serial loc…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Desktopcolors.com catalogs every solid background color ever shipped by desktop operating systems, from Windows 1.0's dithered cyan to KDE Plasma 6's Breeze blue. The open-source archive currently holds 194 colors across…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Chris Staecker restored a well-preserved Digi-Comp I, a mechanical educational toy computer released in 1963 by E.S.R. Programmed by sliding tubes on rails that trigger spring-loaded levers via a manual clock switch, the…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In a new Daily WTF feature, editor Remy Porter argues no ticket-tracking tool is truly good, and ranks Jira among the worst. A reader named Klinsten shares a workflow diagram so tangled, with transition labels mixing Dut…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Calgary writer Brennan Kenneth Brown argues the largely retired job title 'webmaster' deserves a comeback, not as an AI orchestrator but as anyone who builds and runs their own site by hand. His essay traces the term fro…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has drawn a line between pull request descriptions and comments in source code. One is a sales pitch aimed at the reviewer, the other is lasting documentation for whoever comes next. The di…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Ukrainian military intelligence says it recovered an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX 16GB module from the wreckage of a Russian S-71M Monochrome cruise missile, suggesting AI-assisted targeting. Nvidia left Russia in 2022, before …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The latest Error'd column on The Daily WTF collects reader-submitted software blunders: a jackpot ad full of zeroes, a SignUpGenius dialog declaring success an illusion, a PHP crash leaking through redaction, and The Reg…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A PHP developer inherited a project where repeated curl requests were properly initialized and executed but their results were never stored or used. The code block appeared copy-pasted throughout the codebase, with param…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Twitch has introduced a
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Dr. Tim King, whose Tripos multitasking system became AmigaDOS, has died at the end of July. A Cambridge PhD holder and founder of Perihelion, King shaped early microcomputer OS design and remains a pivotal figure in Ami…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A new developer at a software company discovers her manager has forbidden branching and pull requests, claiming they waste time and violate CI principles. Her teammates quietly ignore this rule and work with branches any…