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Type information for faster Python C extensions
Update: The paper version of this post is accepted at PLDI SOAP 2024. Take a look at the preprint (PDF).
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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Dynamic programming is not black magic
This year’s Advent of Code has been brutal (compare the stats of 2023 with that of 2022, especially day 1 part 1 vs. day 1 part 2). It included a problem to solve with dynamic programming as soon as day 12, which discouraged some people I know. This specific problem was particularly gnarly for Advent […]
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Building a fully local LLM voice assistant to control my smart home
I’ve had my days with Siri and Google Assistant. While they have the ability to control your devices, they cannot be customized and inherently rely on cloud services. In hopes of learning something new and having something cool I could use in my life, I decided I want better. The premises are simple: I want my new…
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Exposed RSS
I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I get it. Maybe they picked an off-the-shelf t…
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Peer review is an honor-based system (2008)
It would take too long to expose all of the flaws of peer review, here are some: some work is just flat wrong because the reviewers cannot analyze all of the mathematical results, and because they cannot redo the experiments; numerous researchers cheat, sometimes in small ways ("2 out of 3 experiments agree with by ……
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It's Time to Nationalize and Then Break Up Boeing
If America wants to make civilian airplanes here, the government must step in, take over Boeing, and then design a competitive industry.
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Listening with LLM
Overview # This is the first part of many posts I am writing to consolidate learnings on how to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) to process audio, with the eventual goal of being able to build and host a LLM able to describe human voices. I am motivated to gain hands-on experience tinkering LLMs so, as much as…
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My Knowledge Lakehouse
1 There’re only three entities: log, list, structure.
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How to Be More Agentic
On a supposedly difficult thing
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A decade-old Steam bug
Valve has shown to occasionally not act on community feedback and bug reports. A story about a decade old bug.
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What I learned selling my company
At my first company, I internalized the standard advice to never think about M&A. The consensus was, and is, to just keep growing the business and good things will come. I did that, and I was lucky that good things did come in the form of a $130M acquisition
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Hidden Changes in GPT-4, Uncovered
The tool instructions in this article are not up to date as of 2024-01-12, see this post to learn more about the new tool OpenAI added to block conversations about U.S. elections using function calls.
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Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
Freeways were supposed to be easy. What happened?
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A supply chain attack on PyTorch
Security tends to lag behind adoption, and AI/ML is no exception. Four months ago, Adnan Khan and I exploited a critical CI/CD vulnerability in PyTorch, one of the world’s leading ML platform…
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A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
[Edit May 2024: This concept was republished in Asterisk Magazine.] Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agri…
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Carta's 83b Oversight: A Tax Trap for Married Startup Employees (2023)
There's a blind spot in Carta's 83(b) election feature you need to know about if you're married and living in California.
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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
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We need technology that is less immersive, not more
How come so many of the most talented engineers of our time work on making our entertainment more immersive?
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QMK and Keyboards
A collection of QMK firmware libraries, macros, and thoughts on ergonomic keyboards.
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Is Fortran “A Dead Language”? (2022)
Some C++ folk seem to think so, but they're wrong!
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Doing First Grade Math in Rust's Type System
MIT student who enjoys performance engineering, compilers, and creating unconventional code
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Unity's Open-Source Double Standard: The Ban of VLC
This page has moved to https://martinfinkel.com/blog/unity-double-oss-standards/ .
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The Wolfram Prompt Repository (2023)
Curated collection of prompts for use with LLMs. Accessible interactively in Chat Notebooks and programmatically in functions like LLMFunction. Initial categories in the Prompt Repository cover personas, functions, modifiers.
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A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
I work in product growth helping people discover and use great software, currently at SurveyMonkey. In the past I've done it at Prismatic (acq. by LinkedIn), Clara Lending (acq. by Sofi), Right Side Up, Hubstaff. I've also enjoyed consulting with interesting companies like DoorDash, Empower, StitchFix, Calm, Dell…
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How virtualisation came to Apple Silicon Macs
From Hypervisor APIs in OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014, through early VirtIO kernel extensions in Mojave in 2018, and Arm hypervisor support in Big Sur.
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Generating SVG for the prime knots
How I created a wall poster of knot diagrams.
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Attack of the Week: Airdrop Tracing
It’s been a while since I wrote an “attack of the week” post, and the fault for this is entirely mine. I’ve been much too busy writing boring posts about Schnorr signatures!…
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Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically (2023)
This is the Part 2 of a series. Feel free to read the prequel for more context: Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically Building a good VM for a dynamic language takes a ton of engineerin
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epoll: The API that powers the modern internet (2022)
Linux's epoll API solved the C10K problem, enabling fast and afforable Internet services.