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Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…

An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog

It’s not about saving time… It’s about never wasting it.

Robert Oppenheimer’s isn’t the only film-worthy story from the nuclear age. Kurt Gödel’s cameo as a secret agent was surprising — and itself a bomb.

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

Remote work expert David Tate wrote that when fearful CEOs talk about workplace culture, they’re really talking about workplace control. Their insecurities demand that the way work is done by emplo…

The R Consortium recently interviewed Jan Vitek, a professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He specializes in programming languages, compilers, and systems. Notably, he developed one of...

Swift sucks at web serving… or does it? May 15, 2024 by Contents Benchmark method & apparatus Benchmark results Debugging the benchmark Domain experts weigh in Examining the load The “right” load A “fair” load Do these improvements apply to the other cases too? …but… why is the success rate still we...

Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA — (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastr…

Just 50 years after the Roman Empire grew to its largest size, a mysterious and crippling pandemic known as the Antonine plague brought it to its knees. Research on climate change and in other areas is shedding light into how the plague, which preceded centuries of decline, emerged to pack such a de...

OR: "fuzzy, wet, and unfalsifiable"

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Today’s rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide increase is 10 times faster than at any other point in the past 50,000 years, researchers have found through a detailed chemical analysis of ancient Antarctic ice. The findings, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of ...

The tech giant needs a cool new product — but it seems like Tim Cook is running out of ideas.

Studies from two very different cities showed the same result.

The Variational Principles of Mechanics, Cornelius Lanczos (University of Toronto Press, 1949). While sailing a little boat the other day, I thought of a new way to troll the Aristotelians. I love it when my hobbies converge like that, and if the second one sounds a little mean-spirited, well, remem...

The inside story of four years building Muse, a canvas-based thinking tool for iPad and Mac.

In a paper published in Physical Review X on May 13, a quartet of physicists and computer scientists expand the modern theory of the thermodynamics of computation. By combining approaches from statistical physics and computer science, the researchers introduce mathematical equations that reveal the ...

ULTRA VC, an impact-focused EU startup accelerator and early-stage investor, has surveyed startup founders aged 18 to 60+ on how they maintain work-life balance enroute to success.

The director has spent half his life and $120m of his own money to make his sci-fi epic. Just days ahead of its debut in Cannes, some of his crew members are questioning his methods

When we’re disagreeing with others about some aspect of software, we tend to focus on concrete factors we can easily define and argue about: choice of programming language, approaches to testing, file name conventions, and the like [1]. Some of these choices do clearly make software development easi...

In AI systems, multi-modality is the holy grail. When I was working on self-driving cars, that was also the dream architecture: one big model that takes in all of the sensors as inputs (sound, visual, lidar, radar) and makes decisions directly. For technical reasons, this is really hard to do (compu...

References are like jumps May 13, 2024 In a high-level language, the programmer is deprived of the dangerous power to update his own program while it is running. Even more valuable, he has the power to split his machine into a number of separate variables, arrays, files, etc.; when he wishes to upda...

I read recently on this site that the growth mindset seems not to be real. I did not know that (I admit that I don't follow research into learning as closely as I would like). Can I turn that expe...

An unfortunate psychological trait.

NPR > Shots - Health News Outdoor time is good for your kids' eyesight. Here's why By Maria Godoy Monday, May 13, 2024 • 5:00 AM EDT Heard on Morning Edition If you're a parent struggling to get your kids' off their devices and outdoors to play, here's another reason to keep trying: Spending at leas...

From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus

Apple’s iPad ad might not have been good for Apple, but it was a profound encapsulation of what has happened on the Internet; the question is what it leads to next.

Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I’ll have my ‘On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon’ up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, i…

Steve Jobs famously cared about the unseen backs of cabinets. Antique furniture built with hand tools isn’t like that at all. Cabinetmakers made each part to the tolerance that mattered. The …

The Age of Rage: Why are People are So Angry? According to a 2018 Guardian article, we are living in an ‘age of rage’. Such anger is often framed as having an ideological or political bend or etiology (e.g. Trump, Biden, Covid). Another article The West needs to grow up argues that infantilism is to...

How the country revived its go-getting spirit

When evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, small modular reactors will actually be more expensive than large reactors. 

Worthy Effort, but Not the definitive work on subject

Fully automated luxury mansplaining.

Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of B movies and discovered Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.

The process of stating a problem in a language that is acceptable to a computer is primarily intuitive rather than formal. A specific example of the process is given

Copyright holders can claim damages for copyright infringements that occurred years or even decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court has clarified.

Learn about the $80 billion company that makes the software behind AI, mobile, and automotive chips. Plus: are we at the end of Moore's Law?

BBC journalist and the documentarian behind HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis, discusses art, individualism, power, myth, and the complications of self-expression.

CrowdTangle helps researchers track disinformation, but Meta will close it down before the US election. The tool's cofounder, Brandon Silverman, says it's time to force companies to share data.

How perforated squares of trippy blotter paper allowed outlaw chemists and wizard-alchemists to dose the world with LSD

Home • Tikalon Innovation Service Model • About • Links • Blog • Contact 100 Years of IBM May 6, 2024 There are considerable statistics on human life expectancy. Men in the United States are expected to live 76 years, and women are expected to live nearly 81 years. These are actually lower than for ...

A simple explanation of the various technologies inside touchscreens.

Bureaucratic bloat has siphoned power away from instructors and researchers.

The Uyghur city in Xinjiang has been disrupted by outside forces through history — of which Chinese rebuilding is the latest change. A book of images and stories records what it once was.

Most modern humans regard plants as alive but a bit boring by the standards of creatures that can move around freely. They're wrong.

It's not the 1980s anymore, thankfully.

The Digital Antiquarian A history of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher Home About Me Ebooks Hall of Fame Table of Contents RSS ← This Week on The Analog Antiquarian Blade Runner 03 May Blade Runner has set me thinking about the notion of a “critical consensus.” Why should we ...

Inside the worker-led effort to get the world's most valuable company to stop helping the oil and gas industry drill.

The dystopian spot, which depicts the relentless destruction of instruments and artworks, marks a dark turn for the company and begs the question: Will 2024 be like 1984?

The Shellac and Big Black frontman, who recorded classic albums by Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey, and more, has died of a heart attack

Can you run scanners over iSCSI?

Five ideas for accelerating European progress

David Graeber Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! 2000

Contents: What is Xanadu for - Basic Principles - Writings - chats - Projects

Web software, like all technology, amplifies the priorities of the people who build it. What does that say about our commitment to web accessibility?

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LPCAMM2 promises to be the thin, fast, efficient, and REPAIRABLE laptop memory standard of the future. Today, we take apart the first laptop to actually use it.

Nathan Berman has helped rescue Manhattan’s financial district from a “doom loop” by carving attractive living spaces from hulking buildings that once housed fields of cubicles.

I was recently lucky enough to be invited along on a trip to Sizewell Bs operations training centre to see and try their control room simulator.

Dennett's classic story raises deep philosophical questions about identity and consciousness.

A Useful Productivity Measure? May 5, 2024 In my new role as VP of Engineering, there was one question I was dreading more than any other: “How are you measuring productivity?” I can’t fault the question. I mean, sure, I’d rather it be phrased about how I’m improving productivity, rather than how I’...

Fear, The Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype

It seems there are too many people in the security industry that are too fast to condemn C/C++, touting the virtues of Rust without fully understanding the nuances and implications. Rust may be a safer language but it’s not that simple.

One year ago today, I decided to quit my job.

The story of why and how I developed a tool for designing MDF furniture by writing my own little language that transpiles into a CSS grid layout.

Pushing back on the cult of complexity.

What tools would you reach for today to style the UI for a hyper-customizable app? I just spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to understand the current landscape and settle on the perfect framework. I was...

Conflict over noise in the West End goes back centuries

Athletes train for years to overcome pain, exhaustion, and fatigue. But some people take it too far and are never the same again.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 195.

Let's talk compilers with part one of a whistle stop tour of their history

May 4, 2024 @ 6:45 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Epigraphy, Language and archeology, Language and culture, Language and history, Language contact

In honor of Walpurgisnacht, as the evening of April 30 is known, the hamlets of Saxony-Anhalt do a brisk spring-time tourist trade selling...

Silences that close us off, refusing connection, shoring up the ego at others’ expense—those are dead silences. But the letting-go sort, the silences that hold space or keep vigil for someone else? They are alive.

Can't switch off from work? Envy those 'lazy' strikers? In this 1932 essay, Bertrand Russell, socialist and winner of some minor award called the Nobel Prize in Literature, presents the case for idleness. One can also download and/ or listen to an audio version here.

It was the 28th of June, 2020; the perfect summer day. I remember it distinctly because of two important events that took place on that day. The first was the unfortunate discovery that I am highly sensitive to the venomous hairs of the Oak processionary caterpillar. If you’ve never wished you could...

A new study has calculated how long you should be sleeping, standing and moving each day for optimal health. And you might be doing more physical activity than you thought.

We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more...

The evolution of software development over the past decade has been very frustrating. Little of it seems to makes sense, even to those of us who are right in the middle of it.

The next popular programming language is probably English

Chinampas — an ingenious adaptation to the Valley of Mexico's lake-filled landscape — could hold lessons for cities around the world.

Many predicted that globalization would cause the world's values to converge around freedom and personal rights. This hasn't happened.

Stephen Wolfram explores simple models of biological organisms as computational systems. A study of progressive development, multiway graphs of all possible paths and the need for narrowing the framework space.

Desertification is destroying once-fertile land at an alarming rate, but desert greening techniques are making degraded soil bloom again.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the burn.

2024-05-01

Why gene banks aren’t enough to save the world’s food

Rita Piçarra decided to resign as a corporate CFO to prioritise her happiness, but how does one embrace this new reality? Read her full story.

It’s not you. It’s me. (Taking a break from Mastodon) April 4, 2024March 17, 2024 I’m closing up shop on my Mastodon for the foreseeable future. I have for the most part very much enjoyed my experience on the Fediverse, and experts say that Mastodon is one of the components of the Fediverse. Mastodo...

Just mix together a dead person, some iron, and lots of water.

How the eccentric Argentine author came to occupy the center of Latin American literature.

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

Though repetition has felt like punishment for many of us throughout our lives, perhaps it’s actually a blessing in disguise.

It's so easy to end up with git commit history which looks like London tube map. Let's see how we end up with those big, ugly, meaningless commit histories and how to prevent having one.

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Europe is special to me as I consider myself a proud European, but damn we need to talk. Europe please wake up.

A common complaint amongst the old guard bloggers is that the old web as we knew it is dying. This is false.The old web has actually been dead for many...

AI developer Andrew Mayne explains why technology could create more jobs and lead to unprecedented economic growth.

A huge proportion of tech journalism is characterized by scandals, sensationalism, and shoddy research. Can we fix it?

Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions o...

In the early 1940s, German submarines (U-Boats) were wreaking havoc on Allied forces in the Atlantic Ocean, sinking ships, and threatening to turn the tide of the war. What the Allies of WWII needed was something literally too big to fail. And one inventor working for the British Combined Operations...

In the first Map Story we met Eratosthenes, who tried to calculate the size of the Earth almost 2300 years ago (and got really pretty close). Today we’ll meet

From BBS to Facebook, here's how messaging platforms have changed over the years.

AI has the potential to transform technologically lagging industries by leapfrogging SaaS workflows. Here's what we're seeing.

Its recent usage is hard to shrug off.

It’s a common spy thriller trope. There’s a special key that can unlock something critical – business records, bank vaults, government secrets, nuclear weapons, maybe all of the above, worldwide.

It’s quite a journey from being born on a commune to raising more than $87m in funding at a software company. This journey forced me to wrestle with existential questions about my true beliefs, and how they intersected my life as an entrepreneur. One’s work is rarely a pure reflection of ideology, b...

The "thorium transition", which physicists have been looking for for decades, has now been excited for the first time with lasers. This paves the way for revolutionary high precision technologies, including nuclear clocks.

The Apple MacBook Air 15-inch M3 is a near-perfect combination of silent and effortless performance, epic battery life, and elegant design.

How the past of Personal Computing gives us a hint into the future of Personal Library Science

Newly released documents reveal the Greens engaging in outright fraud to deceive ministers and push the nuclear phase-out in Germany.

Dangerous, polluting SUVs and pickup trucks took over America. Lawmakers are partly to blame.

Quick math-personality quiz: What is seven-and-one-fourth minus three-fourths, expressed as a mixed number (a whole number plus a proper fraction)? What matters isn’t what answer you get but how yo…

Suitcases once belonging to residents of a New York State mental hospital tell the stories of long-forgotten lives

The Voyage of Magellan Chapter 5: Underway Apr 26, 2024 September 20 – October 3, 1519 At nearly the same instant that Magellan’s carracks sailed from Sanlúcar, a dozen or so sleek, swift Portuguese caravels put to sea from Lisbon. Taking advantage of the same favorable wind as Magellan’s fleet but ...

I am a perfectionist by nature. Releasing software in to the wild that has imperfections annoys me. For that matter, doing anything that is imperfect annoys me. Thankfully, there is this little thi…

>>> 2024-04-26 microsoft at work (PDF) I haven't written anything for a bit. I'm not apologizing, because y'all don't pay me enough to apologize, but I do feel a little bad. Part of it is just that I've been busy, with work and travel and events. Part of it is that I've embarked on a couple of writi...

Regulation and antitrust trials are pulling down the walls.

I had another instance of my Apple ID mysteriously being locked. First, my iPhone wanted me to enter the password again, which I thought was the “normal” thing it has done every few months, almost since I got it. But after doing so it said that my account was locked.

640 Pages in 15 Months ↩ ↪ July 29, 2021 book design language personal My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago. But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, e-book and PDF versions are done. You can buy it....

Laws of Software Evolution by kqr , published 2024-03-25 Tags: design management organisations product_development Andrew Kelly has written a thoughtful article on why we can’t have nice software. He acknowledges that software often gets continuous maintenance, and notes that this is curious, since ...

We are now in a very weird liminal space in information retrieval for consumers, particularly those attuned to trends in search and working on the bleeding...

Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years Once you get good at Rust all of these problems will go away Rust being great at big refactorings solves a largely self-inflicted issues with the borrow checker Indirection only solves some problems, and always at the cost of dev ergonomics ECS solves the wrong kin...

This is a bit of a continuation of my last post about burnout, or at least a tangent. I have no tech news to share right now nor any startup tips, so this is what you get :) A thought I had a bit, well, for a long time, was what were the occupational hazards of computing, tech, and to a lesser exten...

John Archibald Wheeler is a bit of a hero for me (and also, like all good hero’s a bit of a villain). Discovering his paper “It from Bit” was definitely a huge inspiration for me …

The unbundling of Big Search is here

I want to tell the story of a beautiful phenomenon in biology. In some sense it’s the prototype of much of the activity of life. The phenomenon is the way in which an individual cell of E. coli forages for nutrients. This process, known as “chemotaxis”—the “chemo-” for chemical and the “taxis” from ...

Their plan was to bomb themselves to Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970.

Focus by Automation Automation Programming Emacs Vim Posted on 2024-03-19 Contents Automation 🤖 Focus 🔍 Distractions ⚡ Organization 📓 The value of mastery 🧙 Braaains 🧠 Footnotes Automation 🤖 I’ve invested leisure time to save time when I’m working hard...

March 2024 (This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think they should tell students something about startups. This is what I think they should tell them.) Most of you probably think that when you're released into ...

The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I started this up, blogging was all the rage, and lots of other blogs about fundamental physics were starting a...

Article URL: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/the-violent-role-of-relentless-positivity-in-the-workplace/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702323 Points: 6 # Comments: 1

Article URL: https://www.june.so/blog/lean-startup-method-2024 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39702224 Points: 15 # Comments: 5