The Shkreli Awards, named for the infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, are awarded by the Lown Institute each year to perpetrators of the ten most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care. “Winners” are judged by a panel of clinicians, health policy experts, journalists, and patient advocates.
RSS feed, filter for "shkreli awards" in the title: https://lowninstitute.org/feed/
llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model. The font shaping engine HarfBuzz, used in applications such as Firefox and Chrome, comes with a Wasm shaper allowing arbitrary code to be used to "shape" text.
In particular, this "arbitrary" code could in principle be an entire LLM inference engine with trained parameters bundled inside, relying on treating text containing magic symbols for fake "ligatures" to initialize the LLM and use it to generate text.
At the end of the day, what this means is that you can just use the font to run the LLM and e.g. get text generation in any Wasm-enabled HarfBuzz-based application; your favorite text editor/email client/whatever without having to wait for the vendor to include the "Copilot"-like features that everyone is rushing to implement these days. And everything runs completely locally. So perhaps this silly hack is in fact a billion dollar idea!? This also means that you can use your font to chat with your font.
Shaming sites with dumb password rules.
Here's a fun project attempting to explain what exactly is happening under the hood for some counter-intuitive snippets and lesser-known features in Python.
While some of the examples you see below may not be WTFs in the truest sense, but they'll reveal some of the interesting parts of Python that you might be unaware of. I find it a nice way to learn the internals of a programming language, and I believe that you'll find it interesting too!
Or, "You have LVM running on one box and an external drive, also running LVM, with the same volume group name - how in the hell do I mount the external drive?!"
Have you ever tried to SSH into one of your boxes, only to get dropped with a "Too many authentication failures" error? Here's how to fix it (it's a server side problem).
A breakdown of the mythology surrounding /dev/random and /dev/urandom. Which is better? Which is worse?