It’s interesting to visualize functions of a complex variable, even very simple functions like f(z) = 1/z. The previous post looked at what happens to triangles under the reciprocal map w = 1/z. This post will look at the same map applied to a polar grid, then look at the effect a shift has, replacing […] The post Shifted reciprocal first...
An LLM TDD loop Super neat demo by David Winterbottom, who wrapped my LLM and files-to-prompt tools in a short Bash script that can be fed a file full of Python unit tests and an empty implementation file and will then iterate on that file in a loop until the tests pass. Via @codeinthehole Tags: llm, ai-assisted-programming, python,...
Wikipedia: The musica universalis (literally universal music), also called music of the spheres or harmony of the spheres, is a philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of music. The theory, originating in ancient Greece, was a tenet of Pythagoreanism, and was later...
I love the js-framework-benchmark. It’s a true open-source success story – a common benchmark, with contributions from various JavaScript framework authors, widely cited, and used to push the entire JavaScript ecosystem forward. It’s a rare marvel. That said, the benchmark is so good that it’s sometimes taken as the One True Measure of a web […]
Mastodon recently added the ability to natively add author labels to links on Mastodon. Basically, when a link is posted, you can have your Mastodon account automatically tagged so people can more easily find you.I would have written up an explainer on how to do it, but Robb Knight
PostgreSQL 17: SQL/JSON is here! Hubert Lubaczewski dives into the new JSON features added in PostgreSQL 17, released a few weeks ago on the 26th of September. This is the latest in his long series of similar posts about new PostgreSQL features. The features are based on the new SQL:2023 standard from June 2023. If you want to actually read the...
For those who are not aware, Nebula is a pretty interesting streaming service which, according to Wikipedia, has been around for five years (this sounds wrong to me though, as I literarily heard about it last year! – but that...
Happy Sunday and Happy Saints Are Winning As I Write this day. Before I get into the links, some administrative. At the bottom of my posts, I've got share links. A few days ago I removed the share to Twitter link as I've gradually removed myself from that platform. I was on there a few weeks ago desperate for some technical help, but in general,...
Bang! Bang! Bang! I love it when it works so well. I want, when you click on something to edit it, that you immediately see the effect of editing, but no pixels move. perfect choreography. maybe there should be a new motto: “I sweat the pixels.” or more in tune with the times: “I sweat the […]
Time for another test post. Yesterday I rewrote the code for setting the title of a post. Previously when you clicked on the space for a title, a dialog would appear asking you to enter the title. When you clicked OK the title would change in the display and be saved to your draft. I […]
Wouldn’t it be something if the NYT one day hopefully in the next week or so discovered that if Harris loses the election the US will quickly become a fascist state, requiring all Jews, Muslims, African-Americans, and naturalized citizens, including “anchor babies,” to register, and wear an identifying armband where ever they go. As a […]
A weekend with the grandkids and Tae Kwon Do, a football game, piano practice, a corn maze, a music store, AYCE French fries and a movie. Is that all?
My Warm Handoffs post generated a lot of activity. Before I had shared it, a former coworker happened to find it via a Google search for “Warm Handoffs Slack.” A few people reposted it on LinkedIn, and someone I don’t know at all shared it on Hacker News, where it briefly reached number 7 on the homepage. Several people told me they shared it...
It’s super late at night on Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I shouldn’t be thinking about weird internet drama, but here we are.
Are you new to LibreOffice Calc and eager to master spreadsheets? Don’t worry—you’re in the right place! Whether you’re a student, professional, or someone who just wants to organize their life better, LibreOffice Calc has got your back. It’s not just an alternative to Excel; it’s a powerful, open-source tool that can help you tackle everything...
Firefox has a feature that lets you map a character or sequence of characters typed in the Firefox address bar to a custom search engine. For example, you can map w to Wikipedia, so the query w coffee would take you to the Wikipedia search page for coffee (which auto-redirects to the Wikipedia page for coffee). I have just set up two shortcuts...
I was fiddling with graphlib in the Python stdlib and found it quite nifty. It processes a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), where tasks (nodes) are connected by directed edges (dependencies), and returns the correct execution order. The “acyclic” part ensures no circular dependencies. Topological sorting is useful for arranging tasks so that each...
You say that these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up. You haven't gotten through. There are people you haven't persuaded yet. These number mean dial it up. Otherwise you're like the French radical, watching the crowd run by and saying, "There go my people. I must find out where they're going so I can lead them." I ran into a...
You say that these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up. You haven't gotten through. There are people you haven't persuaded yet. These number mean dial it up. Otherwise you're like the French radical, watching the crowd run by and saying, "There go my people. I must find out where they're going so I can lead them." I ran into a...
Your eyes open to see rays of the autumn sun peeking through your dark curtains. A soft alarm rings in the background. It’s time to start your day. While it’s a Sunday, you set an alarm to make sure you don’t spend your whole day in bed. Or, if you do, at least you have an alarm to prompt you to make a cup of coffee that you can drink while you...
Ever pondered how turning complex ideas into something simple can both enlighten and mislead us? That's the essence of abstraction. Imagine it as using a map instead of exploring a place firsthand. The map simplifies the journey, offering a clear route but failing to capture the essence of the experience. Abstraction helps us grasp intricate concepts but can also blur our understanding and prompt mistakes.
Enhance your retrieval systems by determining user query intent and tailoring search strategies accordingly.
jefftriplett/django-startproject Django's django-admin startproject and startapp commands include a --template option which can be used to specify an alternative template for generating the initial code. Jeff Triplett actively maintains his own template for new projects, which includes the pattern that I personally prefer of keeping settings and...
This is a long chapter. It touches on so many things. Here is the table of contents.Faults and partial failuresUnreliable networksdetecting faultstimeouts and unbounded delayssync vs async networksUnreliable clocksmonotonic vs time-of-day clocksclock sync and accuracyrelying on sync clocksprocess pausesKnowledge truth and liestruth defined by...
I've been exploring typesetting and formatting code within text documents such as papers, or my thesis. Up until now, I've been using the listings package without thinking much about it. By default, some sample Haskell code processed by listings looks like this (click any of the images to see larger, non-blurry versions): It's formatted with a...
The eight sleep bed is a popular self-cooling bed. Sleeping on a colder surface not only feels great but often improves sleep as well. This post discusses a cheaper homemade option that I use instead. Why I didn’t Buy an … Continue reading →
Last year, I thought Mujjo’s iPhone cases were excellent. I thought they were so good that when I realized I actually wanted the iPhone 15 Pro Max, I bought a second case from them without hesitation. So when they reached out to me this year to see if
I think ultimately Mastodon is going to have to operate a simplified server that federates the same way Threads does. It stays simple for 99% of the users, and the ones who can handle the extra layer of complexity that comes from all servers being equal at all times, can opt in by going to […]
Perks of Being a Python Core Developer Mariatta Wijaya provides a detailed breakdown of the exact capabilities and privileges that are granted to Python core developers - including commit access to the Python main, the ability to write or sponsor PEPs, the ability to vote on new core developers and for the steering council election and financial...
Python 3.13's best new features Trey Hunner highlights some Python 3.13 usability improvements I had missed, mainly around the new REPL. Pasting a block of code like a class or function that includes blank lines no longer breaks in the REPL - particularly useful if you frequently have LLMs write code for you to try out. Hitting F2 in the REPL...
Above is a photo I took of the Statue of Liberty last night from a boat. It looks pretty good, right? The colors are nice and there's a decent amount of detail for a pic taken in total darkness. But 2 megapixels?! To give you some context, this
My experience with Cursor over the last 6+ months on what works, what doesn't, and what I'm still figuring out
I have to keep doing test posts be one two three i’ve got a feeling a feeling deep inside oh yeah okay now we should be okay with the length of the feed we generated, changed the type of the filecontents field from text to longtext. this is code a + b && c
BTW, the reason there’s such a confluence of power between WordPress and Mastodon is this. WordPress has a complete, debugged, deployed, scaled and frozen API. It’s been around since 2016 or so. In contrast Mastodon, while they’re doing excellent work, is trying to wrangle an already large community into a set of consistent interfaces. It’s […]
This is a link. When you read it in WordPress or Mastodon, it should look like a hypertext link, not the Markdown code for a hypertext link. I would say the bug is now fixed. We may proceed. However, there were other bugs! And still one that I haven’t yet figured out. Here’s some italic […]
BTW the thing I hate the most about tech is that you always have to start over. Even if you did something brilliant a few years ago, everyone who’s heard of you (memories are ridiculously short) assume you were either lucky last time, or you forgot everything you learned. And as soon as you achieve […]
Haskell’s expressive type system means that type signatures can carry a lot of information. Haskell’s polymorphism means that you sometime write a function that works across an enormous range of types, and are often left wondering “what do I actually call my variables?”. It is often the case that there’s nothing to say beyond “this variable is a...
Carl Hewitt recently remarked that the question what is an agent? is embarrassing for the agent-based computing community in just the same way that the question what is intelligence? is embarrassing for the mainstream AI community. The problem is that although the term is widely used, by many people working in closely related areas, it defies...
Frankenstein is a terrific book partly based on how concerned people were about electricity. It captures our fears about the nature of being human but didn’t help anyone really come up with better policies for dealing with electricity. I worry that a lot of AI critics are doing the same thing. — James Cham Tags: ai
Cabel Sasser at XOXO I cannot recommend this talk highly enough for the way it ends. After watching the video dive into this new site that accompanies the talk - an online archive of the works of commercial artist Wes Cook. I too would very much love to see a full scan of The Lost McDonalds Satire Triptych. Via Andy Baio Tags: cabel-sasser
Creating dynamic web applications often involves interacting with a database. One of the foundational elements of web development is the ability to perform CRUD operations: Create, Read, Update, and Delete. This tutorial will guide you through core PHP CRUD operations, helping you understand how to manage data effectively in your applications....
We're often focused on big innovations and breakthrough moments. But what if the real key to long-term success lies in the small, everyday actions we often overlook?
How to implement the Open-Dyslexic font to enhance readability for users with dyslexia
Consistency is The Key This week I didn’t have any interesting topics to talk about, and I thought, why not talk about consistency? and maybe I can try to motivate myself. We’ve all heard it before, consistency is key. But what does that really mean? It’s about showing up, day after day, even if it’s just for a bit. Think about this. What’s...
According to a traditional system of classification, "high frequency" or HF refers to the radio spectrum between 3 and 30 MHz. The label now seems anachronistic, as HF is among the lowest ranges of radio frequencies that see regular use. This setting of the goalposts in the early days of radio technology means that modern communications standards...
How does one encapsulate this feeling of awe? I’m looking up at the stars and it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. All the glimmers, from the intense to the twinkling. The moon, with a tint of red, is to my left. As I look West, I don’t see the comet for which I was looking. But it almost doesn’t matter. Because I see… wonder, and a reminder of how...
Some humans put a ~2.4GHz magnetron on a ventilated metal box with a fancy door.
The lack of title quotes should have been your hint that this post is not about The Wire, HBO’s seminal television series from the early 2000s. Rather, this is about Doctor Who, because back in June or July when I no longer was blogging I made a prediction on social media and I needed to get it down here for posterity. before the show returns....
Amazing. Awesome. Well, but what is it? We could store json data in Pg since PostgreSQL 9.2 – so it's been there for over 12 years now. How is the new shiny thing different? What does it allow you to do? Let's see if I can shed some light on it… For starters: SQL/JSON is … Continue reading "SQL/JSON is here! (kinda “Waiting for Pg 17”)"
Recently I've had to compile Go to WebAssembly to run in the browser in a couple of small projects (#1, #2), and in general spent some time looking at WebAssembly. I find WebAssembly to be an exciting technology, both for the web and for other uses (e.g. with WASI …
When I started wood carving, the only sharpening method I remembered was from seeing my mother use some kind of smooth broken stone that she passed over the length of the knife blade before sacrificing a chicken. I also remember seeing my father use a very coarse stone wheel placed on a motor shaft which threw many sparks when he sharpened some...
lm.rs: run inference on Language Models locally on the CPU with Rust Impressive new LLM inference implementation in Rust by Samuel Vitorino. I tried it just now on an M2 Mac with 64GB of RAM and got very snappy performance for this Q8 Llama 3.2 1B, with Activity Monitor reporting 980% CPU usage over 13 threads. Here's how I compiled the library...
all of this year's XOXO talks were stellar, but this is the only one that comes with a newly-launched archive of nearly-lost artwork #
$2 H100s: How the GPU Bubble Burst Fascinating analysis from Eugene Cheah, founder of LLM hosting provider Featherless, discussing GPU economics over the past 12 months. TLDR: Don’t buy H100s. The market has flipped from shortage ($8/hr) to oversupplied ($2/hr), because of reserved compute resales, open model finetuning, and decline in new...
A few months ago, I built a little demo that I simply forgot to actually talk about here. A coworker was building something similar and it reminded me to take a look at the code, update it, and actually share it. This is a pretty cool example of integrating multiple different APIs to create a final product, in this case, a short story with...