The Curious Engineer

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lcamtuf’s thing

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Full archive of all the posts from lcamtuf’s thing.

ElectronicsSecurityEssays / personalAI / ML

’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
182 from 21 Oct 2022 to 28 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (42 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 35

  1. Deus ex machina
  2. Stop! Ontology time!
  3. The Secret Life of Circuits is now in stock everywhere
  4. Dead German guys
  5. The tyranny of the op-ed
  6. Yours truly
  7. Haunted by the ghosts of materialism
  8. A SKILL.md for commenting on Hacker News
  9. The “C” word
  10. What little hope remains
  11. “The Secret Life of Circuits” is here
  12. Inverse-square law
  13. Recursion into madness
  14. Know your paradoxes
  15. Severance
  16. Negative resistance
  17. My falling-out with the rationalist community
  18. Tech note: making your own V-I plots at home
  19. Panel meter calculator with floating point
  20. Cursed circuits #6: reverse avalanche oscillator
  21. Cursed circuits #5: capacitance multiplier
  22. All logic, no bite
  23. AI children's books, body horror edition
  24. The 100,000 whys of AI
  25. Getting silly with C, part &((int*)-8)[3]
  26. Weekend trivia: your process' memory is a file
  27. A nicer voltmeter clock
  28. A breakthrough in C/C++ dependency management
  29. Conway's Game of Life, in real life
  30. How much of HN is AI?
  31. Approximation game
  32. Unreal numbers
  33. It's all a blur
  34. You gotta think outside the hypercube
  35. See it with your lying ears

2025 46

  1. Cursed circuits #4: PLL frequency multiplier
  2. Cursed circuits #3: true mathematics
  3. Cursed circuits #2: switched capacitor lowpass
  4. Cursed circuits: charge pump voltage halver
  5. It's hard to build an oscillator
  6. What's the deal with Euler's identity?
  7. Things you can do with diodes
  8. Weekend projects: Chicken Squisher 3000
  9. Zombies
  10. How has mathematics gotten so abstract?
  11. Folks, we have the best π
  12. Getting silly with C, part ~(~1<<1)
  13. How many dimensions is this?
  14. Multitudes
  15. Gödel's beavers, or the limits of knowledge
  16. Self-referential abstractions
  17. The proof that π = 4
  18. 0.999... ≊ 1
  19. Decibels are ridiculous
  20. Complex numbers #2: a world in 3D
  21. A 20-minute intro to complex numbers
  22. The Mathematics of Love
  23. Sierpiński triangle? In my bitwise AND?
  24. The Long Winter
  25. My approach to teaching electronics
  26. Resistors, Johnson-Nyquist, nV/√Hz
  27. Real MLCCs (and inductors) have curves
  28. Why do lemon batteries work?
  29. The Rapture
  30. Electricity and the speed of light
  31. Understanding root-mean-square voltage
  32. Why are sine waves so common?
  33. The Afterlife
  34. But good sir, what is electricity?
  35. The Review
  36. How security teams fail
  37. Choosing a microcontroller
  38. What's the deal with magnetic fields?
  39. Working with OLEDs: SSD1353 & SSD1333
  40. PCBs, ground planes, and you
  41. UI is hell: four-function calculators
  42. Investigating an "evil" RJ45 dongle
  43. Random object: Sony Mavica MVC-FD73
  44. Getting silly with C, part -5^-7
  45. Weekend projects: Sketchy Sketch
  46. Choosing an op-amp for your project

2024 44

  1. Against the hydraulic analogy
  2. A 15-minute intro to resin casting
  3. Lies, damned lies, and photodiodes
  4. The marvelous disappearing capacitor
  5. Building a phosphorescence detector
  6. A 15-minute intro to involute gears
  7. Deep dive: the (in)stability of op-amps
  8. Shining light on photodiodes
  9. RAM: the forgotten history
  10. Analog filters, part 2: let it ring
  11. How do wood finishes hold up?
  12. A 15-minute intro to hobby CNC
  13. The untimely demise of an image upscaler
  14. The secret lives of snowblowers
  15. Electric chainsaws and the gorge of misery
  16. Dispatches from the farm upstate
  17. The serious science of trolling LLMs
  18. The 101 of analog signal filtering
  19. Weekend projects: getting silly with C
  20. Random objects: Intel Edison
  21. Random objects: Guycot & Jarre
  22. The 8-bit (MCU) manifesto
  23. Some notes on influencering
  24. PSA: if you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx
  25. MCU #13: building a graphics stack
  26. MCU #12: music with one bit to spare
  27. That time I built an LD_PRELOAD worm
  28. Sir, there's a cat in your mirror dimension
  29. Fractals #2: understanding Mandelbrot
  30. You can't handle the Buddhabrot!
  31. The internet's knowledge problem
  32. Is the frequency domain a real place?
  33. OSS backdoors: the folly of the easy fix
  34. Techies vs spies: the xz backdoor debate
  35. An ode to freelance historians
  36. Radios, how do they work?
  37. The myth of the sheltered mind
  38. Afternoon project: JPEG DCT text lossifizer
  39. Not so fast, Mr. Fourier!
  40. The asymmetry of nudges
  41. DACs and ADCs, or there and back again
  42. Core concepts #2: impedance is complex
  43. Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech
  44. Life, the universe, and accidental Sokoban

2023 39

  1. Primer: core concepts in electronic circuits
  2. Goodbye, real electronic lab kits?
  3. Resistors are out to get ya
  4. Signal reflections in electronic circuits
  5. The evolution of expert communities
  6. On corporate life
  7. Now you're thinking with relays
  8. There were no ancient computers and it's fine
  9. Energy in electronic circuits
  10. MCU land #11: Linux toolchain for Cortex-M
  11. Making sense of surface-mount components
  12. The advent of robotic hall monitors
  13. MCU land, part 10: blocks all the way down
  14. MCU land, part 9: ST7789, the final frontier
  15. An illustrated history of the calculator
  16. LLMs are good at playing you
  17. LLMs and plagiarism: a case study
  18. The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion
  19. Square waves, or non-elephant biology
  20. The basics of decoupling capacitors
  21. Building a decent microphone amplifier
  22. Comparing hobby PCB vendors
  23. Designing your own PCBs
  24. MCU land, part 8: DMA bit-vending machines
  25. Nostalgia files: steal this 8-bit look
  26. MCU land, part 7: life in full color
  27. Clocks in digital circuits
  28. Setting up an electronics workshop
  29. What's inside an op-amp?
  30. Afternoon project: CryptMaster 2001
  31. The basics of signal amplification
  32. MCU land, part 6: DMA on Cortex-M7
  33. MCU land, part 5: IRQ and chill on Cortex-M7
  34. MCU land, part 4: building an audio toy
  35. MCU land, part 3: baby steps with Cortex-M7
  36. MCU land, part 2: mysteries of the SPI bus
  37. Fear and loathing in the land of MCUs
  38. Random objects: the Petal camera
  39. Recreating classic games with a bare MCU

2022 18

  1. YouTube is hell
  2. Random objects: Ball's patent anti-garrotter
  3. You should write more
  4. A neophyte's introduction to video
  5. Writing at work
  6. Confessions of an infosec has-been
  7. How do transistors work, anyway?
  8. Digital detritus
  9. Photographing small things
  10. Who killed the vacuum tube?
  11. A requiem for amateur chemistry
  12. Random objects: the nuvistor
  13. The origins of money
  14. How not to fell trees
  15. Random objects: the Berger repeater
  16. Fake books
  17. Random objects: Spaceview
  18. Come into my parlour