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...
I was joking on Mastodon about how the zeitgeist has changed over the years, but its pattern is revealing itself: an acronym which merely drops letters. The Next Big Thing™ is clearly going to be “A”. 2010: Everyone needs an "API" 2020: Everyone needs "AI" 2030: Everyone needs "A" So I just need to figure out what “A” is and I’ll be rich! Annie...
Did you know that according to various easy to find sources, the total CO2 emissions as a by-product of producing cement and concrete account for more than 10% of the total emissions we as humans are responsible for? By expanding our house, we have made our humble contribution to that. Our World In Data visualized yearly annual CO2 emissions from...
The Poisson probability distribution gives a simple, elegant model for count data. You can even derive from certain assumptions that data must have a Poisson distribution. Unfortunately reality doesn’t often go along with those assumptions. A Poisson random variable with mean λ also has variance λ. But it’s often the case that data that would […]...
New 2GB Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip. This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said: The new D0 stepping strips away all that...
Andy Bell: Just Use Fucking Paper, ManI’ve given up this week and gone back to paper and a pencil and I feel unbelievably organised and flexible, day-to-day. It’s because it’s simple. There’s nothing fancy. No fancy pen or anything like that
Gosh, so much stuff has happened since my update in June. Started my sabbatical from work at the end of June, off until mid-October! Pride month in SF was a lot of fun Parties/dancing Trans march I got to spend the whole weekend with my GF Rode on the back of my GF’s motorcycle in the pride parade Did a bunch of walking around SF - In one week, I...
It is well known that the harmonic series 1 + ½ + ⅓ + ¼ + … diverges. But if you take the denominators as numbers in base 11 or higher, the series converges [1]. I wonder what inspired this observation. Maybe Brewster was bored, teaching yet another cohort of students that the harmonic series […] The post A strange take on the harmonic series...
It's been more than a year since the AI crazy hype and now that the dust has settled, we are seeing some clear signs where AI is. We witnessed smart chat platforms like ChatGPT and Claude, services for generating images and videos like DALL-E and Midjourney, GitHub Copilot,
As an entrepreneur and founder I've spent considerable time on the YC Co-Founder Platform.In this post, I'll share my observations about how I use the platform, the types of people you're likely to encounter there and offer insights on whether it's worth your time if you're looking for a co-founder.Why I'm on the YC Co-Founder PlatformAs a solo...
Someone emailed me in response to Two years as an independent technologist, in which I wrote: I miss of being at a large company, which is dealing with deeply cutting-edge technical problems, but my ability to analyze information, make decisions, and perform at a high-level has grown very quickly. They followed up: I had a lot of trepidation...
Someone emailed me in response to Two years as an independent technologist, in which I wrote: I miss of being at a large company, which is dealing with deeply cutting-edge technical problems, but my ability to analyze information, make decisions, and perform at a high-level has grown very quickly. They followed up: I had a lot of trepidation...
This blog post describes my thought process in implementing a transaction log for my database. My implementation may not follow best practices, as I am still learning. If this blog post sparks ideas on what I could do better, please let me know! JameSQL, my NoSQL database, was designed to be an in-memory data store. I use the tool for my blog...
Someone emailed me in response to Two years as an independent technologist, in which I wrote: I miss of being at a large company, which is dealing with deeply cutting-edge technical problems, but my ability to analyze information, make decisions, and perform at a high-level has grown very quickly. They followed up: I had a lot of trepidation...
We recently redesigned this site and a part of that was a sidebar-based article view. That aspect was fine because the Every Layout Sidebar is designed to deliver that layout with no fuss. I threw a spanner into the works though because we have a component named and I wanted it to span the full width, including the sidebar because it needs room...
The web has changed all of our lives: we are more connected than ever, knowledge is easier to access than ever. But sometimes it feels that we are subjected to that change, rather than being able to proactively participate in making the future; in crafting a web that speaks to what we want. Sometimes change feels impossible. I sometimes feel this...
David Imel explaining the fediverse on the latest Waveform video:Just like the United States is a federation, right? Like this group of states with independent laws, but also this higher order of laws under the Constitution that could freely move and trade with each other. A federated social network
If you’ve been keeping up with web development trends lately, you’ve probably heard buzzwords like React Server Components or Islands Architecture. But what do these really mean for the future of web development? Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture of where front-end development is heading in 2025 and beyond. Video version of...
Back in the mid-1990s I was using Windows 95/98 and running up against bugs, problems, driver issues, unexpected things happening. I would often end up on the Microsoft Knowledge Base support web pages, where the issue would often be accompanied by the line “This behavior is by design”, which remains in use to this very day. This mantra has stuck...
I had added Skip to my Swift resource list a while back, and consider it to be a conceptually brilliant solution to bridge the gap between iOS and Android development with a single codebase while trying to keep things as native as possible at either end. Still, given how it converts things into Kotlin and the fact that it is free for Open-Source...
I have a slightly different take on this, since one of the reasons I instantly took to iOS was that I was sure I would have the same experience regardless of carrier, and later I felt my choice further justified by the balkanization of Android, because homogeneity of user experience was a sort of grand equalizer. The regulation game breaks all...
This first part of Chapter 4 of the Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA) book discusses the concepts of data encoding and evolution in data-intensive applications. As applications inevitably change over time, it's important to build systems that can adapt to these changes easily, a property referred to as evolvability (under...
I quite enjoyed Pen & Teller’s Masterclass (paywall, sorry!). I learned some practical card tricks that came in handy while we sitting in the airport waiting for a connecting fight with restless kids. I also really enjoyed Pen & Teller’s reflections on the art of their craft. Here are a few points I wanted to write down. Magic is a Playground For...
Some events in life anoint you with a mission.You experience tragedy, luck, forgiveness, or grace, and you know that you won't be allowed to shut up about it. You have now inherited a responsibility, big or small, to help others or pay what you received forward.Consider today's post, a PSA (Public Service Announcement), as part of my mission.If you aren't already a dad, what you're about to read could spare you future suffering. If you are already blessed with...
Two years ago, I moved my family to a house.Shy above 110 square meters (1,184 square feet for my friends living outside of the metric world), the house itself isn't what you'd call big. But it is what we wanted. It's cheap to heat, cool down, and maintain.This house we bought has an interesting floor plan. The three bedrooms are relatively small, but the kitchen and dining room offer generous space for Christmas, birthdays, and other family gatherings. The living...
My friend looked me in the eye and said: "Now that you have a kid, you will NEVER not worry."Sophie, my daughter, was just a few weeks old, but I had already experienced more worrying for someone else than in the previous three decades. Her early days were quite rough for many reasons. (Some of which I will return to in a future note.)She's my first child. During the first few weeks, I could only relax and sleep if we kept the lights on. I would...
Top coaches and motivational speakers make bread with the dough of thousands wanting to see them on stage.The book market is flooded with self-help and personal development books, from the most uninspired to the most eccentric or bizarre, and only a tiny percentage of helpful ones.We are constantly reminded to get out of our comfort zone. We must "work on ourselves" and "find and fix our blind spots."Parents, though, have their own mini Tony Robbins at home. A...
Only fools believe that what they once felt, they will feel forever. And we are all fools.Youths fall madly in love only for a short while.A new job energizes a woman until she realizes it's not perfect.A man begins learning the piano and stops after a week.Why?Unless we learn to cultivate them, the love, excitement, or sense of mission that originally carried us dissipate.You got the father title the moment your child entered...
We can't stand regular stimulation anymore.We always want to be entertained. Reach into our right pocket and access an infinite list of things to watch, read, or listen to. People get sore thumbs from scrolling.Talking with people is slow. "Boooooring."As a result, it isn't easy to talk to someone uninterrupted. Notifications arrive at a rate inversely proportional to the age of the person you're chatting with.I've been on the receiving end multiple...
Sophie, my four-year-old daughter, loves chess.She has seen me play or do chess puzzles since her early days. There was always a chessboard on the kitchen table.When she was two, we would sometimes sit facing each other on the floor, separated by a chessboard. I would let her grab the chess pieces and make funny noises and gestures to hint at how they move."Fffffff fffff does the bishop" while moving it quickly in the air following an imaginary diagonal.I...
Being a father is an incarnated experience. You can explain what you are going through or share your emotions with guys who don't have kids yet. But they won't get it.It takes living the fatherhood experience to understand it truly.If you tell a pal about your seven-week streak of poor sleeping nights, he might try to approximate what it's like based on his own experience. "Ah! Yeah. I remember when I was in college, we used to go out every evening."Ok, it's...
This is a small talk for Bridges Summit, 28 August 2024. References and Recommendations: Combining, by Nora Bateson. ⬅ this is about seeing the second and third-order effects of what we do. It helps me live in a world that is so far from perfect, and work to make it better without despair. (I don’t ... Read moreBridges Summit
Reading Time: 20 minutes “Let’s start with cars.” My students break out into groups of four, each quartet gathered around a collection of pink and green post-it notes. For the first few minutes, the room remains quiet while each student jots down a personal story about one way that cars have impacted their lives. As the students finish and […]
tl;dr: Donate to our campaign here at stjude.omg.lol. It's basically September which means it's childhood cancer awareness month and time for Relay's annual fundraising event. Last year, me and Adam raised $12,590.57 as part of the campaign. This year we're going to try and beat that total and we have two exclusive stickers which you can get for...
I saw https://websim.ai a couple of weeks ago but didn't quite get it, and then during some research on the creator and web developer ecosystems I came back to it and my mind was blown. I spent the evening exploring a web that is full of applications and sites and only limited by URLs that I could think of (heh - this web never has a 404 or an...
Oliver Darcy on his new, excellent Status newsletter: Zucker-Bucks Under PressureNotably, Zuckerberg's GOP-friendly behavior comes after Trump publicly threatened to target him, should he find his way back into the Oval Office. In early July, Trump warned on Truth Social that if he is elected, he will
“This Key is Useless Now. Discard?” 2024-08-28 The title of this article probably triggers nostalgic memories for old school Resident Evil veterans like myself. My personal favourite in the series (not that anyone asked) was the original, 1998 version of Resident Evil 2 (RE2). I believe that game stands the test of time and is very close to a...
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I was just in the washroom with the CEO of our company in the adjacent stall. We had an awkward eye contact while we both were washing hands. Should I address it with him directly ...? Firstly, I feel like it was his fault for coming to this washroom, this is mine. Ours I mean, the plebians'. Like, don't they have a separate hoity-toity one...
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen some blog posts of a very similar vein to my recent post Technoelitism and the IndieWeb Movement. It seems I’m not the only one with some critical thoughts about this movement and the goals it both claims to have and actually seems to express. I realized while surveying some of these posts that I actually had some...
There’s a common refrain in online discussions about software that “most people don’t use or need that, it’s just a niche that doesn’t matter.” As someone who works in user experience every day, I’m constantly surprised by the
Teens wrote secret binary messages in One Million Checkboxes. I found them.
I love to see this sort of thing. In fact, nothing makes me happier on the web than seeing something simplified and improved because of that simplification. This article demonstrates that beautifully and teaches you how to write some pretty dang solid CSS that is battle tested in the real world. What also makes me happy is accessibility was...
I love @pytest.mark.parametrize—so much so that I sometimes shoehorn my tests to fit into it. But the default style of writing tests with parametrize can quickly turn into an unreadable mess when the test complexity grows. For example: import pytest from math import atan2 def polarify(x: float, y: float) -> tuple[float, float]: r = (x**2 + y**2)...
free desktop-only browser game where you photograph bugs by resizing and moving the browser window #
Previously, we explored how coupling and cohesion are not separable concepts. When our software is cohesive, everything fits. Each part is shaped by its relationships. Together, they comprise an undirected graph, which we will call a structure. Each structure is an amplifier; by explaining one vertex, we begin to explain the others. Often, these...
Anthropic’s decision to publish Claude’s system prompts is a curious mix of transparency and marketing, as it attempts to position itself as the ethical choice in AI. While it’s refreshing to see some behind-the-scenes insight, one can’t help but wonder if this is just a clever way to distract from the fact that these models are still just...
Time is state Imagine I put an ordinary ticking quartz clock in an empty room. I walk in, and ten minutes later I walk out with two photograph prints.1 In the 1st one, the second hand is pointing at the top of the clock, in the 2nd it's pointing at the bottom. Are these two copies of the same photo, or are they two different pictures? There's...
Free/open source has been on my mind lately – more than usual. (FOSS or OSS for short, the distinction matters, a lot, but for the purposes of this post the two are similar enough to lump together.) This was triggered by reading a couple of posts the other day: Tara Tarakiyee’s Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?. Ben Werdmuller’s post that...
I love doing research. My first reaction to a gnarly problem is to try to discover everything I can about it and, crucially, to see how others have tackled it. It’s not just because other people’s work often means I have to do less of my own, but experiencing the plurality of expression that’s available out there i a thing of joy. For example, a...