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Lean, Coq and other proof assistants: Visualising proofs as trees
This week we (me & Anton Kovsharov) published Paperproof, a Gentzen-tree-like proof interface for Lean 4. In this post I'll review proof visualisations from o...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
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Grouping digits in SQL
PostgreSQL 16 was released last week. This is the story of a feature.
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Writing HTML by hand
Behind the scenes - how I'm making redblobgames.com - interactive explanations of game development algorithms and math
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How to evaluate a product roadmap, for engineers
Aka, how do I know if a product leader knows what they're doing? There are thousands of articles, courses, and guides on how to build a roadmap for product managers. Even with all these resources, roadmaps often become a point of contention between product managers and their stakeholders. There
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Programming is hard
Software is weird. In its basic form, software is this very abstract thing with seemingly little connection to the real world. Yet graphical applications running on a hardware device like a modern phone feel very real, even to people who have no appreciation of what happens within this “black box”. Some pieces of…
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Circles do not exist
Many logos, drawings and other graphical designs have the following shape in it. What is this shape? If you thought: "Ah-ha! I'm smart and r...
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RabbitMQ vs. Kafka – An Architect’s Dilemma (Part 1)
RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka might appear similar but serve very different needs. Read to learn and make an informed decision suitable for your needs.
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Getting into Pinball
Almost exactly a year ago, I began playing pinball at my friend Noah's house. I didn't understand how he could be so interested in Pinball that he bought two machines, but since I....
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Historical maps probably helped cause World War I
On cartography as historical argument
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Improving your online privacy: An update
Ten years ago, after it became clear to almost everyone that all our online activity was being tracked and stored, I wrote a blog post about simple steps a person could take to improve their privacy online .
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Web apps are better than no apps
There’s a certain community in tech that’s very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this …
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My trip to the Communication and Laptop Museum in Estonia
I ended up going to a small museum run by a passionate enthusiast in the beautiful countryside of south-east Estonia while on vacation, here are my notes on it.
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Your WiFi Can See You
And it's so much worse than you think
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Tracing: Structured logging, but better
It is no secret that I am not a fan of logs; I’ve baited (rapala in work lingo. Rapala is a Finnish brand of fishing lure, and used to mean baiting in this context) discussion in our work chat with things like: If you’re writing log statements, you’re doing it wrong. This is a pretty incendiary statement, and while…
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Some new snippets from the Snowden documents
A weblog about Signals Intelligence, Communications Security and top level telecommunications equipment
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The anatomy of a Godot API call
UPDATE: This article has started an ongoing conversation with the Godot devs. They care about the issues raised, and would like to improve things. Significant improvements will almost certainly be made, although it’s still early days and it’s unclear what will change and by how much. I am encouraged by the response. I…
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What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?
Recently, I started working on a new LLM-oriented project . It’s currently far from feature-complete and probably filled with bugs, but I’m hoping to use it as a platform for exploring a question I’ve been considering a lot lately: what will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future? It seems undeniable…
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Exploring the Halo 1 System Link Protocol
One of my all-time favorite games is Halo: Combat Evolved that launched together with the original Xbox in 2001. One major part of the game was multiplayer, up to 16 people at a LAN party could play together by connecting four Xbox consoles over Ethernet , referred to as System Link .
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The joys of maintenance programming (2011)
In the old days when I started programming, green programmers trying to build their skills and get experience started out doing maintenance programming. Only the old hands got to write new code. The newbies cut their teeth debugging and fixing musty old code that still worked for the business. I’ve done my share of…
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How unions won a 30% raise for every fast food worker in California
Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. 40 years of declining worker power shattered the American Dream (TM), producing multiple generations whose children fared worse than their parents, cratering faith in institutions and hope for a better future.
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Memory-efficient enum arrays in Zig
Proper support for sum types or tagged unions have become table stakes for systems programming languages. However, they can incur a lot of memory fragmentation that's not trivial to avoid without good support for metaprogramming. This post goes into Zig's powerful comptime feature, and how it allows some radical…
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Unix shells are generally not viable access control mechanisms any more
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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iPhone 15 Pro facts and estimates
A couple of things I learned and one reasonable guess.
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How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021)
FoundationDB is a very impressive database. Its paper won the best industry paper award in SIGMOD’21. In this post, I will explain, in detail, how FDB works and discuss a few very interesting design choices they made. It’s a dense paper packed with neat ideas. Many details (sometimes even proof of correctness) are not…
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Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
In this article, you will learn what stands behind the label immutable when it comes to Linux systems
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AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
AWS grew its IPv4 estate with an additional 27 million IP addresses to now owning 128 Million IPv4 addresses. At a value of $35 per IPv4 address, the total value of AWS’ IPv4 estate is ~4.5 Billion dollars. An increase of $2 billion
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Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
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