2025 Feb 28. Put it in your calendar. It's been three years since HYTRADBOI. Long enough that I've mostly forgotten how stressful it was to run a conference and it's starting to seem like a good idea again. talks The format will stay the same. 10 minute, pre-recorded, heavily-edited talks. Asynchronous chat. Join from a different time-zone, watch talks on your lunch break, answer questions...
“I’m just trying to think of a way to start this,” thought Cassie, as she embarked on her first blog post: an interview with two of her friends on what the web means to them. An assignment to pass her journalism class. Cassie: “Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me today for this interview. I’m so excited! I must admit that I’m a bit nervous....
I spent the evening watching this incredibly grokkable talk on event-driven services by James Eastham at NDC London 2024. Below is a cleaned-up version of my notes. I highly recommend watching the full talk if you’re interested before reading this distillation. The curse of tightly coupled microservices Microservices often...
This episode of Xecast, Xe Iaso is joined by special guest Lithium Fox. They nerd out about simracing, vtubing, and passion projects.
Today in our weekly CS Pizza talk and discussion series, the CS department hosted a panel of senior CS majors sharing their off-campus study experiences. Five juniors went abroad last year, and four were able to join the lunchtime panel. I was unable to attend because of my daughter’s early school dismissal, but I hear […]
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Setapp. Get access to hundreds of Mac and iOS apps for one low monthly subscription fee. Usage A schema for CLIs that can be used to generate man pages, Markdown, and shell completion scripts. I might have to start implementing this… OSStatus — Apple API Errors Look up those inscrutable...
The Keep It giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Toni Martinez Jan Dammshäuser Alex Trecartin You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything! But I didn’t win! If you didn’t win, sorry, but Keep It is still worth checking out. Especially if...
This is part 2 of day 1 of HPTS'24. (You can tell I did some lisp programming back in the day, huh?) Here is the first part of day 1, you should check that out as well. There were 2 sessions each with 4 talks in the afternoon of day 2. After dinner, we had a gong show presentation on miscellaneous topics as well. Session 3: DBOSVirtual Memory: a...
Focus stealing prevention exists for two main reasons: One is security, since we need to prevent rogue apps from deceiving users into e.g. typing their password into another window. If apps can silently claim keyboard focus and open their own window over the currently focused one, this enables phishing and other similar attacks. The other …...
Sipeed NanoKVM: A RISC-V stick-on This is the Sipeed NanoKVM. You stick it on your computer, plug in HDMI, USB, and the power button, and you get full remote control over the network—even if your computer locks up. How did Sipeed make it so small, and so cheap? The 'full' kit above is about $50, while the cheapest competitors running...
I recently posted this on Threads:My regular reminder that anytime someone says “99% of users” is completely making things up and has done precisely zero investigation outside of their own experience.Once you notice this, you start to see it everywhere. People have a very bad habit
Build and Deploy Websites Automatically with Git 2024-09-20 I recently began the process of setting up my self-hosted1 cgit server as my main code forge. Updating repos via cgit on NearlyFreeSpeech on its own has been simple enough, but it lacked the “wow-factor” of having some sort of automated build process. I looked into a bunch of different...
I wake up. Not groggy, not tired, but alert. Something woke me up. I'm getting less sleep these days. Probably the weather changing; it rains at odd times, sometimes at night. The thunder wakes me up too. And sometimes passing vehicles that sound just a little different from the regular traffic. Ha, guess I'm just a light sleeper. I get up,...
Life is tough. Most weeks come with their share of issues. From a tiny aggravation to an enormous problem.Human beings have been trying to find ways to accept it since... well, probably since around the time our species began to exist.We have healthy and unhealthy ways to cope. Periods when it's easier to accept that life is made of these challenges and periods when we struggle.But quasi-universally, we think that our situation is unique. We are the only ones with...
TYI56 asked the following question of Timothy Chow: You have fifteen boxes labelled with the English letters from A to O. Two identical prizes are placed in two (distinct) boxes chosen at random. Andrew’s search order is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO. Barbara’s search … Continue reading →
IntroductionIntroductionThis post is ostensibly about an obscure technical issue in distributed systems, but it's really about human communications, and how disagreements that on the surface appear to be about technical issues can sometimes turn out to actually be disagreements about the meanings of words. I'm taking the time to write a fairly extensive post about this for two reasons. First, I'm hoping it will be helpful to provide a case-study about what appears on the surface to be...This post is ostensibly about an obscure technical issue in distributed systems, but it's really about human communications, and how disagreements that on the surface appear to be about technical issues can sometimes turn out to actually be disagreements about the meanings of words. I'm taking the time to write a fairly extensive post about this for two reasons. First, I'm hoping it will be helpful to provide a case-study about what appears on the surface to be...
Wow, what a week that was! The two days of HPTS (Monday and Tuesday this week) felt like a week to me. I learned a lot, and had a lot of good conversations, and even was able to squeeze in some beach walks in there. HPTS has been operating since 1985, convenening mostly every two years. It has been described as Davos for database systems. Pat...
Once you're competent, everything changes. You stop second-guessing yourself. You stop panicking every time you encounter a new problem. And you start taking on bigger challenges with excitement rather than dread.
Posted on September 20, 2024 by Linus Heckemann Today, I wanted to try out ListenBrainz in conjunction with my self-hosted Navidrome music server. I didn’t want to collect new data for several days before getting interesting suggestions from there, so I had to import some historical...
On June 11th, 2024, we discovered a set of vulnerabilities in Kia vehicles that allowed remote control over key functions using only a license plate. These attacks could be executed remotely on any hardware-equipped vehicle in about 30 seconds, regardless of whether it had an active Kia Connect subscription.
Every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out – Mark Watney, The Martian
Suppose you are looking for my Aeropress recipe. To find this information, you could turn to my blog search engine. This search engine indexes all of my blog posts. The search engine is powered by JameSQL, a NoSQL document database. Turning text queries into JSON queries Let’s start with a query: aeropress recipe When you type this query into my...
Caching is hard. So hard. But also, we are so fucking bad at it. Every time I have to use a public wifi setup I have a joker moment. Does absolutely nobody test shit on anything less than wired symmetric gigabit anymore?Web SPA apps are some of the worst for this. Motherfucker, you have the same fucking iconography for three years, why does it...
Last year I cancelled a bunch of subscriptions to see what was actually worth my money. That went great, so this year I'm doing it again!
Blog » In fact I have two publishing deals. Some of you may have already seen this news, and you may be able to guess where this is going. The first deal is with Ballantine Books, a US-based publisher which is part of Penguin Random House. The second deal is with Del Rey, a UK-based publisher which is also part of Penguin Random House. Ballantine...
Chapter 5 of the Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA) book discusses strategies and challenges in replicating data across distributed systems. I had covered the first part last week, here is the second part of leaderless replication.Leaderless replication abandons the concept of a leader node, and allows any replica to directly accept...
There are several things I would like to see improve with the Vision Pro (and VR hardware in general), but it’s recently hit me that the main issue I have with using it is that despite all of the video passthrough and digital eyes on the outside of
I want to take a crack at predicting the future half because I think it’ll be fun to look back on this post (hi future self, hope you’re doing well! 👋) and half because I think it’s important to periodically take some time to pause, reflect, and plot your future trajectory. And in order to plot where you’re going it’s helpful to look ahead and...
Someone with no exposure to probability or statistics likely has an intuitive sense that averaging random variables reduces variance, though they wouldn’t state it in those terms. They might, for example, agree that the average of several test grades gives a better assessment of a student than a single test grade. But data from a […] The post The...
A simple protocol lets you make the contents of your #smallweb / #indieweb site more fully discoverable and explorable by interested users. This can also let site A see what resources site B offers. I’ve been working on this in the spirit of the web’s simple, venerable, and immensely valuable View Source facility. View Source just lets you view a...
In my security research I often come across weird quirks and behaviours that aren’t particularly useful beyond a neat party trick. It’s always a good idea to keep track of them though, perhaps one day they’ll be just the missing piece you need. Untitled presentation ...
[Mike Doughty, Sebastian Steinberg, Mark degli Antoni at Crystal Ballroom] It’s a very strange experience, seeing a band at the height of their career and then at a reunion show...
In 2017, Apple released a new iPhone with what I consider the worst design decision I could ever imagine — the notch.… Continue reading → The post Weird design decisions that we accept appeared first on Sergey Kaplich.
Letting go of difficult or harmful users can be the key to maintaining the health and growth of your product
It’s not just about getting the message across; it’s about doing so in a way that’s easy for others to follow. Good writing shows respect for your team and your work.
How Meta and other companies use the 'code wins arguments' mindset to turn ideas into reality
A “stories-first” approach to refactor a small yet complicated piece of business code Recently, I didn’t have time or resource for serious writing. I had plans for several long articles for the summer that gone, but unfortunately not many have came of that. But last night I have stumbled upon famous (so it seems, though I have never seen it...
Both last week at London tech leaders and this week at the Open Source Summit in Vienna I engaged in various discussions about pledging money to Open Source. At Sentry we have been funding our Open Source dependencies for a few years now and we're trying to encourage others to do the same. It’s not an easy ask, of course. One quite memorable...
In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce of epic proportions. If a person was dead, it would often be years before the government cleared...
While going through a script at work today, I came across Bash’s nameref feature. It uses declare -n ref="$1" to set up a variable that allows you to reference another variable by name—kind of like pass-by-reference in C. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before but probably just skimmed over it. But as I dug into the man page1, I realized there’s a...
You might already be familiar with the two hardest problems in Computer Science, but here I'm talking about Software Engineering.Naming things is still very hard, but what are the three things that you wish the software engineering industry got better at? Or, conversely, what are your top three sources of frustration?This is my list.1. User-hostile softwareWay too much software is botched even before the first line of boilerplate gets flushed to...
The search engine on this website is powered by JameSQL, an open source, NoSQL database. The engine accepts a query and evaluates it according to any conditions specified. I strive to keep query times below 10ms, to help ensure the search experience feels and is as fast as possible. When I first released the search engine, relevance was...
Both last week at London tech leaders and this week at the Open Source Summit in Vienna I engaged in various discussions about pledging money to Open Source. At Sentry we have been funding our Open Source dependencies for a few years now and we're trying to encourage others to do the same. It’s not an easy ask, of course. One quite memorable...
In Basic MetaProgramming in Zig we saw how std.meta.hasFn uses @typeInfo to determine if the type is a struct, union or enum. In this post, we'll take expand that introduction and use std.builtin.Type to create our own type. Spoiler: as far as I know, you cannot (yet) define methods on comptime-generated structs, unions or enums. Only fields....
What I really like about this article is how Josh explains how :has() works. They’re especially good at that sort of thing. There’s lots of good real-world examples in there too which compliments the vibe I was trying to achieve earlier in the year. We need more real world examples like this! I’ve long said flexbox was my all time favourite CSS...
Mike Doughty, Sebastian Steinberg, Mark degli Antoni at Crystal Ballroom It’s a very strange experience, seeing a band at the height of their career and then at a reunion show two decades and change later. On-stage, early Soul Coughing had Doughty matching the sheer physical and musical vibrancy of Steinberg, Antoni, and Gabay. Today, he’s mostly...
Back in 2018 I wanted to turn this into a more ambitious article but that never
happened. I do like the plots, though, so I’m publishing it mainly to show them
off.
At some point in 2012 or 2013, something weird happened. After years of nothing,
object detection accuracy started going up.
Then it brought with it speech recognition.
Let’s celebrate! we just hit 1000 games at my database of moai in video games 🗿 today is Fiestas Patrias (Independence Day) in Chile 🇨🇱 So here’s some “Moai-chan-dise” ✨ t-shirts and stickers in both silly and serious styles special “relaxing” sticker by @Vxcl T-shirts Various sizes and colours. ...
Sherry Turkle wrote her study of the culture of computing, The Second Self, "on an Apple II computer that had, quite literally, been torn bare."1 Its circuitry had been exposed, and its operating system replaced. Even her word processor felt close to the machine; it required her to use "a formal language of nested delimiters" that could be...
Here’s me finding yet another cool blog, this time by Aaron Giles, a programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer. We’re off to a good start here, I love people who dabble in multiple disciplines. Aaron describes how he ended up with a thousand music CDs, how he re-ripped them all in a lossless format, and as a bonus, summarized his...
Recently I got an interesting performance bug on emoji-picker-element: I’m on a fedi instance with 19k custom emojis […] and when I open the emoji picker […], the page freezes for like a full second at least and overall performance stutters for a while after that. If you’re not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse, […]
Greetings, gentle readers. Today, an update on recent progress in the Whippet embeddable garbage collection library.feature-completenessWhen I started working on Whippet, two and a half years ago already, I was aiming to make a new garbage collector for Guile. In the beginning I was just focussing on proving that it would be advantageous to switch,...
In Always Coming Home, a woman named Stone Telling writes the story of her life, beginning with her parents and the first time she meets her father. Of this telling, she writes:
Part 2: Silimate and the power of AI in chip design.