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Bézier Curves and the logic behind them
The logic behind Bézier Curves used in CSS animations and visual elements.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,824 posts.
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Semantic Zoom
Making a gestural, itemized environment more fluid
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Using uninitialized memory for fun and profit (2008)
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
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The B Lane Swimmer (2009)
A number of years ago, I joined a Master’s swim team. I was doing triathlons at the time, and the swim was my weakest leg. The team I joined divided the pool into four lanes: A (fastest swimmers), B (next fastest), C (next fastest) and D (slowest.) Workouts were organized accordingly; faster swimmers were assigned…
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The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport . It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
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Explaining the Postgres iceberg
Have you seen this legendary SQL iceberg meme? Let's talk about it while wearing our PostgreSQL hat!
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Internals of async / await in JavaScript
If you have ever used JavaScript in the past, there is a high chance you have encountered the async / await syntax. async / a
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Space travel via tether between asteroids
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
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Philosophy of Coroutines
I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…
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Doug Lenat has died
AI has lost a giant
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Browser extensions spy on you, even if its developers don't
I've developed a few browser extensions, and every week I receive numerous emails with "revenue offer". Some experienced developers know that offers like these will inject malware into the browsers of your users, but scammers who make these offers will not tell you about it. They offer "integrations" that don't look…
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AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties advocacy group, recently published a good article entitled “ISPs Should Not Police Online Speech—No Matter How Awful It Is.” 1 It argues that providers within the internet “stack” should refrain from censoring traffic according to their own values. That…
1216
Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell
It is time to celebrate EC2-Classic, which defined early cloud computing, and which is finally retiring.
1217
The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant
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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Becoming a contractor
How many roads must a programmer walk down before you call them a contractor? It’s been about three years since I went down this (bumpy) path, and I finally have the feeling that my contracting business is “bootstrapped”1. Here’s an account of my journey so far, hoping you find it inspiring! 0. Contents Articles about…
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Google Maps Testing New Apple Maps-Inspired Map Style
Back in August 2020 , Google began testing a seemingly Apple Maps-inspired map style that added darker and deeper landcover colors throughout the world:
1220
Writing a bare-metal RISC-V application in D
This post will show you how to use D to write a bare-metal “Hello world” program that targets the RISC-V QEMU simulator. In a future blog post ( now available ) we’ll build on this to target actual hardware: the VisionFive 2 SBC. See blog-code for the final code from this post. For a more complex example, see…
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Wii Architecture – A Practical Analysis
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Types versus sets (and what about categories?) (2022)
A recent Twitter thread brought home to me that there is widespread confusion about what types actually are, even among the most prominent researchers. In particular: are types the same thing as sets ? At the risk of repeating some of my prior posts, perhaps it’s time for a little history about type theory, set theory…
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Mastodon Is Rewinding the Clock on Social Media – In a Good Way
A comment on a Hacker News thread inspired me to contemplate why Mastodon is everything we loved about social media before…
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Docker Is Four Things
Docker is not just a way of running programs on Linux without a virtual machine. Docker is 4 things.
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Absurd Success
So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus. It’s been…
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Echo Chess: The Quest for Solvability
Chess puzzles, but you are what you eat.
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Photogrammetry on commercial flights (2021)
Airplane window seats are great! Not only are they more comfy and easier to take a nap in, but they also have the most quaint form of in-flight entertainment: The outside world!
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My Caste
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
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The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself
The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself, and it's mostly not Biden's doing.