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Why Not Mars
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 428 posts.
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Transformers from Scratch (2021)
I procrastinated a deep dive into transformers for a few years. Finally the discomfort of not knowing what makes them tick grew too great for me. Here is that dive.
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The Yaml document from hell
As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.
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Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust
There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don't think is mentioned enough.
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You cannot have exactly-once delivery (2015)
I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by…
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How MOS 6502 illegal opcodes work
The original NMOS version of the MOS 6502, used in computers like the Commodore 64, the Apple II and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is well-known for its illegal opcodes: Out of 256 possible opcodes, 151 are defined by the architecture, but many of the remaining 105 undefined opcodes do…
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A Tale of Unwanted Disruption: My Week Without Amazon
On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, I finally regained access to my Amazon account after an unexpected and unwarranted lockout that lasted nearly…
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How to Kill a Decentralised Network
How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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Black Triangles (2014)
One of my most popular posts was also my very first… which has since been lost to the Great Blog Devouring of ’14. So… here’s the post from over ten years ago (has it been that long?!?!?!) about an event from almost twenty years ago. Still stuff I have to remind myself about some days.
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A Timeline of the OpenAI Board
Yesterday, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired from the Board of Directors of OpenAI.
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The Scaling Hypothesis
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.
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The Password Game
Please choose a password
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“Clean” code, horrible performance
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
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TypeScripting the technical interview
An homage to Aphyr's Typing the technical interview
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“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
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Filenames and pathnames in shell: How to do it correctly (2020)
This article explains how to correctly handle filenames in Bourne shells (the primary shell of Unix/Linux/POSIX systems), based on the issues discussed in 'Fixing Unix/Linux/Filenames'. Many programs fail to work properly on filenames that include spaces, begin with dash (-), include newlines, and so on, because…
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The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection
I really want an AI assistant: a Large Language Model powered chatbot that can answer questions and perform actions for me based on access to my private data and tools. …
80
The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
81
The Compact Calendar 2023-2024
The Compact Calendar presents days as a continuous candy bar of time. Weeks are presented as a stack of available time with no gaps, making it easier to count-out days naturally as you think.
82
The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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Autoenshittification
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist…
84
Bracketed paste mode (2013)
One of the least well known, and therefore least used, features of many terminal emulators is bracketed paste mode . When you are in bracketed paste mode and you paste into your terminal the content will be wrapped by the sequences \e[200~ and \e[201~ .
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I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023
I will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about A (Possible) Future for Compile-Time Programming.
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Reflecting on my failure to build a billion-dollar company (2019)
In 2011, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life's work...
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GPT-2 as step toward general intelligence (2019)
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you bac…
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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Surprisingly Turing-Complete
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.