The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,212 posts.
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…
Stockholm, 1912 At 35° C it was an unusually hot day for Stockholm. Shizo Kanakuri stood at the start line of the marathon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Shizo was carrying the hopes, dreams, and pride of Japan, a country attempting to become a “modern” nation. There was something that
What’s the “right” level of CPU utilization for a server? If you look at a monitoring dashboard from a well-designed and well-run service, what CPU utilization should we hope to see, averaged over a day or two? It’s a very general question, and it’s not clear it should have a single answer. That said, for a long time…
Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes: Sharing my journey of downsizing my digital storage, letting go of terabytes of data, and moving away from a NAS setup. I decided to use an external Thunderbolt SSD enclosure and an M.2 NVMe SSD to store my data locally. For cloud backup and encryption, I used the Arq…
Important: This page summarizes data scaling only, using tokens to parameters as a ratio, and as derived from large language models like GPT-3, Chinchilla, and beyond, linked to the Compute-Optimal scaling laws like Kaplan and Hoffmann/Chinchilla. Please note that compute scaling laws are outside the scope of my…
We describe a graph-theoretic analogue of vector calculus. The linear operators of vector calculus (gradient, divergence, laplacian) correspond to the matrices naturally associated to graphs (incidence matrix, adjacency matrix). This analogy is useful for formalizing the discretization of some problems in image and…
When I first learned about Fourier series and integrals, I hated it because it seemed like a collection of many ad-hoc definitions, formally related but very different.
This is a story about a security vulnerability in Google that allowed me to run arbitrary code on the computers of 50+ Google employees. Although Google initially considered my finding a serious security incident, later on, it changed its mind and stated that my finding is not, in fact, a vulnerability, but the…
I'm sick of it. In the world of mobile development (though likely also elsewhere), we sink so much engineering talent into making tools that are great...
Someone asked if I could write about the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and what I think that means for the future of people, t...
In the ever-evolving field of information security, curiosity and continuous learning drive innovation. This blog series is tailored for those deeply engaged in experimental projects, leveraging Rust’s capabilities to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The focus on Rust, after exploring various programming…
This is a DS 3600 analog telephone made by Tesla Stropkov in about 1982. It's still functional and to my mind it's absolutely beautiful. Bu...
I’ve heard a lot about classic Doom’s data format and decided to write some Rust code to extract its maps and convert that to vector graphics I could laser cut.
I’ve been writing custom software for a long time and one of the things that annoys me most is when a client adopts the position that there is a silver bullet which will reduce or remove the inherent complexity of this task. This happens more often than you’d think and guess what? They are almost always wrong. Perhaps…
As the 2010’s draw to a close, it’s worth taking a look back at the monumental progress that has been made in Deep Learning in this decade.[1] Driven by the development of ever-more powerful comput
the curious life of Ms. Audrey M. Eschright2023311 points162 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details
The first thing I know about burnout is this: burnout happens when we become locked in a cycle of caring about the results of our actions but having no meaningful control over those outcomes. I first learned this while reading about social workers, but the problem is abdundant in tech. I’ve seen it play out in every…
Activity around building sophisticated applications on top of LLMs (Large Language Models) such as GPT-3/4/ChatGPT/etc is growing like wildfire right now. Many of these applications are potentially vulnerable to prompt …
As the popularity of zig cc, more developers may realize Zig is not only a programming language, but also a toolchain to help maintaining C/C++/Zig project. Today I want to discuss one vital part of this toolchain: Zig's build system, build.zig the first non-trivial Zig program for newcomers. Note: This post is based…
[Hacker News discussion, LinkedIn discussion, Twitter thread]
Buying status is as close to bad as a good act can be.
SQL:2023 has been wrapped. The final text has been submitted by the working group to ISO Central Secretariat, and it’s now up to the ISO gods when it will be published. Based on past experience, it could be between a few weeks and a few months.
The tech behind peer-to-peer (P2P) social networks such as Secure Scuttlebutt enforces permanency. Absolute permanency isn’t what you want in a social network.
Freedom is a state of mind
[Update: 13-Apr-2023 with some of the background context and some things I learned from hackernews ] [Update: 18-Dec-2023] This hiduti...
Spoiler alert: the answer is maybe! Although, my inclusion of the word “actually” betrays my bias. Vector databases are having their day right now. Three different vector DB companies have raised money on valuations up to $700 million (paywall link). Surprisingly, their rise in popularity is not for their “original”…
Over the course of my Spring 2020 semester at Harvey Mudd College , I developed a self-hosting compiler entirely from scratch. This article walks through many interesting parts of the project. It’s laid out so you can just read from beginning to end, but if you’re more interested in a particular topic, feel free to…
