The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,740 posts.
Ask ChatGPT to estimate the carbs in your lunch. Now ask it again. And again. Five hundred times. You’d expect the same answer each time. It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a
Axiom: body hair is cringe. That's how I feel, at least. I decided to build a machine that lets me permanently remove it using electricity.
I recently decided to, finally, have my iPhone fixed, only to realize a few hours later that my AppleCare could have covered it. I was in a low mood until my partner suggested that I was robbing myself of a good decision. The iPhone needed fixing, and procrastinating on it wasn’t useful. Deciding to do […]
He may have had tailoring from Hawkes of Savile Row, but Withnail’s coat has a more complicated history.
I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity. The routine was basically: Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work. When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus. I’ve been trying it, and it’s a…
In an industry that pressures developers to always be shipping side-projects, it can be helpful to be retrospective with the projects that don't make the cut
This past Tuesday I typed C-x C-c in Emacs for the last time after 20 years of daily use. Though nearly half that time was gradually retiring it, switching to modal editing, then to Vim. Emacs is a platform, and I’d grown accustomed to its applications, especially those I built myself. There was no particular hurry…
Apple and Porsche both figured out the same secret that the cheapest product in the lineup can be the most exciting. It just takes a little intention.
I was very excited to get the latest version of my PCB from the manufacturer.
['Programmer', 'Computer nerd', 'Unix enthusiast'];
A blog, notes, gallery, lifestyle and fully conglomerated posts from Joshua.
Porting a 2012 OpenCV paper to YOLOv8 and CoreML on iOS to score rifle shooting targets from a photo - replacing the brass-plug scoring gauge with on-device computer vision.
I was chatting to a friend about my folding bike and I had the urge to write about it - because this falls in the category of “Things I wish I’d had decades ago”. And maybe I can encourage some others to try these wonderful devices. Note: I’m 3 months into a new job so blogging has taken a back seat to drinking from a…
If you agree that Apple itself was It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.
One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday ; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re…
Let’s Explore a Little Math
A tribute not only to phở in the capital of Vietnam, but also to three extraordinary writers who wrote about it with wit, nostalgia, and devotion: Thạch Lam, Vũ Bằng, and Nguyễn Tuân.
A brief history of fish sauce, from Ancient Asian recipes, Roman times, and through to today's many (delicious) uses.
I spent 3 years building Unity games by copying tutorials and stitching forum scripts together. Then an interviewer asked me what Queue<T> was. I could not answer.
Caring deeply – about art, my friends, and shared experiences – has brought me so much joy.
I took this snapshot, and the rest of them, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Unearthed: Raw Beauty exhibition yesterday. Enjoy.
This is a story of a most unexpected journey — one that is just starting. If somebody had told me four years ago that I’d be writing this today, I would have stared at them in astonishment or laughed dismissedly. Yet here I am, writing about a late-found hobby that has somehow become a very important part of my life.
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris:
Cola, orange soda, and almond soda!
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
An introduction to Obsidian. Why you should use it, how to keep it simple, and how you can use it.
As more engineers use the irresistible LLMs their skills atrophy, practicing will make you special.
My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.
