.something-went-wrong-toc { font-size: 85%; } .something-went-wrong-toc ol { list-style-type: ''; margin-left: 0; } .something-went-wrong-toc li { list-style-type: '▾ '; margin-bottom: 0; } .something-went-wrong-toc li::marker { font-size: 130%; line-height: 1; color: #666; } Table of contents Smashing things against each...
Logic For Programmers v0.3 Now available! It's a light release as I learn more about formatting a nice-looking book. You can see some of the differences between v2 and v3 here. Why Not Comments Code is written in a structured machine language, comments are written in an expressive human language. The "human language" bit makes comments more...
My electric toothbrush seems to be running out of charge quicker and quicker but is it or am I just misremembering when I last charged it? This is the first world challenge that I set about to change with WDiL! Introducing When Did I Last? (WDiL) WDiL aims to help solve those sorts of problems […]
Previously, we've looked at code generation in both Rails and Thrift. But unlike Thrift, the code generated by Rails is meant to be changed. Any change is fine, so long as it's not too surprising; the only limit is our judgement. Rails, then, doesn't fit the limb-metaphor. Our explanation will not always end with the model. Even so, the model...
The more progressive side of things has done a somewhat decent job educating others about the shaming of other people’s bodies, to the point where body positivity and acceptance is...
It’s been September for a good week now, I know, but you’ll have to forgive me as I’m running a bit behind my usual blog post cadence. The sudden drop in temperature makes it painfully clear that the summer of 2024 is gone, which is fine considering our garden has been ransacked by excavators and other machines. Not entirely fine, though: our...
Between roughly 2001 and 2018, I’ve happy to have done some nice things in quantum computing theory, from the quantum lower bound for the collision problem to the invention of shadow tomography. I hope that’s not the end of it. QC research brought me about as much pleasure as anything in life did. So I […]
For nine months now, I’ve been telling people about what I describe as “an objectively perfect movie”, one I’ve now seen four times since finally streaming it in January. It’d...
It’s happening. Or, one thing is happening. Whether or not the other thing happens along with it is up to you. Tomorrow marks the start of the completely surprising and...
Watch a video version of this blog post below! Svelte 5 brings a lot of changes, from the new Runes-based syntax to deep reactivity and performance improvements across the board. But one aspect that’s flown under the radar is the massive reduction in bundle size. In my experiments, you can get about 50% decrease in code shipped to users, just by...
I was skimming through the book Mathematical Reflections [1] recently. He was discussing a set of generalizations [2] of the Star of David theorem from combinatorics. The theorem is so named because if you draw a Star of David by connecting points in Pascal’s triangle then each side corresponds to the vertices of a triangle. […] The post...
I replaced my existing Homelab setup from the ground up with Unifi's latest Gateways, Switches APs, and Cameras. Here is what I did and how it ended up.
I started this Substack on 23rd April, 2023 from 0 subscribers with a dream of writing deeply technical articles and making a living.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-assisted software development, a new category of tools has emerged: repository-to-prompt converters. These utilities address the growing need to feed entire codebases into Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini. Let’s delve into the technical aspects and implications of these tools.
Golly! Why is it so hard for us adults to acknowledge when things go well? Why do we seem to obsess over the proverbial late train?Modern science tells us that gratitude has health benefits across the board. Ancient traditions have been screaming at us to do it for literally thousands of years (see, for instance, the writings of Saint Paul).Yet, we don't express gratitude much. We go to bed with the same look on our faces no matter the day we had. We quickly move on to...
Sometime after midnight on Wednesday morning, I had my first-ever lucid dreaming experience, and then later that morning my second. Each began with a cellphone that had been broken in...
AKA the three laws of mental thermodynamics.You are a software engineer and have the luxury of facing interesting problems. You would like to tell others about the interesting stuff that you work on, but once your pen is pointed at blank paper (or your cursor is at offset 0 of an empty file), you just don't know how to make progress.In this post I have some advice for you, but beware: advice for complex problems (writing is...
Xe reflects on a week of intense ups and downs, navigating a whirlwind of job offers, contract work, and personal projects.
Another Rust crate announcement: this time I’m announcing yamlpath, a small library for format-preserving YAML feature extraction.
Our first course is going live this year and it’s all about CSS! Well not all, but we’ll let the Complete CSS page explain just what that is about: …you can spend all the time in the world focussing purely on your CSS knowledge, but top level front-end development is much more than writing code. It’s also about communication, planning and...
Zig doesn't have a simple way to create closures because closures require allocation, and Zig has a "no hidden allocation" policy. The values that you want to capture need to live somewhere (i.e. the heap), but there's no way for Zig (the language) to create the necessary heap memory. However, outside of the language, either in the standard...
I’ve been off the internet all day and wanted to share some gut reactions to the updates Apple just announced before being influenced by others. So, in the general order they talked about things, let’s go!Apple Watch Series 10This looks like a nice update
This may be Apple Vision Pro's killer feature, enabling you to see dead people: augmenting old photos into lifelike representations.
For the past few days, I have been toying with an idea for a board game. To test it out, I wanted to write a simple implementation of it. Here’s an example of a type we might need in a critical phase of the game. In[1]: -- | A quote for a proposal. data Quote = Quote { _proposal :: Proposal , _premium :: Int ,...
A short post of US personal finance tips which are not memetic-competitive Credit Cards You should generally use a credit card rather than debit card in order to receive least 2% back on everything you buy. I don’t participate in … Continue reading →
Cyclomatic complexity is like counting how many ways a car can go. More options make it harder to drive because you have to make more decisions, which can lead to confusion.
In the final chapter of Everything for Everyone, M.E. O’Brien interviews Alkasi Sanchez. The conversation takes place in Brooklyn, on May 2, 2072.
very sad to hear this but I'm grateful for their effort, and loved having them at XOXO to talk about their weird and special community #
OK, fine. Since I upgraded last year, I was quite unfazed by Apple’s 2024 iteration on either the iPhone or the new watches (let alone AirPods), but there were a few things I liked–and some I didn’t. Sizes, for instance. Never mind the lack of an iPhone Mini model (we all know that’s unlikely and almost random), but I don’t need a bigger watch...
Note: I'm trying out enabling comments. Behave! I reserve the right to disable them again for any reason including "the very idea of someone commenting made me anxious." We talked recently about why it’s easy to use a closed-loop benchmark to inappropriately measure latency, and why an open-loop benchmark is a better choice for this, generally....
Note: I'm trying out enabling comments. Behave! I reserve the right to disable them again for any reason including "the very idea of someone commenting made me anxious." We talked recently about why it’s easy to use a closed-loop benchmark to inappropriately measure latency, and why an open-loop benchmark is a better choice for this, generally....
Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard that Windows NT is a very advanced operating system and, being a Unix person myself, it has bothered me to not know why. I’ve been meaning to answer this question for years and I can do so now, which means I want to present you my findings. My desire to know about NT’s internals started in 2006 when I applied...
Part 1: Primitive Instruments, and hardware at the speed of software.
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 licenses ($39 value each) for HoudahGeo. Have you ever wanted a fully-fledged interface for automatically geocoding and geotagging your photo collection? HoudahGeo makes it easy to add locations in Apple Photos, iPhoto, and Aperture, and can write tags to the original image files. This giveaway is for...
“Shady Firms Say They’re Already Manipulating Chatbots to Say Nice Things About Their Clients” “Going Buildless | Max Böck” “AI Gobbled A Record Share Of Startup Funding This Year”. “So far this year, 35% of U.S. startup investment has gone to AI-related companies, per Crunchbase data. That appears to be the highest percentage on record, besting...
It all began because one of the New York Times' professional opinion-havers didn’t like how chatbots were describing him. Of course, his take was not the sharpest: My theory about what happened next — which is supported by conversations I’ve had with researchers in artificial intelligence, some of whom worked on Bing — is that many of the stories...
The Cambridge Carnival is a colorful celebration that is rooted in African traditions. Since the abolition of slavery in the U.S. and Caribbean, Carnival today has become a celebration of emancipation, freedom and expression. Thanks to the Boston photography group for getting me out to see this!
My HTTP Header Analyzer continues to be used a lot. Last week, I received a bug report, so I decided to look into it over the weekend. One thing led to another, and I ended up making a slew of improvements: Clarified the explanations for various Cloudflare headers, including CF-Edge-Cache, CF-APO-Via, CF-BGJ, CF-Polish, CF-Mitigated, CF-Ray,...
Part 2: Growth, Waste, and Externalities§ The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean there isn’t a power problem. If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems. But if we’ve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, what’s left?...
the low-stakes internet mystery to identify the only unknown celebrity on a shower curtain pattern is solved after four years #
My My summer projectsummer project is to work on labels for maps. In the is to work on labels for maps. In the previous postprevious post I described how I created outlines, and how I had a bug in the rendering. While looking closely at text to fix that bug, I noticed in one of my tests that the k and s seemed too close together. The h and e seemed a little too far... I described how I created outlines, and how I had a bug in the rendering. While looking closely at text to fix that bug, I noticed in one of my tests that the k and s seemed too close together. The h and e seemed a little too far...
Ten years ago, I traveled alone around Europe, staying at random strangers' houses that I found through Couchsurfing. It was an amazing experience, and I met many great people—some of whom I'm still happy to call friends.… Continue reading → The post The magic music moment appeared first on Sergey Kaplich.
From smartphones to cars, some technologies can exert exclusive control over entire aspects of daily life, and not always for the better.
Now that uv is rapidly advancing I have started to dive back into making multi-version imports for Python work. The goal here is to enable multiple resolutions from the solver in uv so that two incompatible versions of a library can be installed and used simultaniously. Simplified speaking it should be possible for a library to depend on both...
Patch Nix as soon as a patch is available to protect against GHSA-h4vv-h3jq-v493
FriendlyId is a helpful Ruby gem that streamlines creating permalinks and slugs for Rails applications. In Pika we're using it to help with generating permalinks for blog posts and pages as well as slugs for tags. When a customer wrote in with a request to modify the behavior of these permalinks, I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to override the...
Generative AI is in its Cambrian Explosion phase. So many people are taking the models and messing around with them in so many ways to try and see if they can make something work. There's just one problem: how do you tell if a model is good or not without actually setting it up and using it? One of the biggest points of comparison is the...
On my way back from a trip to Vienna, I got breakfast at the airport. My flight was early, so I was especially looking forward to having a coffee with my meal. At the breakfast eatery I visited, there was a quiet room. The room was detached from the rest of the cafe with a glass wall, enough to significantly dull the sounds from outside. Whereas...
I was speaking with a friend yesterday about finding the time to write blog posts. I offered a tip that has worked for me recently: write before dinner. A few months ago, I had a work project and I decided to set myself a 20 minute deadline. I put my dinner in the oven, then started writing. In the time when I otherwise would be doing dishes or...
It's hard to make progress on side projects sometimes. Getting started is easy when we see the bright future of the project. Then somewhere in the middle, we get stuck in lists of tasks to do, a long way in and still a long way from the finish line. This happens to me as much as anyone. In the last couple of years, I stumbled into a way to avoid...
Now that uv is rapidly advancing I have started to dive back into making multi-version imports for Python work. The goal here is to enable multiple resolutions from the solver in uv so that two incompatible versions of a library can be installed and used simultaniously. Simplified speaking it should be possible for a library to depend on both...
The internet’s full of content, but most of it is becoming junk. I’m talking about the stuff generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). These AI tools are cranking out endless articles, and the quality? It's bad—really bad.
The Euler formula states that for any real x: \[e^{ix}=cos(x)+i sin(x)\] Where i is the imaginary unit. This formula is extremely important in many branches of mathematics and engineering, but at first glance it's puzzling. What does a complex exponent even mean, and how can …
Stanford psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues came up with an interesting study in human behavior. Subjects were given incomplete words and asked to complete them with the first word that came to mind. For example, you’re given the fragments B__T and CHE__ and you write BOOT and CHESS. Afterwards, subjects were asked to explain what they...
And so it came to pass that I took a break from writing (and most other things) for a couple of weeks, and now I’m back. Sort of. Soul CleansingLike last year, I read six or seven books of various genres–some new, some old, some just to try to shake away the blues and try new things. Regretfully, as time goes by, one’s likelihood of finding...
WezTerm is a cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator that supports Sixel graphics and a bunch of other features that make it a saner alternative to most platform-native terminal emulators. In particular, for me, it scratches the following itches: Cross-platform support (macOS, Linux, Windows) with GPU acceleration Lua-based...
We're 24 hours away from Apple announcing new iPhones and Watches, and I'd love it if I can resist the unending urge to always keep up with the latest and greatest.
I did a redesign of this site last night. I hope you like it. It’s heavily inspired by the iA blog. Shamelessly inspired, I guess. But it was a fun exercise to revamp the Jekyll setup, which took a ton of work. I do not love templating in Liquid, but I do like writing filters in Ruby. I think it came out pretty...
So recently I’ve been binge-watching RandomStranger’s Famidaily project and came across his video on Guardic Gaiden, the game we know in the west as The Guardian Legend. In it, he said that the Twin Famicom has slowdown on this game that the regular model doesn’t. Now, I’ve been a big fan of the Sharp Twin Famicom– it’s got no lockout chip, a...