I’m building a web crawler so that I can track how pages in my docs site link to each other and to the outside web more broadly. If a lot of my docs pages link to some particular page, then that page is probably important. PageRank Lite, basically, except with much more focus on intra-site backlinks.
Gemini API Additional Terms of Service I've been trying to figure out what Google's policy is on using data submitted to their Google Gemini LLM for further training. It turns out it's clearly spelled out in their terms of service, but it differs for the paid v.s. free tiers. The paid APIs do not train on your inputs: When you're using Paid...
In the ever-evolving world of technology, open source software stands out as a beacon of collaboration, creativity, and community spirit. As developers dive into the realm of open source, forums play a crucial role in facilitating discussions, sharing knowledge, and fostering innovation. This guide will explore the significance of open source...
While most of the clients I work with are based in Europe, over the last couple of years my client base on the North American side of the Atlantic has slowly but surely started to grow, mainly in the United States. As someone who really enjoys working with and learning from individuals and companies across the globe, this something that I’m...
The Zig official website states in its The Zig official website states in its Overview pageOverview page the following (emphasis mine): the following (emphasis mine): varvar aa = = bb ++ cc..dd;; foofoo(()); bar();; bar(); Examples of hidden control flow:Examples of hidden control flow:D has D has @property@property functions, which are methods that... functions, which are methods that...
The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was incentivized to do so because our search right now is quite slow, and the lowest hanging piece of fruit is to move some of the tsvector generation out of band, and I'd rather do that using the fancy new GeneratedField abstraction than rolling the SQL...
The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was incentivized to do so because our search right now is quite slow, and the lowest hanging piece of fruit is to move some of the tsvector generation out of band, and I'd rather do that using the fancy new GeneratedField abstraction than rolling the SQL...
In the previous part we introduced non-blocking sockets and used them, along with the poll system call, to maximize the efficiency of our server. Rather than having a thread-per-connection, waiting on data, a single thread can now manage multiple client connections. But this performance leap doesn't come for free: our code has gotten more...
When you copy images directly from a Google Document into Ghost, and potentially other rich text editors, URL references to the images in the Document are copied instead of the underlying image. This means that if the document is deleted, the images will be broken. Thus, before you use images in a Google Doc, you should export them. Google Docs...
files-to-prompt 0.4 New release of my files-to-prompt tool adding an option for filtering just for files with a specific extension. The following command will output Claude XML-style markup for all Python and Markdown files in the current directory, and copy that to the macOS clipboard ready to be pasted into an LLM: files-to-prompt . -e py -e md...
Most random number generators are pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs). The distinction may be pedantic or crucial, depending on context. In the context of cryptography, it’s critical. For this post, RNG will mean a physical, true random number generator. A PRNG may be suitable for many uses—Monte Carlo simulation, numerical integration, game...
2025 DSF Board Nominations The Django Software Foundation board elections are coming up. There are four positions open, seven directors total. Terms last two years, and the deadline for submitting a nomination is October 25th (the date of the election has not yet been decided). Several community members have shared "DSF initiatives I'd like to...
Liverpool tattoo artist Rachel Baldwin made charming tattoos for each line of the Talking Heads classic and made it into a music video #
Supercharge the One Person Framework with SQLite: Rails World 2024 Stephen Margheim shares an annotated transcript of the YouTube video of his recent talk at this year's Rails World conference in Toronto. The Rails community is leaning hard into SQLite right now. Stephen's talk is some of the most effective evangelism I've seen anywhere for...
Supercharge the One Person Framework with SQLite: Rails World 2024 Stephen Margheim shares an annotated transcript of the YouTube video of his recent talk at this year's Rails World conference in Toronto. The Rails community is leaning hard into SQLite right now. Stephen's talk is some of the most effective evangelism I've seen anywhere for...
Let a, b, and c be the sides of a triangle. Let r be the radius of an inscribed circle and R the radius of a circumscribed circle. Finally, let p be the perimeter. Then the previous post said that 2prR = abc. We could rewrite this as 2rR = abc / (a + b […] The post Triangle circle maximization problem first appeared on John D. Cook.
Yesterday we were treated to the sight of a major party nominee at what was supposed to be a town hall meeting suddenly stop taking questions and Yesterday we were treated to the sight of a major party nominee at what was supposed to be a town hall meeting suddenly stop taking questions and just dancingjust dancing (badly) (badly) for the better part of an hourfor the better part of an hour. A mere 20 years ago, well within living memory, less than . A mere 20 years ago, well within living memory, less than five seconds of screamingfive seconds of screaming were enough to end Howard Dean's political... were enough to end Howard Dean's political...
Kev is wondering if you ever read your old posts, while both Terence and Roy are tending the “old post” gardens of their blogs. Terence: Sometimes the work is delightful - finding a prescient post from a decade ago. Sometimes it is frustrating - being unable to find a vital-but-long-dead link. And sometimes it is sad - seeing how much or how...
[red-knot] type inference/checking test framework Ruff maintainer Carl Meyer recently landed an interesting new design for a testing framework. It's based on Markdown, and could be described as a form of "literate testing" - the testing equivalent of Donald Knuth's literate programming. A markdown test file is a suite of tests, each test can...
This paper appeared in Sigmod'23.What?Auto-WLM is a machine learning based *automatic workload manager* currently used in production in Amazon Redshift.I thought this would be a machine learning paper, you know deep learning and stuff. But this paper turned out to be a practical/applied data systems paper. At its core, this paper is about...
My view at T-Mobile Park One of the last things I posted before quitting the blog in March was a thing about trying to see baseball for the first time in two decades by risking the exertion required to travel to Seattle for a Red Sox game as they played the Mariners in their opening weekend at home. I probably should follow up. (One of the things...
So there I am, working on a bug exclusive to Safari (we’ve all been there). I can’t figure it out so I ask AI, “Hey, this piece of code is not working in Safari, what’s wrong?” The issue might be related to how Safari handles keyboard events, especially for certain keys… It gives me some advice: Ensure the listener is setup correctly Check for...
I've been creating small, hand-written websites to organise my files. It's a lightweight, flexible approach that I hope will last a long time.
There was, in the mid 2010s, a popular formula for explaining a new startup: "Uber, but for ____." This was a metaphor: the startup, despite targeting a different market, was similar to Uber. It was, however, a fairly ambiguous metaphor; there were many ways that a company could resemble Uber. The most visible facet of Uber was their use of a...
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.
Space Karen Jr, Matt Mullenweg, has continued his scorched earth policy on his reputation with another strange post. This time defending his mother (which is admirable) against some pretty weird...
a series of articles looking back 20 years, worth exploring just for the playful article design inspired by early Gmail, Digg, Kazaa, and more #
a series of articles looking back 20 years, worth exploring just for the playful article design inspired by early Gmail, Digg, Kazaa, and more #
A couple of days ago, I saw this Mastodon post from Casey Liss. I had previously used GitHub Codespaces when working with a client, but it was a bit much. It relies on VMs that run on GitHub servers to give you a VS Code instance. Those VMs take a while to spin up and you have a limited number of hours per month depending on your plan. It’s a...
Reading Time: 15 minutes Tech’s favorite party trick is promoting programmers into leadership roles with zero coaching on how to make the transition, or even a briefing on what the role entails. The programmer accepts the promotion because…I mean, of course you’d accept a promotion. Then, they quickly find themselves in over their heads. In my...
Un Ministral, des Ministraux Two new models from Mistral: Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B (joining Mixtral, Pixtral, Codestral and Mathstral as weird naming variants on the Mistral theme. These models set a new frontier in knowledge, commonsense, reasoning, function-calling, and efficiency in the sub-10B category, and can be used or tuned to a...
From Leslie Lamport's Specifying Systems: You should be suspicious if [the model checker] does not find a violation of a liveness property... you should also be suspicious if [it] finds no errors when checking safety properties. This is specifically in the context of model-checking a formal specification, but it's a widely applicable software...
Dan Davies hypothesizes that organizations form “accountability sinks”—structures that serve to obscure, deflect, or otherwise insulate decision makers from the consequences of their decisions.
Discover the latest release of Llamafile 0.8.14, an open-source AI tool by Mozilla Builders. With a new command-line chat interface, enhanced performance, and support for powerful models, Llamafile makes it easy to run large language models (LLMs) on your own hardware. Learn more about the updates and how to get involved with this cutting-edge...
I decided to take a bit of a writing break after last week’s mammoth essay. Not because writing these things takes so much of my time. I’m a relatively quick writer and most of the time even a two-thousand word post only takes up a couple of hours of my time each week. No, it’s more a question of distance. One of the more effective tools you have...
David Pierce: How Digg helped invent the social internetIn its early days, Digg was something like the homepage of the internet. Any user could submit a link, and then any other user could either promote it with a “dig” or demote it with a “bury.”
Lori Glavin: FIDO Alliance Publishes New Specifications to Promote User Choice and Enhanced UX for PasskeysThe FIDO Alliance has published a working draft of a new set of specifications for secure credential exchange that, when standardized and implemented by credential providers, will enable users to securely move passkeys and
Last night I pushed an update to Quick Reviews to make 2 changes:The reset buttons on the color, text size, and score names settings are now green and actual HTML buttons with aria labels, making them more accessible.I've disabled the "API" that allowed people
The blogs I like are building blocks of something beautiful and heartfelt, not optimized, market driven revenue generators
This group of Icelandic Redpolls stopped by to snack on some birch seeds So, turns out a clear sky, autumn colours, cold still air, and a geothermally active nature are quite picturesque when combined. The steam from the mud and hot water springs was particularly visible in the cold. And people out walking in the quiet weather. For this...
“Norway’s Treatment of Sámi Indigenous People Makes a Mockery of Its Progressive Image”. “Norway often presents itself as a defender of human rights around the globe. Yet its treatment of indigenous people within its own borders tells a quite different story.” Nordic countries are only “fair” to you if you fit a specific demographic “Unmanaged...
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Inspired by numerous people migrating their Next.js applications from Vercel to self-hosted VPS on Hetzner due to pricing concerns, I decided to explore self-hosting some of my non-critical applications. Additionally, I wanted to push my technical boundaries by running Llama 3.2 using Ollama and making its API available to power AI applications...
This is a follow-up to my two previous attempts on this topic: Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server? ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up Since then, I’ve had quite a few changes to my home server setup: I put my home server stuff on an IKEA pegboard I tried the Zimaboard I switched back to the ASRock DeskMini I got fiber again!...
A common misconception about Transformers is to believe that they're a sequence-processing architecture. They're not. They're a set-processing architecture. Transformers are 100% order-agnostic (which was the big innovation compared to RNNs, back in late 2016 -- you compute the full matrix of pairwise token interactions instead of processing one...
I like this notepad. I just open it on my iPad while I’m watching baseball. Now if I get an idea I have a place to type it in. Anyway if you want to get an idea about how hellbent chatgpt is on getting you an answer, try entering the text of a riddle. It […]
In the digital age, technology has become an indispensable tool in education. Open-source software, with its free, accessible, and collaborative nature, offers a powerful means to revolutionize teaching and learning. This article delves into the ways in which open-source solutions can empower both students and teachers, fostering a more...
A variation on my previous design for pinned places has occurred to me that would be more consistent with Rust’s existing feature set. The most outlandish aspect of the previous design was the notion of “pinned fields,” which support pinned projection. This is quite different from how field projection normally works in Rust: if you have a mutable...
Content Security Policy (CSP) acts like a shield against XSS attacks. These attacks are sneaky - they trick your browser into running malicious code by hiding it in content that seems trustworthy. CSP's job is to spot these tricks and shut them down, while also alerting you to any attempts it detects.
A variation on my previous design for pinned places has occurred to me that would be more consistent with Rust’s existing feature set. The most outlandish aspect of the previous design was the notion of “pinned fields,” which support pinned projection. This is quite different from how field projection normally works in Rust: if you have a mutable...
After Turkey banned Discord, I had to jump through some hoops, fix my VPN, and learn a bit about how DNS works.
Let a, b, and c be the sides of a triangle. Let p be perimeter of the triangle. Let r be the radius of the largest circle that can be inscribed in the triangle, and let R be the radius of the circle through the vertices of the triangle. Then all six numbers can be […] The post Relating six properties of a triangle in one equation first appeared...
A quote from Every Page Is Page One that has deeply changed how I approach technical writing.
The XOXO 2024 Talks I missed attending the last XOXO in person, but I've been catching up on the videos of the talks over the past few days and they have been absolutely worth spending time with. This year was a single day with ten speakers. Andy Baio explains the intended formula: I usually explain that the conference is about, more than...
The problem with passkeys is that they're essentially a halfway house to a password manager, but tied to a specific platform in ways that aren't obvious to a user at all, and liable to easily leave them unable to access of their accounts. [...] Chrome on Windows stores your passkeys in Windows Hello, so if you sign up for a service on Windows,...
I'm excited to share an experiment I've been working on: a solar-powered, self-hosted website running on a Raspberry Pi. The website at https://solar.dri.es is powered entirely by a solar panel and battery on our roof deck in Boston. My solar panel and Raspberry Pi Zero 2 are set up on our rooftop deck for testing. Once it works, it will...
I needed a way to redirect charm.catskull.net to an absolute URL path such as https://subdomain.site.com/path/to/page/index.html. I am a DNS noob and was surprised to learn this isn’t possible through DNS alone. You can set a CNAME record to point the subdomain to another (sub)domain, but it’s not an arbitrary URL value. I don’t know why.
Some ideas for the Harris campaign: Do Kickstarters for specific ads. Do 5-minute ads that consist mostly of unedited Trump speeches. Make sure everyone hears what he says. Do a Kickstarter for this. If this can come together quickly it’ll have the effect of making him more self-conscious at his rallies. At both the beginning […]