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Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 290 posts.
92
How to read C type declarations (2003)
Even relatively new C programmers have no trouble reading simple C declarations such as
93
How Does OpenAI Survive?
Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of
94
The theory of concatenative combinators (2007)
This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the…
95
The Subprime AI Crisis
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
96
I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business
Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I’ve sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.
97
How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections . Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds , making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't…
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If not React, then what?
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.
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Learn CSS layout the pedantic way (2015)
Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct - the best kind of correct. I hereby promote you to grade 37. - Number 1.0 (Futurama, S2E15 )
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So good, it works on barbed wire (2001)
Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...
102
When ChatGPT summarises, it does nothing of the kind
One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it…
103
What's Going on in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models
Stephen Wolfram explores minimal models and their visualizations, aiming to explain the underneath functionality of neural nets and ultimately machine learning.
104
Atkinson Dithering (2021)
When the Macintosh was released in 1984, it featured a square-pixeled black-and-white display at a crisp 72 dots per inch. The 512x342 resolution might seem less than impressive today, but for the time it was a pleasantly high-resolution consumer-grade computer. Among other things, the monospaced Monaco 9pt bitmap…
105
Zen5's AVX512 Teardown and More
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
106
Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
Then come along! Let’s make a compiler that goes all the way from source to assembly from scratch—no shortcuts!
107
Unsafe Rust is harder than C
Or: The Most Expensive Linked List I’ve Ever Written
108
Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
Somehow we forgot how to center rectangles and must find our way back
109
RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023)
Date: March 7, 2111
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Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host
Are you sick of Forbes appearing in search results? For topics that Forbes doesn’t have any expertise in? Here’s the organic rankings for “best pet insurance”: Forbes ranks #2. Not sure a business website knows how pet insurance actually works. But okay. They also have the #1 ranking for best cbd gummies: Because it’s…
111
The xz attack shell script
Andres Freund published the existence of the xz attack on 2024-03-29 to the public oss-security@openwall mailing list. The day before, he alerted Debian security and the (private) distros@openwall list. In his mail, he says that he dug into this after “observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz…
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Xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained
Yesterday Andres Freund emailed oss-security@ informing the community of the discovery of a backdoor in xz/liblzma, which affected OpenSSH server (huge respect for noticing and investigating this). Andres' email is an amazing summary of the whole drama, so I'll skip that. While admittedly most juicy and interesting…
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OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now
(“make LLMs play better with one weird trick”)
114
Reflections on Palantir
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
115
Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS
Hello friends, this is the first of two, possibly three (if and when I have time to finish the Windows research) writeups. We will start with targeting GNU/Lin…
116
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
117
Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021)
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
118
If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed
I believe Matt Mullenweg's abuses of his unilateral, unchecked powers prove that it is in the best interest of the entire WordPress community that he be removed from power immediately.
119
Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell
What if you had to fight against your company's culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration. Initially met with skepticism, Snover's idea faced resistance from a company that favored…
120
A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption
About two years ago, I switched teams at Google to focus on fully homomorphic encryption (abbreviated FHE, or sometimes HE). Since then I’ve got to work on a lot of interesting projects, learning along the way about post-quantum cryptography, compiler design, and the ins and outs of fully homomorphic encryption. If…