“I knew you’d love this.” Is there anything more delicious? One of my favorite sensations of this meme age — a friend was scrolling, saw something, and thought of you.
In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he writes: The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room...
In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he writes: The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room...
A thought-experiment on how to regain control over our time and attention in a world of constant notifications.
What’s bad about mindfulness? Why do companies make everything worse? And why do we still work for them? I’ve got answers! Please continue to my website to read the post. Sorry about that. If you're a technical person and you know how let Astro render mdx to an RSS feed, please let me know.
In Paul Graham’s latest essay, he writes: The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room...
The term "AI Slop" is currently on the rise. It describes all the AI generated images and texts we see on the internet. I'd like to propose a term that basically describes the opposite of AI Slop: Mental AI Fog. Instead of consuming too much AI generated content (which also applies), AI Fog describes the inability to produce content without the...
Testing can be tricky, especially when it comes to handling API calls.
Ten days ago, I passed my driving test and my dad was kind enough to give me my mum's old car: a 2011 Smart Fortwo. The plan was I would drive this for a few months before Baby Knight Two is born, then we'd trade it in and get something bigger and I would take my wife's car. It's a weird car. It's much bigger inside than you'd assume, the boot is...
7 years ago I wrote about a script I was using to generate changelogs for Marked. Since then I’ve continued updating the script to work with just about all of my projects, from Xcode projects to Ruby gems to scripts that just have a VERSION file in the same directory. It can output a few different formats of changelog to accommodate all of my...
7 years ago I wrote about a script I was using to generate changelogs for Marked. Since then I’ve continued updating the script to work with just about all of my projects, from Xcode projects to Ruby gems to scripts that just have a VERSION file in the same directory. It can output a few different formats of changelog to accommodate all of my...
I’m sure you’ve heard the slogan “safety first”. It is a statement of values for an organization, but let’s think about how to define what it should mean explicitly. Here’s how I propose to define safety first, in the context of a company. I’ll assume the company is in the tech (software) industry, since that’s … Continue reading Safety first! →
In which I explore the difference between "thought leaders" on social media telling users why they're wrong, and UX designers who would get fired if they treated their users this way. Talking about the work vs doing the work...
This post started out as a Twitter thread. The text below is the same as that of the thread after correcting an error in the first part of the thread. *** The following approximation for sin(x) is remarkably accurate for 0 The post Ancient accurate approximation for sine first appeared on John D. Cook.
We stayed with the family (two kids and my wife) for several weeks in Munich. I took hundreds of photos. Here is how it went.
A deep dive into CPython's bytecode instruction format and execution engine internals
This post will give three ways to multiply by π taken from [1]. Simplest approach Here’s a very simple observation about π : π ≈ 3 + 0.14 + 0.0014. So if you need to multiply by π, you need to multiply by 3 and by 14. Once you’ve multiplied by 14 once, you can […] The post Mentally multiply by π first appeared on John D. Cook.
For a standard normal random variable Z, the probability that Z exceeds some cutoff z is given by If you wanted to compute this probability numerically, you could obviously evaluate its defining integral numerically. But as is often the case in numerical analysis, the most obvious approach is not the best approach. The range of […] The post A...
The other day, I stumbled on this 2017 thread from the retro tech Youtuber CathodeRayDude. He complains about the state of modern (circa 2017) UIs and contrasts them with the keyboard-driven UIs of yesteryear. I don’t think his point is that everything is worse as a mouse-driven GUI, but that a lot of GUIs would be better designed in a different...
While programming on my Mac and converting decimal numbers to hex and binary and using Apple’s Calculator for it – because it is built-in and works decent – I thought, I saw some wobbly lines of numbers. My first thought was: my eyes are getting tired. But it looked annoyingly wobbly and there went my […]
This paper recently appeared at ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. It provides an overview of the shared log abstraction in distributed systems, particularly focusing on its application in State Machine Replication (SMR) and consensus protocols. The paper argues that this abstraction can simplify the design and implementation of distributed...
The Power Play: Gemini Nano in Chrome
G’day! Last month ended with completing the local-export subsystem in Pinto which was the last piece before I could use Pinto for my personal bookmarks. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, using Pinto almost everyday this month. I’ve discovered a few small bugs which have been fixed, and some areas where the UI can be improved. But for the...
zest progress I've started working on the runtime. Many of the features of zest are going to be implemented by the runtime rather than by the compiler, but the runtime is itself written in zest. I'm slowly unpicking the dependency graph of features to make that work, so the last month saw a lot of tiny changes: Added a != operator. I somehow forgot it earlier. Added support for strings and string...
I am making steady progress towards moving the Computers Are Bad enterprise cloud to its new home, here in New Mexico. One of the steps in this process is, of course, purchasing a new server... the current Big Iron is getting rather old (probably about a decade!) and here in town I'll have the rack space for more machines anyway. In our modern,...
I just rewrote parts of my Positive Hacker News RSS Feed project to use an ML model to filter out any negative news from the Hacker News timeline. This method is far more reliable than the previous method of using a rule-based sentiment analyzer through NLTK. I'm using the model cardiffnlp/twitter-roberta-base-sentiment-latest, which was trained...
Questions for when your interviewer says “Do you have any questions for me?”Continue reading on Medium »
The Obsidian Sync giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Donovan Watts Chip Morris Stefan Kuhle Florian Graessle Greg Wallace 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 Obsidian Sync is still...
The Obsidian Sync giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Donovan Watts Chip Morris Stefan Kuhle Florian Graessle Greg Wallace 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 Obsidian Sync is still...
27 years I’ve been a reader and now it’s come to this, either due to the rise of bite-sized tech videos (which turned into a cottage industry of their own) or the torrents of advertising-driven revenue we have to wade through. And Anandtech had a commitment to quality that seems increasingly rare in today’s clickbait-driven environment. But...
In the In the previous postprevious post I introduced my summer project, to render labels on maps. As part of this, I want to be able to draw I introduced my summer project, to render labels on maps. As part of this, I want to be able to draw outlinesoutlines, , haloshalos, and , and drop shadowsdrop shadows. . Signed distance fieldSigned distance field[1][1] fonts are well suited for this. The basic use is to consider the signed distances -1 to 0... fonts are well suited for this. The basic use is to consider the signed distances -1 to 0...
Yesterday I read an article describing the GCRA rate limiting algorithm. I thought it was really interesting, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with Brandur’s explanation, and the Wikipedia articles on leaky buckets and GCRA are terrible, so here’s my version. what is GCRA? GCRA is the “generic cell rate algorithm”, a rate-limiting algorithm that...
For a short summer break, Vitto challenged me to visit Iceland with her. As someone that is used to going south for the summer - this sounded stupid at first, but I was incredibly surprised. For 6 days, we were pretty much in another planet. Here are some notes and tips …
Take a compass and draw a circle on a globe. Then take the same compass, opened to the same width, and draw a circle on a flat piece of paper. Which circle has more area? If the circle is small compared to the radius of the globe, then the two circles will be approximately equal […] The post Drawing with a compass on a globe first appeared on...
How To Read An Article On The Internet reminded me of this rage-inducing gem of a site. This takes users through all of the things that happen when you browse the web these days, and I love/hate it. https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
I’ve recently been motivated to make some improvements to this site, in the hopes that it might become a more ready place for me to do public writing. Some of those changes you may have noticed, some not. # The Clips section Motivated by other online writers, particularly Tracy Durnell, I created a place to share short thoughts on interesting...
This website publishes a number of RSS feeds that you can subscribe to if you’re interested in following along with my writing. Next to each link is approximate post volume from each. Long-form blog posts only - ~0.25-1 post per-month Clippings only - ~several posts per week /now entries only- ~0.5-1 post per-month All posts
A simple guide to reading in 9 simple steps This evokes something similar to how-i-experience-web-today.com, which actually takes you interactively through all of the terrible steps involved in modern web browsing. https://www.marginalia.nu/log/95_how_to_read/
I recently went to the Kill James Bond live show in London, and it was so much fun! There were some guys there dressed as contractors from “Hench,” the fictional gig-economy app the podcast hosts predicted would be the future of henchman employment. In addition to their costumes, they were telling people to try out their new tabletop RPG “Hench,”...
The other day I noticed I don’t follow any tech bloggers personally anymore. Some of that may be the rise of social media and aggregator sites filling the void but the bigger reason I think is that I haven’t been seeking out individuals to follow since around the time Coding Horror stopped blogging regularly. It’s a bit of a shame really since I...
Learn about runtime initialization, parsing and compilation of the Python code into bytecode leading to execution on the virtual machine
But then, in 2018, it all changed, supposedly to appease some downtown merchants. From then on, the VTA staff has been struggling to plan for a single-bore tunnel, about 53 feet in diameter with platforms buried eight stories underground, that will require tunnel lining twice as thick as originally planned and excavation of millions more cubic...
I really like green space in cities, so it’s sad to hear about some being destroyed. At least it’s for affordable housing and not like luxury shopping or office space or something. But after 12 years of struggle between the city and garden advocates, on June 18, 2024, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled six to one that the City of New York...
This article is very unsurprising to me as a SF resident, I love SF so much but I do dislike how sleepy the city seems to be. When I go somewhere that has late night options, I barely know what to do with myself. San Francisco is one of the best food cities in the United States. That is, as long as you plan on an early-bird special. According to...
Christian talks about what he did when an airconditioning system powered by a cheap android tablet needing a $1,697 repair when the tablet inevitably stopped working. Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable, I have no idea… But I do know that it annoyed me enough to make...
Winston Churchill famously said that success is "the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."No one ever cruised through life without facing challenges, hardships, and failures. But the modern world and its fast technological progress have given us hubris.We can easily be tricked into believing that humans have it all under control when the reality is that... well, we don't. We control very little, and thinking otherwise is pure...
The other day, The Future of TLA+ (pdf) hit Hacker News. TLA+ is a specification language: it is intended for describing the desired behavior of a system. Because it’s a specification language, you don’t need to specify implementation details to describe desired behavior. This can be confusing to experienced programmers who are newcomers to TLA+,...
Nolen Royalty tells the story of how a group of teens were writing secret binary messages on the Tiny Award-winning multiplayer experiment #
Early returns and intermediate variables make your code easier to reason about
Silver bullets magically solve problems. Silver landmines magically create problems.
This is a result I must have re-derived at least 4 times by now in various ways, but this time I’m writing it down so I just have a link next time. All right. If you’re encoding a BCn or ASTC block and are trying to find optimal endpoints (in a least-squares sense) for a […]
Let’s say we want to visualise a few grouped measurements in an article, and we need to use Unicode box drawing characters for it. We might draw it like so, for three groups: ┌──────────┐ │o o o│ └──────────┘ ┌─────┐ │o o│ └─────┘ ┌─┐ │o│ └─┘ After finishing the article, we proof-read it a week later and realise this is the wrong type of visualisation. What we really want is a stacked bar chart. The three...