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The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
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Maximum likelihood estimation and loss functions
When I started learning about loss functions, I could always understand the intuition behind them. For example, the mean squared error (MSE) for regression seemed logical—penalizing large deviations from the ground-truth makes sense. But one thing always bothered me: I could never come up with those loss functions on…
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A visual proof that a^2 – b^2 = (a + b)(a – b)
A visual proof that a2 – b2 = (a + b)(a – b). Sophie Germain wrote, “It has been said that algebra is but written geometry and geometry is but diagrammatic algebra.”
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XFCE 4.20 Released
After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.20.
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In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby Concurrency Landscape
I was honored to present a talk on Ruby concurrency at RubyConf 2024. It represents a high-level distillation of much of my writing and research over the past year. The conference itself was great, and presenting was such a fun experience. Here is the talk, titled “In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby…
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Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up
OpenAI recently published a public writeup for an incident they had on December 11, and there are lots of good details in here! Here are some of my off-the-cuff observations: Saturation With thousa…
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Tenstorrent and the State of AI Hardware Startups
Semi-custom silicon is a bigger problem than Nvidia.
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Should you ditch Spark for DuckDB or Polars?
There’s been a lot of excitement lately about single-machine compute engines like DuckDB and Polars. With the recent release of pure Python Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, the excitement about these lightweight native engines has risen to a new high. Out with Spark and in with the new and cool animal-themed engines— is…
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Hacking physics from the back of a napkin (2020)
February 24, 2020. The computational power of a humble napkin is awesome. I discuss three napkin algorithms — dimensional analysis, Fermi estimates, and random walks — and use them to figure out why rain falls, the length of the E. coli genome, and the mass of a proton, among other things. These examples suggest a…
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Fast LLM Inference From Scratch (using CUDA)
This post is about building an LLM inference engine using C++ and CUDA from scratch without libraries.
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Preferring throwaway code over design docs
If you have discipline to throw away your first idea, draft, throwaway PRs often drives more progress than a design doc.
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Konwinski Prize
Why I launched the K Prize, aka, why want to give $1M to the first open source AI that gets 90% on contamination-free SWE-bench.
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Computing Inside an AI
Since the launch of ChatGPT, explorations in two directions kicked into high gear.
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Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)
Anyway, here's what happened: Not to say that big brother is everywhere, but short of having microsoft people monitoring our lists and newsgroups (with wouldn't overly surprise me, after all they also tried a PR compain with magazines, posing as simple users who liked microsoft products), the announcement was…
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A quick look at OS/2's builtin virtualization
A while ago, someone on the fediverse mentioned "OS/2's virtualization features" to me. I don't remember who it was, sorry. I had the chance to take a look at this today.
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Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government reform
Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand the nature of government reform
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Garbage collected smart pointers in Rust via concurrent cycle collection
Scheme to the Spec is a series on the more complex, often overlooked aspects of programming language implementation.
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I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
How I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
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My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)
The point of these scripts is not to ban all use of constructs like the passive voice. (When it comes to writing, there are exceptions to every "rule.")
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Eyes Wide Shut: Hidden in plain sight
Eyes Wide Shut is the last work of legendary movie director Stanley Kubrick, and like many of his films it contains layers of meaning not easily deciphered or understood on first viewing. Released in 1999 to mixed responses, Eyes Wide Shut has since garnered considerable interest and has come to be
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Elixir/Erlang Hot Swapping Code (2016)
Hot code reloading with Elixir and Erlang
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Energy-Harvesting Electronic Holiday Card 2024
We're delighted to share our electronic creation with you this holiday season, six long years after the previous one. The theme this time around is "powered by the holiday spirit", and it's an exercise in energy harvesting.
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Converting untrusted PDFs into trusted ones: The Qubes Way (2013)
Arguably one of the biggest challenges for desktop security is how to handle those overly complex PDFs, DOCs, and similar files, that are so often exchange...
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The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)
Vulcan & dBASE
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Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going
So I’m two months into trying to teach a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to a computer. We already have one interesting story, which I felt was worth sharing.
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CADing and 3D printing like a software engineer
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
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Parkinson's Law: It’s real, so use it
Yes, just set that deadline.