1831
Sales happen when buyers fear missing out
ROI (and I) are naïve
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
1832
Making my local LLM voice assistant faster and more scalable with RAG
If you read my previous blog post, you probably already know that I like my smart home open-source and very local, and that certainly includes any voice assistant I may have. If you watched the video demo, you have probably also found out that it’s… slow. Trust me, I did too. Prefix caching helps, but it feels like…
1833
Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read
This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average. Michael Nielsen and Gwern tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daughter from a very…
1834
Exponentially Better Rotations (2022)
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
1835
Leveraging Zig's Allocators
How Zig's allocators can help manage memory and improve performance
1836
Start presentations on the second slide
Aka "in media res"
1837
Does anybody know this fractal? (2012)
Experimenting with the "divisibility" of complex numbers, I stumbled across this thingy. It looks like a fractal. Although the formula does not do any iterations. It reminds me of something. But I dont know what. Doing a Google image search brings up a couple of galaxies :) This image shows the region from (-1/-1) to…
1838
The problem with OpenTelemetry
I regularly complain about OpenTelemetry, so with an aim to be a less useless contributor, today I'm putting pen to paper. If you're an implementer, I ask you to read this and take away the personal bias you might have towards your work, and instead look objectively at the feedback being given.
1839
I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game
Update: This kinda blew up! Featured in Hacker News, Ars Technica and PC Gamer, among others. Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student…
1840
A look at Apple's technical approach to AI including core model performance etc.
Apple Intelligence makes a lot of sense when you get out of the AI bubble. Plus, the cool technical details Apple shared about their language models "thinking different."
1841
Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers (2009)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
1842
Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds (2022)
A high-level how-to guide by Lars Doucet and Dan Cook for game designers and game economists working in large multiplayer online games and/or virtual worlds.
1843
Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code
You can come to McDonalds and order a salad, but you won't. Same with notebooks, you can write NASA-production-grade software in a notebook, but most likely you won't. Notebooks make you lazy, and encourage bad practices.
1844
1845
Chaos in the medium: Watercolour plotting
Over the past few weeks, I've been experimenting with painting in watercolours using my AxiDraw plotter. Watercolour is a medium I enjoy painting in (by hand) as a personal hobby, kind of separate from my public art making, so it’s been interesting to combine it with code. I’ve thought about trying
1846
Eden Abhez: The strangest hit songwriter
He wrote one of my favorite songs, but was so much more than a composer
1847
The Swift compiler is slow due to how types are inferred
How a 10 year old design choice for Swift’s type checker still haunts us to this day
1848
Group chats rule the world
The importance and dynamics of private group chats in shaping tech discourse
1849
1850
How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system
I discuss why Alexa missed the opportunity to take the lead and become the dominant player in the conversational AI market.
1851
The borrow checker within
This post lays out a 4-part roadmap for the borrow checker that I call “the borrow checker within”. These changes are meant to help Rust become a better version of itself, enabling patterns of code which feel like they fit within Rust’s spirit , but run afoul of the letter of its law . I feel fairly comfortable with…
1852
Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
An analysis of the Croatian classic.
1853
Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
Ask most venture-backed founders why they get 10x more equity than employee #1, 100x more equity than employee #5, and 1000x more equity than employee #15, and you'll get the same answer: "I'M TAKING SO MUCH RISK, IT'S SO HARD TO START A COMPANY, I MADE
1854
AES-GCM and breaking it on nonce reuse
In this post, we will look at how the security of the AES-GCM mode of operation can be completely compromised when a nonce is reused.
1855
Decade of the Battery
A repost with some updates.
1856
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) Phishing
Providing security research and red team techniques
1857
Borges on Chaos Theory
About a weird, lovely short story
1858
Solving Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe
This morning, I came accross Cameron Sun’s Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe on HN . However, the comments were disappointing, with people proposing probabilistic models, linear programming, minimax algorithms, and heuristic evaluations to develop AI approaches for the game, none of which quite correct. In this post, I’ll…
1859
I like the RP2040
The RP2040 is a microcontroller made by Raspberry Pi. Unlike their more widely known products, the RP2040 is meant to be embedded in consumer electronics. It's cheap and available in tens of thousands for immediate dispatch from your local Mouser.
1860
Scan HTML faster with SIMD instructions – Chrome edition
Modern processors have instructions to process several bytes at once. Effectively all processors have the capability of processing 16 bytes at once. These instructions are called SIMD, for single instruction, multiple data. It was once an open question whether these instructions could be useful to accelerate common…