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Notes on manufacturing and our posterity.

I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has c…

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...

The Cathedral and the Bazaar Next

While America is battling exhaustion and political polarization at home, it is now facing something it’s never faced abroad: it is locked into a security competition against multiple opponents who, when taken together, are in fact vastly superior to America in terms of industrial capacity. This on i...

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...

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

Congratulations to the xAI team—and the advocates of the scaling laws

A developer's journey through building an LLM from scratch, sharing key insights about tokenization, training, and the learning process of mastering AI fundamentals.

Why does this ancient society capture the modern imagination?

I was reading about a dispute involving the Linux kernel recently (which for the record I don't think either side handled well), and I realised something: Very...

And the politics aren't looking great

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 ...

The description suggests that this is some kind of extended metaphor about work. It appears to be written in that _Choose Your Own Adventure_ style second-person voice, yet there are no choices to be found within. Against your better judgment, you follow the link.

It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell

I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”

Creativity after AI

then do life with them.

Peter Ames Carlin’s book The Name of This Band is R.E.M. charts the band’s path from kings of alternative rock to elevator muzak.

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...

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 ...

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...

Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United States as we know it -- in the very near future

Instead of forcing people out of Golden Gate Park, ranger Amanda Barrows helps them find housing.

Learn how to achieve flow state and defeat digital distractions through environment design, mindful breaks, and deep work practices for a more focused life.

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 →

Thoughts on what A.I. is good at, and where it lacks, and how that impacts web developers

what I spent, what I earned, and why I'm walking away

What LLM's can't do yet

This is the research. This is the work.

Opinion Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ‘Not on the Best Path’ Gary Marcus discusses AI's technical problems, and why he thinks Large Language Models have reached a “point of diminishing returns.” By Leah Hoffmann Posted Feb 13 2025 Share Twitter Reddit Hacker News Download PDF Print Jo...

Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.

I woke up this morning about an hour ahead of my alarm, the sky already light, birds calling.

A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of – and one you probably saw earlier today.

This summarizes the frustratingly ambiguous state of the evidence for pretty much any "Does X cause Y?" question you might have.

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...

IRB you kidding me?

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 ...

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 … […]

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…

I still have dozens of sketchbooks, many filled with ideas for logos, layouts, and other designs. These pages don’t just capture fully realized

A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup

What is the Tao of Go, and how can we work with it, like a surfer going with the waves instead of struggling against them? By being kind, simple, humble, and not striving; here’s how.

Grief and new motherhood have transformed my brain, my body, and my sense of self.

Most of the things we make and do for money are patently irrelevant to our survival—and to what gives life meaning, besides.

Pre-order Civilization VII for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, or Steam. Choose from the Standard, Deluxe Edition, or Founders Edition.

A TL;DR version of Andrej Karpathy's "Deep dive into LLMs like ChatGPT" video.

Frupidity is stupid frugality that wrecks engineering teams. Misguided cost-cutting kills productivity, morale, and innovation. You can fight it.

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...

What's the point of blogging?

Nucelo is an open source blogging platform with a minimal and beautiful page.

It’s been an idea for over three decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?

{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 ...

A haven for the super rich, or a city built on scams? The BBC was invited to find out.

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...

jam code

We talked with the designer behind games such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

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...

Inside a decade of struggle to bring a scandal to light

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.

A Systems View of LLMs on TPUs (Part 0: Intro | Part 1: Rooflines)

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...

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 ...

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.

Before I dig into the gist of my own testing, just a wee reference to Microsoft's hardware requirement mantra. Apparently, Microsoft has decided to stick with its business plan, statistics be damned. 'Tis a game of who blinketh first, the customer or the arbitrary TPM thingie. Now, Microsoft also se...

The polymath making venture adventurous again

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....

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...

William Gibson offers a future where technology has enabled a socially-cleansed London. Gibson's earlier prescience has Justin McGuirk a little worried.

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...

The prevailing public mindset that AI is only a labor-saving tool betrays a lack of understanding of why people create and a lack of imagination of this technology's potential.

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.

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...

A “build system” is one of the most important tools in a developer’stoolbox. Roughly, it figures out how to create runnable programs froma bunch of different...

[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...

Silicon Valley is reeling. However, founder Liang Wenfeng has remained low-key, with his most recent appearance being on China Central Television's Xinwen Lianbo (CCTV News).

Goodbye, Digital Natives. Hello, AI Natives

What’s odd about you is what’s interesting.

Plus: news.

New research finds that iodine played a substantial role in cognitive improvements in 20th century Americans.

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...

Eros, desire, instinct, eternity

Writing modern software increasingly involves the use of dependencies, that is other pieces of software [1]. For example, I “wrote” the software that produces the website you’re looking at right now by gluing together a number of Rust libraries. If those libraries hadn’t existed – and if cargo [2] d...

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.

Documenting an attempt to build a single-purpose smartwatch.

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...

I break down the logic behind the company's towering price tag and why I think the most valuable AI companies have yet to be built.

I go on a journey to learn about a man named Quentell, and discover unsettling things about the information landscape.

It’s been over a year since one of the most significant turning points in my life, and it’s time to reflect on that.

Outmaneuvering internet firewalls isn't easy, but Proton VPN is waging a digital war for an open internet.

Explainer: What's R1 & Everything Else? Sat January 25, 2025 Is AI making you dizzy? A lot of industry insiders are feeling the same. R1 just came out a few days ago out of nowhere, and then there’s o1 and o3, but no o2. Gosh! It’s hard to know what’s going on. This post aims to be a guide for recen...

A digital twin of a human mind? It isn’t science fiction.

All the reasons why Nvidia will have a very hard time living up to the currently lofty expectations of the market.

Joel Hawksley / joel@hawksley.org / ←home

An exposé no one will read, about the widespread falsification of user posts in PhysicsForums, a scientific community founded in 2001. This is a microcosm of the death of the human-written Internet.

We need a vibe shift on dependencies in programming.

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...

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...

Steve Korshakov's Personal Site

Can All-Purpose Robots Fuel a Comeback?

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...

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

This post celebrates influential papers that shaped technology and communication. Their foundational concepts inspire continued innovation, highlighting the importance of understanding our roots fo…

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 ...

Optimizing Castro's worker jobs to get your podcasts to you more quickly

GHQ is available now, nearly 70 years after the author created it

Machine conquest: Jules Verne’s technocratic worldmaking

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...

I quit my last contracting gig in August with £40k in debt, no other income, and only a business idea (it failed).

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...

A new village for families building the future

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.

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 ...

From the Stanford Prison Experiment to time perspective theory, Phil Zimbardo left his mark on the field of psychology.

For decades, school design was synonymous with rigidity; now, child-centric principles are reshaping contemporary educational spaces.

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.

A retrospective of an eight-year stint.

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...

Try to Fix It One Level Deeper Sep 6, 2024 I had a productive day today! I did many different and unrelated things, but they all had the same unifying theme: There’s a bug! And it is sort-of obvious how to fix it. But if you don’t laser-focus on that, and try to perceive the surrounding context, it ...

John Cena's not a small guy, but he—and Mattel's movie—have some big shoes to fill if they're telling the origin story of Matchbox.

We praise canonical authors for their boundless imagination. Then why do all their plots feel the same?

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...

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design Bret Victor / November 8, 2011

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...

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 …

Happy Hacking Keyboards (HHKB) and REALFORCE keyboards are engineered for maximum performance. Learn more about our mechanical keyboards for gamers, programmers, and more.

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...

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...

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 …

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 ...

Technology is enabling increasingly fast times but how fair is it when it impacts marathon runners so differently?

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...

How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

An open response to a recent Decoder episode on workplace software and Slack

Tom Lamont: Author & Aviator - James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist by Jeffrey Meyers

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

This paper discusses ways in which automation of industrial processes may expand rather than eliminate problems with the human operator.   ...

Surviving a world gone gray.

It was once normal for economists to imagine a world with less work. What happened?

A new analysis of mummified brains pushes back the timeline for the globalization of coca

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 —

What would the Django Software Foundation look like if we had 4x our current budget?

What is changing now that will still be changing in ten years? Anchor your strategy on that.

OR: The mystery of the televised salad

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.

Minicars are all the rage in Europe and Asia, but they haven't caught on in the United States

The Rise of Worse is Better Richard P. Gabriel Lucid, Inc {an excerpt from "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big." [html]} 2.1 The Rise of Worse is Better I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this st...

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...

Anthropology has been bad at capturing the living conditions of women. A kidnapped woman who returned to civilization was the exception.

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...

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...

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 ...

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

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...

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 - 'Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.'

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...

Social media isn't toxic, most people just haven't figured out the game (yet)

Cosmopolitan Libc has the fastest most efficient mutexes for contended workloads.

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 ...

ALWYN TURNER selects some passages from British literature that concern sausages.

John Maynard Keynes was an aesthete in the most capacious sense.

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. ...

Have you plucked away at this thing they call the ‘Internet’ lately?

fhur's blog

Drawing a line art imitation of one of demoscene favorite Boris Vallejo's fantasy paintings using only four colors.

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...

The personal website of Jeffrey Paul.

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.

"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.

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 = […...

The market needs to be irrational for you to stay solvent.

Kris Kristofferson, the revered songwriter whose poetic lyrics transcended genre, has died at age 88.

Ted Kaczynski Ted Kaczynski's Low-Tech Lifestyle

'There are no good modern pubs.' With original sketches from 1966 and scathing critique, Gardiner bemoans the state of London's pubs.

Taking a good look around (both inside and out) of my brand new MEGA65 computer system from Trenz Electronic GmbH.

Greenwich, an experiment in collaborative curation

How to build developer tools for happiness and productivity.

The language Go hails from an era when programmers had smaller egos and fewer commercial ambitions. My generation of strivers has a lot to learn.

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...

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...

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.

Engineers Need Art Projects SystemSix Mooncraft 2000 Adam74 Stereographer

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.

Working five days a week has long been the corporate cultural norm. But some companies are exploring the option of letting employees work for days a week. shedding the tradition and exploring a four-day week.

Keju's role in slowing technological development

When everyone builds in public, no one builds in public.

I published an overview of the project a few days ago:

Operator does not look like much, but a lot of thought went into adding details that make a difference. Here are some of them:

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...

JJ About Articles Reminder

Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?

Doctors need a medical humanities that does more than just help them see health and disease through a patient's eyes.

Use the parallel processing power of your GPU to simulate a simple chemical system that exhibits emergent behaviors

Why Britain has stagnated

Is the meaning of MTTR "Mean Time to Repair" or "Mean Time to Recover"? What's the difference and why does it matter?

Organizations tend to drift towards danger and normalize deviations from procedure.

Dark Forests, Dense Networks

I program my home computer, beam myself into the future

Guest Post   Every once in a while I get a question, either privately or in a department meeting, regarding CUNYFirst. Here is what I ...

Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants. CMYKat The Road to Hell Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big…

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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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…

It's hard to make friends as an adult. One lonely man in his 30s finds a nonjudgmental and supportive community at a local spin studio.

A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.

Keynotes as a proxy for reflecting on Apple as a whole.

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...

Or what happens when journalism forgets about quality writing

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.

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…

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?

Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.

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

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

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

From our print archive: Gamesmanship and America’s first Nobel Prize scientist, Albert Abraham Michelson.

In the early 1980s, Drexel became the first university in the country to require all students to have a personal computer, a mandate made possible through a first-of-its-kind partnership with Apple Inc.

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...

How far are the o1 preview and mini models from AGI?

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.

Seismologists were mystified by a strange signal that persisted for nine days in 2023 – now its source has been identified as a standing wave caused by a landslide in Greenland

My blog

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 ...

Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React. Plenty of corporations thought they knew better but failed to see the larger picture.

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...

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...

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...

Why we should give up on trying to avoid distractions, and just get better ones instead.

about me I am 18, born in 2006. This is generally a good thing as I am in the prime of life currently. I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”, I think I was born at the perfect time to take advantage of superlinearly growing technological advancements. the intern...

I am no longer investing in new companies.

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...

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.

A future you might actually want to live in.

Genius is fragile. Success, even more so. What does it mean then for an artist to fail?

Euan Ashley joins Derek to discuss the benefits of exercise and our current scientific understanding of why it helps

Children's perception of time is relatively understudied. Learning to see time through their eyes may be fundamental to a happier human experience.

FOSS • Linux • Programming

Published on Sunday, January 15, 01989 • 35 years, 7 months ago Written by Danny Hillis for Physics Today

I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...

Ohad's blog

Radical Simplicity is about cutting through the noise, focusing on what truly matters, and delivering results that are effective and efficient.

Things I learned after lying in an MRI machine for 30 hours

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

But, for us, computation doesn't mean scrolling around in screens.

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...

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

Frances Glessner Lee didn’t want to be known as a “rich woman who didn’t have enough to do.” In her 60s, she became a pioneer of forensic science.

This cooperative could be its own country.

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 ...

Trees, bicycles, quiet pints by the lake, and taking out £1.9bn of debt to have it all

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...

A leading computer scientist says it’s “educability,” not intelligence, that matters most.

💻 mbrizic home about blog

It might seem a reasonable question, but it makes some terrible assumptions: lines of code = effort lines of code = value all lines of c...

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...

On his 65th birthday, Stephen Wolfram details how his 'now or never' thinking has made the last five years some of his most productive. Read about his projects in tech and science.

After a few years of unhappiness, I finally write the email that saved my life.

Half a century ago, an obscure state senator fought to ban gas-powered cars — and almost won.

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...

Part 11) 2021-July-24, she was arrested I was sound asleep, in a hazy state, when suddenly I heard the door to the bedroom being opened. My heart skipped a beat: Could she know that the situation h…

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…

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...

It has been twenty years since Valgrind 1.0 was released.

After 12 years at Google (18 years if you count my time as a Visiting Scientist while I still was in academia), I have decided it is time to move on.  I will… | 116 comments on LinkedIn

State is time, time is state.

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.

There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.

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, …

Imagine the following scenario:

An increasing number of self-hostable software meets a tool to make self-hosting trivial.

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...

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.

Modern software architectures are a Jenga tower about to collapse

The OpenAI CEO wants to extend his life by 10 years, but doesn’t care the poor die 15 years earlier than the rich

The Olivetti Programma 101 desk-top computer; history, design, and legacy of what is possibly the first human-centered personal computer ever

the art of programming and why i won't use llm

Dr. David Minkoff shares what he's learned from competing in multisport as a septuagenarian.

Every Age Echoes with Its Own Ideas. Ancient Voices Offer a Way to Cut Through the Noise. A Response to a Critic of Old Books

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...

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.

Kevin Boone

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...

Marc Olson, a long-time Amazonian, discusses the evolution of EBS, highlighting hard-won lessons in queueing theory, the importance of comprehensive instrumentation, and the value of incrementalism versus radical changes. It's an insightful look at how one of AWS’s foundational services has evolved...

When working remotely, asking for help is often just a few keystrokes away. So it's tempting to "quickly" ask someone for support when you get stuck.

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.

Euphemisms are like underwear: best changed frequently. What work are they doing in our language and why do they expire?

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...

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...

[Simon Tatham, 2024-08-21]

Nuclear is expensive, but it should be cheap

The Discovery of the Celendrical Date Line

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...

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.

Home Notes Popular RSS Subscribe August 20, 2024 What's the big deal about Deterministic Simulation Testing? testingdst

Art Videos Books

EWD 1036 On the cruelty of really teaching computing science The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to w...

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…

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

How would you classify all the pdfs in the internet? Well, that is what I tried doing this time.

Innovation dead for twenty years? Tell that to 2004

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 …

Lee Maxwell owns a Guinness-world-record-holding washing machine collection. When his wife of 71 years died, he was left to ponder what his life would look like.

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-...

Casey and I discuss solar energy economics, learning curves, the triumphs and foibles of the space industry, and more.

My top 3 biggest productivity killers and my solutions to them + 🎁 BONUS: one additional: multi-tasking

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

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...

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...

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 …

The future of Deep Learning frameworks

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...

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,

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...

This blog post looks at how Bede’s famous parable of the sparrow was reused in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

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.

One of the central themes of stackoverflow.com is that software developers no longer learn programming from books, as Joel mentioned: Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers. Joel ex...

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 ...

A recent study in BMJ Open reveals that Americans have the shortest life expectancy among six high-income English-speaking countries.

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...

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...

Monday, August 12, 2024

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.

The mayor of Philadelphia ordered all city employees back to the office full-time this summer. Now some workers are wondering whether their jobs are worth the flexibility they're giving up.

Escaping our problems, whether in our homes, our marriages, our careers, or elsewhere, is easier than remaining where we are and doing the hard work of repair.

Always choose the right tool for the job? Nah. I know Go quite well, and I use it wherever I can. Want to find out why?

Introducing the autonomy, product, and operations teams.

A blog about AI and random thoughts.

OpenStreetMap at 20

A blog about AI and random thoughts.

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.

Theory #31 | For people who aspire to build things that do

Over many visits over two decades, I have witnessed China's meteoric rise from a land of bicycles to an electric vehicle powerhouse.

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."...

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...

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...

When do music stars achieve fame, and how long does fame typically last?

Chuck Carroll Reading Writing Now

Ergodic literature is a subgenre of literature that upends the very fabric of storytelling itself.

Millions of men don’t know they’re suffering from sleep apnea. Consider this a wake-up call.

Well-run payment systems are developed by engineers who understand what is the best use of their time: to catch unknown unknowns, and to do it fast.

“From the beginning, he displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed.”

A GitHub founder's musings on the past, present and future of large groups of people collaborating on software in awesome ways.

Programming Adventures

Now more famous as a distilling ingredient, agave has been a traditional food in Southern California for millennia.

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.

Twenty years after its debut, Yelp has changed how we think about reviewing everything and anything

The composer Tristan Foison was a plagiarizing fabulist. His brief success reveals the rot at the heart of the classical music industry.

Transform your board with a simple 3D print

Cyber|Show Home Episodes About Blog

All three of these things get a lot of hate for being elitist, obscure, irrelevant, painful, and useless. But are they?

now about contact Kartik Agaram Freewheeling Apps Jul 31, 2024 How I program in 2024 I talk a lot here about using computers freely, how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such i...

One of the world's foremost economists, Lant Pritchett, has a plan.

4k words, 19 minutes reading time

A middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.

Computers are amazing. So why is software so terrible?

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other

Had history gone differently, it might have been EDSF or even ASXC.

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...

I gave an invited keynote at PyCon US 2024 in Pittsburgh this year. My goal was to say some interesting things about AI—specifically about Large Language Models—both to help catch …

We've forgotten what community really means.

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...

The city can no longer use personal judgment when deciding how to alter historic properties. Will redevelopment of a ‘sacrosanct’ funeral home pass muster?

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...

Or, Inference in Relational Space is Human-Hard

Regulation-induced monocultures meet unfortunate but explicable engineering decisions.

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.

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.

Dear Safari, I know we’ve been together for a long time, but I’m starting to have second thoughts.

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.

(or at least work better)

Was the Internet Created for Nuclear War?

Or Why Tech Monopolies Are Actually Good For Society. A defence of “Big Tech” on the principles of progress. Hold on! Stow the pitchforks! Hear me out...

Software industry has become more driven by profit and unnecessary complexity that by the ability to build and launch innovative products.

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...

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

The tonal Navajo language differentiates words based on pitch and makes Spanish conjugation look like child’s play.

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...

We've learned a lot in the last year -- from specific growth tactics to the importance of planning for the long-term.

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Matthew Honnibal is a computational linguist from Sydney based in Berlin, Germany. He's the author of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library and the co-founder of Explosion.

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...

Kurt greeted us in his beautiful 19th century house and in his bare feet (of which more later). As the interview progressed it grew sort of

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...

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...

C R Y P T O N O M I C O N

Or, why are there Seven Sisters?

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.

Dealing with unexpected popularity

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 ...

Those who want to ditch their car might want to avoid North America

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…

Defense of Lisp macros Replacing Lisp's beautiful parentheses with dozens of special tools and languages, none powerful enough to conquer the whole software landscape, leads to fragmentation and extra effort from everyone, vendors and developers alike. The automotive field is a case in point. Intro ...

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...

LLMs are being commoditized

Things I believe about computer programming. Might change.

Humans have always tried to live forever. Maybe you can, but not in the way you imagine.

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...

First of all, this blogpost is kinda long. Let me prove to you reading it will actually have some payoff:

Drama and the Birth Rate

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

A reconsideration of the Microsoft CEO everybody loves to hate

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 …

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...

What exists in the space between riffing and ripping

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.

everybody's afraid to disagree with you, so, you know, cool

8 months post-ice, it's time for something new!

Software Engineer, LITM

Digital disaster should not happen so easily.

Most of the Cuomo-era countdown clocks on the lettered subway lines failed; the old ones on the numbered lines did not.

How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it.

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...

It is nearly impossible to be happy without friends

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...

Peter K. G. Williams

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 ...

I am currently using the Russian textbook Mathematical Analysis by Zorich. But the more I use it, the more I feel it is making problems too hard or too advanced for the subject and it is unnecessar...

What were the binding constraints on a Roman Industrial Revolution?

A Blogpost series about Model Architectures Part 1: What happened to BERT and T5? Thoughts on Transformer Encoders, PrefixLM and Denoising objectives

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...

We live in an amazing world, and we should stop taking it for granted.

Bob Newhart, the genteel comic whose TV series “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” were huge hits throughout the 1970s and '80s, died Thursday. 

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.

Exclusive video footage of Steve Jobs talking about his design vision and philosophy and how design worked at Apple.

Practical tips that allow you to build an evolving architecture

The classic 1973 GMC Motorhome had a gross, little-known option that let it spray sewage out the exhaust as you drove.

After reading hundreds and hundreds of PhD theses, we accidentally discovered how to write the perfect PhD acknowledgement: it's a kind of poetry.

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 ...

For years, Lehrer spent half the year teaching math at UC Santa Cruz. At 96, he now lives in Massachusetts. Richard Stockton tracks his local legacy.

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.

Alexander Billet reviews Dominique Routhier’s “With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation.”

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.

Platonov is one of the greatest of Russian writers—not least for the characters he brought into the world. He deserves to be more widely read

From melting airport tarmac to power grids hit by hurricanes and reservoir dams stressed by extreme rainfall, our ‘Old World’ infrastructure is ill-equipped for climate change, writes Jeff Goodell.

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…

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.

Dr. Alan Kay:Doing With Images Makes Symbols: Communicating with ComputersSponsored by the Higher Education Marketing Group, Apple Computer, Inc.Recorded on...

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.

Immunotherapy is making tumors melt away.

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...

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....

It was mostly pretty bad, but Happy 4th of July!

You've surely read plenty about how simple is good, but what's wrong with easy?

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

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...

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 ...

Exploring Approaches to Electronic Music Notation

Back To the Calvin & Hobbes Page Back To the C&H Books Page Back To the Main Page Introduction By Bill Watterson (C)2001 From the book, "Calvin and Hobbes - Sunday Pages 1985 - 1995"

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 ...

The Exa API retrieves the best, realtime data from the web to complement your AI

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 ...

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...

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.

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 ...

In 1966, a British psychiatrist had an idea: to change the course of history by asking the public to share their eerie intuitions

I was contacted by someone asking what life in North Korea was really like followed by questions asking about my 3 years living there

A chance encounter in remote Australia has pushed back evidence for the start of complex life on the planet by 750 million years.

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…

If plate tectonics, oceans and continents are rare on worlds throughout the universe, that is.

Big Ball of Mud

The one where I talk about career stuff.

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

When the UK was the richest country in the world its regional inequality was unusually low. It's unlikely we could return to being the former without reducing regional inequality.

„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 …

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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

Biologist John Calhoun’s rodent experiments gripped a society consumed by fears of overpopulation.

Plus! Sanction Economics; Exiting; Building Complements; Shares and Votes; Quality Problems; Diff JObs

In the baltic sea, between Finland and Sverige there is a group of islands that are beautiful but have an anti-growth mindset.

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...

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

This article was posted to newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written on 10 Aug 1994 on behalf of Iain M Banks by Ken MacLeod.

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…

April 2007 A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of...

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If gamification isn’t specific to its subject, it won’t be effective.

I went to an algorave and it changed me forever.

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...

(the software crisis)

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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...

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Header Image: Katharine Way, undated. Photo courtesy of Physics Today.

This is a story of how it took me way too long to ship a product, and I ended up paying for a competitor product instead.

It really should be acceptable and normal to say “I don’t entirely understand what I just read, but I loved it.”

Rick Tumlinson writes that the International Space Station must be preserved rather than destroyed in reentry.

The University of Liverpool’s synchrocyclotron helped define physics in the 20th century, yet little trace of it remains. Rob Lea looks into the history of this lost machine

Why not just say "Profitable?"

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; ...

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.

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)...

On the freaky model world of the Dollomites; plus—more lucid dreaming and a roundup of recent favorites.

Using new techniques, every object in Conway's Game of Life that can be constructed at all, now has a fixed cost of 15 gliders. Here's how.

The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re living through, if not the last days of humanity, then surely the last days of liberal democracy on earth. All the more reason to…

How to maximize 10x work and avoid thoughtless daily 1x work routines

Self-hosting software comes with privacy, simple pricing and it's distributed by design. Why are we not building more self-hosted products?

This is part of a series of blog posts relating my experience pushing the performance of programming language interpreters written in Rust.

1 July 2024

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.

“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…

As someone who has used a static site generator every day at work for years I am on the threshold of believing “actually just writing HTML by hand is probably easier” This becomes obvious when you …

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.

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.

A case for planting more trees in urban areas.

Programmers should be paranoid.

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…

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 — ...

People expect that we all have the same communication instincts, but there are at least two communication styles that, without knowledge of them, will result in a lifetime of missed connections.

How Ukrainian prisoners are tortured and killed—stories from one Russian detention center.Читати українською

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…

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...

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...

Explore how investing in a better developer experience frees developers to do what matters most: building great software.

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...

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...

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...

The DevOps movement has died out. What went wrong?

Microsoft blamed for million-plus patient record theft at US hospital giant Updated Probe: Worker at speech-recog outfit Nuance wasn't locked out after firing CSO 26 Jun 2024 | 20

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.

How the Most Important Celebrity Magazine of the Last 50 Years Started Endorsing "The Best Air Purifiers of 2024"

Yeah, I read

And What is Says About the Institutional Problems in American Cities & Infrastructure

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....

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.

BS (behavioral science) without creativity—indeed BS without a tiny little whiff of BS (meaning bullshit)—is actually suboptimal.

In 1521, a German merchant and banker known as Jakob Fugger 'the Rich' funded and built the first social settlement in the world

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: It&#821…

I used to be good at spinning stories. Give me a half-baked startup idea, a semi-charismatic founder and a fistful of VC dollars, and I could write a...

There is such a thing as a free lunch

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....

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...

MTV.com is gone. Kaput. Wiped off the face of the Earth. Parent company Paramount, formerly Viacom, has tossed twenty plus years of news archives. All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by ...

Why we must seek a widely-applicable Science of Systems.

Indonesia’s emergence was both more violent and more pioneering than commonly imagined

Why Do We Still Teach People to Calculate? - Freakonomics

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...

Fedora has an ableism problem but woe to you if you point it out.

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.

Mobile before iOS and Android

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'.

The famed English author, poet, and literary critic Samuel Johnson once said that "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in

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...

In the Berlin Journal: Epistles from a prehistory of the cloud.

Musings on management and how to can get that endorphin rush that I’m missing

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...

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...

Dave Snowden's Organization, Collective, Decision - transcription.md

The Vienna Secession: A History By: Roberto Rosenman Take a […]

In which a pasta-filled rabbit hole leads to an unexpected place

Explore how will your city feel in the future.

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...

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...

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 …

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]...

Qualcomm’s new AI/Copilot PCs has overwhelming hype but their actions point to a far murkier picture.

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...

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

His fingerprints were on the Manhattan Project, the World Wide Web, and more

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...

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o

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 ...

The five stages describe a grief that’s knowable and controlled. An accident in my kitchen helped me find a truer metaphor

Jonathan Haidt talks to Noema about “The Anxious Generation” and how technology is upending democracy.

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...

What if the internet were public interest technology? Is that too wildly speculative? I think not. I am not talking about a utopian project here — a public interest internet would be a glorious imperfect mess and it would be far from problem-free. But while there is a lot of solid thinking about var...

The better things get, the more desperately activists struggle to stay in business.

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?

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...

HowToWareInterviewsLinks

A golden era for newsletters in the pre-Substack days.

〰️ it’s weird to look back; I sometimes get confused on how I got here 〰️ Most folks dream of being entrepreneur; “a path that seemed inevitable“, they say. None of that shit applies to me. I’m only here cause I kept getting laid off and that nonsense infuriated me. I treated my first layoff ... Rea...

A discussion of discussions on AI bias | Patreon

A few weeks ago I was roasting some pumpkin for a delicious soup and towards the end of the cooking time the fan on the oven started into overdrive, making a lot of noise then it started beeping...

From 1979 to 2012, Marion Stokes recorded her television 24/7. In total, she amassed about 71,000 tapes of archival footage.

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, ...

by Evan Silberman, Duckrabbit Solutions

Why Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs matters

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):

I fell in love with numbers some time before I began going to school. I loved arithmetic from day one. I was one of those horrible people who were good at maths at school and actually enjoyed doing…

Missing Pieces The Theft of the Ghent Altarpiece When a priceless altarpiece was stolen from a Belgian cathedral it sparked a 90-year hunt. The crime remains unsolved. Alexander Lee | Published in History Today Volume 74 Issue 6 June 2024 Early on the morning of 11 April 1934 the sacristan of St Bav...

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...

At the risk of stating the obvious even more obviously than I usually do: sometimes the perfect approach involves tolerating imperfection. Imperfection?! Yes. Specifically, the more macroscopic one’s view becomes, the more microscopic imperfections may need to be tolerated — if they don’t matter t...

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...

On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to…

The tumor-seeking radiopharmaceuticals are charting a new course in oncology, with promise for targeted treatments with fewer side effects

Baba Is You is a philosophical video game that facilitates the kind of thinking needed for frontier topics in the sciences of life and mind.

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...

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...

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.

Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student in Massachusetts, wrote the first Lunar Landing game. By 1973, it had become “by far an…

Apple Intelligence makes a lot of sense when you get out of the AI bubble. Plus, the cool technical details Apple shared about their language models "thinking different."

NOTE: This is a companion post to my piece in Public Books, 'The Encylopedia Project: Or, how to know in…

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.

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...

A social network founded by a former OpenAI employee was caught importing public posts from Mastodon...and ran AI analysis to add tags to them.

We're pausing our fundraising and investing activity

TerraPower just started construction on the Natrium plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming, which will soon be home to the most advanced nuclear facility in the world.

Caltech mourns the loss of Edward C. Stone, leader of humanity’s first foray into interstellar space.

A repost with some updates.

Fields Medalist Terence Tao explains how proof checkers and AI programs are dramatically changing mathematics

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...

Is AI the next big wave? Maybe. Maybe not. If we are lucky maybe we go back to atoms.

Interviews-first technical recruiting.

Private equity and monopoly capitalists will destroy anything to make a buck, and they’ve turned their sights on TV and film. If you hated cable’s high prices, endless ads, and copycat programming, you’re going to loathe the future of streaming.

maraoz's personal website.

Personal blog of Christian Haschek

Germany's four-day workweek trial may be the solution to greater productivity, worker satisfaction, and work-life balance.