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...
Nicole Sperling for the New York Times: Apple Rethinks Its Movie Strategy After a String of MissesApple executives in Cupertino were already questioning the entertainment units over the amount of money being spent on movies, and the people said there was a thought within the company to not risk
Dan Faggella recorded an unusual podcast with me that’s now online. He introduces me as a “quantum physicist,” which is something that I never call myself (I’m a theoretical computer scientist) but have sort of given up on not being called by others. But the ensuing 85-minute conversation has virtually nothing to do with physics, […]
I finally fixed Marky the Markdownifier. I didn’t do any updates to the interface as it is, in my opinion, not too bad. Marky is a tool for turning web pages into Markdown. It now uses Pandoc with GFM formatting. There’s an API available for outputting to various formats (including JSON with title, source, rendered content, and Markdown content)....
To me and to many mathematicians in Israel, the Annual meeting of the Israeli Mathematical Union is a dear event and we try to take part. (Here we briefly described the 2017 meeting in Acre, and here the 2014 meeting … Continue reading →
How the experimental Speculation Rules API improves web performance by prefetching and prerendering future navigations
Why staying relevant in tech means constantly adapting to new technologies and trends
James Bridle on the value of randomness, and how modern computing is fundamentally incompatible with the very idea of it.
Giving Opportunities to People Who Need Them When I was about to start high school in a small town in Brazil, a teacher gave me a chance to go to one of the best schools in the state for free. This was a life-changing opportunity for me. When I started to like computers, a friend let me use his computer. This gave me the opportunity to learn...
The playground (play.haskell.org) allows you to run single-file Haskell programs right from your browser, and share them with others. In this post, I will introduce the playground and give some implementation details.
The JavaScript world has been battling for low bundle size from the very beginning. It is now our turn to enter the battle
In the Haddock team, part of our mission is to help with writing documentation, and promoting best practices. This article will help you write the best documentation you can!
I've been really enjoying following Simon Willison's blog posts recently. Simon shows other programmers the way LLMs will be used for code assistance in the future, and posts full interactions with LLMs to build small tools or parts of larger applications. A recent post caught my attention; here Simon got …
I keep running into Edward John Routh (1831–1907). He is best known for the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion but he pops up occasionally elsewhere. The previous post discussed Routh’s mnemonic for moments of inertia and his “stretch” theorem. This post will discuss his triangle theorem. Before stating Routh’s theorem, we need to say what a...
Long time Birchtree readers know I love data, and love data even more when I can throw it into a graph. I’m also a fan of testing things that everyone generally agrees are true, but no one seems to have any data to back up.That brings us
Edward John Routh FRS (1831–1907) came up with a mnemonic for summarizing many formulas for moment of inertia of a solid rotating about an axis through its center of mass. Routh’s mnemonic is I = MS / k where M is the mass of an object, S is the sum of the squares of the […] The post Moments of inertia mnemonic first appeared on John D. Cook.
Cog is my tool for using bits of Python to generate content inside an otherwise static file. I used it in extreme ways to generate my GitHub profile page.If you haven’t seen it before, you can customize your GitHub profile by creating a README.md in a repo named the same as your username. So my profile is rendered from...
Designing software is tough. I think we can all agree on that. No matter how much experience you have, your first idea about how to struc
I had the opportunity to test the resiliency of my home server setup due to a scheduled power outage on 2024-09-13. It was also Friday the 13th. I’m not superstitious, but I’m a little stitious. My setup usually consists of the home server, a Wifi AP/router combo box, a converter box for the fiber line, and a CyberPower UT850EG UPS. The planned...
Whenever I bring up memory it inevitably also implicates my aphantasia, but this Musings post reminds me of that other mental process that causes much surprise at how different brains...
Recently I’ve been exploring, once again, options for book tracking that aren’t Goodreads, prompted in part by this very long read about the site. Whenever I do this, it quickly...
At the end of a long and trying day that did not go in any way that especially resembled how I’d hoped it would go, disability access designer Nick Colley...
Just a couple of weeks ago, I referenced what I called my aphantasiac monologue, an attempt to describe how i only can conceive of sounds, much as I only can...
Why real company culture grows from the ground up, not top down.
When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now — I was thrilled by the concept of an "architecture review", and by extension the concept of a "Principal Engineer" (Amazon's term for a staff-level engineer, someone beyond career level) who was always treated with some level of mystique and...
Coding Just for Fun When was the last time you worked on something just for fun? No deadlines, no expectations, no pressure. Just pure pleasure and curiosity, without worrying about the final result or what others will think. Without thinking about: - Overengineering - Best practices - Clean code - Hexagonal architecture - Performance -...
The Haskell Ecosystem plays host to some amazing projects. Talented developers spend significant amounts of time, often their free time, helping develop, maintain, and support this ecosystem that all Haskell developers use. This space is for all of the developer teams that work on Haskell core infrastructure and power the Haskell Ecosystem. This...
When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now — I was thrilled by the concept of an "architecture review", and by extension the concept of a "Principal Engineer" (Amazon's term for a staff-level engineer, someone beyond career level) who was always treated with some level of mystique and...
Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed the extensive and variable products that AT&T and telephone operating companies sold as private lines. One of the interesting properties of private line systems is that they can be ordered as four-wire. Internally, the telephone network handles calls as four-wire with separate talk and listen pairs (or...
When I started writing here about five years ago, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t give in to the trend of starting a blog, adding one overly enthusiastic entry about the stack behind it, and then vanishing into the ether. I was somewhat successful at that and wanted to write something I can link to when people are curious about the...
Guess My RGB, the little colour guessing game, just got a small update. This update adds a "Mode" link to the footer which can be used to toggle the game between normal mode and expert mode. The expert mode was introduced as a hidden feature five months ago in the previous release. With the current release, the expert mode no longer...
Recently I found myself doing more and more things using org-mode. Not surprisingly, I also wanted to use it to write articles here. With some time on my hands this weekend, I decided to give it a try and see how hard would it be to add org support to BridgetownWhich this blog uses as an SSG.Even though Bridgetown supports adding own formats via...
I just realized that this is happening, and that they’re effectively going to (finally) Sherlock DeX, although Android apps have a very steep hill to climb before they stop looking like crap on tablet devices–let alone full-size monitors. However, the real test will be how developers adapt their apps to take full advantage of this feature. The...
I'm resisting my temptation towards digital hoarding and "save everything", and trying to be more selective about the data I'm keeping.
The HoudahGeo giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Adam Oldakowski Stephen Hannam Steve Mattan Gary Burkhardt Theo Menezes 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 HoudahGeo is still...
Shorly after publishing Planter, user cavalierex brought Cookiecutter to my attention on the forum. It appears to be a complete replacement and is far more mature than Planter. I don’t regret making Planter — it fits my own needs perfectly. If I’d known about cookiecutter before starting, though, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reinventing the...
A lot of people are wondering about the technical stack used by updown.io and more generaly by one-man tech companies. A while back (2016) I filled up this information on StackShare. I haven't kept it up-to-date and I don't like to have to maintain yet another third party documentation so it's unlikely I'll update it again. Though it changes very...
I recently came across an upper bound I hadn’t seen before [1]. Given a binomial coefficient C(r, k), let n = min(k, r − k) and m = r − n. Then for any ε > 0, C(n + m, n) ≤ (1 + ε)n + m / εn. I could imagine how non-optimal choice […] The post Binomial bound first appeared on John D. Cook.
It's 3:22 p.m., and I'm sitting in the clinic's waiting room. They send you to this place when you have an emergency that isn't urgent enough for the ER.I'm here with my daughter, who needs to see a doc. (She's good now)A few other kids are in the waiting room—all with only one of their parents. And every parent is breaking their neck staring down at their phone.Fortunately, I realize this as soon as we enter the room and decide I won't pull my phone out of my...
I did not think I would ever be spinning a blog again. I think I did in the, like, pre-Google Blogger days? Or something? I was 14. I thought everyone would follow it and I would be internet famous. I wish I could go back in time and kick my own ass. This will not be a newsletter. I wanted to make one to have a more centralized "here's an...
Using can improve your website's performance by reducing connection setup times to key external domains. Speed up the loading of critical resources like images, analytics, and embedded content for a smoother user experience.
How to save bandwidth and speed up your site by lazy-loading iframes
What do we lose when we default to crafting our written words using purely digital tools?
The college startup pipe dream I write this article to pose a question: Will the next trillion dollar startup be started by a college-aged kid in his dorm? Can the pattern of Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Google be repeated? (Bezos being a sort-of exception to this, as he was ancient when he started Amazon at 30). An analysis of historical...
Theorical ideas about a distributed database that can store infinite data across a set of agents.
Look, Twitter is trash now, let’s be honest. It used to be a gold mine for discovering stuff as a developer, but since the Musk takeover, finding anything of value is hard. We’re all fragmented now too, spread around Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and LinkedIn, so finding stuff is still tough on social media. I’ll always back RSS — it’s why we...
[Cooper, 2013-2024] Earlier this week, Ross Andersen for The Atlantic considered the current state of comparative thanatology, or the question of how similar or dissimilar is the understanding of death from...