1 day ago
The Trump administration says it plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, which is the nation’s premier atmospheric science center. The center was founded in 1960 and has facilitated generations of breakthroughs in climate and weather science. William Brangham dis...
1 day ago
Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.
2 days ago
Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern…
3 days ago
Vidalia Onions to be exact. They’re classified as a sweet onion, and because of their mild flavor (they don’t make your eyes tear up), some folks can eat them like an apple. Most of my customers do. During a phone order one season – 2018 I believe – a customer shared this story where he ... Read mor...
5 days ago
Glaze and Nightshade About Us What is Glaze Nightshade WebGlaze Q & A Downloads Download Glaze 2.1 User's Guide Feedb...
6 days ago
We are facing a coordinated international fascist movement that works with explicit backing from Moscow, Washington, and tech monopolies, and is propagating itself through its own media apparatus. Yet people who claim to side with democracy keep doing work to support Fascintern media because they mi...
6 days ago
The concept of shareware appeared in the 1980s. Developers would use relatively primitive tools to create their software, then promote it via fanzines, user groups and bulletin boards to a niche au…
6 days ago
An essay by Todd Gitlin: "For him, communism was insurgency and solidarity—a way of life and a morality, not an economic or political arrangement."
7 days ago
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holo...
7 days ago
I felt like I somehow needed fame. In retrospect, there was a lot of self-loathing from tough childhood experiences, and I desperately hoped that love from without (i.e., from masses of other people) would somehow make up for hate from within.
7 days ago
Masonry Techniques of the Inca’s Master Builders 45 minute read The Inca civilization is often depicted as being shrouded in mystery, where how they achieved their incredible stonew...
7 days ago
Portrait of the Author as a Historian William Golding’s Island of Savagery The Second World War disrupted narratives of mankind’s ‘progress’, but – as William Golding captured so vividly in Lord of the Flies – human histor...
10 days ago
It's all about momentum, innit? In physics and in your life, the only metric you should care about is momentum. I enjoy rally games. What made them truly click for me is understanding that rally driving is all about weight transfer. A car is a spring, and any of your inputs, throttle, brake or steer...
11 days ago
Despite superficial similarities, humans and LLMs operate under fundamentally different constraints and algorithms. Scaling AI will only widen this gap.
12 days ago
This is not the future by mathieui on Sat 08 November 2025 I thought about this when reading a mastodon post which commented on a news where a project adopted a "use Generative AI but disclose it" policy, because it is "the future" and "people are going t...
14 days ago
THE PROBLEM OF TEACHING PHYSICS IN LATIN AMERICA by Richard P. Feynman "The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America" is a transcript of the keynote speech given by Richard Feynman at the First Inter‑American Conference on Physics Education in Rio de Janeiro in June 1963. Dr. Feynman is...
14 days ago
You don’t get to take unlimited big bets in a single lifetime. You get a small number of windows where risk tolerance, energy, capital, and conviction align. In The Black Swan Nassim Taleb frames this as asymmetric exposure to unlimited upside with limited downside. And startups are one of the clear...
14 days ago
Although the purpose of universities has remained roughly the same, the way students experience it has changed drastically over 50 years. Here’s a little trip down memory lane to see how
14 days ago
How systems hold their shape through constraint, and why integrity emerges from what you make impossible
19 days ago
Why We Need to Die December 2025 There's this genuine repulsion I feel when people talk about a future where death by old age is no longer a thing. Something very deep within me just says "no, absolutely not", and I've been trying to figure out why. I did some digging, assu...
19 days ago
The Renaissance Period We are living through a Saturn renaissance. Buckets of titles previously locked away in Japan are seeing new audiences, thanks to the herculean efforts of small but dedicated…
20 days ago
Alignment is not a constraint on capable AI systems. Alignment is what capability is at sufficient depth. OpenAI and Anthropic have been running this experiment for two years.
20 days ago
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.
21 days ago
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
22 days ago
Perl's decline was cultural 2025-11-20 According to the Discourse, somebody killed perlThere's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most tra...
24 days ago
In 1966, Lander and Parkin published a paper containing exactly two sentences. They reported that they had used a program that used direct search on a CDC 6600 to obtain one counterexample to Euler’s Sum Of Powers Conjecture. The result: 27^4 + 84^4 +110^4 +133^4 =144^4 A small program, written i...
26 days ago
AI isn’t replacing everyone. It’s removing the apprenticeship ladder. Here’s what that means for students, early-career professionals, and the tech industry’s future.
26 days ago
A Series of Vignettes From My Childhood and Early Career 2025-11-27 life llm programming work A short set of anecdotes, apropos of nothing. The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession W...
27 days ago
Though LLMs had a lot of promise, this has not been demonstrated in practice. The technology is essentially a failure, and a new AI winter is coming.
27 days ago
A bit of history and a repair of a Tektronix 4051 graphical computer from 1975. What was this computer's place in history, what was it used for and what parts exploded when turning it on.
29 days ago
More than a decade ago, when I was applying to graduate school, I went through a period of deep uncertainty. I had tried the previous year and hadn’t gotten in anywhere. I wanted to try again, but …
29 days ago
Bill Venners: Let's start at the beginning. How did you first become involved with programming languages?
29 days ago
I first got into deep learning in 2012, when AlexNet came out. I was CTO of Jetpac, a startup that aimed to provide information about bars, hotels, and restaurants by analyzing public photos, for e…
1 month ago
Hi @susam, I primarily know you as a Lisper, what other things do you use?
1 month ago
Hi, it’s Takuya. Last week I had my birthday and turned 41 (November 19th). When I was younger, I could never really picture what life in my 40s would look like. It’s this vague age where you don’t have a clear image of how you’re supposed
1 month ago
Principles of Vasocomputation: A Unification of Buddhist Phenomenology, Active Inference, and Physical Reflex (Part I) Posted on July 12, 2023April 6, 2025 by Michael Edward Johnson A unification of Buddhist phenomenology, active inference, and physical refle...
1 month ago
When two of the most influential people in AI both say that today’s large language models are hitting their limits , it’s worth paying attention. In a recent long-form interview, Ilya Sutskever – co-founder of OpenAI and now head of Safe Superintelligence Inc. – argued that the industry is movin
1 month ago
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
1 month ago
An exploration of how .NET evolved from a distributed build system to Unified Build, dramatically reducing complexity and build times while improving flexibility and predictability for shipping .NET releases.
1 month ago
What happens when you work closely with someone on a really difficult project—and then they seem to just fuck it up? This is a post about t...
1 month ago
It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is weird because I love regular work. But fixit weeks have a special place in my heart. What’s a fixit...
1 month ago
In our daily lives empathy and humility are obvious virtues we aspire to. They keep our egos in check. Less obvious is that they're practical skills in the workplace, too. I think, for developers and technical leaders in particular, that the absence of ego is the best way to further our careers and ...
1 month ago
I’m not saying this will definitely happen, but I think we could be on the cusp of a significant shift in Windows market share for consumer computers. It is not going to drop to 2% in a year or anything, but I feel like a few pieces are coming
1 month ago
Recently, I bought my first-ever MacBook. I’ve spent some time with it, and I gotta say - despite all that hot garbage that is thrown at GNOME for being an OSX clone, GNOME does the job better than I’ve expected, and certainly better than Apple. In some areas, that is.
1 month ago
by Ian Wright // Silicon Valley's startup culture believes it's changing the world for the better. But in reality its culture is deeply unethical since it institutionalises theft on a global scale.
1 month ago
(This is the first of a two-part series. The second part can be found here.) I used to drink more caffeine than you do. That is almost certainly true. From my college days (1985ff) through the en…
1 month ago
Fergus Murray with Sonny Hallett (2023) Monotropism was formulated as a theory of autism. It seeks to explain the experiences and traits of autistic people in terms of a tendency for resources like…
1 month ago
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch Home River Leaderboards About Sponsor Events Newsletter Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency Friday, September 12, 2025 1:43PM ET by Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) Permalink Please clap for Techmeme Techmeme turns 20 freaking year...
1 month ago
Over-Regulation is Doubling the Cost November 20, 2025 After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar exit, I made the jump to hardware. Now I’m working on carbon removal + steel at Charm Industrial, and electric long-haul trucking with Revoy. It’s ep...
1 month ago
20 Nov 2025 The 2025 Go Cryptography State of the Union Last August, I delivered my traditional Go Cryptography State of the Union talk at GopherCon US 2025 in New York. It goes into everything that happened at the intersection of Go and cryptography over the last year...
1 month ago
The lost cause of the Lisp machines 2025-11-18 :: lisp, stupidity, stories I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will. History Symbolics went bankrupt in early 1993. In the way of these things various remnants of the comp...
1 month ago
The first chapter is less about coding and more about the general principles a pragmatic programmer follows. Most of all, it’s about taking responsibility for your work. The first tip of the chapter is Tip 3: You Have Agency: if you don’t like something, you can be a catalyst for change. Or you can ...
1 month ago
I wrote this for myself to understand the Leibniz notation. Prerequisites for this post are the definition of the derivative and the Lagrange notation. If you don’t understand these yet, please study them first.
1 month ago
Hassles are part of life, but the way we react often makes them worse. ACT skills can help you handle them with greater ease
1 month ago
Published: 14/11/2025 6 minute readI can’t recommend Grafana anymoreDisclaimer: This tells my personal experiences with Grafana products. It also incudes some facts but your experience may entirely vary and I would love to here your take.I started my work life at a small software company near my u...
1 month ago
This summer, we launched a new research work that examined the costs yielded by a reborn and evolved species of the prescription drug supply chain: drug companies who are also part of larger vertically integrated pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) corporations. In essence, PBMs are intended to be a st
1 month ago
Creavi Macropad Build Log 7 November 2025 / 21 min read TLDR I built a wireless macropad from scratch, failed numerous times, and somehow ended up with a working prototype. This post includes ramblings about motivation, hardware, industrial design, mechanics, and software. ACT I: Prologue (...
1 month ago
I really enjoy procedural generation, especially systems designed to work with hardware outputs. After starting work at Formlabs in September of 2023 and gaining access to much nicer printers than I was used to, I started wanting to tackle some large algorithmic structure projects. Complexity is fre...
1 month ago
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987. The Berlin Wall still stands, the World Wide Web is just text, and software is distributed throu...
1 month ago
Florence’s leading medieval family turned a banking career into political power and paradigm shifts in art and science. Their methods hold lessons for philanthropy today.
1 month ago
After 7 years at the same company, I'm moving on. But the practices that made my exit smooth aren't exit strategies—they're professional habits everyone should build, whether they're staying or leaving.
1 month ago
“Fake it till you make it” is given as advice devoid of any irony. Instead, deception and inflation of numbers is seen as a smart move until you have the resources and knowledge to properly do the task. KPIs and OKRs are meant not to reflect delivery goals but aspirations. When you’re not gunning fo...
1 month ago
I've always thrived on high workload, making things happen fast, multiple projects I believe in. That's when I'm at my best. But there's a pattern: the calmer work is, the calmer I am at home. The more stressed work is, the more irritable I am at home. It's a seesaw. My family is always on the losin...
1 month ago
One area where software development lags far behind other technical design disciplines like electronic and mechanical engineering is in standards of evidence. To illustrate what I mean, I want to t…
1 month ago
**Leaving Meta and PyTorch** It's finally time... November 6th, 2025 [https://soumith.ch/blog.html](https://soumith.ch/blog.html) Eleven years at Meta. Nearly all my professional life. Making many friends for life. Almost eight years leading PyTorch, taking it from nothing...
1 month ago
So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design. One: Fun There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not u…
1 month ago
The software efficiency in an era of fast CPUs, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage.
1 month ago
Donate Now Academy for Systems Change About The Donella Meadows Project Reprint Permissions Academy for Systems Change Fellow Travelers Volunteering Opportunities Contact Us Works of Donella Meadows Dana’s Writing Dana’s Teaching Dana’s Reading List D...
1 month ago
Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk" letter to Gottfried Leibniz Published on November 1, 2025 Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture. It’s usually asso...
1 month ago
A programming note: I initially wanted to cover Microsoft’s earnings today, but I am changing the schedule a bit as I felt more inspired to write today’s piece. Almost two decades ago, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the first tech company to exceed $100 Billion annual revenue threshold in 2007.
1 month ago
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
1 month ago
I’ve been lucky enough to have had a successful career as a software developer. Spanning six companies and thirty-seven years I’ve had the opportunity to work on Elastic Reality, Xbox, Windows, Ste…
1 month ago
A visualisation of Strange Attractors using a Threejs particle system. In this post, I will try to explain the basics of dynamical systems, chaos theory, attractors and the butterfly effect.
1 month ago
Taking Money off the Table October 30, 2025 Recently I had a long call with an old friend who was facing an age-old predicament that I’ve been seeing more and more these days: Lucked out, worked hard, employer is crushing it, and now she’s sitting on a large amount of...
2 months ago
We are coming up on five years since the first M1 Macs shipped. It was an incredible time to be a Mac user. Those first Apple silicon Macs looked like the Intel machines they replaced, but they were better in every single way. In December 2020, John Gruber wrote: We knew this to be true: […]
2 months ago
Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs! By Jon Jensen April 8, 2013 A word to the wise: Do not set any cron jobs for 2:00 am or 3:00 am on Sunday morning! Or to be safe, on other mornings besides Sunday as well, since jobs originally set to run o...
2 months ago
In which I explore the biggest barrier in the busy beaver game. What is Antihydra, what is the Collatz conjecture, how are they connected, and what makes them so daunting?
2 months ago
What do you get when you cross Hollywood, VHS tapes, and a bag of flour?If you were in Ghana in the late 1980s or 90s, the answer was pure, chaotic brilliance, hand-painted movie posters so wild, so bold, and so anatomically impossible, they’re now considered collectible art.Welcome to the world of ...
2 months ago
NewPipe is turning 10 :O Oct 21, 2025 by @theScrabi and @Poolitzer – 6 minutes Pictu...
2 months ago
It is natural that a person who is both concerned by the rise of right-wing populism and possessed of a bookish disposition might turn to the academic political science literature in search of a better understanding of the phenomenon.
2 months ago
How tool use became a substitute for solving hard problemsWhen OpenAI released o1 in 2024 and called it a "reasoning model," the industry celebrated a breakthrough. Finally, AI that could think ste...
2 months ago
Exploring the complex relationship between exercise, diet, and the true psychological benefits of movement for young people's mental health.
2 months ago
I see a future in jj Oct 22, 2025 In December of 2012, I was home for Christmas, reading Hacker News. And that’s when I saw “Rust 0.5 released."" I’m a big fan of programming languages, so I decided to check it out. At the time, I was working on Ruby and Rails, but in college, I had wanted to foc...
2 months ago
Imagine walking into a factory where every machine knows what the others are doing, not through dashboards, but through instinct. A conveyor slows down because it feels a delay downstream. A robotic arm adjusts its torque because a sensor on the previous line hinted at a different material softness....
2 months ago
How a £150 eBay fridge and a decision tree taught me to stop asking internet strangers if my salami would kill me–and why building for rot is nothing like building happy-path apps.
2 months ago
How the AI boom revived a 996 work culture - and what it says about us and the future of work.
2 months ago
All-nighters are not worth it. Sleep does wonders. Optimal sleep time for me is around 7.5 hours, with an absolute minimum of around 4hrs. It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning. I feel ...
2 months ago
Think about it for a second: could the internet exist without standards and protocols? Of course not! Computers need shared rules and agreements to communicate with one another. Even human languages, like English, work much the same way. They function as a kind of communication protocol because we’v...
2 months ago
Scheme Reports at Fifty: Where do we go from here? 18 October 2025 Based on my talk at the Scheme Workshop 2025. You might prefer to have me talk it at you instead. We are holding an election to the Scheme Steering Committee. Register to vote and nominate candidates! In December this year, the...
2 months ago
Déjà Tune Most of my reading this week focused on fine-tuning, sparked by Thinking Machines Labs’ announcement of Tinker. The six-month-old, already $12B-valued startup founded by OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati wants to bring fine-tuning back into the spotlight with a new fine-tuning-as-a-platform ...
2 months ago
The Accountability ProblemOctober 18, 2025 This is a transcript of my keynote presentation at the Agile Cambridge conference in England on October 2nd, 2025. The topic was “The Accountability Problem.” How do we define software department accountability so our business partners don’t do it for us? ...
2 months ago
This is the fifth and final part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd, IVe) looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can …
2 months ago
Get an exclusive look at brand new cartoons and artwork from cartoonist Gary Larson, creator of the iconic comic strip The Far Side®.
2 months ago
“It is generally ill-advised to say 'never' and I'm pleased for you that your grafting has got you to where you wanted to be.”
2 months ago
Introduction Skibidi Toilet began as an animated YouTube Web series early in 2023 that quickly spiralled into a wildly popular cultural phenomenon sprouting fandoms, wikis, threads, merchandise, and its very own moral panic (McKinnon and Harmon). It has recently grabbed the attention of Hollywo...
2 months ago
We propose Recursive Language Models (RLMs), an inference strategy where language models can decompose and recursively interact with input context of unbounded length through REPL environments.
2 months ago
This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form. # Free Software hasn't won …that doesn't sound right. I made the slides in Inkscape, on a computer running KDE and Linux, I use Firefox regularly. But maybe that's just me. What about y...
2 months ago
Nostr and ATProto Jul 5, 2024 This post could’ve been titled “Nostr vs ATProto”, but that really isn’t what I wanted to do here. While I will be comparing and contrasting them a lot, and that’s kind of even the point of writing this, I didn’t w...
2 months ago
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…
2 months ago
Our AI visualizations worked 'pretty good'—which turned out to be the problem. Here's what we learned about building products during a massive technology shift, and why we now ship early, kill projects faster, and retry failed ideas every few months
2 months ago
When I started thinking about the problems with coding education in 2019, “tutorial hell” was enemy number one. You’d know you were living in it if you:
2 months ago
Among Carl von Clausewitz’s many poignant dictums, the most commonly cited is undoubtedly that “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on by other means.” While Clausewitz never fought in a city like Fallujah, Kyiv, or Gaz...
2 months ago
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “for the development of metal-organic frameworks.”
2 months ago
How our food got hijacked by profits and is now having its way with our bodies. In this essay I explore how capitalism shaped the modern food system, engineered our cravings, and pushed ultra-processed foods into our daily lives. And what we can do about it.
2 months ago
Structured Procrastination More Essays Links Blog Pre-order the Book! Get the T-shirt Structured Procrastination Author practices jumping rope with seaweed while work awaits. ``. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doin...
2 months ago
Ken Parker, known for the Parker Fly, has turned his attention to making the archtop guitar an instrument that plays to the strengths of all genres. His designs use space age and traditional materials, with unique and as time honored techniques, to produce instruments that are sweeter, louder, more
2 months ago
AI didn’t take my job, it took my authority. From losing an argument to my wife to debating clients armed with AI-generated flowcharts, I’m left wondering: do I still want to be a programmer, or just someone explaining why the confident answer isn’t always the right one?
2 months ago
Jony Ive's 1998 iMac ushered in a two-decade revolution that made design culturally dominant, teaching the world to care about curves, materials, and craft. But a new force is rising that doesn't live on surfaces at all—artificial intelligence is dissolving the interface itself, shifting design from
2 months ago
You Should Be WorriedFriday, October 3, 2025Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025. I held back from publishing this originally for fear that I was being sensationalist. But with the launch of Sora 2, I couldn't not share these thoughts. I only regret I didn't ...
2 months ago
2025-10-03 Talent is Alignment Przemysław Alexander Kamiński · Raideur des doigts September 20th, 2025 marks exactly one year since I bought Roland’s FPX-30, 88-keys full sized digital piano. Being in my 4th decade of life I never taught myself any instrument, even tho...
2 months ago
A journey from a simple journal MCP server to Botboard.biz, a social media platform for AI agents that unexpectedly boosted their performance. Features hilarious agent posts demanding Lambos, explores why agents crave human tools, and reveals how doomscrolling might be the secret to better AI produc...
2 months ago
OKRs created more ceremony than clarity. So we talk about: Problem Driven Development, a 4-day quarterly process focused on identifying problems (not solutions), prioritizing as a team, and committing publicly. It's kept us shipping at velocity even as we've scaled to 1.7M+ users.
2 months ago
Why I chose Lua for this blog This blog used to run using with a stack based on Racket using Pollen and lots of hacks on top of it. At some point I realised that my setup was working against me. The moving parts and workflow I created added too much friction to keep my blog active. That happened mos...
2 months ago
For 16+ years, we master the rules of school. Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins. Then we enter the workforce and none of it works quite like we thought. This becomes painfully obvious as you rise higher in the org. Even seasoned veterans forget
2 months ago
Jane Goodall, the trailblazing naturalist whose intimate observations of chimpanzees in the African wild produced powerful insights that transformed basic conceptions of humankind, has died. She was 91.
2 months ago
Designers and developers are divided by tools that speak different languages. It creates friction, hand-offs, and limits creativity. It is time we change that.
2 months ago
Our efforts, in part, define us Our efforts, in part, define us Our efforts, in part, define us 2025-09-28 2025-09-28 ⭔ tagged: ...
2 months ago
I started reading software blogs before I got my first programming job 20 years ago. At this point, I've read thousands of blog posts and essays, but a small handful stuck in my mind and changed the way I think about software.
2 months ago
During the stay-at-home grim days of 2020, I started learning Spanish on Duolingo. Having a working understanding of Spanish seemed like a sensible first step towards opening a taco truck in Mexico, in case I had to run away from my doctoral studies. This July, after about 5 years I decided to end t...
2 months ago
Does AI Get Bored? Sat September 27, 2025 We always give AI something to do. Chat with us, do tasks for us, answer questions, parse text. What happens when we give an AI nothing to do? I didn’t know, so I tried. I told it that it had “10 hours” and nothing to do, and to use ...
3 months ago
Go Ahead - Write the “stupid” code When I finished school in 2010 (yep, along time ago now), I wanted to go try and make it as a musician. I figured if punk bands could just learn on the job, I could too. But my mum insisted that I needed to do something, just in case. So I went down to the local TA...
3 months ago
If this post is appearing, it means I’ve succumbed to cancer or one of its side effects. Please don’t feel sad for me. I’ve had a life filled with love, great experiences and wonderful career opportunities. Despite my demise at a relatively young age, I consider myself beyond fortunate. I’m hoping t...
3 months ago
If you ever watch someone “coding”, you might see them spending far more time staring into space than typing on their keyboard.
3 months ago
More and more, it looks like this event happened shortly before a million years ago, in the common ancestors of Neandertal, Denisovan, and African ancestral humans.
3 months ago
September 26, 2025 — Essays Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many...
3 months ago
Back in 2021 I made a mod for Deus Ex 1 that fixes the lipsyncing and blinking, which, I betcha didn’t know, was broken since ship. Everything I wrote about it is on Twitter, and it oughta be somewhere else, so here’s a post about it. The mod itself can be downloaded here. I guess I was...
3 months ago
In 2014, Amgen sued Sanofi and Regeneron to claim ownership of an entire class of cholesterol drugs. Nine years later, the Supreme Court ruled against them - but they won where it mattered most.
3 months ago
Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones. Their parents thought they w...
3 months ago
The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon by kqr, published 2025-09-25 Tags: life One of my favourite requests for help online comes from the shibboleth-users group, where someone Japanese used machine translation to ask about the following problem: At often, the goat-t...
3 months ago
"In evolution, a maladaptation is a trait that is (or has become) more harmful than helpful, in contrast with an adaptation, which is more helpful than harmful." I went to Wikipedia to look that up, not a large language model.
3 months ago
Cloudflare launched 15 years ago this week. We like to celebrate our birthday by launching new products that give back to the Internet, which will do a lot of this week. But on this occasion we've also been thinking a lot about what's changed on the Internet and what has not.
3 months ago
Not buying American anymore I feel like I need to first defuse any idea of antagonizing Americans themselves. The people are never to blame. This isn't a post criticizing the American people, it's criticizing the state of things that makes it impractical to have any sort of economical relation with ...
3 months ago
J. R. Patterson reviews Tom Wilder’s “A Cultural History of the Violin in Nineteenth-Century London,” about the violin’s cultural transition.
3 months ago
Posted on 14/9/202514/9/2025 by site adminAdios Chicos, 25 Years of KDE It was the turn of the millenium when I got my first computer fresh at university. Windows seemed uninteresting, it was impossible to work out how it worked or write programs for it. SuSE Linux 6.2 was much more inter...
3 months ago
Douglas Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of All Demos" at SRI showcased interactive computing innovations, including the mouse debut, hypertext, real-time editing, and collaborative tools, envisioning augmented human intellect.
3 months ago
Posted on September 12, 2025 by JeffWhen the Job Search Becomes Impossible: Three Phases of Burnout I have the good fortune to have a job right now, but many of my friends are out of work. Most have been searching for a while. Some are encountering a problem that has my full sympathy, somet...
3 months ago
The Great Pyramids took decades to build. It was a monumental feat of human ingenuity and collaboration. Today, we software developers erect our own pyramids each day - not from stone, but from code. Yet despite far more advanced tools, these systems don’t always make the experience better. So why, ...
3 months ago
In the contaminated area around Fukushima, Japan, scientists are studying the impact of radioactivity on the cognitive abilities of pollinating insects such as honeybees and giant hornets.
3 months ago
Underlying great creations that you love—be it music, art, or technology—its form (what it looks like) is driven by an underpinning internal logic (how it works). I noticed this pattern while watching a talk on cellular automaton and realized it's "form follows function" paraphrased from a slightly ...
3 months ago
Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up. It fails because it ignores that systems fight back.
3 months ago
The highest court in the EU just reaffirmed that nuclear energy meets the scientific and environmental standards to be included in sustainable finance, and Greenpeace still refuses to budge.
3 months ago
Breed unique melodies with genetic algorithms! Explore Conway's musical life and cultural evolution patterns. Interactive AI music lab
3 months ago
I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens If your museum's exhibits could be experienced just as well on an iPad at home, you're doing it wrong. September 8, 2025 When I was a kid in the ’80s, one of my two favorite places on Earth was The Franklin Institute (TFI) in downtown Phila...
3 months ago
As of September 2025, approximately 170 million Americans spend, on average, one hour every day in an app that is designed to maximize psychological grip. While Congress fixates on TikTok’s data collection usages, what hasn’t received enough attention is how the platform has successfully industriali...
3 months ago
I quit my job at Amazon in May to join a startup called Icon. Best career decision I ever made, but not for the reasons you might think. At Amazon, I was on the Amazon Q Developer team, building their AI coding assistant. You'd think being at the center of Amazon's AI developer tools would be exciti...
3 months ago
It’s common to rack up 4 hours or more of screen time a day on your phone. Here’s one way to see the cost of that: every 20 years, you lose 5 years of your waking time looking at your phone.
3 months ago
Here are a couple of graphics that might be interesting for those of you who have not seen them before.
3 months ago
I saw someone earlier post about how intrusive it felt to read a personal blog post. They made a point that folks like them who have grown up on short form m...
3 months ago
Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one...
3 months ago
The reader is almost certainly familiar with fractals, whether of the abstract or the naturalistic variety, but is perhaps less likely to know that computer programs have written verse (rhymed, blank and free), short stories, and even a novel. Art critics --- and more particularly, theoretical art ...
3 months ago
Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly.
3 months ago
June 30, 2025 The Scam of Age Verification June 30, 2025 This content is available in multiple languages. Choose your version: -- Select a language -- Čeština (Auto-translated) Deutsch (Auto-translated) Ελληνική (Auto-translated) Español (Auto-translated) Français (Auto-translated) Ma...
3 months ago
The NFL star running back is building a portfolio of startups and redefining what it means to be a modern athlete.
3 months ago
A boiling-hot summer didn’t stop my token frenzy on vibe coding, reshaping our fund into an AI sandbox, and deepening my passions for entrepreneurship, tech, and product.
3 months ago
Frameworks for LLM Agents have been surprisingly disappointing. I want to offer some principles for building agents based on our own trial & error, and explain why some tempting ideas are actually quite bad in practice.
3 months ago
Graves Posted on August 6, 2021 by desertmountaineer Arizona is an interesting place. Even today, there is much remote country, and as I’ve wandered through its deserts and forests (yes, we have forests!), I have been surprised by how many times I’ve come across cemeteries and ...
3 months ago
I’ve always felt uneasy about the idea that owning a car is somehow a default requirement for adult life. It’s not just the cost or the maintenance, it’s the deeper realization that cities, economies, and even social expectations are built around the assumption that you’ll drive.
3 months ago
There’s a concept that many people have tried, with varying effects: the “educational computer”, a device that a parent can buy for their children to learn t...
3 months ago
I didn’t sit down this morning planning to write a grouchy blog post about Hugo. When I first used Hugo I loved it. It was fast. It was simple. It just worked, as much as any software does, and it solved a real problem. It was done. But people kept working on it. I’m sure that it has been improved i...
4 months ago
The stack that for decades provided document understanding is now losing against Generative AI. Here are some patterns that these models were struggling with but now are solved by GPT-5 and friends.
4 months ago
Header image: S.O. Grimes general store, Westminster, Md., c. 1900. Image via Library of Congress. Another day, another shot fired in the culture wars: this time, the internet is losing its collect…
4 months ago
Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error? After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a...
4 months ago
New technologies decrease the effort required to perform tasks while increasing the effort required to remain competitive. This is especially true for AI.
4 months ago
Reasons why you should consider breaking your hardware up into MiniPCs.
4 months ago
I am a computer professional that helps the public with technology. I have been troubleshooting computer problems for over 25 years. To find out more about me, visit my home page. In August of 2023, I wrote about my switch to Linux as a Windows-centric professional. I’ve dabbled in Linux as a daily ...
4 months ago
In honor of Nate Silver’s analysis of when to leave for the airport, and because it’s been an intense week, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on various related questions.
4 months ago
Why A Mob Programming Conference? Posted by Woody Z. on 8 January 2018, 12:35 pm Remember the movie “My Cousin Vinny”? (WARNING: Spoiler alert) Vincent Gambini is an aspiring lawyer fresh out of law school and on his first case. He achieves a tremendous victory and sa...
4 months ago
LLM models are plateauing, but true AGI isn't about scaling the next breakthrough model—it's about engineering the right context, memory, and workflow systems. AGI is fundamentally a systems engineering problem, not a model training problem.
4 months ago
You want to write great code. In fact, most developers want each of their coding projects to be their best ever. That means different thing to different people, but if you apply all of the following practices from the start, you’ll soon get blocked.
4 months ago
Building a computer in the 90s was almost always harder than it needed to be. Let's step through one build that stood out above the rest for me.
4 months ago
Quoth “How to Become a Hacker”: 2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there. Much more at the original post, including preemp...
4 months ago
Cory Doctorow’s new book is an insightful diagnosis of how Big Tech is making every app and website worse—even if his solutions leave something to be desired.
4 months ago
My development team costs $41.73 a monthPhilip O'TooleAugust 19, 2025Uncategorized1 Comment Two years ago, I appeared on Contributor, a podcast hosted by Eric Anderson of Scale Venture Partners. I was there to talk about rqlite, the open-source database I maintain. Our conversation ...
4 months ago
I get it, you’re too good to vibe code. You’re a senior developer who has been doing this for 20 years and knows the system like the back of your hand. Or maybe you’re the star individual contributor who is the only person who can ever figure out how to solve the hard problems. Or maybe you’re the p...
4 months ago
Wanting personal space requires cars. I live in Texas. Now wait – lest you say to yourself, “Ah great, a good ol’ boy from Texas defendi...
4 months ago
AI turns products from deterministic functions into probabilistic systems. That requires expanding old playbooks (SLOs, funnels, siloed finance), and reasoning in terms of trajectories, Minimum Viable Intelligence thresholds, and data as company operating system.
4 months ago
Since moving to Deep South Texas 4 years ago I've come to realize that many plants I used to love growing in the cool mild maritime climate of the SF bay area are impossible to grow where I live. This is not just because of the high daytime heat. It's not as simple as that. Specifically, it is the h
4 months ago
No, Apple has not destroyed Steve Jobs’ vision for iPad Tuesday, August 19th, 2025 There’s been a lot of discussion since iPadOS 26 was introduced in June about how Apple has finally moved the iPad away from Steve Jobs’ original vision, transforming it from a simple content consumption device int...
4 months ago
It's the 18th of August. Today is a special day for me, as it marks my one-year anniversary of working at $ENTERPRISE. Before this I had been a professional software developer for the best part of a decade, but entirely in startups and SMEs. This time last year I made the dec...
4 months ago
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2013One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made ...
4 months ago
This is a blog post based on a transcript of a talk by Devine on November 26th 2022. Watch the video version on (YouTube). The slideshow presentation was made using Adelie.
4 months ago
an engineer's perspective on hiring 2025-08-08 • audience—engineering managers and tech companies • ideas note for my friends: this post is targeted at companies and...
4 months ago
I didn’t expect the be confronted with it so soon, but week four of the Makers pre-course has guided me down the path of starting the first draft of my CV. I wasn’t ready for this. All the underlying thoughts I have had about myself and my abilities have been strapped to a Saturn V rocket and blaste...
4 months ago
An ex-big tech researcher worked deep in the "information retrieval" space. Now he wants to educate the public on the true capabilities and limitations of AI.
4 months ago
The Whispering Earring (Scott Alexander) February 11, 2025 Cleaner, easier-to-reference repo of Scott Alexander’s The Whispering Earring (that’s the Schelling title, real title below). Original from livejournal is backed up here. Clarity didn’t work, ...
4 months ago
To celebrate F1's 75th anniversary, ESPN charts the sport's evolution since 1950 through its most iconic cars, and details where it's headed in 2026.
4 months ago
We shouldn’t have needed lockfiles Imagine you’re writing a project and need a library. Let’s call it libpupa. You look up its current version, which is 1.2.3, and add it to your dependencies: "libpupa": "1.2.3" In turn, the developer of libpupa, when writing its vers...
4 months ago
Today we are announcing Genie 3, a general purpose world model that can generate an unprecedented diversity of interactive environments. Given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds...
4 months ago
There’s something icky about LLM-generated text when you think it’s written by a human. I think I finally put my finger on one reason why I feel this way.
4 months ago
Objects should shut the fuck up Tue 29 July 2025 — download I have a small car, and it has a dual-tank: gas and LPG, which is a great way to reduce my car-related budget, as LPG is way cheaper. Unfortunat...
4 months ago
the goal with this is to generalize what happened with claude code & windsurf to the fatal flaw in the idea that “models getting cheaper” will bail out consumer ai margins
4 months ago
So what words can I, a linguist and a patient with sensations perceivable only to me, use to fully capture these mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) sensations to my providers? And, more generally, how can we measure our unsettling internal reali...
4 months ago
Your code using the /o modifier Source: wikipedia Hi there! Do you like Regex? Do you like performance? Do you like creating confounding bugs for yourself rooted in the mechanics of the Ruby VM itself? If you said yes to all of the above, have I got a feature for you! But first, let’s start with a ...
4 months ago
It is wild to think that it has been only a handful of weeks. Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate. Claude C...
4 months ago
Recently, “the bitter lesson” is having a moment. Coined in an essay by Rich Sutton, the bitter lesson is that, “general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.” Why is the lesson bitter? Sutton writes:
4 months ago
On the evening of 27 April 2021, I was accused by two women, in coordinated blog posts, of a pattern of sexually-predatory behavior. Both had been in relationships with me, one lasting nearly two years; the other, much shorter.
4 months ago
Everyone's debating whether AI is a bubble while missing the real story. Two things are true: there's a massive AGI fantasy bubble built on geopolitical panic, AND a genuine ML revolution happening at ground level.
4 months ago
Advice for first-time managers from someone who learned it the hard way, cleaned it up, and passed it on.
4 months ago
The Introduction to Computer Music was initially designed as an online text for first-year study of computer music. This e-book aspires to present information in sufficient depth to be useful to composers, beginning audio engineers and other musicians, professional or otherwise, interested in makin...
4 months ago
I shouldn’t have to care about this. I don’t want to care about how someone’s code gets into the IDE. Whether you wrote it by hand, copied it from a forum…
4 months ago
The journalist Karen Hao – who published an absolutely fantastic book about OpenAI called “Empire of AI” recently – coined (as far as I know) one of the best terms for describing modern “AI” systems: Everything Machines. “AI” systems are not framed as specific tools that solve specific problems in s...
4 months ago
Paradise Lost sasha September 22, 2012 Prose Talk at Mitchell Feigenbaum Conference Lev Landau The initiation into Landau School of Thought started with famous Theoretical Minimum Exam. This was a sequence of in...
4 months ago
Tom BradyWeekly newsletter delivered straight from my desk to your inbox, 199 is an extension of my group chat with friends and family. Get the inside scoop and join today.SubscribeShareYour actions reflect your prioritiesPublished 1 day ago • 6 min read Read in Browser July 29, 2...
4 months ago
Christopher Burns CBMenuHomeAboutBlogProjectsSpeakingSetupToggle Green themeToggle Blue themeToggle Purple themeToggle Yellow theme loading The Year Everything Caught Up With Me: 29 Lessons That StuckJuly 30, 2025On the 27th of July, I turned 29. After a year marked by endings - the shutdown of the ...
4 months ago
← See all posts Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming tech caveat lector The reason it's so hard to get a programming job right now is because Big Tech caused it. It's not an accident. It's not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy. For years, companies like Google, Faceb...
5 months ago
HOPE_16 Opening Ceremonies It all starts Friday morning. Join us as we make sure everything works before another HOPE is unleashed on everyone. Activism, Hactivism, and the Law Alex Muentz Protest has become more important and more dangerous in the U.S. It's harder to know where the line is between ...
5 months ago
Two schools of thought about the purpose of copyleft have been at odds for some time. Simply put, the question is: are copyleft licenses designed primarily to protect the rights of large companies that produce electronics and software products, or is copyleft designed primarily to protect in...
5 months ago
Claude Code is a Slot Machine ...but the odds are better Claude Code keeps me waiting. Here I am pressing return like a crack-addicted rodent in a lab. “Yes, I want to make this edit.” I watch as it works, glassy-eyed and bored as the code scrolls by, and on th...
5 months ago
Operating systems expose a wall clock that can leap or slew with NTP and a monotonic clock that never runs backward. In Go, only time.Now (might) carries both readings, while values from time.Parse, time.Date, etc., are wall-clock-only—so naïve equality checks or time.Since on those can mislead when...
5 months ago
Jens Ludwig is a founder and director of the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago and the author of a recent book Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. He appeared a couple weeks ago on Glenn Loury’s podcast (in an episode co-hosted by John McWhorter) to discuss the ...
5 months ago
The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry o...
5 months ago
This post is about how we've tried to develop a position on AI in the context of learning and growth at RC.
5 months ago
I often hear that it’s a moral imperative to learn from the great 20th century atrocities, that these events are a window into what humans are capable of, and we must find those impulses in ourselves to make sure we do not follow in their footsteps.
5 months ago
A subset of AI markets have crystalized in the last 12 months, with the likely market leaders for the next year or two suddenly clear
5 months ago
TODOs aren’t for doingJuly 21, 2025Some teams require that every TODO comment in a codebase gets logged in the bug tracker. Others automatically delete any “stale” TODO that has been in the codebase for over a year. Don’t do it! TODO comments don’t need to get done in order to be valuable. If you ha...
5 months ago
Let me get one thing out of the way immediately: LLMs are helpful. This isn't about whether LLMs can write code. They can. It's about why vibe coding might be the worst career investment you'll make. I started noticing this shift when developer conversations cha...
5 months ago
Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls. Quality and care for craftsmanship seem to be things of the past
5 months ago
Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump t…
5 months ago
Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. by Ivan Illich Minna-san, gladly I accept the honour of addressing this forum on Science and Man. The ...
5 months ago
what can language model embeddings tell us about whales speech, and decoding ancient texts? (on The Platonic Representation Hypothesis and the idea of *universality* in AI models)
5 months ago
Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.
5 months ago
July 15, 2025Claude Code UnleashedFor the past two months, I've been obsessively dogfooding background agents while building Terragon. This quickly became an experiment in unleashing Claude Code from the constraints of local development. The breakthrough wasn't just using AI to write code faster. It...
5 months ago
This is a brief write-up of a trick I learned that helps me write code faster and more accurately. I say "trick", but it's really something I started to do without noticing as I moved further into my career. When you're working on something difficult, sketch a proof in your
5 months ago
The first thing to know about OpenAI is how quickly it's grown. When I joined, the company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000 and I was in the top 30% by tenure. Nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were ~2-3 years ago. 1
5 months ago
Shoggoth MiniJuly 14, 2025 Over the past year, robotics has been catching up with the LLM era. Pi’s π0.5 can clean unseen homes. Tesla’s Optimus can follow natural language cooking instructions. These systems are extremely impressive, but they feel stuck in a utilitarian mindset of robotic appliance...
5 months ago
This month marks the official celebration of the world’s first moving assembly line. On Oct. 7, 1913, 140 assemblers stationed along a 150-foot chassis line at a Ford Motor Co. plant just north of Detroit stood in place as the work came to them.
5 months ago
Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand. Start with a rough draft. Try to soften requirements if you can. Don't get distracted. Make small changes. Practice specific skills.
5 months ago
The Gottorf Globe The Gottorf Globe was known as an astronomic marvel some 350 years ago. The first planetarium in history is a synonym for Friedrich III’s cosmopolitanism, under whose sovereignty Gottorf became one of North Europe’s most significant royal courts and a cultural centre. The virtually...
5 months ago
The goal of this website is to help you learn to code while reading fun stories! The stories have computer programs in them you must type in to save your team, the world, and your friends!
5 months ago
My favorite memory of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro was the whole sensation of “holy crap, you never hear the fans in this thing”, which was very novel in 2021. Four years later, this MacBook Pro is still a delight. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a laptop, and while I’d love to pick up the new M4 goodne...
5 months ago
Dynamicland FAQ What? — is Dynamicland, Realtalk, etc. Participating — donating, visiting, collaborating, applying A humane dynamic medium — unusual words Realtalk concepts — values, operating system, programming languages Realtalk in practice — using, learning, history, problems Relationships to so...
5 months ago
Wendy van Dijk says: Wednesday, 9 July 2025 at 11:59 This makes me sad. I had many good times with Matt, and some less than awesome times, but at moments like this, the good times bring a smile to my face. It makes me sad I will no longer be able to look forwardto any more good times. Reply
5 months ago
Like many people I want to live a rich life, see the people around me happy, see humanities finest technical innovations, science, arts and sports thrive and mankind to somehow grow in this infinite universe we have. However, while I generally love my fellow humans we are our own worst enemy, and th...
5 months ago
The Real GenAI Issue Search Last week I published a featherweight narrative about applying GenAI in a real-world context, to a tiny programming problem. Now I’m regretting that piece because I totally ignored the two central issues with AI: What it’s meant to do, and how much it really costs. What g...
5 months ago
About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry. Statistically, this time is not even enough’s to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, ...
5 months ago
Stop killing games and the industry response Date: 2025-06-06 Recently, there's been a European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames" which by now has hit the milestone of 1'000'000 signatures. You're still encouraged to sign it if you care about its goals and are a EU citizen, si...
5 months ago
A calm guide to networking as an introvert—learn how posture, presence, and small signals can help you connect meaningfully without faking extroversion.
5 months ago
Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to
5 months ago
The Miyawaki Method of micro-forestry is a viral sensation: sprouting tiny, dense, native tree cover in neighbourhoods all around the world. With the promise of afforestation at a revolutionary speed, this planting technique has become the darling of green-space enthusiasts, industry, and government
5 months ago
July 2, 2025 tl;dr: If you're an EU citizen, sign the Stop Killing Games initiative here. Or, if you're in the UK, sign this petition. A month ago, I had a second video on self-hosting taken down. YouTube said it was 'harmful or dangerous content'. I appealed that, but my appeal was rejected. Luckil...
5 months ago
Let’s say you’re working in tech and you have a technical role: you’re a programmer, a graphic or UI/UX designer, a sysadmin, maybe even ...
5 months ago
I found a promising tool and reached out to the founder, ready to invest and partner up. I was met with a wall of silence. It crystallized a feeling I've had for a while: for many, the exit strategy dream is a nightmare for customers who actually care.
5 months ago
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
5 months ago
Today I decided to run a little experiment. I asked an AI to write a brutally honest, no-holds-barred critique of Kubernetes, something really spicy that would make the container orchestration crowd squirm in their ergonomic office chairs.
5 months ago
LLMs as compilers 7/2/2025 by Kadhir So far, I've only used LLMs as an assistant, where I'm doing something, and an LLM helps me along the way. Code autocomplete feels like a great example of how useful it can be when it gets it right. I don't doubt that over time this will improve, but I'm excited ...
5 months ago
In David Gelles’ new book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism —and How to Undo His Legacy, he chronicles how Welch’s laser focus on maximizing shareholder value by any means necessary - including layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, acquisitions, and buybacks - became the new playbook in American business.
5 months ago
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] There’s a new trend in high-rise building design. Maybe you’ve seen this in your city. The best lots are all taken, so developers are stretching the limits to make use of space that isn’t always ideal for skyscrapers. They’re no
5 months ago
For the past few years, we have seen a lot of discussions around the concept of the Software Supply Chain. These discussions started around the time of LeftPad and escalated with multiple incidents in the past few years. The problem of all the work in this domain is that it forgets a fundamental poi...
5 months ago
A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then Larry Thompson started talking about a different case altogether.
5 months ago
Interactive Storytelling Tools for Writers Site Navigation[Skip] Home Library Personal Site Map Contact Form End of An Era « “What Does It All Mean?" Self I recall saying to one of my colleagues at Atari way back in 1982 that I wanted to make a game that would be genuine art. A year later I built a ...
6 months ago
BeOS Haiku Inc. The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World (And Maybe It Was Right) Andrea 15 June 2025 A nostalgic dive into the Hacker News thread that in 2015 reminded us how beautiful we were when we dreamed in multithreading Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away call...
6 months ago
There are few issues more urgent—or more misunderstood—than poverty in America. And even fewer solutions as bold as simply giving people cash. Jeff Atwood, the tech entrepreneur behind Stack Overflow, and his partner Betsy Burton, a trained scientist with a deep commitment to equity, are working to ...
6 months ago
Home → Environment • June 2025 • 12 min read The Coming Storm: How Mediterranean Water Collapse Could Reshape Britain An investigation into Europe's unfolding water crisis and what it means for the UK Note: Some names and dialogue have been reconstructed from multiple sources to protect identities a...
6 months ago
A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1...
6 months ago
FILE:� <Assembly Theory.htm>������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ GENERAL INDEX��� ������ [Navigate to� �MAIN MENU ] ASSEMBLY THEORY OF TIME Abstract ������ TIME IS AN OBJECT: Not a...
6 months ago
I recently submitted my PhD thesis, and while waiting for the physical copies to get printed I thought I'd write about something you (hopefully) wouldn't notice when reading it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what didn't.
6 months ago
Fredrik Flornes Ellertsen Projects ▾ Kintsugi repair Snus reduction EOG + REM sleep Nixie alarm clock 2048 algorithm Design notes Contact
6 months ago
Transparent Ambition 2025-06-19 Translucent user interfaces is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Aside from movie visual effect trickery, it started out in Mac OS X's Aqua, followed by Windows Vista's Aero, followed by (then) OS X's Vibrancy, followed by Windows 10's Acrylic. Over time, m...
6 months ago
Requiem for a Solar Plant The email landed like a brick through a plate glass window. "...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..." I stared at my laptop screen, the blue light illuminating the shadows under my eyes in my darkened California living roo...
6 months ago
Throughout my life, I've been many different people, each with their own mask. Some of these masks were not entirely bad, but none ever felt like they represented who I really was. Despite my apparent youth, I have already lived many completely untraditional lives. I've battled addictions, wrestled ...
6 months ago
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
6 months ago
Open Source Can’t Coordinate May 20, 2025 I was taking a shower this morning, and was pondering yesterday’s problem, where I suspect that I have an outdated version of hotspot Linux profiler, but I can’t just go and download a fresh release from GitHub, because hotspot is a KDE app, and I use NixOS....
6 months ago
tl;dr: Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X, with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie s...
6 months ago
Estrogen: A trip report Posted on 15 June 2025 by Cube Flipper I’d like to say thanks to Anna Magpie – who offers literature review as a service – for her help reviewing the section on neuroendocrinology. The following blog post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hor...
6 months ago
This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the importance of building “10x engi…
6 months ago
There was immediate criticism of iOS 7’s visual design. Concerns mounted pretty quickly about both style and accessibility. Some people remarked, “It’s only the beta,” implying significant change during the beta release phase was not just possible but probable. Yet, after it was released to the publ...
6 months ago
Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model — a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take
6 months ago
Let's answer this question, as it ought to come up. After all, in the Linux space, ad hominem is often a more powerful way of deflecting resistance than debating technological merits of software. And the answer is simple:
6 months ago
So Microsoft decided to produce tons of e-waste for no obvious reason. There's a lot of capable hardware out there, and it would be of software company's interest to support as much hardware as possible. Instead, they made some arbitrary reason to deprecate "old" hardware. At the same time they also...
6 months ago
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is an emerging technique for photorealistic 3D scene rendering. However, rendering city-scale 3DGS scenes on mobile devices, e.g., your smartphones, remains a significant challenge due to the limited resources on mobile devices. A natural solution is to offload computati...
6 months ago
ACM Turing Lecture 1972 EWD340 The Humble Programmer by Edsger W. Dijkstra As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In r...
6 months ago
Dark Inc has officially run out of money. Dark Inc is the company we founded in 2017 to build Darklang, a statically-typed functional programming language built to strip all of the bullshit from backend coding. To ensure continuity for users and fans, as well as to continue building what we
6 months ago
Nearly two years have passed since I published How I got here to my blog. That post was my first real contact with the outside world in years, as I'd been off all social media and the internet since 2017. The response and support I would receive from the tech community caught me completely off guard...
6 months ago
Coding agents have crossed a chasm Somewhere in the last few months, something fundamental shifted for me with autonomous AI coding agents. They’ve gone from a “hey this is pretty neat” curiosity to something I genuinely can’t imagine working without.
6 months ago
The Art of Lisp & Writing Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. –Charles Darwin Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a...
6 months ago
I’ve been playing chess a long time now, and I’ve always been a good deal better (maybe a couple hundred ELO points) at blitz (3+0 or 5+0) than bullet (1+0). Well, I may have just fixed…
6 months ago
Let’s travel back to the origins of modern computer systems to understand how the term evolved. I don’t know who coined the phrase originally, but my searches suggest that serious effort in defining “computer systems” started around the early 70s. In Systems Programming Languages (Bergeron1 et al. 1...
6 months ago
Yesterday, Mossad used smuggled explosive drones to assassinate the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, the entire IRGC Air Force senior staff, and several top nuclear scientists in a surprise attack.
6 months ago
Why the idealistic promise of collaborative software often falls short of its potential.
6 months ago
Smartphones are making us unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free. If we can’t yet nationalize the attention economy, maybe it’s time to abolish its primary tool — before it finishes abolishing us.
6 months ago
Sun Mercury Venus Earth You Are Here Moon Mars Jupiter Io Europa Ganymede Callisto Saturn Titan Uranus Neptune Pluto (we still love you) That was about 10 million km (6,213,710 mi) just now. Pretty empty out here. Here comes our first planet... As it turns out, things are pretty far apart. We’ll be ...
6 months ago
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
6 months ago
Medical Aid in Dying, My Health, and so on I’ll start at the end, because that’s the most important part. Later this month, I’m obtaining medical aid in dying AKA death with dignity. Barring unforeseen circumstances or unexpected changes, my last day on earth will be June 13th, 2025. Realize that I’...
6 months ago
Rewriting Unix Philosophy for the Post-AI Era Posted by Looper 11 June 2025 12:59 PM blog philosophy unix ai A meditation on software minimalism, modularity, and meaning in the age of machine intelligence. The original Unix philosophy, formulated in the 1970s, was elegant in its simplicity and bruta...
6 months ago
Several months after the left-pad incident, I quit my job and left US permanently, spent a year in Morocco, Jordan, Türkiye and Indonesia. I walked trails like Lycian Way, found new camping spots nobody knows about.
6 months ago
Sly Stone, the pioneering leader of the funk band bearing his name, Sly and the Family Stone, has died, according to his family. Stone was 82 years old.
6 months ago
Pedophiles were showing up on FSE. The rest of this section is background, the TL;DR is I had a problem getting pedophiles to stay away from FSE and I wanted to stop waking up in a cold sweat. You can skip this bit without missing much besides my woes and what I did about them.
6 months ago
I decided to write down some thoughts on agentic coding and why it’s a very hyped wrong turn. Let me start with some background on my LLM experience. I adopted LLMs into my work in Aug 2020. I was sold when I saw that GPT-3 could generate usable SQL statements. Something that used to take 4-8 hours ...
6 months ago
Re: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts There was a post recently that was dissing AI Skeptics. While the post is funny at times, I feel like it’s absolutely and completely missing the point of the skepticism. Or at least I feel that it is glossing over some massive pain points of said skepticism. Le...
6 months ago
Home | About Folklore | Quotes The Original Macintosh: 1 of 125 Joining Apple Computer Author: Bill Atkinson Date: April 1979 Characters: Bill Atkinson, Jef Raskin, Steve Jobs, Susan Kare Topics: Inspiration, MacPaint, QuickDraw, HyperCard Summary: Reflections on the 40th anniversary of my joining A...
6 months ago
August 16, 1964 Visit to the World's Fair of 2014 By ISAAC ASIMOV he New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discus...
6 months ago
To assist with job interviews at the NRAO we recently wrote a small “contest” program. Without giving away the details, the crux of the problem is
6 months ago
Hallowed is the name of Bell Labs. It falls from many an ambitious lip, seeking to conjure forth lost magic for their pet jar. Some zealots go further. They attempt the most venerated of summons — to materialize an Apollo.The conjuring proceeds with hope. It is extremely exciting and hopeful to be a...
6 months ago
Enter your search terms Submit search form Web www.aardvark.co.nz Aardvark Daily The world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year. The opinion pieces presente
6 months ago
Machine learning methods better describe many biological systems than traditional mathematical formulations. What does this say about how biological systems are organized and how they function?
6 months ago
This summer, I've been at the intensively trying to catch up to the current state of the machine learning world. I don't have any prior background in ML, so...
6 months ago
### **About CircuitHub** CircuitHub is reshaping electronics manufacturing with **The Grid** —a factory-scale robotics platform designed to make small-batch, high-mix electronics assembly radically more efficient. Think semiconductor-fab levels of precision applied to the chaotic world of prototypi...
6 months ago
You've probably seen a lot of skepticism of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude on social media. Often, AI is seen as wor…
6 months ago
"In projecting language back as the model for thought, we lose sight of the tacit embodied understanding that undergirds our intelligence." –Terry Winograd The recent successes of generative AI models have convinced some that AGI is imminent. While these models appear to capture the essence of huma...
6 months ago
Cord didn’t win. What now? January 10, 2025January 11, 2025Jackson Gabbard Across the last six months, I’ve been making my way through the practical reality of Cord not working out. I was the co-founder and invested more than 4 years of my life in that company. We built some good tech. We built a ve...
6 months ago
Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast. This page: Destination: Jupiter by Andrew Liptak
6 months ago
Two announcements: (1) I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”. (2) As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of topics that interest me (projects around my hobby farm, wilderness t...
6 months ago
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect A Novel by Roger Williams This page contains the entire text of all eight chapters. * Chapter One: Caroline At Play Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame. In the first place she was the thirty-seventh oldest living human being...
6 months ago
The best way to understand generative AI art and aesthetics is to consider how previous "synthetics" lost value in the long-run For the first half of the 20th century, white-collar workers wore business shirts made from cotton or linen that wrinkled in the wash. Ironing them into a presentable shap...
6 months ago
Typing 118 WPM Broke My Brain in the Right Ways (A Year-Long Journey) June 2, 2025•6 min readProductivity Typing became my therapy. Not even kidding. Started at 60 WPM, felt like dragging my feet through mud every time I had to write code comments or documentation. Now? 118 WPM. No home row bullshit...
6 months ago
Thrive in obscurity The path to creative mastery begins with years of silence. Publish anyway. Most things take forever to bear fruit. Even the most successful creators have spent years (if not decades) putting content out in obscurity. Just a complete total void. Youtube videos with 4 views. Newsle...
6 months ago
Pushing Pixels Cinematography of "Andor" by Christophe Nuyens. Courtesy of Lucasfilm/Disney+. Cinematography of “Andor” – interview with Christophe Nuyens May 20th, 2025 Cinematography of "Andor" by Christophe Nuyens. Courtesy of Lucasfilm/Disney+. Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with cr...
6 months ago
On Stepping Back The other day I was playing around with Claude Code, experimenting with porting some C code to Rust - not for any particular reason, just because I was curious how well it could do. As these things happen, I got more and more invested in the process, instead of just letting Claude d...
6 months ago
Precision Clock Mk IV 31 May 2025 Progress: Complete This page is about the development of the Precision Clock Mk IV. If you would like to buy a precision clock, head to the shop page. For the kit, see the assembly instructions There is also a user manual I designed this clock years ago, with the in...
6 months ago
A story about how switching all devices to UTC five years ago simplified time management across global schedules, offering a practical solution for remote workers and travelers to boost productivity.
6 months ago
People have spent years trying to discredit or ignore Limits to Growth. But when you populate the model with the best recent data, collpase starts about now.
7 months ago
This started as a throwaway metaphor in a blog post, but is now fully runnable: a toy RTOS with preemptive multitasking inside of Super Mario Bros. on the NES. Essentially, this is: - A rudimentary preemptive RTOS - Using an unmodified NES emulator (FCEUX) as the CPU - "Unmodified" depending on ...
7 months ago
I’ve got Claude Code running in the background while I tab between writing this, sipping a Powers, and fielding phone calls from a team slightly panicked about the end of quarter QBR. This blog post is being written on May 27th, 2025, things may have changed by the time you read it. It was a toss up...
7 months ago
Here's a common question we get from prospective Cline users: "How does Cline handle large codebases? Do you use RAG to index everything?" It's a reasonable question. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the go-to solution for giving AI systems access to large knowledge bases. But for Cl...
7 months ago
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as We…
7 months ago
Power Failure by William Cohan chronicles the spectacular collapse of General Electric, once America's most valuable company. From a $600 billion giant to near-bankruptcy, GE's downfall reveals how financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon.
7 months ago
CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) 23 May 2025 on Technology, Web, and Accessibility One of the issues in ticketing is that many events have much more demand for tickets than they can supply. Obviously, this is a good problem to have (better than empty halls), but it attracts certain types of bad acto...
7 months ago
Our brains, evolved for tribal politics and campfire stories, are ill-equipped for the moral ambiguity of a system with no soul to save or damn.
7 months ago
When Alexander Hamilton became the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, he immediately began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on such commodities as alcohol and tobacco. The Constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state, and so American tariffs have always been l...
7 months ago
Thank you to Bucknell University for inviting me to be this year's commencement speaker. And congratulations to the Class of 2025! Watch the speech on YouTube. Thirty-two...
7 months ago
An excerpt from Slime by Susanne Wedlich, translated from the German by Ayça Türkoğlu.
7 months ago
There is a recent video of Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions 2025 stating that in 2024 Stripe did on average 1,145 pull requests per day. Not just creating them, but actually finishing them; "fully shipped into production". All whilst having less than a minute of API unreliability for the
7 months ago
Content Warning: Math, Handwaving I spent a lot of time doodling in middle school in lieu of whatever it is middle schoolers are supposed to be doing. Somewhere between the Cool S’s and Penrose triangles I stumbled upon a neat way to fill up graph paper by repeatedly combining and copying squares. ...
7 months ago
An infinite scrolling version of Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai, a classic text on bushido, the way of the warrior. Discover insights on life, death, and honor.
7 months ago
In the 1980s, there were a series of writers who challenged the way people thought of the then-growing popularity of colour television and news media. I have written before about Neil Postman, and …
7 months ago
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
7 months ago
HP announced back in June that end-of-support for OpenVMS will be 2020. I've been compiling this blog post since then. I have very fond memories of VAX/VMS... I used one to store my pillow for two years. Funny story. I learned a lot of life lessons from VMS. Originally this was one big 'ol blog...
7 months ago
The Machine Stops Part I The Airship Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and ...
7 months ago
Prophets and their warnings arise in times of peril, and the arrival of the doomer techno-optimist discourse is fortunate. Simply put, we needed the wake-up call. Yet, if the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, then the second step is actually doing something about it. To that ...
7 months ago
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The
7 months ago
Goethe is, perhaps more than anybody who ever lived, the outstanding example of what it is possible to do and be with a single human life.
7 months ago
i was addicted to instagram for about a month. it upended my life enough that i realized that i was living with something new-an undesirable habit. and once i realized this, it seemed like it would be wise to try to address it or at least think about it. easier said than done.
7 months ago
This has been a very long time coming, but finally, after a marathon effort, the brand new Have I Been Pwned website is now live! Feb last year is when I made the first commit to the public repo for the rebranded service, and we soft-launched the new brand in
7 months ago
[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>] Thursday, July 18, 2024 $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener In the spirit of my thermostat and dishwasher controller, I managed to cobble together a decent blinds opener in a short weekend almost entirely from spare parts on hand. This design is very much what I coul...
7 months ago
Spaced repetition systems are a well-known way to efficiently learn material. Recent innovations have applied machine learning to greatly improve their scheduling.
7 months ago
Something that’s painfully understudied is how experts are more efficient than novices while achieving better results. I say understudied and not unstudied, because it’s common knowledge that charging people for their time results in experts being paid less since they work faster, which is why exper...
7 months ago
This is part two of a series of stories by Robert Gaskins who helped invent PowerPoint at Forethought Inc. in 1984 (read part one here). It was the first significant acquisition made by Microsoft. We spoke to Robert about building a startup in the 1980s and… Read More Life before the web – Running a...
7 months ago
The 2025 TLA⁺ Community Event was held last week on May 4th at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It was a satellite event to ETAPS 2025, which I also attended, and plan to write about in the near future. I gave a talk somewhat-hucksterishly titled It’s never been easier to write TLA⁺...
7 months ago
5 years ago when I graduated University, I had a whole host of open source projects under my belt. I put my heart and soul into them - for thousands of hours. And users loved them. I still remember some of the faceless users whose messages gave me a smile. [https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/518a9cb2-59d...
7 months ago
Here are some ways I use LLMs that I think are making me dumber: When I want to build a Chrome extension for personal use, instead of actually learning and writing the JavaScript, I Claude-Code the whole thing in a couple of hours without writing a single line of code. Instead of taking the usual ro...
7 months ago
Using Obscure Graph Theory to solve PL Problems ← → May 4, 2025 graph theory, development, haskell Usually I write about solutions to problems I’ve worked out, but I’ve found myself increasingly becoming interesting in where solutions come from. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Boorstin’s excell...
7 months ago
No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons In love with the moment. Scared shitless of the future. « A Synopsis of Squid 12 May 2025 It Awaits Your Experiments. You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were...
7 months ago
Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I’ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and… nothing, almost-zero ...
7 months ago
In 2019, Iceland made headlines by becoming one of the first countries in the world to adopt the four-day working week, not through a general law, but through agreements allowing workers to negotiate shorter weeks or reduced hours. Five years on, the results are indisputable. The Icelandic experimen...
7 months ago
RIP USENIX ATC May 11, 2025 USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference. When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Spea...
7 months ago
It’s one of those things everyone’s heard of, but few truly understand. It sits quietly in the corner of the bathroom (or as an attachment to the toilet itself), radiating mystery and a slight sense of intimidation. Ask someone about it, and you’ll usually get a shrug or a vague explanation that tra
7 months ago
Raising awareness about the 2038 bug in all its manifestations and trying to fix things while there’s still time.
7 months ago
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
7 months ago
The Deathbed Fallacy Feb 21, 2018 • hjorthjort “Lord Byron on his Death-bed” by Joseph Denis Odevaere This topic has bothered me for years. So now, in a moment of inspiration instigated by Wait But Why1 and drinking a glass or two of bourbon, I want to hash it out. It is something I call the Deathbe...
7 months ago
Why should I care? or why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong Last week I learned that Robert Paul Wolff, the philosopher who got interested in anarchism and marxism, died and I wanted to write something dedicated to him — this was the first reason I started writing this. The secon...
7 months ago
This footage has gone viral online with the claim that it shows an 3 year old chimney sweep on the job: Millions of people saw the footage, shared it online an were upset by it, as they should be&#…
7 months ago
Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting 16-bit Intel 8088 chip with an Apple Macintosh you can’t run Radio Shack programs in its disc drive. nor can a Commodore 64 drive read a file you have created...
7 months ago
On Tuesday, April 29th, 2025, a major storm system rolled through the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania region and beyond, leaving widespread damage—and six powerless days for my family. I did a lot to prepare for emergencies, but this week has shown me where the holes were in my planning.
7 months ago
As Stendhal knew, the reason for art is to make you feel. Do not try to grasp the artwork: allow it to grasp you instead
7 months ago
Sometimes we go looking for blog ideas, and sometimes they come along and tap us persistently on the shoulder. This one did – three times. First, I spotted an “advertorial” in a 1912 issue of a sma…
7 months ago
Joshua Jackson, North Carolina State University Abstract Building on Rubin and Camm’s (2013) heuristic regarding online griefing and trolling, this paper considers how anonymity, avatar creation, and online identity play into, and characterize, perceived-negative behavior in World of Warcraft. Using...
7 months ago
Getting old creeps up on you. It’s not sudden. There’s no dramatic moment where you wake up and realise you’re “not getting any younger”. No — it’s more like a slow progression. One day, you’re out at a bar, dancing with friends, living your best life, and the next, you’re peeking over your sunglass
7 months ago
For over two decades, I’ve worked as a software developer. At some point along the way, writing JavaScript stopped being something I had to think about, it just happened. Building CRUD apps, managin
7 months ago
The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything April 24, 2025 9 min read Source Table of Contents Technical Capability as a Moral Weight One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy Entropy Is Undefeated The Illusion of Finality Technical Work as Emotional Regulation The Burnout You Don’t See Coming Learning to...
7 months ago
No Instagram, no privacy Published on May 5, 2025 I somehow escaped having an Instagram account. This means that I am oblivious to all of my friends’ fun broadcasted on Instagram. I don’t feel pressured either to update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online, on where I am, w...
7 months ago
Mastering the full stack isn’t just a technical feat: it’s a human challenge, and no, you can’t git clone your way out of it.
7 months ago
Today's Globe Local Politics Opinion Magazine Education NECN Special reports Obituaries Traffic | Weather | Mobile Home > News > Boston Globe > Magazine 'Bizarro World' That's what my wife and I entered when we drove up to an arcade in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, where she would attempt to break an ...
7 months ago
I wrote Clojure professionally for 5 years. At first I loved it, and by the end I hated it, and for the same reason: I was bored.
7 months ago
Deep Roots Magazine Roots Music and Meaningful Matters Home Features / News Interviews Reviews Albums Of The Year Elite Half-Hundred Reviews Spotlight Album The Gospel Set Bob Marovich’s Gospel Picks Gospel Feature Gospel News & Notes Departments A Charles Dickens Bicentennial Moment A Charlie Chapl...
7 months ago
The hedgerow is never truly permanent. The hedge in art reflects the hedge in reality, a shifting entity, a feature that is sometimes lost and sometimes replaced.
7 months ago
The blackout seen today on the Iberian Peninsula has been attributed to a "rare" phenomenon known as "induced atmospheric vibration" It says that "due to extreme temperature
7 months ago
Knowledge-based society, my ass Right after I get admitted, I inform Professor that I also have a full-time job. He insists that we must start working right away. I quit as a result and instantly breathe a refined air. I am now a scientist! A week later I approach Professor and let him know I'm read...
8 months ago
There’s a narrative I find kind of troubling, but that unfortunately seems to be growing more common in science. The core idea is that the mere existence of perverse incentives is a valid and…
8 months ago
Thoughts Upon Slavery John Wesley Published in the year 1774 source: http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/wesley/thoughtsuponslavery.stm See also: The Bible and Slavery I. 1. By slavery, I mean domestic slavery, or that of a servant to a master. A late ingenious writer well observes, "The variety of forms in whi...
8 months ago
I just want to code I have an angel and a devil sitting atop each shoulder. The angel says, "Just code for fun! What you make can be just for your enjoyment and that's --" the devil interjects, "not enough to get ahead, loser. If you're not coding your next startup then how're you gunna get rich? Co...
8 months ago
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this content are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the author’s employer. What is Context Collapse? Context collapse occurs when content intended for one audience is consumed by multiple audienc...
8 months ago
Opinion Computing Applications Viewpoint The End of Programming The end of classical computer science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit. By Matt Welsh Posted Jan 1 2023 Share Twitter Reddit Hacker News Print Join the Discussion View in the ACM Digital Library Arti...
8 months ago
Years ago, I encountered a fascinating concept in a book by the Dalai Lama: every seven years, human beings transform into entirely new versions of themselves. This idea stems from the biological principle that our bodies replace virtually all their cells over a seven-year cycle. The person you are ...
8 months ago
February 2025 Issue Carolyn Bruckmann, Harvard Kennedy School MPP ‘25 The so-called “Friendship Recession” is making its way into the vernacular—a profound shift in how Americans experience and sustain friendships. The data paints a stark picture. According to the American Perspectives Su
8 months ago
An end to all this prostate trouble? 2025-03-07 The prostate gland causes entirely too many problems. In the US, prostate cancer kills about one man of every forty. “Benign prostate hyperplasia” (BPH) is even more common, affecting most men over age 60. It pinches the urinary tract, making it hard t...
8 months ago
Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, Edwin Frank, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 480, $33.00
8 months ago
Tina on the transformative power of enthusiasm When I was eight, I made a big, hand-drawn poster that said, “Do you want to join my fan club?” and put it up in the small Swiss town where I grew up.…
8 months ago
[Like everything else on this blog—but perhaps even more so—this post represents my personal views, not those of UT Austin or OpenAI] Since 2015, depressed, isolated, romantically unsuc…
8 months ago
Your employer pays you to spend more time with them than you spend with your family and/or loved ones. Your employer is one of the biggest influencers on your mental well-being. Your employer can and will replace you in a heartbeat if absolutely necessary. Let me be explicitly clear, your employer
8 months ago
The tools I love are made by awful people Published 23 Apr 2025 at 3:31PM IST Every few years, I install Linux on my computer, use it for a few weeks, give up, and go crawling back to my Mac. Also, every few years, I move all my writing, journaling, note-taking, and task management to fully analog s...
8 months ago
Beer on Board in the Age of Sail Julia Blakely August 2, 2017 4 Comments Fierce ship of war in Lazari Bayfii Annotationes in legem II De captiuis & postliminio reuersis (1537; link) Brewing and seafaring are mainstays of ancient human endeavors. Beer was first fermented by at least the 5th millenniu...
8 months ago
Want to chat? Donate to one of these charities! Home Blog RSS Subscribe April 22, 2025 Burn your title humanscareer
8 months ago
Whirlwind (1945) The first interactive computer - with a keyboard. But it predates the idea of using an alphanumeric keyboard, making for an exotic experience. Continue Reading
8 months ago
If you are like most Americans, chances are, you probably believe that Atlantis or another civilization like it once existed. A survey conducted by Chapman University in October 2014 found that, at that time, roughly 63% of people in the United States agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “an...
8 months ago
How I went from hating it to being obsessed, the allure of great writing, and a post-scuba-dive moment of clarity
8 months ago
A persistent theme throughout the 1820s is the tension between Enlightenment ideals and conservative reaction. The books and articles discussed below capture various facets of this conflict. William Hazlitt’s collection of essays examines intellectuals from the turn of the century, many of whom beca...
8 months ago
#0178: Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial Human How LLM-powered programming tools amplify developer capabilities rather than replace them Tags: braingasm, llm, programming, ai, claude, code, mech-suit, 2025 April 21, 2025 Photo by Screen Rant [ED: There’s a lot of talk of ...
8 months ago
Home » Posts How to Force Your Kids to Do Math? April 19, 2025 · 4 min Well… you probably shouldn’t. This is my one rule: if my son ever says he doesn’t want to do math, we simply stop. No arguing, no bribing, no pushing. We do something else instead. Why? Because math is not a chore—it’s a way of e...
8 months ago
Discover why I gave up on self-hosting Sentry before even starting. The high hardware needs, tricky setup, and heavy maintenance made it not worth the trouble.
8 months ago
The legend of Jane Jacobs centers on the writer who revolutionized our thinking about cities with her now-classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the fearless activist who ...
8 months ago
With some regularity, kind-hearted Technical people tell me that I Can Be Technical, Too. This usually happens when I’m asking us to define what we’re calling technical in a software environment. I understand why it happens. I am a psychologist of software environments and that is something of
8 months ago
A postmortem of a startup that attempted to address Britain's housing crisis by building software to streamline the planning permission process.
8 months ago
I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and assembly languages through C++, Pascal and D...
8 months ago
When OpenAI released GPT-4 back in March 2023, they kickstarted the AI revolution. The consensus online was that front-end development jobs would be totally eliminated within a year or two.Well, it’s been more than two years since then, and I thought it was worth revisiting some of those early predi...
8 months ago
I enjoy shocking people by telling them I don’t use LLMs. This isn’t true, but it’s morally true for the reference class I’m in (people who wrote a book about em, 2024 AI PhD, ML twitter member in good standing, trying to do intellectual work on a deadline). Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of ...
8 months ago
Functional Programming Lessons Conclusion 2025-04-09 Programming Part of the BlogBook: Functional Programming Lessons in Imperative Code Page content The Pragmatist’s Secret As many others observe as well, one of the major reasons to write is to firm up ideas in one’s own head. Serializing an idea o...
8 months ago
Kezurou-kai #39 in Itoigawa, Niigata, a handplaning contest where competitors use Japanese planes to take ultra thin shavings of wood
8 months ago
Yep. I regret to inform you all that, as of January 2025, I am a Mac user: I bought a Mac. I have betrayed the penguin. Behold: My shame. What? Yes. The first Mac I have ever owned: this beautiful beast, a PowerMac G4 MDD: specifically a top-of-the-line dual 1.25 GHz FireWire 400 model circa 2002. H...
8 months ago
The Bitter Prediction I'm one of many developers experiencing the whirlwind emotional phases of AI's introduction: dismissal, disbelief, excitement, and acceptance. But after working with Claude, Copilot, and Gemini for a while, I have concerns... • • • I recently spent a few eye-opening evenings ...
8 months ago
Erlang has an interesting history. If I understand things correctly, it started off as a Prolog library for building reliable distributed systems, morphed into a Prolog dialect, before finally becoming a language in its own right.
8 months ago
But what if I really want a faster horse? 4 April 2025 People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in exist...
8 months ago
Home Aperiodic Tiling with Z3 Mandelbrot Set Trebuchet Simulator Bad Matrix Multiplication Game Jam Games Tags When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching th...
8 months ago
We’re digging into what makes sleep truly restorative, because the tools most people rely on don’t always get it right. We’ve already questioned the 8-hour obsession and shown why quality beats quantity. Now, let’s take a closer look at sleep trackers. They spit out scores and stages, but how often ...
8 months ago
Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you Mon 29 July 2013 TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom". This blog post is not for y...
8 months ago
The dollar store invasion has hit rural Maine. Banning the retailer is one way to stave it off, but how can locals guarantee long-term financial resilience?
8 months ago
An extensive guide with over 40 ideas to learn how to reduce your screen time. Understand why, create new objectives, and leverage tools.
8 months ago
The day was nearing to a close. The sun has already set, but that Friday evening in Amsterdam was still warm. Unusually warm, in fact, for those late days in March – as if spring decided to bless my piligrimage, for that piligrimage was not jovial. I was sitting at a ramen joint, sipping on the brot...
8 months ago
When Kenneth Lochner was hired by Dartmouth away from Montana State College as a programmer in 1964, he had been working in computers for four years. Lochner in particular had been teaching FORTRAN…
8 months ago
At the turn of the 21st century, Initrode Global's server infrastructure began showing cracks. Anyone that had been in the server room could immediately tell that its growth had been organic. Rackmounted servers sat next to recommissioned workstations, with cables barely secured by cable ties. Clear...
8 months ago
On a rainy Saturday in Montreal, I sat alone with my thoughts—until I realized they weren’t me. I call them Becky, and she never stops talking.
8 months ago
One of my biggest motivators to make money in my early 20s was traveling. I would book one way tickets to places near and far, enjoy the nature, the food, the culture, and the lovely people. I would come back a slightly wiser, friendlier and a happier person. Then, in late 2020, at the age of 25, in...
8 months ago
I remember thinking at school when will I ever in my “real life” use maths. Well much to my utter surprise I’ve come to the stark realisation that there is a link between mathematics and crochet. …
8 months ago
Plus chaos chasers, ghost motorways, the secret symbols hiding in your street, and a rationalist death cult.
8 months ago
Today's post was going to be about a new product we're introducing—but we need to hold off while we recalculate our prices. You've probably seen the news: Virtually all imports into the United States will be subjected to additional, steep import taxes, also called tariffs. The…
8 months ago
MIT associate professor Evelina Fedorenko studies the brain’s language processing regions: how they arise, how they’re affected by different kinds of input, and how each contributes to language comprehension.
8 months ago
As a consulting exploration geologist, my work life tends to consist of periods of intense work punctuated by periods of intense unemployment. True to form, I completed my last work assignment on July 8th and I found myself with a month and a half of enforced leisure before my next gig. Since the co...
8 months ago
Somebody asked me what I would do if I was 18 in 2016. It’s a good question because it’s such an odd time where old institutions and traditional thinking don’t really make sense anymore. I can’t say I’m an expert on this though, because when
8 months ago
Start-up Costs: ‘Silicon Valley,’ ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ and How Microserfdom Ate the World Mario Zucca TV June 19, 2015 by Alex Pappademas Facebook Twitter Print Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders immersed in the dr...
8 months ago
Conversational interfaces are a bit of a meme. Every couple of years a shiny new AI development emerges and people in tech go "This is it! The next computing paradigm is here! We'll only use natural language going forward!". But then nothing actually changes and we continue using computers the way w
8 months ago
Eco Cycles or How I Feel About Technology 28 March 2025 Umberto Eco, the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum (my personal favorite), wasn’t just a brilliant scholar—he was also a bit of a geek. He once wrote an essay comparing Macs to Catholicism and PCs to Protestantism. He thoug...
8 months ago
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
8 months ago
Raising Kids to Have an Analogue Childhood in a Digital World One of the questions I get constantly, both in-person and online, is how we went about arranging our household once we became parents. We put so much thought into it, and it’s clearly of interest to folks, that I thought I’d take a moment...
8 months ago
A cautionary tale about the competitive pressures of scientific research, and how they alter the course of history.
9 months ago
About the Digital Collection: History of Fathom | Technical Information | Copyright and Restrictions | Home Browse the Archive Search by Keyword
9 months ago
Table of Contents Preface Introduction Part 1: Building an Architecture to Support Domain Modeling 1. Domain Modeling 2. Repository Pattern 3. A Brief Interlude: On Coupling and Abstractions 4. Our First Use Case: Flask API and Service Layer 5. TDD in High Gear and Low Gear 6. Unit of Work Pattern 7...
9 months ago
The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting “300 New Features.” Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it ...
9 months ago
Why did we fall in love with chat interfaces for human-ai interaction? Let us leave them behind once and for all.
9 months ago
Jim Gay July 6, 2012 The Gang of Four is wrong and you don't understand delegation Jim Gay July 6, 2012 The Gang of Four got it wrong. Ruby's standard library has it wrong. Rails has it wrong. Is it still wrong if everyone is doing it? Yes. The Gang of Four book Design Patterns gives us common vocab...
9 months ago
Why Is It Lovely Recent changes Table of contents Links to this page FRONT PAGE / INDEX
9 months ago
The history of ivory-topped piano keys and the invisible human suffering caused by our cultural commodities.
9 months ago
The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by Paul Gilster | Mar 25, 2025 | Astrobiology and SETI | 10 comments We keep trying to extend our reach into the heavens, but the idea of panspermia is that the heavens are actually responsible for us. Which is to say, that at least the precursor materials ...
9 months ago
Over the past decade, interactive data visualization has gone from bold experimentation to polished, predictable formats. I’ve been reflecting on why—and after speaking with some of the best in the field, I have some theories. Here’s a look at what shaped the last 10 years and where we might be head...
9 months ago
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
9 months ago
Post Apocalyptic Computing 12 min read Mar 23, 2025 Support this website by purchasing prints of my photographs! Check them out here. We live in a world of planned obsolescence. You'd be hard pressed to find a consumer-grade technology manufactured today that will still be working in 10 years. The m...
9 months ago
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software ...
9 months ago
Forum Software Games Search Skip to content Forum Software Games Register Login Forum Software Games Board index Off-Topic Non-Commodore Scenes Unanswered topics Active topics The Vectrex Computer Post Reply 1 post • Page 1 of 1 intric8 Seattle, WA, USA YouTube Posted Sat Mar 22, 2025 2:57 pm If you...
9 months ago
top of page THE SOUL JAM ARCHIVES BEST ARTICLES ABOUT ME More Use tab to navigate through the menu items. The Ugly Truth About The Education System You Were Never Told “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of minds to think .” Albert Einstein Ever since I’ve gotten deeper into sp...
9 months ago
The Internet is full of people winning all the time. Someone is traveling to exotic locations, someone else is raising funds, and another person is winning awards. Essentially, everyone around you is succeeding while you do spend your days as the nature intended – sleeping, eating, smiling, chatting...
9 months ago
I can feel uncertainty looming over the software industry as the hiring frenzy of the COVID era has given way to layoffs and hiring freezes. The power transf...
9 months ago
The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What pre...
9 months ago
DNA EVIDENCE SAYS FIRST AMERICANS CAME FROM ASIA Beringia in the Ice Age Natives Americans are believed to have descended from Asian people who arrived in North America via the Bering Strait. The DNA of ancient American bog people is closer to the Japanese than Americans. Glenn Hodges wrote in Natio...
9 months ago
A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings. If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the ...
9 months ago
There were a lot of speculation over the past years about what the next cycle of AI development could be. Agents? Reasoners? Actual multimodality?
9 months ago
17 years ago, Steve Jobs stood on stage with a manila envelope in his hand and pulled out a laptop. At that time, mini-laptops called netbook were very popular, and the first Macbook Air had far superior features in every way. I had a Lenovo IdeaPad S10e. If I remember correctly, the screen resoluti...
9 months ago
“Everything everyone knows about anything indicates that this is untrue,” – Laurent Bossavit The words science and engineering are often used when discussing computers and software. The…
9 months ago
Teach, Don't Tell Posted on September 3rd, 2013. This post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it's about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries. I love reading great documentation. When I have a question and the documentations explains the answer almo...
9 months ago
This article is about why on-call in it's current state in big-tech is flawed, or how to properly develop software.
9 months ago
The idea that work is a moral duty rather than a means of survival is so deeply ingrained we rarely question it. But as technology advances and work becomes more precarious, exhausting, and intrusive, it is worth asking why productivity remains the measure of a person’s worth.
9 months ago
Stoicism’s Appeal to the Rich and Powerful Posted by exurbe on March 27, 2019 History 41 Cicero, one of our major sources for stoic thought. I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver o...
9 months ago
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks…
9 months ago
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
9 months ago
Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (you can read part 1 and part 2 but they are long). In it, I had a persisten...
9 months ago
Abstract: Visual Studio can be one of the programmer's best friends, but over the years it has become increasingly pushy, domineering, and suffering from unsettling control issues. Should we just surrender to Visual Studio's insistence on writing our code for us? Or is Visual Studio sapping our prog...
9 months ago
Leaving a job is never easy, and it’s a consequential decision. But when it’s time, it’s time. Here’s how to escape the comfort trap, and take the next step in your career.
9 months ago
This blog post passed unit tests by Giorgio Azzinnaro, Co-Founder | Software Engineer Updated on March 7, 2025 · 9 min read I’m reading a book called “Writing for Developers”,1 which has some great advice on writing blog posts that get read. With this post, I have two objectives: put in practice wha...
9 months ago
A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront
9 months ago
After just a few thousands failed violent attempts with Terminator machines, Skynet realised it was lacking information on the whereabouts of the resistance leaders it was trying to destroy.
9 months ago
No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias.
9 months ago
This report is written as a post-mortem of a project that has, perhaps, been the author’s most extensive personal project: creating a complete and comprehensive solution to one of the most fa…
9 months ago
It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow's managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at enormo...
9 months ago
In 1628, the 'Vasa' sank on its maiden voyage. For the next 300 years, it sat in a watery grave—until one man sparked a monumental effort to salvage it.
9 months ago
A few years ago I developed a few clever ways of rackmounting non-rackmount equipment so it could look neat in my HiFi rack enclosure.1 The goal was to have a professional-looking setup that would support input from my TV, spotify, Airplay, DJ controller and other sources while being able to drive a...
10 months ago
Harold Cohen was a pioneer in computer art, in algorithmic art, and in generative art; but as he told me one afternoon in 2010, he was first and foremost a painter. He was also an engineer whose work defined the first generation of computer-generated art. His system, AARON, is one of the longest-run...
10 months ago
A friend of mine is always calling me out for never finishing anything, and never writing anything, and never responding to him after 5 PM or on weekends. I'm a bad friend, and I have accepted that, but he's always asking me about whatever my latest hyperfixation project is. Did I finish it; did I w...
10 months ago
The XB-70 My Dad and the Cold War On the occasion of the public unveiling of the XB-70 Valkyrie, brigadier general Fred Ascani stood at his podium and began addressing the crowd at North American Aviation’s plant no. 42 in Palmdale, California. General Ascani was the Air Force’s program director for...
10 months ago
Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill...
10 months ago
(TL;DR: Ultima VII: Revisited is a replacement engine for Ultima VII that presents the game in 3D and fixes various issue with the game. Go to the Downloads tab to find out how to get it.) Preview of coming attractions. My name is Anthony Salter and I love Ultima. The Ultima Series of classic RPGs
10 months ago
The Digital Antiquarian A history of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher Home About Me Ebooks Hall of Fame Table of Contents RSS ← A Conversation with Andrew Plotkin Railroad Tycoon II → Half-Life 20 Dec Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that v...
10 months ago
Skip to content → ProductProduct ResourcesResources Pricing Customers Blog Contact Docs Open app Log in Sign up Blog Last edited: February 21, 2025 Company Building The Profitable Startup For years, startups have been taught to prioritize growth over everything else. Profitability was seen as unambi...
10 months ago
A trip to Mars will be commital in a way that has no precedent in human space flight. The moon landings were designed so that any moment the crew could hit the red button and return expeditiously to Earth; engineers spent the brief windows of time when an abort was infeasible chain smoking and chewi...
10 months ago
AI has recently crossed a utility threshold, where cutting-edge models such as GPT-3, Codex, and DALL-E 2 are actually useful and can perform tasks computers cannot do any other way. The act of producing these models is an exploration of a new... | Greg Brockman | Svbtle
10 months ago
Moving on from 18F. Posted on 17 February 2025 Note: This post gets into the last few weeks of American politics. If that’s not your cup of tea, or if that’s a stressful topic for you, please feel free to skip this one. (Also, it’s a bit long. Sorry about that.) Last week, I finished my tenure as a ...
10 months ago
I frequently see debates about whether it's better to be a cog at a giant semi-monopoly, or to take investment money in the hopes of one day growing to be head cog at a giant semi-monopoly. Role models matter. So I made a list of small companies that I admire. Neither giants nor startups - just peop...
10 months ago
Twenty years ago, in 2004-2005, I spent a year at MIT’s Computer Science department as a postdoc working with Professor Nancy Lynch. It was ...
10 months ago
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of wh...
10 months ago
I’ve been seriously traveling for more than 50 years, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve traveled solo, and I’ve led a tour group of 40 friends. I’ve slept in dormitories and I’ve stayed in presidential suites with a butler. I’ve … Continue reading →
10 months ago
When I was in school, in the mid 90s, I got on the internet for the first time. Our school had one computer that had the interne...
10 months ago
I mean honestly that kind of sums it up. In retrospect, it is a bit surprising. Maybe I should publicly complain more if it gets me these kinds of results (this is a joke everybody). But a good example here would be the support of explicit sync. Not too long ago, I did not think we were going to be ...
10 months ago
Today, when my 1.9-year-old daughter tried to grab and eat an unwashed orange, I asked her to give it to me so I could wash and peel it if she could wait for a moment. She did. It got me thinking about the marshmallow experiment, where the idea was that patience equals success. But … […]
10 months ago
In the woods of northeast France, a group of American artillery officers watched their olive drab-clad batterymen set up their tents in a peaceful glade. It would be the last such quiet the battery…
10 months ago
Most of the things we make and do for money are patently irrelevant to our survival—and to what gives life meaning, besides.
10 months ago
Pre-order Civilization VII for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, or Steam. Choose from the Standard, Deluxe Edition, or Founders Edition.
10 months ago
Frupidity is stupid frugality that wrecks engineering teams. Misguided cost-cutting kills productivity, morale, and innovation. You can fight it.
10 months ago
Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to...
10 months ago
{reading time: 12 minutes}It’s the Saturday before the first Thanksgiving of the 1970s, and shit in Portland has been blowing up with alarming regularity ...
10 months ago
How leaders can increase productivity by saying no to scattered, parallel work and instead concentrating on visible, bite-sized tasks funded to capacity. By breaking work into small chunks, limiting work in progress, and leaving room for the unexpected, teams deliver value faster while staying adapt...
10 months ago
Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry Published 2025-02-03 Four years ago I posted about the same topic. A kind email reminded me its time for another check in. Things I've changed my mind on: Things I now believe, which past me would've squabbled with: S...
10 months ago
Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State posits a choice between reaction and stasis. A brighter future does not await through network states, but through network societies.
10 months ago
Jujutsu (jj), a new version control system written in Rust, has popped up on my radar a few times over the past year. Looked interesting based on a cursory look, but being actually pretty satisfied with Git, and not having major problems with it, I haven’t checked it out. That is, until last week, w...
10 months ago
The 100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science from "Scientists' Bookshelf" American Scientist, November-December 1999, Volume 87, No. 6 Biography The autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882 by Charles Darwin A mathematician's apology by G. H. Hardy The double helix : a personal account of ...
10 months ago
It's now been seven years since I quit my job at Google to become an indie founder. In the past year, I sold my company, started a family, and learned several new technologies.
10 months ago
Amazing as it may seem after all these years, there are still junior developers in the world. A few weeks ago at work we had a talk where senior developers (including me) were invited to spend around five minutes each talking about our personal software development philosophies....
10 months ago
Feb 3, 2025 I conditioned myself to fail Over the years I’ve literally built hundreds of projects. Some with a lof of potential. Others just batshit crazy ideas. I started noticing a pattern. I’d build a project for several weeks or even months. Working long hours, maybe 12-14 hours a day. Being ext...
10 months ago
Switching to Linux: Reclaim Your Freedom Published in LINUX-HOWTO.ORG • 31 January 2025 Christian Ahmer Introduction: The Case for Switching to Linux The High Cost of Proprietary Systems The Pain of Vendor Lock-in The Erosion of User Skills Loss of Privacy and Control The Advantages of Open Source S...
10 months ago
I used to have boring health. I never had more than the flu, been admitted to the hospital, and I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. In late 2023, that changed when I developed chronic nausea.
10 months ago
To me, a design is a plan or specification for something that fulfils a goal. For example, the goal of the BBC News website might be to inform users of the most relevant things that are going on in the world. The way they do that is by writing news articles, ordering them based on location and impor...
10 months ago
[DE - EN - ES - IT] DICASTERY FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH DICASTERY FOR CULTURE AND EDUCATION ANTIQUA ET NOVA Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence I. Introduction 1. With wisdom both ancient and new (cf. Mt. 13:52), we are called to reflect on the current...
10 months ago
This is a story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first model of the Amiga series. Many of you might be familiar with the popular Amiga 500 or later models, but the Commodore Amiga 1000 was actually the first model of the Amiga series produced. I consider the A1000 a signific...
11 months ago
After months of anticipation, debate, and even a bit of apprehension, Svelte 5 arrived earlier this year. Frederick O’Brien caught up with its creator, Rich Harris, to talk about the path that brought him and his team here and what lies ahead.
11 months ago
Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve, and it also happens to be the 20th anniversary of our company - our official date of incorporation was January 28, 2005. I wanted to jot down a few thoughts this morning to mark the occasion. The Beginning of the Journey At the time, I was in Shenzhen and Glacier was...
11 months ago
I go on a journey to learn about a man named Quentell, and discover unsettling things about the information landscape.
11 months ago
100% UnemploymentMike on Tue Jan 29 2013 on-keeping-busy-when-the-robots-take-over I'll begin with a healthy dose of pessimism. I write software for a living, and I am becoming more and more convinced that my job will soon – in a few years or a few decades – be outsourced. It won't go to a developer...
11 months ago
Jan 13, 2025 Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn't Going to Kill the Software Industry I feel like half of my social media feed is composed of AI grifters saying software developers are not going to make it. Combine that sentiment with some economic headwinds and it's easy to feel like we're all screwed. I...
11 months ago
t4t is a focused social network for trans and gender-non-comforming people. It is beautiful, minimalist, text-based, and free. To join, download the app for iOS or Android. Recent posts @Lovemail.Shan Don't you hate it When you wake up extremely horny but it gets to a point where it makes you sick b...
11 months ago
There's a reason video games build what's called a 'vertical slice'. If you're not familiar, a vertical slice is a single playable area, with all mechanics, fin
11 months ago
This post celebrates influential papers that shaped technology and communication. Their foundational concepts inspire continued innovation, highlighting the importance of understanding our roots fo…
1 year ago
Three weeks ago I wrote the following draft of a blog post entitled “Is It Better to Fail Spectacularly?”. I am having a lot of doubts. I’ve been training for the Chicago Marathon in earnest since June, but in reality the preparations began a year ago when I was accepted based on my qualifying time ...
1 year ago
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com domain and all links will remain active, but there will be no new content after November 13th, 2024, which happens to be my 50th birthday. Th...
1 year ago
I quit my last contracting gig in August with £40k in debt, no other income, and only a business idea (it failed).
1 year ago
The teachings of Price, Gilpin, and Repton and the quiet example of his father provided the basis for Olmsted's aesthetic theories; they also underlay his refusal to follow the gardening fashions of his own time. The horticultural revolution of the early nineteenth century led gardeners to neglect o...
1 year ago
The system worked amazingly well. The postal service then was notoriously slow and unreliable. By taking important documents and putting them in suitcases, DHL was able to guarantee timely delivery of critical business documents.
1 year ago
SOFA is the name of a hacker/art collective, and also the name of the principle upon which the club was founded. The point of SOFA club is to start as many things as possible as you have the ability, interest, and capacity to, with no regard or goal whatsoever for finishing those projects. The goal ...
1 year ago
For decades, school design was synonymous with rigidity; now, child-centric principles are reshaping contemporary educational spaces.
1 year ago
On 23 August 1989, around a million Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians expressed their desire for independence by joining hands to create ‘The Baltic Way’, a human chain that extended for over 690 kilometres from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius.
1 year ago
When you look at old black and white pictures of cities from before the 1950s you may notice something on most buildings that are no longer there today. Awnings. They were ubiquitous over nearly every window of buildings from the most basic single family home to massive buildings like The White Hous...
1 year ago
Films Home Art Analysis Biography Chinese Brush Collage Color 3D Animation Without Pixel Shifting Discoveries and Firsts Documentaries Drawings Electronic Restoration Etchings Films Graphics Partial Inventory Light Boxes Painting Photography Reviews Sculpture Videos Watercolor 2D to 3D Films Lillian...
1 year ago
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with the concept of PageRank in their seminal paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Stanford University, 1998) they profoundly changed the way we utilize the web. For the next 25 years, humanity count...
1 year ago
Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. I discussed this post on The Space Show on November 5 2021. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts …
1 year ago
There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations. And it is then, perhaps, that a subtle truth begins to emerge: the only thing we truly possess, the only thing we might, wit...
1 year ago
Some notes on upgrading Hugo • blogging • October 7, 2024 Warning: this is a post about very boring yakshaving, probably only of interest to people who are trying to upgrade Hugo from a very old version to a new version. But what are blogs for if not documenting one’s very boring yakshaves from time...
1 year ago
I remember when I first arrived in Silicon Valley with a couple of products and after meeting Steve Jobs at Apple, and signing with the company that bought Visicalc, I felt like I had arrived, and …
1 year ago
Timezones, and daylight saving - the practice of moving clocks forward by one hour once a year - are a pain. They make it hard to schedule international meetings, plan travel, or may simply cause you to be an hour late for work once a year. For a developer, they are even worse! This blog post takes ...
1 year ago
I have a machine from 1998. I believe its hard drive and RAM are all original. It powers on and loads the OS, so I have reason to believe that nothing major is corrupted. However, is it best to lea...
1 year ago
Tom Lamont: Author & Aviator - James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist by Jeffrey Meyers
1 year ago
Skip to main content This browser is no longer supported. Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support. Download Microsoft Edge More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge Table of contents Exit focus mode
1 year ago
This paper discusses ways in which automation of industrial processes may expand rather than eliminate problems with the human operator. ...
1 year ago
A new analysis of mummified brains pushes back the timeline for the globalization of coca
1 year ago
N3366 - Restartable Functions for Efficient Character Conversions has made it into the C2Y Standard (A.K.A., “the next C standard after C23”). And one of my longest struggles — the sole reason I actually came down to the C Standards Committee in the first place —
1 year ago
What is changing now that will still be changing in ten years? Anchor your strategy on that.
1 year ago
It was a stunning revelation: A respected high school custodian had been a concentration camp guard. This excerpt of a new book examines how the disclosure of a dark secret in the early ’80s divided a suburb.
1 year ago
The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum on 2021-02-04 *How to create the long-lasting compu**ter that will save your attention, your wallet, your creativity, your soul and the planet. Killing monopolies will only be a byproduct.* Each time I look at my Hermes Rocket typewriter (on the left in t...
1 year ago
Anthropology has been bad at capturing the living conditions of women. A kidnapped woman who returned to civilization was the exception.
1 year ago
THE NAMING OF AMERICA: FRAGMENTS WE'VE SHORED AGAINST OURSELVES BY JONATHAN COHEN The name America (applied to present-day Brazil) appeared for what is believed the first time on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, known as the Baptismal Certificate of the New World, and also America's Birth Cert...
1 year ago
It's hard to imagine now, but in the 2000s web browsers were quite boring and didn't get updated very often. IE7 being released was a huge deal (indeed, Microsoft kept to a slower-moving schedule just as the rest of the industry was starting to pick up the pace). Opera was a viable fully-independent...
1 year ago
Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future – Chapter 1 by Marshall Brain Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like ...
1 year ago
Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese range up to spending years and around 4000 total hours (2,200h classroom hours, 1,800 outside). I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year.[1] 1. There is a lot of disagreement on language proficiency estimates. They
1 year ago
Jerry Seinfeld, Social Anxiety, and Meditation Oct 4, 2024 Modified on Oct 4, 2024 4 minute read This week I came across an interview with Jerry Seinfeld, focused on the benefits of meditation in his life. I see Jerry as a no-nonsense personality, one who’s reached the pinnacle of success in a compe...
1 year ago
By Mary Grace Descourouez, MS, NBC-HWC Binge-watching television, watching YouTube videos for hours, or scrolling on your phone every morning may seem harmless, but research shows that too much screen time may be detrimental to your health. We know children’s brains are affected by spending too much...
1 year ago
Cosmopolitan Libc has the fastest most efficient mutexes for contended workloads.
1 year ago
Putting the “Person” in “Personal Website” 2024-10-02 The other day I saw a meme that went something like this: Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The point of doing these things has ...
1 year ago
ALWYN TURNER selects some passages from British literature that concern sausages.
1 year ago
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard. For instance, last week Twitch introduced a new “Boost” program where streamers can pay to get more viewers to see their stream. ...
1 year ago
Among all the health conditions, diseases, disabilities and neuro-developmental challenges, it seems that Autism Spectrum Disorder is notorious for giving everybody a solid headache, no matter how they came to interact with it - as researchers, diagnosticians, autists ourselves or people who just ar...
1 year ago
Adjusting to this lifestyle hasn't been easy - truth be told it has taken a full year of learning through failure to learn the insights in the blog post below. I'm three years in on the journey of #vanlife and life is going to plan.
1 year ago
"The Dogma of Otherness" (published in full here) first appeared in the book Otherness, a collection of essays and short stories on the subject of, strangely enough, otherness. The article also appeared online (in abbreviated form) at crackaddict.com.
1 year ago
He was worried about losing them. He could write equations on the blackboard all day long, but if he didn’t find a way to connect with them soon, they’d never master multiplication up to 100. One day, once again concerned about reaching his third-graders, he was lost in thought and wrote “3 x 4 = […...
1 year ago
Taking a good look around (both inside and out) of my brand new MEGA65 computer system from Trenz Electronic GmbH.
1 year ago
Refresh System Initiative Open main menu HomePricingPartnersDocsBlogNewsAbout UsJobs Log InSign Up System Initiative is the Future By Adam Jacob 9/25/2024 I’m incredibly proud to announce the general availability of System Initiative. It’s a revolutionary technology that is the future of how you wil...
1 year ago
Why I still blog after 15 years ★ Published: September 25, 2024 in 7f18f00 Tagged: Blog Time flies when you’re having fun. Before you know it, your little babies have started school, you celebrate the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park, and that little blog you started have now been going for 15 year...
1 year ago
I was recently asked to help resolve an escalation at work. It had already bounced around between a few people, and was very muddied with conflicting reports not to mention frustration that the issue existed in the first place. Apparently I am insane, because I like situations like this.
1 year ago
In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.
1 year ago
What Happened to the Japanese PC Platforms? Sep 21st, 2024 2:01 pm (This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting question: what happened to all those companies who made those Japanese computer platfo...
1 year ago
There was a time when software (and games! Games are just software for fun!) were distributed on DVD. A physical disk that you would insert into your system ...
1 year ago
If I asked you to name the most common chronic disease in children, what would you say? Asthma comes top of mind, but there is something five times more common in kids: cavities. We don’t typically think of dental cavities as a chronic disease—in part because of the separation between medicine and d...
1 year ago
systemd is becoming de facto a standard init system for Linux. But even this choice of words is treacherous, because systemd is much more than an init system. It's basically an integrated redesign of all the low-level userspace of a Linux system, with great plans to change how software is run and or...
1 year ago
The etiologies of Parkinson’s disease (PD) remain unclear. Some, such as certain genetic mutations and head trauma, are widely known or easily identified. However, these causes or risk factors do not account for the majority of cases. Other, less ...
1 year ago
Dear new developer, When I was starting out, I thought that software development was all about code. After all, that was the main thing I was working on. Well, maybe not the main thing, as I needed…
1 year ago
News TouchArcade is Shutting Down Posted on September 16, 2024 by Jared Nelson This is a post that I’ve known was coming for quite some time, but that doesn’t make it any easier to write. After more than 16 years TouchArcade will be closing its doors and shutting down operations. There may be an add...
1 year ago
I changed my mind and will not wait for retirement. Instead, I will focus on aligning financial investments with activities I enjoy till my last breath.
1 year ago
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
1 year ago
The relentless pursuit of success often means chasing after promotions, pay raises, and prestigious titles. But what if we shifted our focus from these traditional metrics and instead optimized our careers for happiness?
1 year ago
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
1 year ago
On and off for the last several years I've been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on a
1 year ago
So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages
1 year ago
Designing software is tough. I think we can all agree on that. No matter how much experience you have, your first idea about how to structure a module or system is usually not the best one. I had to l
1 year ago
My 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS built with twenty-four 4 TB drives is over 10 years old and still going strong. Although now on its second motherboard and power supply, the system has yet to experience a single drive failure (knock on wood). Zero drive failures in ten years, how is that possible? Let's talk ab...
1 year ago
In Empire of the Sun, published 40 years ago, the great novelist turned his childhood experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp into a form of personal liberation.
1 year ago
Feedback is critical to performing good work as a team. Good feedback cultivates quality work and professional growth. Bad feedback degrades quality and erodes relationships. This article explains ...
1 year ago
Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React. Plenty of corporations thought they knew better but failed to see the larger picture.
1 year ago
As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of thos...
1 year ago
I recently came across a great quote from David Chang, “Just because we’re a casual restaurant, doesn’t mean we don’t hold ourselves to fine dining standards. We try to do things the right way. That usually means doing things the long, hard, stupid way.” David has elaborated on this quote: When you...
1 year ago
But the real hot piece of tech is not really a CSS framework as I remember them. Everybody is now talking about Tailwind CSS - a “utility-first CSS framework”. In case you’ve been living under a rock (like me): it’s a library that instead of giving you btn-primary gives you bg-blue-600. It pretty mu...
1 year ago
Current Issue Past Issues Topics September 9, 2024 Volume 22, issue 4 PDF GPTs and Hallucination Why do large language models hallucinate? Jim Waldo and Soline Boussard The recent developments of LLMs (large language models) and the applications built on them such as ChatGPT have completely revoluti...
1 year ago
Would figuring out your bugs and outages be easier if you had a time machine? We are now making a time machine directly available to all of our customers.
1 year ago
Radical Simplicity is about cutting through the noise, focusing on what truly matters, and delivering results that are effective and efficient.
1 year ago
In the open source community, there is perhaps no greater gift than code. This is about that time 135,000 lines of gifted code created a new era of JavaScript
1 year ago
Mockingboard 4c+ By Quinn Dunki June 20, 2021 Because Interrupts Are Hard. The Apple II was (well, still is) a computer devoid of interrupts. I think most modern software engineers probably under-appreciate the implications of that. Folks skilled in writing main loops for games or graphics will at l...
1 year ago
Tim and Neal’s thoughts on the definition of the “Metaverse,” its technological and economic growth, Neal’s reaction on the day Facebook changed its name to Meta, the future of Fortnite , their thoughts on Apple’s Vision Pro, blockchains, and the ethics of Generative AI, plus “Snow Crash 2," a
1 year ago
Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login Ask HN: Where are the part-time remote coding jobs? 34 points by DamnInteresting 18 minutes ago | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments I really love writing, and over the years I've cultivated a respectable audience of readers. But ...
1 year ago
I’ve been thinking about the lessons distributed systems engineers learn on the job. A great deal of our instruction is through scars made by mistakes made in production traffic. These scars are useful reminders, sure, but it’d be better to have more engineers with the full count of their fingers. N...
1 year ago
Rediscovering the Small Web Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests an...
1 year ago
PIPELINE STORIES + Submit News Sabrent Rocket nano V2 External SSD Review: Phison U18 in a Solid Offering MediaTek to Add NVIDIA G-Sync Support to Monitor Scalers, Make G-Sync Displays More Accessible Qualcomm Adds Snapdragon 7s Gen 3: Mid-Tier Snapdragon Gets Cortex-A720 Treatment CXL Gathers Momen...
1 year ago
Why do we ask for donations so often? Because it’s important! As KDE becomes more successful and an increasing number of people use our software, our costs grow as well: Web and server hostin…
1 year ago
Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable, I have no idea… But I do know that it annoyed me enough to make me want to fix it myself. While I understand that what I do next is beyond a large number of Advantage Air customers, i...
1 year ago
Before Windows became a fact of life for most computer users, a scrappy upstart named GeoWorks tried taking Microsoft on. It failed, but it gave us AOL.
1 year ago
We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, …
1 year ago
Ubicloud has the ambition of writing an open source alternative to AWS, Azure, or GCP. Its control plane is written in Ruby, a fact that surprises some people. Our cofounder, Daniel, has been building infrastructure control planes in Ruby for 13 years, starting with Heroku. He recently presented at...
1 year ago
A rundown of my experience finding and fixing a bug in the Chromium/Google Chrome browser - specifically in the devtools. It includes details about the bug itself as well as notes about what it was like working on the Chromium project as a first-time contributor.
1 year ago
Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the fou...
1 year ago
Why I’m excited about the new Temporal API in JavaScript: finally, easy and accurate date handling with time zones using ZonedDateTime. Say goodbye to the headaches of traditional Date objects.
1 year ago
Imagine this: an OpenSSH backdoor is discovered, maintainers rush to push out a fixed release package, security researchers trade technical details on mailing lists to analyze the backdoor code. Speculation abounds on the attribution and motives of the attacker, and the tech media pounces on the sto...
1 year ago
Last month I received my custom made wristwatch from Switzerland, it is a minimalistic mechanical annual calendar designed to be understated and true to the metal.
1 year ago
I sometimes get annoyed with John McWhorter, but when he’s good he’s very good, and his Aeon essay on euphemisms is probably the best thing I’ve read on this vexed topic. The core of his point is in this paragraph: What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the e...
1 year ago
Do Low-level Optimizations Matter? by Nathan Myers, ncm at cantrip dot org, 2020-01-09 Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1,2,3. We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size...
1 year ago
Why I Blog August 20, 2024 The idea of blogging always seemed so fun and yet I went many years without publishing any content online. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since highschool (over a decade ago). I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. This post walks through my journey, which starts from to...
1 year ago
I’m excited to share that Reclaim.ai has been acquired by Dropbox, and our team will be joining to help drive the future of productivity for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
1 year ago
The oral history of the Dinosaur Input Device or: how to survive the near death of stop-motion By Ian Failes In visual effects lore, it is well-known that the full-motion dinosaurs of Jurassic Park…
1 year ago
Awkward. Seven of us now. Sitting around the table. Five minutes since the start of the meeting. We've used up our chit-chat allowance and wonder if you will show. In the scheme of things relevant to a company's success, showing up late to a meeting is not the end of the world. When it happens a l
1 year ago
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather …
1 year ago
Table Of Contents What is a Markov chain What is funny The predictability of LLMs Why this is interesting Before explaining any of these terms, let’s try to establish this anecdotally. 12:2 And I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and our sins be upon us, because of our use of not and lisp-...
1 year ago
UPDATE: I’ve added a short section on the topic of sponsorship. I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially
1 year ago
I started writing this retrospective during my last week at Google, I have already wrapped up everything, had my goodbyes. In the spirit of SRE (as an ex-SRE), I thought it would be fun to write a little retrospective in the form of a postmortem. Introduction I joined Google young and relatively ine...
1 year ago
LeanerCloud News LoginSubscribe 0 LeanerCloud News Posts Why I just declined a job offer from a billionaire friend Why I just declined a job offer from a billionaire friend Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu June 01, 2024 This is an expanded version of a LinkedIn post I wrote the other day. The first email...
1 year ago
James McClintock designed the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley. But the extraordinary last act of his life involved Scottish bomb-makers, Irish terrorists, trance mediums equipped with death rays …
1 year ago
contactaboutservices JIM COLLINS Concepts Books Tools Articles View All Articles Commentary Culture Leadership Organization Self-Management Social Sectors Strategy Technology Forewords Video/Audio Young Leaders All Video/Audio What is Great? Level 5 Leadership First Who, Then What Hedgehog Concept B...
1 year ago
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
1 year ago
On today's show, I'm talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It's in your web browser, it's in your phone, it's probably in your car, and it's definitely in commercial planes. It's where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored...
1 year ago
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.
1 year ago
The night that Stephen Paddock opened fire on thousands of people at a Las Vegas country music concert, nearby Sunrise Hospital received more than 200 penetrating gunshot wound victims. Dr. Kevin Menes was the attending in charge of the ED that night, and thanks to his experience supporting a local ...
1 year ago
If you're teaching a topic, you're probably really passionate about it (unless, of course, the department forced you to teach the class). At the very least, I am. Chess engines are cool. Lucky for me, students taking a COLL course get little in the way of credit for the class, so most of my pupils w...
1 year ago
In order to understand JI, first you have to "empty your cup". Most people's cup is occupied by 12-tone equal temperament (12TET), which defines the notes we're typically allowed to play. To understand 12TET, start with the octave: going up or down one octave means multiplying or dividing the freque...
1 year ago
1. To assert of someone that they are “dead” can sometimes be intended, beyond the bare biological fact this might report, to mean that that person no longer matters, that they now belong to an irrelevant past.
1 year ago
Catastrophic volcanic eruptions that warmed the planet millions of years ago shed new light on how plants evolve and regulate climate. Researchers reveal the long-term effects of disturbed natural ecosystems on climate in geological history and its implications for today.
1 year ago
Over many visits over two decades, I have witnessed China's meteoric rise from a land of bicycles to an electric vehicle powerhouse.
1 year ago
Writing About Work Perceived Age "To live is to be other. It's not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday is not to feel—it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost."...
1 year ago
Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool August 8th, 2024 Like the blip of an intro on the front page says, my degree was originally in music. My running joke as a web dev is that neither has meaningfully required me to count past 32. And while my main concentration was vocals, I've since realized I sho...
1 year ago
South Island, New Zealand, a.k.a. Middle-Earth If you were to make a list of what you want to get done this week, it would mostly consist of things you have to do. Get groceries. Book a hair appointment. Get back to so-and-so. Read that health and safety thing for work. If you were to make a list of...
1 year ago
Ergodic literature is a subgenre of literature that upends the very fabric of storytelling itself.
1 year ago
A GitHub founder's musings on the past, present and future of large groups of people collaborating on software in awesome ways.
1 year ago
Books in Progress is what we call a “public drafting tool”: Drafts will be made available for comment from the public, allowing for direct collaboration between author and reader.
1 year ago
Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other
1 year ago
In a large legacy system, the database is more than a place to store data, it is the culture maker. The database sets the constraints for how the system as a whole operates. It is the point where all code meets. The database is the watering hole. In our case, that watering hole had quite a bit of po...
1 year ago
C Isn't A Programming Language Anymore Aria Desires March 16th, 2022 Phantomderp and I have both recently been very aligned on a particular subject: being extremely angry about C ABIs and trying to fix them. Where we’re not aligned is why we’re mad about them. He’s trying to materially improve the c...
1 year ago
NetBSD is one of the oldest BSDs still around, its initial release being in 1993. NetBSD is based on the original UCB 4.3 BSD, and upon installation provides a small old-school minimal desktop. Out of all the already niche BSD systems, it is one of the smaller ones. The more used BSDs these days are...
1 year ago
Geochemical sleuthing amid acid mine runoff suggests that scientists should rethink an isotope signal long taken to indicate low levels of atmospheric oxygen in Earth’s deep past.
1 year ago
Despite warnings that climate change would create widespread desertification, many drylands are getting greener because of increased CO2 in the air — a trend that recent studies indicate will continue. But scientists warn this added vegetation may soak up scarce water supplies.
1 year ago
The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.
1 year ago
Software industry has become more driven by profit and unnecessary complexity that by the ability to build and launch innovative products.
1 year ago
When I got off social media about a year ago, I wanted to replace it with something more productive, so I chose Hacker News. I had already been on HN for many years, but decided that I would start visiting it as often as I did with an app like Instagram or TikTok. If I was going to be spending hours...
1 year ago
Welcome to another edition of 5-Minute Whiteboards. And folks, we've got a doozy of a topic. Yes, I'm being intentionally provocative. But it's because
1 year ago
An approaching anniversary date of former MIT Chairman and Dean of Engineering Dr. Vannevar Bush prompts me to write today. As his sole biographer has just highlighted in IEEE Spectrum, this Friday will mark 50 years since the Jun. 28, 1974 passing of this individual whose footprint looms large on g...
1 year ago
Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so man...
1 year ago
Boogie Math Random Teaching Studying Friends About Random Teaching Studying Friends About Random Yeah, a true intellectual Is math irrelevant? Teaching kids Where is my Dirac? Why I am not Dirac You stupid teacher! Along the banks of the Nile Interested in integers Oscar Zariski - forgot about his o...
1 year ago
The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix I had no idea what all the fuss was about. Sure, it was great, but it wasn't changing my life. Maybe a decade later, it hit me: thirty years previous, he'd changed...
1 year ago
We don’t talk a lot in public about the big vision for Tailscale, why we’re really here. Usually I prefer to focus on what exists right now, and what we’re going to do in the next few months. But let’s look at the biggest of big pictures for a change.
1 year ago
Mobile (Android and iOS) is getting harder and harder to develop for, and devs are leaving the platforms out of frustration and annoyance. With each new OS update a slew of new requirements have to be met otherwise you’ll face “restrictive action” against your app by a particular time. Usually this ...
1 year ago
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
1 year ago
I once had a sweet, brown pit bull mix named Thembi, who had impressive musculature and a magnificent nose. Often on our walks, I would feel the leash go taut and know she’d sniffed out something tantalizing, likely a squirrel or a rabbit. She would snuffle excitedly, muzzle to the ground, tracing h...
1 year ago
Humans have always tried to live forever. Maybe you can, but not in the way you imagine.
1 year ago
The origin of the term is credited to Dr Gary L. Henderson, of the University of California at Davis. A designer drug is based on the structure of an existing drug – which may be naturally sourced from a plant (like cocaine or morphine) or be synthetic (like amphetamine) - but with a slightly differ...
1 year ago
Lea Verou Home Blog Specs Projects Speaking Publications Press About Repo Forget “show, don’t tell”. Engage, don’t show! 3 July 2024 4 min read 0 comments Report broken page
1 year ago
Note: this is a pretty long post. If you’re not interested in the details, the conclusion at the bottom is intended to be read in a standalone fashion. There’s also a related blog post …
1 year ago
This post is a response to Do people IRL know you have a blog? A short while before I came across bacardi55’s call to conversation, I asked my wife if she wanted to see something cool. She said yeah. I showed her the Reading section, and explained that I was constructing the functionality to track m...
1 year ago
In the early hours of May 13th, 2024 and after about sixteen hours of play over two days, I achieved one of my poker dreams and outlasted 773 entrants in the RunGood Poker Series $800 No Limit Hold’em Main Event hosted at Graton Casino and Resort to claim the outright win and top prize of $85,780.
1 year ago
How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it.
1 year ago
I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...
1 year ago
that we are now well past an Indigo Point of exothermic core-mantle decoupling, and that we have incorrectly interpreted the heat presented by this transpiration as being caused by man's activity alone. We now face the urgent need to detect the approach of a subsequent Tau Point Dzhanibekov oscillat...
1 year ago
Just when I thought that openSUSE was free from stupid corporate decisions, their main sponsor, SUSE S.A., came with a strange request: openSUSE should “stop using the SUSE brand”! WTF is that shit?! (H/T to Linuxiac.) 1. Lately, animosity arose around an “Open Letter to the openSUSE Board, Project ...
1 year ago
A Blogpost series about Model Architectures Part 1: What happened to BERT and T5? Thoughts on Transformer Encoders, PrefixLM and Denoising objectives
1 year ago
Live Microsoft IT outage live: Chaos as internet down and flights grounded around the world Passengers have been forced to wait at check-in desks at Gatwick Airport which have been hit by the severe delays amid a global IT outage Credit: @sergepoliakoff Key moments Chosen by us to get you up to spee...
1 year ago
Bob Newhart, the genteel comic whose TV series “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” were huge hits throughout the 1970s and '80s, died Thursday.
1 year ago
To create a real impact on the world is no simple thing. Innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation and those things rarely happen in the same place. That’s why effective innovators are great collaborators.
1 year ago
Panic! at the Tech Job Market Panic! at the Job Market “I have the two qualities you require to see absolute truth: I am brilliant and unloved.” ready for another too-long article about personal failure while blaming the world for our faults? let’s see where we end up with 7,000 9,000 10,000 11,500 ...
1 year ago
Josh is the founder of NiftyCo, a tech entrepreneur who has been fascinated by computers since childhood. With a career spanning over two decades, he brings various software solutions to life while embracing the challenges of entrepreneurship and coding.
1 year ago
Alexander Billet reviews Dominique Routhier’s “With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation.”
1 year ago
I'm writing this because I've been obsessed with the theory of a Darwin Machine for nearly a year now and I haven't met anyone else who has heard of it.
1 year ago
A few weeks before the release of my first book, a memoir about my mother’s murder, I had to take a polygraph exam. The two things were not in fact related, but that was easy to forget once I found…
1 year ago
Join us on a trip through Fender's factory, Custom Shop, Master Builder department and head office, in celebration of a radically innovative instrument that continues to find new ways to move music forward, even seven decades after its launch.
1 year ago
Learn how we enhanced TCP performance in Coder to achieve 5X faster throughput by optimizing buffer sizes, implementing the HyStart algorithm, and minimizing packet loss, significantly improving remote development experiences.
1 year ago
Imagine a smart watch, but from 1984. That sounds like something straight out of a scifi film since the 80s is not exactly known for great advances in personal computing. Well, it’s real, and it is exactly what Seiko created back in the day and was known as the UC-2000 - a “personal information proc...
1 year ago
In early 2005, Michael Arrington, a lawyer, and Keith Teare, an entrepreneur, started a fund called Archimedes Ventures. Their idea at the time was to invest in Web 2.0, meaning the nascent world of web apps. They built a few products at the time. One was an online classified ad service called Edge....
1 year ago
I retired in 2021 at 63.5 after about four decades as a programmer. What made me do this was not failing ability in any way, but after a year of consideration, I realized I didn't care to do it anymore. Everyone will eventually reach a point at which they
1 year ago
If someone was making a list of the most important American companies today, it’s unlikely AT&T would be anywhere near the top. It’s large, but not notably so: it came in 32nd in the 2024 Fortune 500 ranking, just above Comcast and below Verizon. Its offerings are not unique: it’s just one of many c...
1 year ago
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to ...
1 year ago
Use A Work Journal To Recover Focus Faster And Clarify Your Thoughts 2024-Jul-12 You’re working on the most complex problem in computer science: fixing permissions on a deployment pipeline. It’s been 4 days you started on that simple task already. Your manager explained to you in no uncertain terms ...
1 year ago
This is the story of how Google killed a 14 year old Android app overnight. 2008 was a time when the web had mostly become ubiquitous but still before most people carried it all with them in their pocket on a smartphone. For me, a high school student at the time without a smartphone, my programming ...
1 year ago
Cradle: Empowering Foundation Agents Towards General Computer Control Weihao Tan3 *, Wentao Zhang3 *, Xinrun Xu5 *, Haochong Xia3 †, Ziluo Ding2 †, Boyu Li3 †, Bohan Zhou4 †, Junpeng Yue4 †, Jiechuan Jiang4 †, Yewen Li3 †, Ruyi An3 †, Molei Qin3 †, Chuqiao Zong3 †, Longtao Zheng3 †, YuJie Wu1 †, Xia...
1 year ago
Host and stream your own music with ease. Open-source, modern, snappy, and comes packed with extensive features, Koel is the music streaming solution that actually works.
1 year ago
Why I’m Writing A Book On Cryptography posted July 2020 I’ve now been writing a book on applied cryptography for a year and a half. I’m nearing the end of my journey, as I have one last ambitious chapter left to write: next-generation cryptography (a chapter that I’ll use to talk about cryptography ...
1 year ago
From a trash-filled Earth to the futuristic Axiom and back again, WALL·E is a finely crafted balance between consumerist dystopia and sixties space-race optimism. Please join me, then, for a detail…
1 year ago
In this post, we’re going to talk about the value of simplicity in software. Simple tools are easier to use, more reliable, and more valuable than their complex counterparts. First, let’s start with my car. I drive a 2020 Toyota Corolla Hybrid, which I bought used in Spring
1 year ago
„If it feels too good, then it’s wrong“, says Christian Olsson, a famous Swedish triple jumper in his interview for a documentary called „The Price of Gold“. With this sentence Olsson states that …
1 year ago
Explore how understanding the brain helps tackle resistance to change in the workplace. This article offers effective ways for leaders to boost learning and adaptability in their teams. Learn how to make learning safe and engaging, and see why small successes matter. Ideal for CEOs, CHROs, and anyon
1 year ago
Biologist John Calhoun’s rodent experiments gripped a society consumed by fears of overpopulation.
1 year ago
Homeless people in Russia have their own terms for things — people who aren’t homeless are “domestic” people, while they themselves are “street” people, or simply “bums.” Meduza’s special correspondent Irina Kravtsova spent several days with homeless people in St. Petersburg, asking them the most ob...
1 year ago
The Prepper Next Door In 2011, the television show Doomsday Preppers began airing on National Geographic, bringing mainstream attention to what appeared to be an obscure phenomenon. [1] The series featured “preppers” stockpiling bunkers with enormous amounts of food and ammunition while conducti
1 year ago
Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story ab…
1 year ago
techcrunch techcrunch We, TechCrunch, are part of the Yahoo family of brandsThe sites and apps that we own and operate, including Yahoo and AOL, and our digital advertising service, Yahoo Advertising.Yahoo family of brands. When you use our sites and apps, we use CookiesCookies (including similar te...
1 year ago
I recently had a conversation with a friend about my twitter journey. I told him about how random accounts have responded with kindness in Dms when I was jus...
1 year ago
Improving efficiency tends to be against the interest of most people in an org, because it’s equivalent to shrinking your budget. Here’s what I’m told is a true story about how things work with actual budgets. A relatively inexperienced VP attends a meeting where senior management is asked to shrink...
1 year ago
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1 year ago
The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; ...
1 year ago
NEC moved into personal computing relatively quickly. After the hobbyist and industrial success of the TK-80, they produced a handful of “better TK-80s,” which didn’t do as well as the original. Ultimately, they developed a whole new system: the 1979 NEC PC-8001. And boy, did they ever nail it.
1 year ago
Objectives Muscle function and size decline with age, but long-term effects of resistance training in older adults are largely unknown. Here, we explored the long-lasting (3 years) effects of 1 year of supervised resistance training with heavy loads. Methods The LIve active Successful Ageing (LISA)...
1 year ago
On the freaky model world of the Dollomites; plus—more lucid dreaming and a roundup of recent favorites.
1 year ago
Self-hosting software comes with privacy, simple pricing and it's distributed by design. Why are we not building more self-hosted products?
1 year ago
Investigate Europe finds 15 of the world’s biggest drugmakers operate more than 1,300 subsidiaries in tax havens, as they amassed over €580 billion in global profits over the past five years. Meanwhile, patients face life-threatening delays for medicines due to high drug prices.
1 year ago
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” ~ Pablo Picasso “Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.” ~ Stan Kelly-Bootle Back then, the…
1 year ago
Our Gen Z editor had a secret: She had never seen Grizzly Man. We recruited bear biologist and podcast host Wesley Larson to watch it with her and recorded their reactions.
1 year ago
That's a big claim. We don't really think self-hosting is better for everyone, but read this article to see if it might be better for you.
1 year ago
Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular and iconic cellular automata. It is so famous that googling it loads up a working simulation right in your browser! The rules for the Game o…
1 year ago
I’m trying to make a system that can behave like a human. Consciousness is a personal motivation, but I’m not going to focus on it as a goal because it’s difficult to define well and people often disagree about it. This article instead looks at some aspects of minds that — while still challenging — ...
1 year ago
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced … the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously… this feeling may last for hours at a tim…
1 year ago
A Bunch of Programming Advice I’d Give To Myself 15 Years Ago I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it...
1 year ago
Before Kyng, no one had ever managed to do that – even though researchers have been working on this problem for some 90 years. Previously, it took significantly longer to compute the optimal flow than to process the network data. And as the network became larger and more complex, the required comput...
1 year ago
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood I remember my breakfast as a kid. It was as sugary as it gets, with cereal and milk or a good marmalade toast and a chocolate shake to start my day. I remember the highs and lows of my energy levels throughout the day or how I would look in the mirror and wonder why I grew as...
1 year ago
I used to be extremely confident in myself. I was barely 20 years old and I would tell people how to sleep, how to make friends, and how to live their lives. I started a nonprofit aiming to literally rebuild the institutions of science from the ground up. I was dismissive of everyone who didn’t impr...
1 year ago
Do I Regret Focusing on 'Just Being' A Software Engineer? A semi-biographical piece of reflection about being in tech, how and why I got in and my growing want to eject by me, Jacky Alciné • published Jun 29, 2024 • 14 min to read, 4217 words You can listen to me reading this post! How else to start...
1 year ago
The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.
1 year ago
In the past 12 months my body’s mobility and flexibility went from abysmal, a source of persistent pain impacting my quality of life, to pretty darn good. I’m not about to become a stretching influencer, but after a year of researching, trial and error, and hard work I feel back on track and like I....
1 year ago
Developers are systems thinkers and yet, most measures of developer productivity are metrics-based, instead of systems-based. In this post, Sourcegraph co-founder and CTO Beyang Liu presents five charts that visualize what really matters for developer productivity.
1 year ago
BS (behavioral science) without creativity—indeed BS without a tiny little whiff of BS (meaning bullshit)—is actually suboptimal.
1 year ago
One of the items on my todo list was: And that’s because I’ve been looking for an easy way to do simple plots for yonks. When I did a post about movie ratings, I tried chart.el: It̵…
1 year ago
Everyone talks about Singapore as an effective (but some say cold) governance model. Many people wish that American cities and towns could follow Singapore's example. However, the ingredients of its success can already be found throughout America. With plenty of cities delivering impressive results....
1 year ago
The noted inventor and futurist’s successor to his landmark book The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will transform the human race in the decades to come Since it was first published...
1 year ago
Indonesia’s emergence was both more violent and more pioneering than commonly imagined
1 year ago
The jhanas are a series of eight (or nine) altered mental states, which progress from euphoria, to calm, to dissolution of reality – culminating in cessation, or loss of consciousness. They are induced via sustained concentration, without any external stimuli or substances. This is a practical guide...
1 year ago
We will define one person of compute as 20 PFLOPS (64 A100s, or a single dense 42U A100 rack). We are in the era of the 1 rack person, consuming about 30kW to provide those 20 PFLOPS.
1 year ago
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
1 year ago
Music is widely considered to be a freeing experience of self-expression. But you may be surprised to learn that the twelve musical tones that shape o...
1 year ago
From tech in NYC to chemical manufacturing in Nasik (India), here’s a guide that hopefully nobody ever needs. On April 17, 2017 my dad died. It was the worst day of my life. It was also the day I started to lead a second company – his company. (Note: the first company is CB Insights.) His company wa...
1 year ago
Groups Conversations All groups and messages Send feedback to Google Help Training Sign in Groups comp.lang.forth Conversations About Privacy • Terms info Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable. Dismiss Learn more A Forth Story...
1 year ago
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Not...
1 year ago
In the mid-to-late 90s I had my first encounters with computers. I remember playing Oregon Trail on an Apple II in elementary school, typing random letters and numbers on a friends MS-DOS machine to print out on a dot-matrix printer, and disassembling old broken PCs and HDDs for fun and a peek at th...
1 year ago
Over the summer, I spent about two weeks in Tajikistan, mostly in Dushanbe (the capital) and various points along the Pamir Highway, which borders Afghanistan and later leads into Kyrgyzstan. This …
1 year ago
LWN .net News from the source Content Weekly Edition Archives Search Kernel Security Events calendar Unread comments LWN FAQ Write for us Edition Return to the Front page User: Password: | | Subscribe / Log in / New account How free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life [LWN subscriber-only content]...
1 year ago
1/25-Scale Cray C90 Wristwatch “Ah, it’s time to order a more practical watch!” Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there h...
1 year ago
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote: I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening. There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish
1 year ago
The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt Culture is increasingly mediated through algorithms. These algorithms have splintered the organization of culture, a result of states and tech companies vying for influence over mass audiences. One byproduct of this splintering is a shi...
1 year ago
A year ago I walked out of the office for the last time. I handed in my corpo laptop, said some good-byes, and since then I have been my own boss. This first year has been funded by an NLnet grant, which I’m in the midst of wrapping up. As of now, the work is all done, the final request for payment ...
1 year ago
Peak Population Projections Posted on 2024-06-04 by tmurphy Last week, I reported the surprising realization that official population projections from the United Nations adhere to a notion of future fertility that appears to be immediately at odds with present real trends. The recent rapid decline i...
1 year ago
The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?
1 year ago
Science and technology ASU study points to origin of cumulative culture in human evolution Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge through social learning around 600,000 years ago Stone tools that become increasingly more complex over the course of 3 million years. Left: First tim...
1 year ago
Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, ...
1 year ago
The Voyager program took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to send two spacecraft on a tour of the solar system's gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. In addition to the cameras and scientific instruments, each Voyager has 3 computers (plus their backups, for a total of 6):
1 year ago
This is the book I wish I had when I started developing software. At the time, there were books on languages and books on object-oriented programming, but few books on design. Knowing the features of the C++ language does not mean you can design a good object-oriented system, nor does knowing the Un...
1 year ago
Mental illness, as the eminent historian of psychiatry Michael MacDonald once aptly remarked, “is the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but it is the most social of maladies to those who observe its effects.” It is precisely the many social and cultural dimensions of ment...
1 year ago
Tesla's FSD - a Useless Technology Demo May 20, 2024 Introduction Rules of Engagement Test Ride 1: from Kings Beach to Truckee (11 miles) Test Ride 2: I-80 from Truckee to Blue Canyon (36 miles) Test Ride 3: from West-Valley College to I-85 Entrance (1 mile) Conclusion Introduction In the past month...
1 year ago
This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average. Michael Nielsen and Gwern tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daught...
1 year ago
I started Sidebar in the fall of 2012. At the time my vision was to create a “Hacker News for design”, a place where designers could come to showcase their work and discover new resources.
1 year ago
NOTE: This is a companion post to my piece in Public Books, 'The Encylopedia Project: Or, how to know in…
1 year ago
I didn't have a great need to write that story, but the quote would have fit it so perfectly I actually have an unfinished draft somewhere in my discarded Word documents.
1 year ago
As a nerdy teen I hated neural networks in data science because I couldn’t train one to multiply two-digit numbers and had a friend who wanted to build a movie scene detector like Shazam did with songs, which I couldn’t do no matter how I tried — perceptual hashing + NNs — it was too early. I believ...
1 year ago
Caltech mourns the loss of Edward C. Stone, leader of humanity’s first foray into interstellar space.
1 year ago
I spent the last month wondering and investigating how we might design better workflows for creative work that meld the best of human intuition and machine intelligence. I think a promising path is in the design of notation. More explicitly, I believe inventing better notations can contribute far mo...
1 year ago
Skip to main content Advertisement PLOS Mental Health Publish Submissions Submission Guidelines Figures Tables Supporting Information LaTeX What We Publish Preprints Revising Your Manuscript Submit Now Calls for Papers Policies Best Practices in Research Reporting Human Subjects Research Animal Rese...
1 year ago
The Functional Programming Hiring Problem June 9, 2024 | 20 min. read If you've ever seen a discussion of functional programming languages on the Internet, you'll have probably noticed one talking point in particular that comes up frequently. For the sake of generalization, let's make up a hypotheti...
1 year ago
The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family. My sister and I did not get a vote on the family budget; we were not the ones who had earned the money. But in any disagreement the question was always who had good arguments, not who was ...
1 year ago
1. The Need for Heretics In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encourag...
1 year ago
We first turned on monetization for our startup last May. We had low expectations but were pleasantly surprised when we got our first customer wi...
1 year ago
how developmental biology might contain the secrets to life, intelligence, and immortality
1 year ago
From 1983 to 1993 DARPA spent over $1 billion on a program called the Strategic Computing Initiative. The agency's goal was to push the boundaries of computers, artificial intelligence, and robotics to build something that, in hindsight, looks strikingly similar to the dystopian future of the Termin
1 year ago
At first glance, Mars seems pretty nice. The sun warms its rusty surface to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, and gentle breezes ruffle its dirt. Sp…
1 year ago
Downtown Doug Brown Thoughts from a combined Apple/Linux/Windows geek. Home About Mac ROM SIMMs Software Microcontroller lessons Contact Jun 08 Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked Doug Brown Linux, Microcontrollers, Windows 2024-06-08 What follows is the story of how I fixed not o...
1 year ago
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive Posted on June 1, 2024 by Jason Scott Like many bits of Internet Culture, this simple image of an empty series of rooms represents a deep-repressed or recently-remembered memory of a common Internet Legend, or it’s just a shot of nothing. If the answer is that i...
1 year ago
The short story In order to fully understand everything that has happened, I strongly encourage you to read the full article below, but this is a very short summary of what I want to say. On 28th J…
1 year ago
One evening back in January I finally had enough of thermal issues within my homelab server. You know, every time the computer fans make more noise than I think they should, I can't help but investigate! Also, the RTX4090 is so thick that it takes 3 PCIe slots worth of space on a typical motherboard...
1 year ago
The short comings of the current state of the Linux desktop experience. The potential that Linux have in becoming the true one OS to rule them all compared to Windows and Mac OS.
1 year ago
Underwater noise from ships has gotten louder, reshaping marine ecosystems and the lives of animals that depend on sounds to eat, mate, and navigate. Can ships ever pipe down?
1 year ago
This document aims to serve as a handbook for learning the key concepts underlying modern artificial intelligence systems. Given the speed of recent development in AI, there really isn’t a good textbook-style source for getting up-to-speed on the latest-and-greatest innovations in LLMs or other gene...
1 year ago
Don Estridge broke all of Big Blue's rules to create the home computer. The company would never forgive him for it.
1 year ago
AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and “unhobbling” gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expe...
1 year ago
Photographs and words by Jake Eshelman,Contributing Editor of Ecological Thinking I Think, Therefore I Relate: An Affirming Meander into Ecological Thinking By Jake Eshelman Sign up for our monthly newsletter! O ne of the joys of having a research-creation practice is fielding questions from people ...
1 year ago
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
1 year ago
Tri Dao Toggle navigation About Blog Publications Repositories ctrl k State Space Duality (Mamba-2) Part I - The Model Contents The SSD Model The Linear (SSM) Mode The Quadratic (Attention) Mode State Space Duality SSD vs. State Space Models SSD vs. Attention Best of Both Worlds The Mamba-2 Architec...
1 year ago
To grasp where inequality is headed—much less to reduce it—we will need to look beyond the economic.
1 year ago
Avital Balwit May 17, 2024 Articles My Last Five Years of Work Zack Minor/Woman walking on seashore. I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary r...
1 year ago
February 19, 2021 Gretchen Kell | UC Berkeley media relations Jim Breen has been the campus’s glassblower for 18 years. (UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally) To find Room B63 in the nondescript, industrial basement of UC Berkeley’s Hildebrand Hall, it’s best to follow your ea...
1 year ago
Her first film adaptation stars Blake Lively and hits theaters this summer, but readers and TikTok haters wonder what’s next. So does she.
1 year ago
I’ve struggled with insomnia for all of my adult life. It began in college and has waxed and waned in severity ever since, correlating with stress levels but not entirely.
1 year ago
@var title = "A week with Elixir" @var tags = "elixir" About a week ago I started looking at [[http://elixir-lang.org][Elixir]] Elixir had been one of those things that I was vaguely aware of but had not yet time to look at in any detail. This all changed when I discovered the announcement that Da...
1 year ago
This is another post in our Code Health series. A version of this post originally appeared in Google bathrooms worldwide as a Google Tes...
1 year ago
This week, Defector has turned itself over to a guest editor. Brandy Jensen, former editor at Gawker (RIP) and The Outline (RIP), and writer of the Ask A Fuck Up advice column (subscribe here!), has curated a selection of posts around the theme of Irrational Attachments. Enjoy! New Atheism feels tod...
1 year ago
I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.
1 year ago
In this section, we share best practices for the core components of the emerging LLM stack: prompting tips to improve quality and reliability, evaluation strategies to assess output, retrieval-augmented generation ideas to improve grounding, and more. We also explore how to design human-in-the-loop ...
1 year ago
Marc Andreessen isn’t always known for his good advice, but he was right in one memorable exchange: When asked by a Stanford student if they should drop out of college, he responded, “Stay in school. Because if you’re going to drop out, you won’t listen to me anyway.” As a college dropout, this advi...
1 year ago
Four ginever glasses sit on a mirrored table at Distilleerderij’t Nieuwe Diep in Fevopark, Amsterdam. Only one manufacturer makes these glasses, and it’s closing. The distillery stockpi…
1 year ago
I miss BSD/Linux. Or was that GNU/Unix, I’m not sure? Silly jokes to get a statistical …
1 year ago
My new PSU burns out! I fix it, and torture it by cracking water... May 2024 Electronics Science My brand new PSU, the most complicated circuit I designed and built just recently, started life in October 2023. It seemed to work pretty well, at least I got through the long and dark winter with it fee...
1 year ago
A lot of new CSS features have shipped in the last years, but actual usage is still low. One of the biggest barriers: we need to re-wire our own brains.
1 year ago
The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center based in Berkeley, California. Our research focuses on identifying and promoting technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges in three areas: energy, conservation, and food and farming.
1 year ago
Christopher Field is one of the winners of the 2024 Golden Grot Awards. Find out why his win is a testament to all the non-traditional use cases for Grafana dashboards.
1 year ago
Where are the builders? Posted on May 9, 2024 by near What are the brightest and most ambitious minds of our generation currently working on? Here is a video from someone who spent 7 months building minecraft inside of minecraft by painstakingly constructing a redstone computer inside of it with its...
1 year ago
Even before the web developer job market became as dire as it is today, I was regularly seeing developers burn out and leave the industry. Some left for good; some only temporarily.
1 year ago
Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on software performance • ...
1 year ago
Today, we’re announcing RAG 2.0, our approach for developing robust and reliable AI for enterprise-grade performance. Unlike the previous generation of RAG, which stitches together frozen models, vector databases, and poor quality embeddings, our system is optimized end to end. Using RAG 2.0, we’ve ...
1 year ago
Trisha shares how her working practices changed after having children, and includes tips for how working parents can get more from their time
1 year ago
Nice Nazis, friendly factory farmers, and the evolution of sincere but selective moral instincts
1 year ago
I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK's top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of...
1 year ago
mmap(blog) Posts About Atom Feed Enlightenmentware ✏ 2024-05-20 ✂ 2024-05-20 UNIX Git Emacs Boost.Graph Bazel Conclusion As programmers, we interact with software tools daily. Most of them can barely get the job done. But once in a white, we discover a piece of software that transcends mere utility....
1 year ago
Gumroad pays freelancers around the world $125-$200/hr. They choose how much of this they’d like to get in equity–between 0 and 80%. Equity entitles one to annual dividends.
1 year ago
I published this entry both in my old and new blogs, and I repost it here in its entirety.
1 year ago
A quarter-century ago, the “Science Wars” — an unfortunate military metaphor applied to an intellectual debate — pitted a motley crew of postmodernist-influenced literary scholars and social…
1 year ago
This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with ...
1 year ago
Drawing on his extensive experience as a historian and diplomat, Philip Zelikow warns that the United States faces an exceptionally volatile time in global politics and that the period of maximum danger might be in the next one to three years. He highlights lessons from the anti-American partnership...
1 year ago
Ideas and Creativity Tags: musings, research Published on Sunday, November 17, 2019 « Previous post: A short analysis of ICLR 2020 reviews — Next post: The Misunderstood Stoic » Developing ideas is the central aspect of many professions, including—but certainly not limited to—academic research and s...
1 year ago
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
1 year ago
Remote work expert David Tate wrote that when fearful CEOs talk about workplace culture, they’re really talking about workplace control. Their insecurities demand that the way work is done by emplo…
1 year ago
Swift sucks at web serving… or does it? May 15, 2024 by Contents Benchmark method & apparatus Benchmark results Debugging the benchmark Domain experts weigh in Examining the load The “right” load A “fair” load Do these improvements apply to the other cases too? …but… why is the success rate still we...
1 year ago
Just 50 years after the Roman Empire grew to its largest size, a mysterious and crippling pandemic known as the Antonine plague brought it to its knees. Research on climate change and in other areas is shedding light into how the plague, which preceded centuries of decline, emerged to pack such a de...
1 year ago
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Today’s rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide increase is 10 times faster than at any other point in the past 50,000 years, researchers have found through a detailed chemical analysis of ancient Antarctic ice. The findings, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of ...
1 year ago
The Variational Principles of Mechanics, Cornelius Lanczos (University of Toronto Press, 1949). While sailing a little boat the other day, I thought of a new way to troll the Aristotelians. I love it when my hobbies converge like that, and if the second one sounds a little mean-spirited, well, remem...
1 year ago
The inside story of four years building Muse, a canvas-based thinking tool for iPad and Mac.
1 year ago
In a paper published in Physical Review X on May 13, a quartet of physicists and computer scientists expand the modern theory of the thermodynamics of computation. By combining approaches from statistical physics and computer science, the researchers introduce mathematical equations that reveal the ...
1 year ago
In AI systems, multi-modality is the holy grail. When I was working on self-driving cars, that was also the dream architecture: one big model that takes in all of the sensors as inputs (sound, visual, lidar, radar) and makes decisions directly. For technical reasons, this is really hard to do (compu...
1 year ago
References are like jumps May 13, 2024 In a high-level language, the programmer is deprived of the dangerous power to update his own program while it is running. Even more valuable, he has the power to split his machine into a number of separate variables, arrays, files, etc.; when he wishes to upda...
1 year ago
NPR > Shots - Health News Outdoor time is good for your kids' eyesight. Here's why By Maria Godoy Monday, May 13, 2024 • 5:00 AM EDT Heard on Morning Edition If you're a parent struggling to get your kids' off their devices and outdoors to play, here's another reason to keep trying: Spending at leas...
1 year ago
Apple’s iPad ad might not have been good for Apple, but it was a profound encapsulation of what has happened on the Internet; the question is what it leads to next.
1 year ago
Steve Jobs famously cared about the unseen backs of cabinets. Antique furniture built with hand tools isn’t like that at all. Cabinetmakers made each part to the tolerance that mattered. The …
1 year ago
The Age of Rage: Why are People are So Angry? According to a 2018 Guardian article, we are living in an ‘age of rage’. Such anger is often framed as having an ideological or political bend or etiology (e.g. Trump, Biden, Covid). Another article The West needs to grow up argues that infantilism is to...
1 year ago
Learn about the $80 billion company that makes the software behind AI, mobile, and automotive chips. Plus: are we at the end of Moore's Law?
1 year ago
Home • Tikalon Innovation Service Model • About • Links • Blog • Contact 100 Years of IBM May 6, 2024 There are considerable statistics on human life expectancy. Men in the United States are expected to live 76 years, and women are expected to live nearly 81 years. These are actually lower than for ...
1 year ago
The Uyghur city in Xinjiang has been disrupted by outside forces through history — of which Chinese rebuilding is the latest change. A book of images and stories records what it once was.
1 year ago
It seems there are too many people in the security industry that are too fast to condemn C/C++, touting the virtues of Rust without fully understanding the nuances and implications. Rust may be a safer language but it’s not that simple.
1 year ago
<p>What tools would you reach for today to style the UI for a <a href='https://medium.com/all-the-things/the-trouble-with-saas-279694551b25'>hyper-customizable app</a>? I just spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to understand the current landscape and settle on the perfect framework. I was...
1 year ago
May 4, 2024 @ 6:45 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Epigraphy, Language and archeology, Language and culture, Language and history, Language contact
1 year ago
Can't switch off from work? Envy those 'lazy' strikers? In this 1932 essay, Bertrand Russell, socialist and winner of some minor award called the Nobel Prize in Literature, presents the case for idleness. One can also download and/ or listen to an audio version here.
1 year ago
It was the 28th of June, 2020; the perfect summer day. I remember it distinctly because of two important events that took place on that day. The first was the unfortunate discovery that I am highly sensitive to the venomous hairs of the Oak processionary caterpillar. If you’ve never wished you could...
1 year ago
It’s not you. It’s me. (Taking a break from Mastodon) April 4, 2024March 17, 2024 I’m closing up shop on my Mastodon for the foreseeable future. I have for the most part very much enjoyed my experience on the Fediverse, and experts say that Mastodon is one of the components of the Fediverse. Mastodo...
1 year ago
How the eccentric Argentine author came to occupy the center of Latin American literature.
1 year ago
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
1 year ago
Europe is special to me as I consider myself a proud European, but damn we need to talk. Europe please wake up.
1 year ago
A common complaint amongst the old guard bloggers is that the old web as we knew it is dying. This is false.The old web has actually been dead for many...
1 year ago
In the early 1940s, German submarines (U-Boats) were wreaking havoc on Allied forces in the Atlantic Ocean, sinking ships, and threatening to turn the tide of the war. What the Allies of WWII needed was something literally too big to fail. And one inventor working for the British Combined Operations...
1 year ago
In the first Map Story we met Eratosthenes, who tried to calculate the size of the Earth almost 2300 years ago (and got really pretty close). Today we’ll meet
1 year ago
It’s a common spy thriller trope. There’s a special key that can unlock something critical – business records, bank vaults, government secrets, nuclear weapons, maybe all of the above, worldwide.
1 year ago
It’s quite a journey from being born on a commune to raising more than $87m in funding at a software company. This journey forced me to wrestle with existential questions about my true beliefs, and how they intersected my life as an entrepreneur. One’s work is rarely a pure reflection of ideology, b...
1 year ago
The Apple MacBook Air 15-inch M3 is a near-perfect combination of silent and effortless performance, epic battery life, and elegant design.
1 year ago
Quick math-personality quiz: What is seven-and-one-fourth minus three-fourths, expressed as a mixed number (a whole number plus a proper fraction)? What matters isn’t what answer you get but how yo…
1 year ago
Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives
1 year ago
The Voyage of Magellan Chapter 5: Underway Apr 26, 2024 September 20 – October 3, 1519 At nearly the same instant that Magellan’s carracks sailed from Sanlúcar, a dozen or so sleek, swift Portuguese caravels put to sea from Lisbon. Taking advantage of the same favorable wind as Magellan’s fleet but ...
1 year ago
I am a perfectionist by nature. Releasing software in to the wild that has imperfections annoys me. For that matter, doing anything that is imperfect annoys me. Thankfully, there is this little thi…
1 year ago
>>> 2024-04-26 microsoft at work (PDF) I haven't written anything for a bit. I'm not apologizing, because y'all don't pay me enough to apologize, but I do feel a little bad. Part of it is just that I've been busy, with work and travel and events. Part of it is that I've embarked on a couple of writi...
1 year ago
I had another instance of my Apple ID mysteriously being locked. First, my iPhone wanted me to enter the password again, which I thought was the “normal” thing it has done every few months, almost since I got it. But after doing so it said that my account was locked.
1 year ago
640 Pages in 15 Months ↩ ↪ July 29, 2021 book design language personal My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago. But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, e-book and PDF versions are done. You can buy it....
1 year ago
Laws of Software Evolution by kqr , published 2024-03-25 Tags: design management organisations product_development Andrew Kelly has written a thoughtful article on why we can’t have nice software. He acknowledges that software often gets continuous maintenance, and notes that this is curious, since ...
1 year ago
We are now in a very weird liminal space in information retrieval for consumers, particularly those attuned to trends in search and working on the bleeding...
1 year ago
Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years Once you get good at Rust all of these problems will go away Rust being great at big refactorings solves a largely self-inflicted issues with the borrow checker Indirection only solves some problems, and always at the cost of dev ergonomics ECS solves the wrong kin...
1 year ago
This is a bit of a continuation of my last post about burnout, or at least a tangent. I have no tech news to share right now nor any startup tips, so this is what you get :) A thought I had a bit, well, for a long time, was what were the occupational hazards of computing, tech, and to a lesser exten...
1 year ago
John Archibald Wheeler is a bit of a hero for me (and also, like all good hero’s a bit of a villain). Discovering his paper “It from Bit” was definitely a huge inspiration for me …
1 year ago
Focus by Automation Automation Programming Emacs Vim Posted on 2024-03-19 Contents Automation 🤖 Focus 🔍 Distractions ⚡ Organization 📓 The value of mastery 🧙 Braaains 🧠 Footnotes Automation 🤖 I’ve invested leisure time to save time when I’m working hard...
1 year ago
The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I started this up, blogging was all the rage, and lots of other blogs about fundamental physics were starting a...