Given the upcoming demise of botsin.space, I’m in the process of moving this site’s account to mastodon.social. Since Mastodon seems to have trouble with follower migrations, I would advise you to double-check if you’re following the right account. Update: Everything seems to be fixed now.
Given the upcoming demise of botsin.space, I’m in the process of moving this site’s account to mastodon.social. Given that Mastodon seems to have trouble with follower migrations, I would advise you to double-check if you’re following the right account.
Everything is decaying from the moment it is created, no matter how much we love it.
I’ve been using large language models (LLMs) for a while now. They accelerate and improve my output at work, to the point that losing access to them would make me feel slightly impaired in some areas. Rather than fearing WriterBot, I’m embracing the additional capabilities it grants. At the same time, I’m extremeley conscious of their...
When learning the basics of quantum computing, the Bloch sphere comes early on as a visualization technique of quantum states. It shows the state of a single qubit as a point on this sphere: This post explains how the Bloch sphere works and also why it works. Mapping 4 dimensions …
There was a thing going around on social about naming a movie that was released the year you were born. Having decided I’d narrow things down to my actual birth month for the sake of as much temporal accuracy as possible, that meant that I was, and am, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid years old. (Yes, for real I was going on hiatus due to...
I try to publish weeknotes at least once every two weeks. It's been four since the last entry, so I guess this one counts as monthnotes instead. In my defense, the reason I've fallen behind on weeknotes is that I've been publishing a lot of long-form blog entries this month. Plentiful LLM vendor news A lot of LLM stuff happened. OpenAI had their...
A play in one act Dramatis personae Scene 1: A meeting room in an office. The walls are adorned with whiteboards with boxes and arrows. EM: So, do you think the team will be able to finish all of these features by end of the Q2? TL: Well, it might be a bit tight, but … Continue reading The carefulness knob →
Bringing developer choice to Copilot with Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o1-preview The big announcement from GitHub Universe: Copilot is growing support for alternative models. GitHub Copilot predated the release of ChatGPT by more than year, and was the first widely used LLM-powered tool. This announcement...
There's many ways to provision a Linux VM. I'm going to show you my approach, which as usual, is aimed at keeping it as simple as possible.1 I use Ansible to provision servers. It isn't perfect (it's a huge tool, it's slow, and it uses YAML), but it's the most reliable approach I've found for this task. The nice advantage to Ansible over running...
I've been thinking a lot about this in preparation for the next I've been thinking a lot about this in preparation for the next HYTRADBOIHYTRADBOI.. My experience of online conferences has mostly been underwhelming. They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference.My experience of online conferences has mostly been underwhelming. They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference. The most important function of...The most important function of...
(Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly than Meta. I had a Facebook account in high school and college and got rid of it at some point post-graduation, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you when exactly that was.) It was fun to listen to Acquired's six-hour episode on Meta. Ben and...
(Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly than Meta. I had a Facebook account in high school and college and got rid of it at some point post-graduation, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you when exactly that was.) It was fun to listen to Acquired's six-hour episode on Meta. Ben and...
This post is a great run down of how much thought and consideration goes into making form validation actually useful. This part really stood out to me: However, if not well-designed, in-line error messages can become overwhelming. For example, flagging a field as incorrect after just one character can be disruptive, especially if the person...
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are the backbone of countless organizations, promising seamless integration of business processes, improved efficiency, and centralized data management. Yet, the glitter of ERP solutions sometimes conceals a harsh reality: the promise of “one-size-fits-all” is often a myth. While ERP systems claim to be...
TLDR Nginx explorer is a minimal web interface for file download/upload using a lua free configuration. git clone https://github.com/izissise/nginx-explorer.git nginx-explorer/ngxp.sh download_icons nginx-explorer/ngxp.sh servethis Genesis Sharing files across devices can be a hassle. Luckily, most devices support HTTP through a browser, which...
Now that we're more familiar with epoll and kqueue individually, it's time to bring everything together. We'll begin by looking at the possible interaction between evented I/O and threads and then look at writing a basic cross-platform abstraction over the platform-specific epoll and kqueue. Evented I/O + Multithreading We began our journey with...
Most software that exists today does not forget. Creating software that remembers is easy, but designing software that deliberately “forgets” is a bit more complex. By “forgetting,” I don't mean losing data because it wasn’t saved or losing it randomly due to bugs. I'm referring to making a deliberate design decision to discard data at a later...
Most software that exists today does not forget. Creating software that remembers is easy, but designing software that deliberately “forgets” is a bit more complex. By “forgetting,” I don't mean losing data because it wasn’t saved or losing it randomly due to bugs. I'm referring to making a deliberate design decision to discard data at a later...
backstory (skip if only interested in technical explanation) Yesterday I had a CS midterm from 8-10pm. I was somewhat stressed as I had basically gambled by not properly studying for it. However I finished early, and I was feeling pretty good. Even though it was a Monday night I felt it was cause for celebration. So all of us CS kids gathered...
Over the past few years, I worked with over half a dozen teams claiming to be agile and implement some version of Scrum.Over the past few years, I worked with over half a dozen teams claiming to be agile and implement some version of Scrum.
Even though on paper they were all doing some form of Scrum, in practice, my experience varied wildly from one team to another. It’s almost as if the term “agile” has become meaningless.Even though on paper they were all doing some form of Scrum, in practice, my experience varied wildly from one team to another. It’s almost as if the term “agile” has become meaningless.
This isn’t a rant against Scrum and agile but rather a semi-structured, subjective review of what I think works well and what doesn’t.This isn’t a rant against Scrum and agile but rather a semi-structured, subjective review of what I think works well and what doesn’t.
This morning I saw a Bluesky post from Andy Baio mentioning that Too Many Cooks was released 10 years ago.
Generating Descriptive Weather Reports with LLMs Drew Breunig produces the first example I've seen in the wild of the new LLM attachments Python API. Drew's Downtown San Francisco Weather Vibes project combines output from a JSON weather API with the latest image from a webcam pointed at downtown San Francisco to produce a weather report "with a...
I'm too depressed to elaborate much on this, but I just wanted to go on the record with this prediction before the election. Why do I think Trump is going to win? Because I'm too depressed to elaborate much on this, but I just wanted to go on the record with this prediction before the election. Why do I think Trump is going to win? Because DJT stock is upDJT stock is up and has been rising steadily since it hit an all-time low in late September. It didn't even go down today after yesterday's and has been rising steadily since it hit an all-time low in late September. It didn't even go down today after yesterday's
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The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel's clearheaded "endorsement of democracy, solving problems, and Kamala Harris" #
I've done a couple blog posts now on Chrome's efforts to bring generative AI to the browser. It's still somewhat of a rough process (remember, you can sign up for access to test and learn more at the intro post from the Chrome engineers), but it's getting better over time. One thing I mentioned in my last post ("Using Chrome AI to Rewrite Text")...
This weekend a story from ABC News on issues with audio transcription machine learning models did the rounds. “Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a...
Thankful to see that 11ty was removed from the next State of JS survey (per my request): https://github.com/Devographics/surveys/issues/252#issuecomment-2443276622I maintain that the State of JS is mostly a popularity contest, highly correlated to marketing budgets and VC investment.
This starling was waiting patiently in a nearby tree for a male blackbird to finish to get their turn at the bird feeder. The politeness is entirely down to the fact that the starling was alone and blackbirds are quite a bit bigger. I’m very bad with names, so when I’ve been told the name of one of the local cats I’ve usually just forgotten it...
“Platform Strategy and Its Discontents - Infrequently Noted”. “The rate of failure to deliver minimally usable experiences on phones seemed to be increasing over time, despite the accelerating costs associated with the client-side JS-based stacks that teams were reaching for. Worse and costlier is a bad combo, and the the opposite of what...
I released LLM 0.17 last night, the latest version of my combined CLI tool and Python library for interacting with hundreds of different Large Language Models such as GPT-4o, Llama, Claude and Gemini. The signature feature of 0.17 is that LLM can now be used to prompt multi-modal models - which means you can now use it to send images, audio and...
I think I have finally found the balance between the calendar view in Drummer blogs, a fully editable Bookmarks list like I use in Drummer. We automatically insert every new post into the Bookmarks menu using a very simple calendar structure. We just group them by months, so any new post would be put into […]
TIL stock WordPress only supports a single author for a blog post. Huh.
A fascinating look at Google Fonts from @stoyan shows the median size for variable (Latin-extended) web font on the service is 34744 bytes.Hefty!https://www.phpied.com/web-font-file-size-study-a-variable-font-addition/
I didn’t imagine that Bezos cared what subscribers to the Washington Post thought about his decision to cancel their endorsement of VP Harris in the election one week from today. But 200K people unsubscribed, and I guess that message got through to him, so he wrote an op-ed that ran in the Post yesterday, explaining […]
We recently launched the Open Source Pledge, and the response has been very positive, particularly from developers, but also from foundations, companies and the press. But yesterday, David Cramer pointed out a perplexing sentiment some people express — that developers of Open Source software ought not to be paid. @dmb on Slashdot, 25 Oct 2024...
Some thoughts on those I've known who've stood out because of their selfless kindness.
PostgreSQL documentation is, generally speaking, great. But it isn't the easiest thing to search in. Over the years I memorized urls to certain docs, but there is a limit to it. What's more, there are certain inconsistencies. For example – most pages that describe program have name that starts with app-. But not all. Some … Continue reading "New...
No clustering algorithm is perfect and you must make a trade-off.
I wasn’t terribly excited about Apple’s announcements yesterday, but the fact that the Magic Mouse’s charging port was only “fixed” by making it USB-C was definitely a low point until I read this, which I rate as either a perfect piece of satire or a self-infliced massacre on the one hill you wouldn’t want to die on defending Apple’s design...
I wrote a script that reads my redirect rules, and checks that every redirect takes you to a page that actually exists on my site.
const Control = union(enum) { button: *Controls.Button, menubar: *Controls.Menubar, menu: *Controls.Menu, menu_item: *Controls.MenuItem, editor: *Controls.Editor, fn generation(self: Control) usize { return switch (self) { inline else => |c| c.generation, }; } fn setGeneration(self:...
Concurrency is really, really difficult for humans to reason about. TLA+ itself was borne out of Leslie Lamport’s frustration with the difficulty of write error-free concurrent algorithms: When I first learned about the mutual exclusion problem, it seemed easy and the published algorithms seemed needlessly complicated. So, I dashed off a simple...
Matt Webb's Colophon I love a good colophon (here's mine, I should really expand it). Matt Webb has been publishing his thoughts online for 24 years, so his colophon is a delightful accumulation of ideas and principles. So following the principles of web longevity, what matters is the data, i.e. the posts, and simplicity. I want to minimise...
This article summarizes the important factors involved when deciding between the two leading cross platform mobile development frameworks of Google's Flutter and Facebook's React Native.FlutterAdvantages✅ It can design complex UIs which are standardized across Android & iOS resulting in less platform dependent bugs.✅ Easier to learn for existing...
Well, I am going back to not blogging for a bit, and stopping all work on the restoration project, because after conforming hundreds and hundreds of internal links to the new (and hopefully forever) permalinks format, it turns out that Weblog.LOL’s handling of dates is fucked up, and even if it got solved despite the service being frozen because...
Jennifer Maas writing for Variety: 'Dinner Plan' Short Film at Nebula Casts Griffin Newman, Zach CherryNebula has set the cast for its upcoming short film from “Night of the Coconut” director and popular video essayist Patrick Willems, “The Dinner Plan.” A dark comedy
Meet the innovators who laid the foundation for modern computing. Their contributions span decades, creating the tools and concepts developers use every day.
In the hours following the release of CVE-2024-9632 for the project X.org, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a buffer overflow that allows an attacker with access to raw X client calls to arbitrarily read and write memory, allowing for privilege...
Object-oriented programming (OOP) has been hailed as the savior of the software world, promising more manageable codebases and scalable applications. From encapsulation to inheritance, the paradigm offers a toolkit that is designed to make developers’ lives easier. Yet, over the years, OOP has gained its fair share of critics who argue that the...
Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the whole world.
A deep dive into how pipeline operators can make your code more readable and maintainable
Fractional scaling is hard. Anyone that had the misfortune of working on it knows that… so it won’t surprise a lot of people that it’s not all figured out yet! Today I’ll talk about the fractional scaling problems with KWin’s server side decorations, and why we need to do an API break to fix it.
I have long struggled with understanding what probability-generating functions
are and how to intuit them. There were two pieces of the puzzle missing for me,
and we’ll go through both in this article.
I have long struggled with understanding what probability-generating functions
are and how to intuit them. There were two pieces of the puzzle missing for me,
and we’ll go through both in this article.
There’s no real reason for anyone other than me to care about this, but if
you’ve ever heard the term
There’s no real reason for anyone other than me to care about this, but if
you’ve ever heard the term pgfpgf or or characteristic functioncharacteristic function and you’re curious
what it’s about, hop on for the ride!
and you’re curious
what it’s about, hop on for the ride!
My Plea to the W3C: Giving a semantic meaning to an "Obsolete" element. !--more-- I'll cut right to the chase, here's my proposal: span style="font-size-adjust:0.7;"The big element can be used to represent the "big idea" of a document or section, ie. text that should still be read when skimming through a document/span Rationale Why do we make...