121
Wordle-solving state of the art: all optimality results so far
Almost all mathematical questions one could have about Wordle are settled by now. I summarize here what is known so far.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 411 posts.
122
Hardware-accelerated Linux virtual machines on jailbroken iPhone 12 / iOS 14.1
I unlocked Hypervisor.framework on my jailbroken phone and modified UTM, a popular QEMU port for iOS, to run arm64 Linux in a VM at full native speed. …for the clickbait - and to show iPhone’s untapped potential.
123
Modeling Starlink Capacity
Prior attempts to calculate Starlink’s potential for service have been theoretical. We simulate based on the actual constellation.
124
Creating Shazam in Java (2010)
A couple of days ago I encountered this article: How Shazam WorksThis got me interested in how a program like Shazam works… And more importantly, how hard is...
125
Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009)
I recently came up with what I think is an intuitive way to explain Bayes’ Theorem. I searched in google for a while and could not find any article that explains it in this particular way.
126
The internet was designed with a narrow waist
When you hear the term, you should picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle.
127
Lil: A Scripting Language
Lil is part of the technology that powers Decker , a multimedia creative tool inspired by HyperCard . Decker uses Lil for adding custom behavior to decks and the widgets within. Lil is designed to be learned in layers, but it is a richly multi-paradigm language which incorporates ideas from imperative, functional…
128
A Rust match made in hell
I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevents you from making a bunch of mistakes. If you read something like S...
129
Google Search Is Dying
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
130
4.2 Gigabytes, Or: How to Draw Anything
In our world, we can do anything that we want to do here. Any old thing. - Bob Ross, The Joy Of Painting Season 29 Episode 1
131
Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
I grew up believing that following the news makes you a better citizen. Eight years after having quit, that idea now seems ridiculous—that consuming a particularly unimaginative information produ...
132
We're going to need a lot of solar panels
The team at Terraform Industries is now 11 people working towards a near term future where atmospheric CO2, much of it centuries of unpriced industrial waste, becomes the preferred default source o…
133
An interactive guide to Flexbox
When we truly learn the secrets of the Flexbox layout mode, we can build absolutely incredible things. Fluid layouts that stretch and shrink without arbitrary breakpoints. In this action-packed interactive tutorial, we'll pop the hood on the Flexbox algorithm and learn how to do remarkable things with it. ✨
134
U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
This is part 1. Part 2: update : U+237C ⍼ angzarr; Part 3: Monotype Mathematical Sorts Part 4: U+237C ⍼ is (also) S9576 ⍼
135
The Demise of Scientific American
Scott’s foreword One week ago, E. O. Wilson—the legendary naturalist and conservationist, and man who was universally acknowledged to know more about ants than anyone else in human hist…
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137
10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive
We've been waiting since April 24, 2012 for a Google Drive Linux client.
138
What is money, anyway?
Editor’s Note: This topic is now comprehensively covered in my book, Broken Money. Money is a surprisingly complex subject. People spend their lives seeking money, and in some ways it seems so straightforward, and yet what humanity has defined as money has changed significantly over the centuries. How could something…
139
I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
Organizing my thoughts regarding an argument about the Dunning-Kruger study and statistics in general
140
Someone’s Been Messing with My Subnormals
TL;DR: After noticing an annoying warning, I went on an absurd yak shave, and discovered that because of a tiny handful of Python packages b...
141
Why LSP?
LSP (language server protocol) is fairly popular today. There's a standard explanation of why that is the case. You probably have seen this picture before:
142
Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)
We’ve all sat in those presentations. A speaker with a stream of slides full of text, monotonously reading them off as we read along. We’re so used to it we expect it. We accept it. We even consider it ‘learning’. As an educator I push against ‘death by PowerPoint’ and I'm fascinated with how we
143
What to blog about
You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul! But what should you write about? It’s easy to get hung up …
144
When network is faster than browser cache (2020)
We assume that browser caches are near-instantaneous, but data shows that retrieving an object from cache can take hundreds of milliseconds!
145
Off the Grid
People choose to live off-grid for self-sufficiency, resilience, or ecological reasons. For us, to live off-grid, is mostly letting go of the numbing culture of convenience and surrounding ourselves with systems we trust for long transits across the ocean. When far away from the coasts, we have to rely on our vessel…
146
Emergent Features in 6.7B+ Param Transformers
When I attended NAACL, I wanted to do a little test. I had two pitches for my LLM.int8() paper. One pitch is about how I use advanced quantization methods to achieve no performance degradation transformer inference at scale that makes large models more accessible. The other pitch talks about emergent outliers in…
147
Stop Writing Dead Programs
A strong runner up was this quote, which captures the essence of what we should be trying to do when creating new languages:
148
How to Drop Out (2004)
People who work get bored when they don't work. People who don't work never get bored.
149
Separate Your Billing from Entitlements
Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you…
150
The German School of Lisp (2011)
The German school of Lisp is described by Kazimir Majorinc as a Spartan movement 1 in Lisp implementation. But let me be clear, the Lisps in question are not toys like the one’s littering the Lisp landscape (including my own ). Likewise, these Lisps are not libraries nor are they full-blown development ecosystems.