When upgrading to Rails 7.1 with any models using the encrypts macro from ActiveRecord::Encryption, be wary of upgrading the config.load_defaults in config/application.rb from 7.0 to 7.1. The 7.1 defaults for ActiveRecord::Encryption include a combination of settings that can lead to your app...
Revisiting the timeless Von Neumann Architecture
The SHA-256 hash of this sentence begins with 0573e7473. Read on website | #technology
We should always be supporting each other, but it feels particularly important right now. An election just finished in the US, which means that half the country lost and has to face the coming changes. In particular, this is a scary time for many folks who have been targets in the past couple of years, with escalating legislation against access...
Learn how to integrate SQLite with Go using the C API provided by the language, focusing on key operations like opening and closing the database, preparing statements, and binding parameters.
Extracting text from a PDF is usually straightforward when it’s in English and doesn’t have embedded fonts. However, once those assumptions are removed, it becomes challenging to use basic python libraries like pdfminer or pdfplumber. Last month, I was tasked with extracting text from a Gujarati-language PDF and importing data fields such as...
purpose Physicists long balked at colloquial usages of “entropy” (especially by philosophers). I believe some usages of entropy as resistance to systematic understanding has precise mathematical grounding in information theory. I am tired of arguing with my physics major friends over this. definitions Shannon entropy H(X) for discrete random...
Today’s Music Monday is less a specific song, and more an exploration of a band that was a huge part of my childhood. Mad World! Sewing the Seeds of Love! Everybody Wants to Rule the World! Shout (Let it all out)! If you’ve never seen Trash Theory before, the channel explores the rise of popular bands, with a specific interest towards the 1980s....
This is great news, via the Fedora Pagure: As discussed at Flock, the Fedora KDE SIG and the newly forming Fedora Personal Systems Working Group that will oversee the SIG are requesting that the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop spin be upgraded to Edition status for Fedora Linux 42. amoloney: This request can now be considered APPROVED (+9, 0, 0)....
Why not to use AI for writing - a blog post on the underestimated long term costs of AI tools for human creativity.
Everything I've learned so far about running local LLMs Chris Wellons shares detailed notes on his experience running local LLMs on Windows - though most of these tips apply to other operating systems as well. This is great, there's a ton of detail here and the root recommendations are very solid: Use llama-server from llama.cpp and try ~8B...
I was on episode 4 of the On The Board podcast: Taking on New Challenges. I’m never quite sure what parts of my experience people will be able to relate to, but it was a good chat with Jason and Michael about becoming a newb late in my career.
Yeah, I skipped a few weeks’ worth of notes, but the gist of things is that I moved to a new role, had a grueling first week (wasn’t able to leave the house for breaks), slept through most of Saturday and am still trying to figure out where all my free time went. The high point of the week is that I got a TerraMaster F4-424 MAX NAS in the post,...
I recently stumbled upon the Postage Stamp Problem. Given two relatively prime positive numbers a and b, show that any sufficiently large number N, there exists positive integers x and y such that ax + by = N. I initially missed the constraint that x and y must be positive, in which result is well […] The post The Postage Stamp Problem first...
The Supernote A5X is an e-ink notebook that lets me draw in black, white, and two shades of gray. It has a drawing app that supports other shades of gray, but the main notebook app and the PDF annotation is limited to those two shades of gray. I like to use a dotted grid in order to write in neat lines. I used to manually change this template to...
I answer the question, "What is it you long for - a time, a place, a feeling?"
I’ve read some math publications from around a century or so ago, and I wondered if I could pull off being a math professor if a time machine dropped me into a math department from the time. I think I’d come across as something of an autistic savant, ignorant of what contemporaries would think of […] The post Impersonating an Edwardian math...
I’ve just released I’ve just released pizauth-1.0.6pizauth-1.0.6 which introduces one notable new feature: support for HTTPS redirects. New features sound good, but what does this actually mean? My experience is that the way OAuth2 works is sufficiently counter-intuitive that people often struggle to make sense of what it’s doing. which introduces one notable new feature: support for HTTPS redirects. New features sound good, but what does this actually mean? My experience is that the way OAuth2 works is sufficiently counter-intuitive that people often struggle to make sense of what it’s doing. Here’s a very quick, simplified, summary of what OAuth2, and pizauth do Here’s a very quick, simplified, summary of what OAuth2, and pizauth do [1][1]. OAuth2 lets you.... OAuth2 lets you...
This article was discussed on Hacker News. Over the past month I’ve been exploring the rapidly evolving world of Large Language Models (LLM). It’s now accessible enough to run a LLM on a Raspberry Pi smarter than the original ChatGPT (November 2022). A modest desktop or laptop supports even smarter AI. It’s also private, offline, unlimited, and...
Stop mixing try/catch with Promise chains - JavaScript's new Promise.try handles return values, Promises, and errors uniformly
Understanding the new import attributes syntax and why we can't rely on file extensions alone
Most well-known living philosophies -such as Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Buddhism, and Sufism- advocate some form of Asceticism. This could involve various acts such as fasting, deliberately confronting personal fears, or even something as subtle as choosing not to pour salt on food. But regardless of the specific way that these practices...
In no particular order: The serif fonts have been retired. It was fun, but they weren’t as legible on non-HiDPI/Retina displays. You might need to clear your cache or press SHIFT when refreshing to see any change. I’ve added Ninomae Ina’nis and Ceres Fauna to my fan section on the sidebar. They’re talented, comfy streamers who have done wonders...
Alex Garcia and myself hosted the first Datasette Open Office Hours on Friday - a live-streamed video session where we hacked on a project together and took questions and tips from community members on Discord. We didn't record this one (surprisingly not a feature that Discord offers) but we hope to do more of these and record them in the future....
I’ve struggled mentally with the idea of blocking people. I internalised the oft-repeated idea that I was being closed minded each time I reached for the big red button, and that I could be the “bigger person” somehow (whatever that means). I got around this before by claiming I blocked people for mental health. I’d say I wanted to help and...
I was interested in learning about htmx, so I used it to improve the experience of posting comments on my blog. It seems much of modern web development is structured around having a JavaScript program on the front-end (browser) which exchanges data encoded in JSON asynchronously with the back-end servers. htmx uses a novel (or throwback)...
After my review of the CM3588 running OpenMediaVault, I spent a little while trying to get it to run Proxmox with ZFS enabled. There still isn’t any official version of Proxmox for ARM64, so I stuck to Proxmox-Port, which has been working great for me on all the Rockchip devices I tested it on. Getting ZFS to work proved a bit challenging,...
GraphQL is better than OData, and REST… So this guide will show you how to create a GraphQL API allows you to offer a flexible data querying interface where clients can request exactly the data they need. Here, we’ll create a simple GraphQL API in C# that returns data about music artists and their albums. Prerequisites To follow along, you need...
Golf video games are one of my passions, ever since World Class Leader Board and Microprose Golf on Atari ST. These days my favourite golf games are still the old ones. In particular I have a soft spot for T&E SOFT’s New 3D Golf Simulation series with its blue skies, bright colours, and FM synth tunes. This series has a long history so I thought...
Last year I got my first experience of implementing software internally. My team found a SaaS (software as a service) product they wanted to use, so we bought it and used it. Sort of. It was NOT SO EASY. There’s money to pay, and that has to get through several rounds of budget approvals, and ... Read moreHow hard can it be to buy software?
Why the Pythonic way of doing emptiness check on sequences is not necessarily ambiguous in most cases
You can bring back anyone from the dead from any era, at any point of their life and for only one day. Who?
I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called TIL (“today I learned”). the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is “hey, here’s a cool thing”, like the great SQLite repl litecli, or the fact that cross compiling in Go Just Works and it’s amazing, or...
This is a very friendly and supportive place where you are surrounded by peers - we all want to help each other succeed. The golden rule of this server is: Don't ever try to impress anyone here with your knowledge! Instead try to impress folks here with your desire to learn, and desire to help others learn. — fast.ai Discord Server Tags:...
Apparently my family back east has been arguing late into the night about Israel and Gaza, and I’ll get to the actual point in a minute but I just need to say that this goes in the column against moving out there some day and losing all my independence (you know, the thought that gives me vague and uncomfortable ideations), because holy hell...
Last night in bed, I realised we’d encountered a scenario at work during the day where something happened so fluidly in jujutsu that it’d make a good case story! Let’s compare, step by step, how it’d look with git. The stage is set: you’re working on a big, old, legacy codebase, and you’re 10 commits deep in a branch where you’re adding a new...
Last year I signed up for one of those online book summary services. I’d been curious for a while, and they were offering a steep discount for the first year. I figured I could give it a shot, and cancel it before renewal if I didn’t find it useful. This service promised to “distill” books to their “essence”, and deliver a summary in a half hour...
The Atari ST family of machines are my favourite of the 16-bit era. Introduced between 1985 and 1993, they weren’t the most technically advanced available, nor did they achieve significant marketshare against incumbents like Apple, Commodore, or the ever-expanding PC clone market. But they had so much home computer history soldered into their DNA...
Why Raspberry Pi for an SBC guy If anyone asks why I prefer to work with Raspberry Pis when I want to tinker on a random project, consider: I just spent the past hour with a brand new ArmSoM Sige7 board (see my debugging notes in my sbc-reviews repo). This SBC has been on the market for months, with glowing reviews all the way back...
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We keep trying to get LLMs to do math. We want them to count the number of “rs” in strawberry, to perform algebraic reasoning, do multiplication, and to solve math theorems. A recent experiment particularly piqued my interest. Researchers used OpenAI’s new 4o model to solve multiplication problems by using the prompt: Calculate the product of x...
I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never succeed. During the late decades of the Cold War and even into the '00s, the military and (to a lesser extent) the telecommunications industry parted ways with a great number of underground facilities. Missile silos, command bunkers, and hardened telephone exchanges were...
Indie bloggers are on the constant lookout for tools that simplify their work while keeping costs low and user experience seamless. One of the most overlooked aspects of running a blog is finding the right comment hosting system. Enter giscus, a modern solution that stands out among its peers for being lightweight, privacy-friendly, and free to...
How I ditched Google Analytics bloat for a privacy-focused analytics tool that bypasses ad blockers
uv 0.5.0 The first backwards-incompatible (in minor ways) release after 30 releases without a breaking change. I found out about this release this morning when I filed an issue about a fiddly usability problem I had encountered with the combo of uv and conda... and learned that the exact problem had been fixed in the brand new version! Tags:...
As developers, we love our booleans. They map perfectly into how computers work at a low level and play nicely with if statements, our primary control-flow tool. They are simple to reason about. What's not to like? We actually like them so much that we use them for domain modeling. And that's where things get problematic. I would like to show you...
I love filter and immersion brewing at home. I’ve talked about how much I love the AeroPress as a daily driver, and the Hario V60 is a fun treat when I’m feeling a bit fancier. Some nice single-origin beans from a local roaster, fresh water, and those cheap coffee machines make some incredible brews, and they can taste markedly different...
ChainForge I'm still on the hunt for good options for running evaluations against prompts. ChainForge offers an interesting approach, calling itself "an open-source visual programming environment for prompt engineering". The interface is one of those boxes-and-lines visual programming tools, which reminds me of Yahoo Pipes. It's open source (from...
As I was catching up on some reading while being subjected to yet another bout of morning insomnia after feeding the cat at eight o’clock, I caught Dave’s list of Democratic mistakes. Take a hard look at what he deems their fourth such. Men’s votes need to be sought and welcomed, specifically. So much has been done to alienate male voters, which...
As I was catching up on some reading while being subjected to yet another bout of morning insomnia after feeding the cat at eight o’clock, I caught Dave’s list of Democratic mistakes. Take a hard look at what he deems their fourth such. Men’s votes need to be sought and welcomed, specifically. So much has been done to alienate male voters, which...
The Name Mangler giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Troy Patterson Jim Simpson René Quesnel Billy Rowell D. Lee Grooms 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 Name Mangler is still...