Good evening. Tonight, notes on things I have learned recently while hacking on the Whippet GC library.service updateFor some time now, the name Whippet has referred to three things. Firstly, it is the project as a whole, consisting of an include-only garbage collection library containing a compile-time configurable choice of specific collector...
On a sweltering August evening, I gathered a bunch of friends for dinner. It had been a while since we'd met, so there was a backlog of updates and stories to catch up on. We settled in and placed our orders. I opted for a cottage cheese steak. As the food arrived, we traded "gossip" - interesting stories from our recent past, ranging from mildly...
I recently changed my workflow around authoring and publishing my site notes.jim-nielsen.com. Here’s the rundown. Before Pretty standard JAMstack type stuff. All my notes are markdown files in a git repository that live alongside the code generating the website, e.g. package.json notes/ note1.md note2.md note3.md src/ index.js ...
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, sometimes the world requires a bit of what Brad Delong calls “Intellectual Garbage Pickup,” namely: correcting wrong, or mostly-wrong ideas that spread unchecked …...
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, sometimes the world requires a bit of what Brad Delong calls “Intellectual Garbage Pickup,” namely: correcting wrong, or mostly-wrong ideas that spread unchecked …...
Also: co-working in NYC, and Normal Computing is hiring!
Allison Johnson for The Verge: Google’s AI tool helped us add disasters and corpses to our photosIn our week of testing, we added car wrecks, smoking bombs in public places, sheets that appear to cover bloody corpses, and drug paraphernalia to images. That seems bad. As a
The Epoch Cassette Vision is often reported as the first Japanese cartridge-based game console. But reality is always a bit more complicated. In 1978, years before the Cassette Vision, two Japanese companies put together cartridge-based game consoles that were unique to Japan, but relied on technology and chips licensed from American firms. And...
Friday evening I had dinner with Felix. Among other things, we talked about good code. Good code, we both agreed, is simple. It's code boiled down to its essence.
In this essay, I share some tips that I’ve found particularly beneficial for my own debugging experience. Hope it helps the reader as well. If you have any cool tips you’d also like to share, feel free to share them. I might include them in the essay and give you credit for it. Writing Logs to STDERR I’ve noticed that developers, myself included,...
In This Post Is Not About Python, I make a comment towards the beginning about how Python “written for performance” is “Python that is very straightforward and does not use many of its features”. It may seem odd to post an addendum prior to the post it is an addendum too, but, let’s just say, I’ve learned a bit about how the Internet reads things...
When it comes to AI tooling, I am equal parts optimist and cynic. I have no moral qualm with using these tools (Supermaven is a pretty heavy part of my day-to-day work), but have found most tools quite bad by the metric of "do they make me more productive on Buttondown's code base?" I think it's important to be able to taste the kool-aid with...
When it comes to AI tooling, I am equal parts optimist and cynic. I have no moral qualm with using these tools (Supermaven is a pretty heavy part of my day-to-day work), but have found most tools quite bad by the metric of "do they make me more productive on Buttondown's code base?" I think it's important to be able to taste the kool-aid with...
Introduction I self host everything but email. I wrote about this here, here, or here. As a summary, at home, I run a 3 node Proxmox cluster with several services, powering a home network with Mikrotik router, Mikrotik switches, and UniFi WiFi, as well as an external VPS. This article is about two things: Why I still bother and what it has...
I recently finished up the process of fixing a bug in the Chromium/Google Chrome web browser. It was my first time contributing to the Chromium project or any other open source project of that scale, and it was a very unique experience compared to other open source work I've done in the past. I figured that I'd write up an overview of the whole...
When it comes to AI tooling, I am equal parts optimist and cynic. I have no moral qualm with using these tools (Supermaven is a pretty heavy part of my day-to-day work), but have found most tools quite bad by the metric of "do they make me more productive on Buttondown's code base?" I think it's important to be able to taste the kool-aid with...
This article is an attempt to present the reasons why I chose OCaml and why I am satisfied with it, for both personal and professional projects.
Xe returns while on vacation where they built a new PC, made a SaaS to check web server headers, and re-evaluated how they think about complexity.
As part of our zoom reading group (wow, 4.5 years old now), we discussed a paper that uses LLMs for automatic root cause analysis (RCA) for cloud incidents.This was a pretty straightforward application of LLMs. The proposed system employs an LLM to match incoming incidents to incident handlers based on their alert types, predicts the incident's...
CORS, and the browser’s same-origin policy are often misunderstood. I’m going to explain what they are and what you need to do to stop worrying about them.Note: I’m going to talk about CORS and the same-origin policy as one thing and use the terms mostly interchangeably. This is because they are basically one system, they work together to decide...
Orbital mechanics is fascinating. I’ve learned a bit about it for fun, not for profit. I seriously doubt Elon Musk will ever call asking me to design an orbit for him. [1] One of the things that makes orbital mechanics interesting is that it can be counter-intuitive. For example, atmospheric friction can make a satellite […] The post Increasing...
Draw a quadrilateral by pick four arbitrary points on a circle and connecting them cyclically. Now multiply the lengths of the pairs of opposite sides. In the diagram below this means multiplying the lengths of the two horizontal-ish blue sides and the two vertical-ish orange sides. Ptolemy’s theorem says that the sum of the two […] The post...
Earlier this year I wrote a post about implementing BPE tokenization in Go, which made it possible to reproduce OpenAI's tokenizer. Today I want to mention a new project I've been hacking on recently: go-sentencepiece - a pure Go implementation of the SentencePiece tokenizer that's used for Google AI's models like …
Most people fundamentally misunderstand risk. Risk is a broad, somewhat useful, metric that people use to predict future outcomes. Risk is only correct relationally to the system that its defined by. It’s a way to quantify a lack of knowledge in relation to predicted future outcomes. Risk is inherent to all systems designed to predict the future...
Some quick Zig feedback in the context of a new 8-bit emulator project I started a little while ago: https://github.com/floooh/chipz Currently the project consists of: a cycle-stepped Z80 CPU emulator (similar to the emulator described here: https://floooh.github.io/2021/12/17/cycle-stepped-z80.html chip emulators for Z80 PIO, Z80 CTC and...
In your professional and personal life, I don't believe there is a stronger motivation than having something in mind and the desire to do it. Yet the natural way to deal with a desire to do something is to justify why it's not possible. "I want to read more books but nobody reads books these days so how could I." "I want to write for a magazine...
So one thing that I realise after starting writing this blog is that I care more about it than some of my other projects. For some reason or another I want to make sure that this blog will continue with me for a long time. This is one of the reasons why I use GitHub as mirror blog and why I created a bunch of automation to make sure I never...
Objective-C is, without a doubt, one of the ugliest programming languages out there
complexity The sum of every explanation. Weighted heavily towards future explanations. Measured in bits, but only relative to your audience's expectations. See also: a brief introduction coupling The degree to which two things tend to be explained together. Sometimes it helps, and sometimes it doesn't. See also: coupling as co-explanation...
The iStat Menus giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Bhaskar Bhat Leighton Price Robert Shaw Johan Romin Yinan Chen 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 iStat Menus is still worth...
The iStat Menus giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Bhaskar Bhat Leighton Price Robert Shaw Johan Romin Yinan Chen 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 iStat Menus is still worth...
The iStat Menus giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! The winners! Congratulations to: Bhaskar Bhat Leighton Price Robert Shaw Johan Romin Yinan Chen 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 iStat Menus is still worth...
In a world of infinite automation and infinite surveillance, survival is going to depend on being the least boring person. Over my career I've written and attached my name to thousands of public source code files. I know they are being scraped from the web and used to train AIs. But if I ask something like...
... enough. Men don't hug their kids enough.I remember this weird story my mum shared with me. When I was a baby, my father's mother got really upset because my dad was changing my diaper.To her, this was something a dad did not do.It was cultural and generational, and things have changed since then. Yet, many still associate toughness (an attribute often praised for a dad) with emotional minimalism.Some men struggle to cry in front of their children. Some...
By Tom Moertel Posted on August 23, 2024 Tags: sampling, sql, probability, poisson process, exponential distribution, statistics Sampling is one of the most powerful tools you can wield to extract meaning from large datasets. It lets you reduce a massive pile of data into a small yet representative dataset that’s fast and easy to use. If you...
Google, among other search engines, supports advanced operators for writing refined search queries. For example, you can use the site: search operator to constrain your search to a website, like: site:reddit.com aeropress coffee recipe In my How to build a query language in Python blog post, I walked through how to create the foundations of a...
I was having a conversation yesterday with a reader about clustering news headlines according to similarity. This had me reflecting on some of my past experiments with clustering and sorting, where I have used word embeddings to find similar documents. Word embeddings encode semantic similarity between documents, which allow for more nuanced...
In our last blog post, we saw how builtins like @hasDecl and functions like std.meta.hasMethod can be used to inspect a type to determine its capabilities. Zig's standard library makes use of these in a few place to allow developers to opt-into specific behavior. In particular, both std.fmt and std.json provide developers the ability to define...
Every now and then you hear outrageous claims such as “Python has no preprocessor”. This is simply not true. In fact, Python has the best preprocessor of all languages - it quite literally allows us to do whatever we want, and a lot more. It’s just a little tricky to (ab)use. Python source code encodings Thanks to PEP-0263 it is possible to...
How component manages async dependencies and improves loading states in Vue apps
July and August have been really busy, not with teaching (it’s the summer teaching break), but with research and research supervision, a little bit of holiday travel, and various life things taking up my time and attention. I have had time to read, but not so much time to write paragraphs about each book. Instead of skipping the...
Ironically, according to my experience, the .well-known directory doesn’t do justice to its name. Even in use cases that would fit nicely in its original purpose. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Let’s first start with what it is, then move to discuss where it’s used. But we’ll do this rapidly, otherwise this […]
Better IX network quality monitoring This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at the first NetUK. You can watch the talk on YouTube that was recorded by the wonderful AV team below if that’s your preferred medium:
In the 2023 edition of State of CSS, the demographics were as follows: Over 50% of respondents were between 25 and 44 Over 30% of respondents earned $50k or more Over 60% of respondents identified as male Sure, the demographics are seemingly improving year-on-year but to get a true reflection of the industry, we’re asking — possibly even begging...
Over the years, I have written articles and sample apps to demonstrate the new features of each year’s SwiftUI updates with particular emphasis on macOS app development. Last year, the major update to SwiftUI was the new data flow system using the Observation framework. I covered that in my article SwiftUI Data Flow 2023 but I didn’t feel there...
our relationship is not predicated on me caring what you think or feel — if you like my work, you like it precisely because I do things you don’t know to ask for and you could never think of so yeah hello there. i write words so you don’t have to. if you haven’t figured it out, this site is a playground for experimenting with balances between technology and art and the past and the...
I like to home roll abstractions, but commoditize implementations.What I mean by that is a fairly simple rule that has a very powerful effect, but can be tricky to find the right balance.Home rolling the abstraction, to me, means deeply exploring and fleshing out out an abstraction from whole cloth, whether it be an interface, or a mental model,...
Folks, today's the day. As of this morning, I've made over a million dollars on GitHub sponsors. W...
How I used a bunch of open-source tools to automate the management of my side project.
The key highlight for me is the new “drop zones” functionality, which looks a lot like the Windows PowerToys’ FancyZones feature I have come to rely on. I’ve been using BetterSnapTool solely for replicating FancyZones, so adding that feature to Moom makes upgrading a no-brainer for me. On my laptop, I’ve been using AeroSpace instead–because,...
The 'with' statement is the only feature ever deprecated in JavaScript
Hello friends,
For episode number 3 of Papa Notes presents: Conversations, I had the pleasure to chat with Joao Aguiam. We covered many different topics, including raising kids abroad and the challenges of speaking multiple languages at home.
Please watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TNkypqUZGGQ?s...
Or listen to the full conversation: