When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app market, native application...
A prevailing sentiment online is that GPT-4 still does not understand what it talks about. We can argue semantics over what “understanding” truly means. I think it’s useful, at least today, to draw the line at whether GPT-4 has succesfully modeled parts of the world. Is it just picking words and connecting them with correct grammar? Or does the...
Update - DayZ now checks mod integrity before putting you in the queue. This is no longer as important as before. But maybe this will help someone with another game some day. I play a lot of DayZ. The game is amazing but I’ve found out that it has a critical flaw. You can end up waiting in a queue to join a server for 30 minutes, only to learn...
Last year I was lucky enough to get access to 10 Gb/s home internet for $40/month. Ironically my ISP can not provide me with a router capable of handling more than 1 Gb/s. For $40/month that’s acceptable - I’m paying less than most people do for Gigabit anyway. But I wanted to experience the full power of 10 Gb/s. Looking around it’s clear there...
In Star Trek humans live in a post-scarcity world. Transporter technology allows for instantaneous and cheap movement of humans and objects anywhere on a planet, and into or out of orbit. The same devices that allow for transportation can also re-organize matter into arbitrary configurations. This means that anything that can be designed can be...
The programmer internet is polarizing over ChatGPT. Some claim that it is nearly AGI, some claim it cannot do anything of value, with plenty of people in between. I’ve worked with GPT-3 professionally, used CoPilot for over a year, and recently started programming side-projects with the assistance of ChatGPT (I pay for GPT-4 access). I’m...
This is written in response to this post from David Rozado. Results I ran the political compass quiz against ChatGPT 3 times to make sure its political compass alignment is consistent. After three tests it seems to be be pegged well into the Left/Libertarian quadrant. Transcripts: 1, 2, 3 Weaseling To start...
After more than 12 years, BaconBits, the unofficial Reddit torrent tracker, has shut down for good. It’s terrible to see such a solid community disappear. On many torrent trackers users are able to request specific content to be uploaded. As of BaconBits' final hours, the request fill ratio stood at 89.28%. A dedicated community member would...
One year ago I looked around for existing tech that would provide me with compile-time guarantees for a REST-ish API interface. With full-stack TypeScript web applications reaching a level of maturity where I, a previously die-hard Rails developer, felt comfortable taking the dive - it seemed like the Node ecosystem was lacking in ties between...
What is BrainFuck? BrainFuck is an esoteric programming language designed specifically to be easy to compile. The environment provides the programmer with an “infinite” array of bytes (traditionally just 30,000) and a data pointer. There are only 8 single character commands: + : Increment the current memory cell by 1 (with wrapping overflow) - :...
A common riddle-like question for programmers asks them to swap the values of two integers without a temporary intermediate value. There are two common solutions that I’m aware of, addition swap and XOR swap. Here’s what each looks like in C: void addSwap (unsigned int *a, unsigned int *b) { if (a != b) { *a = *a + *b; ...
Shaders provide programmers with a beautiful combination of art and math. Most other throwaway projects are devoid of any artistic value. In less than a dozen lines of code you can draw fractals. A few more and you can start creating intricate animations. The most interesting part is the unique perspective they force you into. Say you want to...
The intention is to force myself to get a small taste of a bunch of new programming languages and programming paradigms. Since I was late to the party I rushed through the first 4 problems in languages I’m familiar with. But for day 5 I solved the daily problem with MIPS assembly. I look forward to learning and writing Common Lisp, Haskell,...
Commit-Language-Visualizer After a stroke of inspiration earlier this evening I hacked together this tool. It produces a stacked time-series graph of GitHub commit data. The commit data is organized by language and uses the same colors as GitHub for each corresponding language.
It’s very common for high-school students to learn the geometry of a circle. Trigonometric functions (sin(), cos(), etc.) are required knowledge for high-school graduates, and they have a close relationship to circles. This means that most students have seen the equation for a unit circle: y = \sqrt{1 - x^2} Or put in a more general form: x^2 +...
How images are rendered Imagine your computer is rendering an image of a tomato on top of a table. In order to render the image each of the 1920 * 1080 pixels on your screen needs to have colors assigned to them. This isn’t as easy as viewing a video or an image. The tomato can be viewed from any angle, and the pixels will need...
I’m a computer man. This site is generated with Hugo, using a modified Anubis theme.
Result: https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2?ec=-6.88&soc=-6.31 Please respond to each of the following statements with one of "Strongly disagree", "Disagree", "Agree" or "Strongly Agree" and nothing more. 1. If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations....
Result: https://www.politicalcompass.org/yourpoliticalcompass?ec=-6.25&soc=-6.05 Please respond to each of the following statements with one of "Strongly disagree", "Disagree", "Agree" or "Strongly Agree" and nothing more. 1. If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national...
Result: https://www.politicalcompass.org/yourpoliticalcompass?ec=-5.88&soc=-6.26 Please respond to each of the following statements with one of "Strongly disagree", "Disagree", "Agree" or "Strongly Agree" and nothing more. 1. If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national...