HTTP 418 · Oddities
Rabah Shihab had Claude Fable 5 port his 1993 Amiga game Babylonian Twins to Godot 4. The model rebuilt 72,758 lines of 68000 assembly byte-identically, reverse-engineered undocumented level formats, and shipped store as…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Uber pulled out of Nigeria and Uganda on September 2, 2026, notifying customers and drivers the same day service ended. Users reported rides stopping mid-trip, a phenomenon dubbed the 'Uber rapture'. The exits fit a wide…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A home automation project ships temperature conversion as a lookup table with wrong values, mapping roughly 0.5C steps to 1F steps. The twist: the table faithfully mirrors what mini-split IR remotes actually send. The re…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A video essay digs into the fate of Borland, the company behind Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Delphi. It traces how a firm that once defined the PC developer tools market faded from relevance. A nostalgia trip for anyone who…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Polish engineer ran 1,040 mushroom photos through 16 AI models to test foraging advice. The best model identified species correctly only 65 percent of the time, and some confused deadly fungi with edible ones. His advi…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF tale: a proudly metrics-driven manufacturing team tracks only widgets produced per unit time, pulls six databases into a Google Sheet, and blocks any change that does not improve the noisy top-level number. I…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF presents a code comment that truncates mid-sentence: 'Leave some room for'. The snippet subtracts 16 characters from a column size, and the trailing remark stops exactly where its explanation should begin, …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A digital bus departure board in Manchester showed passengers a Windows Defender Firewall alert instead of clean timetable data. The Vix Technology sign, part of the Bee Network rollout, had its destination text partly h…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A decompiled 2004 RuneScape client shows how Jagex ran a live multiplayer RPG over a 56k modem delivering roughly 5 KB/s. Tracing a single walk command from click to server and back, the analysis reveals delta-encoded co…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Computer History Museum has published part one of a 43-page oral history transcript in which Andy Hertzfeld, Apple's second Macintosh software engineer, describes porting QuickDraw from the Lisa, clashing with manage…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The ZCOM museum in Hoyerswerda, Germany, which houses original Zuse and Robotron computers, could close by the end of the year. The municipal housing company withdrew its annual 110,000-euro subsidy, and the city council…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In the latest episode of The Register's Kettle podcast, host Brandon Vigliarolo talks with reporters Liam Proven and Richard Speed about Windows XP's 25th anniversary, a Bluetooth-enabled Casio watch with two-year batter…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF reader recalls building a police tracking app for Brazil's 2014 World Cup with four engineers instead of the promised twenty, a photo-submission feature nicknamed the 'dick-pic encyclopedia,' and a debugging …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF's Error'd column for 2026-08-28 gathers reader-found software flops: a language picker with scrambled order, a Google screen where the math doesn't add up, an Outlook support form that fights back, a cheese…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Tarsnap creator Colin Percival has released Route 53 Files, a satirical but functional file system mounted on Amazon's DNS service. The project pokes fun at AWS S3 Files and its promise of buckets-as-filesystems, while e…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
tmp.0ut interviewed Unix pioneer Doug McIlroy at Dartmouth's Binary Fun Week. He recounts writing echo as his first C program, how Ken Thompson built Unix in three weeks and implemented pipes in a single night, Tom Duff'…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
University of Queensland researchers have outfitted giant burrowing cockroaches with electrodes and syringe-launching backpacks, achieving 95 percent injection accuracy at close range. The team says cyborg insect rescue …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A digital billboard in Greenock, Scotland, has displayed a Debian 11 login prompt for weeks after its operator, 75Media, went into liquidation at the end of 2025. The 1,200 x 320 pixel display runs Bullseye, which leaves…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Thoreau BASIC is a bootable, bare-metal BASIC interpreter for x86 machines with UEFI, built by developer Tarjan. It is largely GW-BASIC compatible, uses all system memory, and adds 24-bit high-resolution graphics, bitmap…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF presents a 400-line PHP block from a booking form that concatenates SQL conditions by string, builds localization keys via variable property names, and duplicates the same logic three times: once for option…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A C++ catch block for Exception::Deadlock contains a single mystery macro, retry, that jumps back to the top of the block without releasing any held resources. The fix was delivered by a highly paid consultant hired spec…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A self-service scale at a Tesco store in Coventry was photographed displaying the number 404, with a sibling unit showing 403. The machines appear to be Linux-powered Avery Berkel XT series terminals, normally used to we…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Casey Muratori gave a talk at BSC 2026 titled "The Root of The Root of All Evil", a nod to Knuth's famous warning about premature optimization. The video is on YouTube. No abstract or further details have been published.
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…