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Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3
Last year I wrote about my initial experiments with DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image generation model. I’ve been having an absurd amount of fun playing with its sequel, DALL-E 3 recently. …
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
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Things I like about Gleam's Syntax
Gleam is a Type-Safe programming language that transpiles to Erlang And javascript . , so you can run its code on the BEAM. I’ve slept on Gleam for a while because its syntax. It was too much Rust and not enough Elixir for me.
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Takkyu-bin: Luggage forwarding in Japan
Please don't roll your big bags around town
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EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption
This week, the European Parliament's negotiators reached a broad majority agreement on a common position concerning the controversial EU chat control bill. The Commission’s bill proposes bulk scanning and reporting of private messages for allegedly suspicious content by using error-prone algorithms,
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Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that
This article is an excerpt of my new book Cloudflare for Speed and Security where you will learn, among other things, how networking works in order to create fast, secure and scalable applications. If you are not overspending on compute (like many companies do because of "scale") then your biggest
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Lindenmayer Systems
Originally developed by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968, an L-System is a formalism to generate self-similar structures. Although, L-Systems are capable of generating famous fractals like the Sierpinski Triangle (Axiom: FXF--FF--FF, F → FF , X → --FXF++FXF++FXF-- , angle = 60 ) or the Gosper Curve (Axiom: FX, X →…
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Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler
Supply chain security is a hot topic today, but it is a very old problem. In October 1983, 40 years ago this week, Ken Thompson chose supply chain security as the topic for his Turing award lecture, although the specific term wasn’t used back then. (The field of computer science was still young and small enough that…
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Why every microwave sucks these days
if you're lucky, you haven't. you're still using a microwave from the 1990's or something like that, and it still works just fine. after all, how can a microwave be made any better? you put stuff in, and the water in the stuff heats up. there really isn't much innovation to be done that wasn't already done half a…
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Was Rust Worth It?
From JavaScript to Rust, three years in.
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The Case of a Curious SQL Query
Languages that suffer success often have to do so by selling out and adding features that go against some of the original purposes of their design. SQL is a...
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I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)
I originally posted this on Reddit so I could get a good sample of opinions from other engineers to see how they compared to mine before…
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Unpacking Elixir: Observability
Elixir supports the usual supects of observability. Open Telemetry (OTel), log handlers, capturing metrics. And it does it well. This post will mostly focus on the observability you have on the BEAM that is either incredibly rare to see elsewhere or possibly entirely unique.
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Advice to a novice programmer
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Wait, what's a bookmarklet?
How this one small browser quirk turned into a tool used by countless people for decades.
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What Transport for London can learn about us from our mobile data
Big Brother meets Big Data
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Web components will outlive JavaScript frameworks
If we're building things that we want to work in five or ten or even 20 years, we need to avoid dependencies and use the web with no layers in between.
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Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source
The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920. It's hard to overstate the importance of the work the Foundation does; they provide hardware which keeps the FreeBSD project running, they fund a myriad of independent projects, and they have…
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Not knowing the /proc file system
Overview Edit: this post was discussed on hacker news Some of the comments contained valuable reviews of the C code listed below. I’ve appended some edits after the original listing. I’ve been working quite with files and file systems on Linux recently. Mostly from the vantage point of either a shell or a python…
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Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up …
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Why we don’t generate elliptic curves every day
Elliptic curves are standardized, instead of being generated like Diffie-Hellman parameters. There's good reasons!
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There should be more cash prizes for solving historical mysteries
On the Herculaneum scroll and the underrated value of historical knowledge
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Good times create weak men (2019)
Software abstraction ladder becomes too tall and starts to fall
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I face investigation for terrorism
My phone is not being returned to me by police as, astonishingly, I am now formally under investigation for terrorism. Whether this relates to support for Palestine or for Wikileaks has currently not been made clear. What follows is, unspun and unvarnished, my account of my interview under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism…
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The risk of RISC-V: What's going on at SiFive?
Updated 10/25
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Goodbye, Node.js Buffer
It’s time to move from Buffer to Uint8Array.
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The killer features of the Steam Deck
In the beginning of the year I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck for myself. There were two main reasons I decided to buy it:
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Unified versus Split Diff
Which is better for code reviews, a unified diff or a split diff?