A few shell scripts I use to go between the Finder and the Terminal.
This was originally something I was going to talk about in Corporations have Rejected Copyright, back when that series was going to just be one long post (really!). But since I saw Nintendo apparently sued Palworld today, I wanted to put this up as background information. You should definitely read You’ve Never Seen Copyright first, particularly...
most "blue zones," concentrated areas of supercentenarians, can be attributed to pension fraud or bad record-keeping #
a search engine using OCRed text from map imagery across Brooklyn, expanding to all of NYC soon #
@celine/celine is a microlibrary for building reactive HTML notebooks.
Engineering managers who stop writing code lose touch with their teams and become ineffective leaders
Automatically update your package.json dependencies one by one in chronological order, ensuring compatibility and reducing errors
Great products speak for themselves, without the need for massive marketing campaigns
Over the last year I worked on a static site generator written from scratch in Zig. It's called Zine, like in fanzine (wiki) and in this blog post I'll briefly present the reasons why I decided to create my own, and describe what's innovative about it.If you want to try it out (or just jump straight into the docs) the official website is
A button is arguably the most likely component to find itself in your codebase so I’m going to show you how I approach building one. The hope is it demystifies the humble button and encourages folks who reach for a and a JavaScript handler to use semantic elements. What we’re building We’ve got a pretty standard button with three variants, a...
In January 2018 I published a blogpost titled Pangeo: JupyterHub, Dask, and XArray on the Cloud, which introduced a new architecture for running scalable Python computations on the cloud using …
Fancy new build tools come and go, but I think I will stick with using makefiles to orchestrate everyday tasks in my projects.
For the past two years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a passive aggressive win-back campaign from Dropbox. The feud originally started when I migrated away from Dropbox and hence canceled my subscription while leaving them saddled with over a terabyte of my data to carry forever, like a camel in the digital desert. After all, why wouldn’t I?...
The title of this post makes it sound like I’m buying new PCs every five minutes, which is not the case, but I really couldn’t think of a better title, so here we are. I’ve not posted for months at this point, so gimme a break won’t you? First things...
Beware ye who enter, here be personal opinions. I’ve never understood reading time estimation widgets. Why did these get so popular? Is it because they’re easy? I mean, you can grab one off npm no problem. Baldur suggests a theory in his piece about estimated reading times: At some point a programmer read in a study that the average person read...
I am reading Mara Bos' Rust Atomics and Locks. On the first pass, I didn't really grok memory ordering. So here's my attempt at understanding by explaining.
Blog Hiatus You might have noticed I haven't been updating my website. I haven't even looked at any of my drafts for the past three months. All that time is instead going into Logic for Programmers. I'll get back to the site when that's done or in 2025, whichever comes first. Newsletter and Patreon will still get regular updates. (As a...
Pop quiz: what emoji do you see below? [1] Depending on your browser and operating system, you might see: The flag of Martinique The old flag of Martinique (which kinda looks like the Quebecois flag) The enigmatic initials “MQ” This, frankly, is a mess. And it’s emblematic of how half-heartedly browsers and operating systems have […]
I recently ran across a theorem connecting the arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean, and the golden ratio. Each of these comes fairly often, and there are elegant connections between them, but I don’t recall seeing all four together in one theorem before. Here’s the theorem [1]: The arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means of two […]...
Finding a customer for your product in the Department of Defense is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention? How do you know if they have money to spend on your product? It almost always starts with a Program Executive Office. The Department of Defense (DoD) no longer owns all […]
The debridement operation was a success: nothing bad grew afterwards. I was discharged after a couple of nights with crutches, instructions not to weight-bear, a remarkable, portable negative-pressure "Vac" pump that lived by my side, and some strong painkillers. About two weeks later, I had a skin graft. The surgeon took some skin from my thigh...
Haiku R1/beta5 is out, and I completely lost track of it until today. Not overly enthusiastic about the cosmetics (dark mode should really have an option to change tab color as well), but as someone who actually ran BeOS in the past I find it… original, for sure. I remain mostly unfazed by the lack of a working ARM port (I’ve been saying this for...
The language we use matters. Hyperboles and exaggerations can be tempting to use to make a point. Or if you're French... oh yes! Some of us have a sweet spot for drama.But our kids have yet to adjust their rhetorical tools. They tend to take things literally even when we, adults, think that it's obviously just a figure of speech.If I say to my wife, "The tax level this year is KILLING US!" in front of my young daughter, she won't know that I don't mean that. Whether she...
In Xcode 16, project files and folders are arranged differently in the Project navigator. What used to be a group is now a folder, and this simple change has some interesting effects. At first, I was against the new scheme - in fact in my SwiftUI for Mac 2024 article, I specifically recommended reverting back to the old group method. But after...
Discover how FAANG companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix reduce the hidden costs of meetings by embracing written communication and minimizing unnecessary gatherings.
How Amazon's emphasis on eliminating weasel words leads to more precise, actionable communication and better decision-making
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you probably have seen the same massive surge I’ve seen in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to pretty much every problem out there, in software testing, in software development, and in life in general.
If you do just foo, the following justfile will write a single byte 0x0A to a file named bar: x := "\n" foo: printf '{{x}}' > bar Let's find out where that 0x0A byte comes from. just is written in Rust, and the just parser has a function called cook_string, which transforms a just string token containing escape sequences into a UTF-8 string....
No Apple Intelligence yet, and in the short time I’ve had since installing it I’ve already come up against a couple of bugs and inconsistent behavior in Mail, and pretty much zero visible improvement other than in Safari. Mind you, iOS 18.0 is much worse, a couple of my critical shortcuts have broken already, including the ones I use to post...
There’s some 2015 research out of Microsoft titled Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs11 Code Reviews Do Not Find Bugs; How the Current Code Review Best Practice Slows Us Down; Czerwonka, Greiler, Tilford; IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering; 2015. which seems strangely named because reviewers do find bugs. Here’s what the authors say: Contrary to the often stated...
And Opinions on Yurts in New England The last six months I took a break from writing in order to transition myself to off-grid living. Of course, this post and many others I have waiting in the wings would have been written much faster if I didn’t have such demand avoidance…even demand from myself, doing something I want to do. Thanks to folks on...
When I launched WDiL earlier this week I knew that it was what might be politely described as a MVP. And while I like SimpleCSS it doesn’t make for the most attractive sites. Therefore, I set about making it more appealing while also adding more functionality. Moving from Simple CSS I spent quite a bit […]
Rick Rubin gives this advice about working in the studio with artists when making an album: [Let’s say] We’ve recorded twenty-five songs. We think the album is going to have ten. Instead of picking our favorite ten, we limit it to: “What are the five or six we can’t live without?” [So you] go past the goal to get to the real heart of it, and then...
We’ve now talked twice about an important dimension of a benchmark: the openness of the loop. While there’s more subtlety to it, if what you take away is: open-loop is better for measuring latency, and closed-loop is better for measuring throughput. then you’re not going to be in such a bad place. There’s maybe three main roles someone could find...
We’ve now talked twice about an important dimension of a benchmark: the openness of the loop. While there’s more subtlety to it, if what you take away is: open-loop is better for measuring latency, and closed-loop is better for measuring throughput. then you’re not going to be in such a bad place. There’s maybe three main roles someone could find...
I wrote a small thing about Cohost that I’ll probably come back to later for, like, some kinda actual “goodbye to this site”-type post but for now I just want to think (out loud) a bit on something that came up in the aforementioned post. I brought up that my digital art journey began on deviantART, touching on how critical that place was for the...
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the gaps in my skill set. As we’re now about to head into the year’s final quarter, I’ve been looking back at the two-year review I wrote at the beginning of the year and assessing my progress. And it’s a mixed bag. I decided to spend some time focusing on building up the blog and the newsletter instead of...
Although most single-board computers these days ship in a “full” Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 “B” form-factor or larger, I have been on the lookout for Zero variants for a long time, and the Geniatech XPI-3566-Zero is the latest one I’ve tested. Disclaimer: Geniatech supplied me with a Geniatech XPI-3566-Zero free of charge, for which I thank them. And, as...
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 1-year subscriptions ($40 value each) for Mac and iOS for Keep It. Keep It from Reinvented Software is the perfect tool for people who want to collect notes, documents, web links, and more without locking their data into something like Evernote. If you’ve been tempted by something like DEVONthink but the...
“Something went wrong · molily” The JavaScript community is roughly where PHP was in 2000. Which is a good thing. We have just scratched the surface of what a sensible use of JavaScript might look like. This involves rendering some pages statically, rendering some pages dynamically on the server, and rendering interactive “islands” on the client....
I’m highlighting this new redesign of Ahmad Shadeed’s website because it ticks so many boxes for me as excellent work. First up, it’s clean, considered and uses typography and space really well. Ahmad’s site is a combination of a personal site and a professional site and they’ve rightly allowed space in their design while delivering flair in...
py2010: Intermediate Logic is a University of St Andrews undergraduate subject in which we cover important results in logic to philosophy students. It’s taught by Greg Restall, together with a committed crew of postgraduate students. The subject introduces the proof theory and model theory of propositional, modal and predicate logic–in that...
A detailed look at the key changes and improvements in Express v5.0 and how to migrate your app
A deep dive into the strategies, mindset, and team culture that have made MrBeast one of the most successful creators on YouTube
This is inspired by receiving a "personnel update" when a friend was fired many years ago. It felt coldly impersonal for such a deeply personal event, so I imagined what it would be like if the same approach were taken to other deeply personal events. * * * Subject: Personnel Update From: dad@family.com To: son@family.com CC:...
Here’s my usual report on our fall 2024 enrollments, as of week 2 of the semester. Number Title Enrolled under Math Women:Men Waitlist CS 167-A, -B, -C Intro. Computational Problem Solving 68/60 3:4 CS/Math 215 Introduction to Data Science 25/24 2:3 CS/Math 220-A, -B Discrete Math & Functional Programming 37/24 3 1:2 CS 270-A, -B […]
It’s easy to get carried away when you’re building a new web app. You’ve got big ideas, you picture millions of users flocking to your platform, and you start imagining the kind of infrastructure needed to handle all that traffic. So, you build for scale from day one—optimising databases, setting up powerful servers, and ensuring everything is...
There are a billion things in iOS 18 this year, and I highly suggest checking out Federico Viticci’s review over on MacStories tomorrow, but here are a few things that have actually been impactful for me since installing the beta back in June. This is addressing things in
There was a time when software (and games! Games are just software for fun!) were distributed on DVD. A physical disk that you would insert into your system to load up software and install. This was the 2000's, when computers prided themselves on being personal computation devices. A Chromebook was a curiosity at the time, promising to run most...