2191
Designing furniture using the CSS grid (2023)
The story of why and how I developed a tool for designing MDF furniture by writing my own little language that transpiles into a CSS grid layout.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,433 posts.
2192
Flying planes in Microsoft Flight Simulator with a JavaScript autopilot (2023)
Writing auto-pilots in JavaScript for MSFS
2193
Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana
My obsession with measuring the power consumption of my devices reached a whole new level.
2194
Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
Musings on software, technology, and life by Darren Kopp
2195
Simplicity is an advantage but sadly complexity sells better (2022)
Pushing back on the cult of complexity.
2196
ESP32-S3 has a few SIMD instructions
Intro Espressif Systems released their ESP32-S3 SoC a few years ago, but only recently have they released more documentation and support of ...
2197
Visiting the annual Braun collectors fair
The Braun+Design Börse is an annual event and fair focusing on Braun products. Braun might not be the design icon it was 40 years ago, but starting in 1955, it profoundly impacted the design world, starting with its cooperation with the Ulm School of Design. With Dieter Rams as
2198
Small Things
The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 195.
2199
2200
A History of C Compilers – Part 1: Performance, Portability and Freedom
Let's talk compilers with part one of a whistle stop tour of their history
2201
Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers
Traefik got really popular over the last few years in the bubble of home-lab youtubers , that’s when I first heard about it.
2202
Deterministic Quoting: Making LLMs safer for healthcare
LLMs have the potential to revolutionise our field of healthcare, but the fear and reality of hallucinations prevent adoption in most applications.
2203
Decoding UTF8 with parallel extract
As a side-quest I recently decided to write a branchless utf8 decoder utilizing the pext or "parallel extract" instruction. It's compliant with rfc-3629 , meaning that it doesn't just naively decode the code-point but also checks for overlong encoding, surrogate pairs and such. Compiled with gcc -O3 -march=x86-64-v3…
2204
Flags Are Not Languages
Famous Birthdays has been described as a “ Wikipedia for Gen-Z ”. It’s an insight into popularity across the internet of influencers, not just from traditional stage and screen but also social media channels such as TikTok and Instagram.
2205
A 100x speedup with unsafe Python
We're going to speed up some numpy code by 100x using "unsafe Python." Which is not quite the same as unsafe Rust, but it's a bit similar, and I'm not sure what else to call it... you'll see. It's not something you'd use in most Python code, but it's handy on occasion, and I think it shows "the nature of Python” from…
2206
MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diver…
2207
Swift's native Clocks are inefficient
In absolute terms they don’t have much overhead – think sub-microsecond for most uses. Which makes them perfectly acceptable when they’re used sporadically (e.g. only a few times per second).
2208
A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption
About two years ago, I switched teams at Google to focus on fully homomorphic encryption (abbreviated FHE, or sometimes HE). Since then I’ve got to work on a lot of interesting projects, learning along the way about post-quantum cryptography, compiler design, and the ins and outs of fully homomorphic encryption. If…
2209
With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er
Telemedicine (and mobile health generally) accumulated a hunk of public mindshare during the pandemic emergency, but speaking as someone wit...
2210
Time-Based CSS Animations
In my earlier post Time Uniform For CSS Animation, I took a note about a way to do CSS animations with time ticks instead of keyframes. It was limited applicable because CSS lacked the ability of doing complex Math calculations. After years of wait, CSS now has enough Math functions supported, particularly mod()…
2211
Understanding Stein's Paradox (2021)
An intuitive explanation of the James-Stein estimator.
2212
Superfest – The almost unbreakable East German Glass (2021)
Originally named ceverit, Superfest was an extremely durable glass patented and developed in 1979 in East Germany to combat excessive glass waste.
2213
Atari's Mike Jang
Some sad news to report on the blog this week. I got word that long-time Industrial Designer at Atari coin-operated division, Mike Jang, has passed away. I’ve known Mike since 2016, and whils…
2214
How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
For the last several decades, one avenue of technological progress has towered over nearly everything else: semiconductors.
2215
The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)
A decade-long effort to build a machine to unlock the promise of nuclear fusion fell victim to budget constraints and competing science, and was shut down the day it was dedicated. It was never turned on.
2216
I don't want to fill out your contact form
This is my personal blog, where I write solely in my personal capacity. It does not represent the positions of any organisations I'm associated with.
2217
A love letter to bicycle maintenance and repair
It was the 28th of June, 2020; the perfect summer day. I remember it distinctly because of two important events that took place on that day. The first was the unfortunate discovery that I am highly sensitive to the venomous hairs of the Oak processionary caterpillar. If you’ve never wished you could use a cheese…
2218
I joined landlord groups to persuade them to be better people to their tenants
1 sites already link to thisisalot.com, after 2 years online. Listed at $195 — keep the equity.
2219
How hard can generating 1024-bit primes be?
On the one hand they are easy to explain, they are just numbers that have no factors other than one and themselves, but on the other hand they contain endless complexity. They show up in numerous places, ranging from mathematical concepts and conjectures to interesting looking visualizations and cryptography…
2220
Evidence of price-fixing in the oil industry?
The FTC just found evidence that American oil companies colluded with the Saudi government to hike gas prices, costing the average family $3,000 last year. The question is, what can we do about it?