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Damnit I slipped and (mostly) built an Amiga 500
EDIT - the original article has an image of the PCB with the floppy power connector mounted the WRONG WAY. This is the INCORRECT WAY. Do NO...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,821 posts.
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Fast midpoint between two integers without overflow
Let us say that I ask you to find the number I am thinking about between -1000 and 1000, by repeatedly guessing a number. With each guess, I tell you whether your guess is correct, smaller or larger than my number. A binary search algorithm tries to find a value in an interval by repeating … Continue reading Fast…
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A crash course in Python “comprehensions” and “generators”
Master them in 20 minutes. Use them every day.
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What is a black start of the power grid?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] November 1965 saw one of the most widespread power outages in North American history. On the freezing cold evening of the 9th, the grid was operating at maximum capacity as people tried to stay warm when a misconfigured relay tr
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Loopr: A Loop/Reduction Macro for Clojure
I write a lot of reductions: loops that combine every element from a collection in some way. For example, summing a vector of integers:
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I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language
In which ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people
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Optimizing compilers reload vector constants needlessly
Modern processors have powerful vector instructions which allow you to load several values at once, and operate (in one instruction) on all these values. Similarly, they allow you to have vector constants. Thus if you wanted to add some integer (say 10001) to all integers in a large array, you might first load a…
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A homework question in someone’s 11th grade statistics class
My son is in 11th grade. Below you’ll find a HW question which was given in my son’s statistics class. How would you answer?
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Why do new cars look like wet putty?
"Wet Putty" whips are everywhere. What’s behind it? ... a BBSP investigation
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No one wants to have kids anymore
As the world's population reaches 8 billion, we're slowly running out of babies.
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The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
Is what we do development anymore?
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FTX Contagion
Charting the FTX collapse.
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Exercises for understanding Haskell Lenses (2019)
No matter how many blog posts and tutorials I read about lenses, it seems like there's no replacement for just using them to get an intuition. So here are some exercises I came up with. While they shouldn't be all that difficult, they build up from some basic knowledge about lenses up to the more advanced usages of…
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Linux Certificate Authority root stores have a too simple view of 'trust'
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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Framer's Magic Motion
How does Framer Motion make layout changes look seamless? In this post, we're taking a deep dive into FLIP, the technique used by Framer Motion to animate changes in layout without sacrificing performance.
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ChatGPT vs. a Cryptic Crossword
The first Times crossword Having seen several mind-blowing articles about ChatGPT’s ability (most notably this one), I wondered how ChatGPT would fare solving a cryptic crossword. I decided to try with an easy one: a Quick Cryptic from The Times. I had a search through the Times for the Times archives to try and find…
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Air Marshals Will Refuse Orders to Go to the Border, Prefer First Class Cabins
Armed federal officers publicly threatening to defy orders from the President seems like it’s getting insufficient attention. The Biden administration largely continuing Trump’s border policies (he’s building the wall!) seems under-covered as well. The claim about vulnerable flights as a result is absurd.
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Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports
Hertz announced a $168 million settlement covering 364 claims against them, at an average of just over $460,000 per customer. There are perhaps a dozen more customers who are suing Hertz, that are not a part of the settlement. I have to think that in many of those cases the customers believe the egregiousness of their…
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One does not simply destroy a nuclear weapon
It's the isotopes...
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AI Homework
The first obvious casualty of large language models is homework: the real training for everyone, though, and the best way to leverage AI, will be in verifying and editing information.
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The Peking Duck Exemption
Most food safety regulations say that Peking duck should be illegal. But it's not, so what gives?
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Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
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If you unscrew your belly button, your bottom will fall off
My Dad died on 5 December 2021. My earliest memory is sitting on his shoulders watching a Guy Fawkes bonfire on one of several visits to the UK as a child. An…
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Using ChatGPT as a Co-Founder
In the quest to explore the capabilities of ChatGPT, I decided to utilized it as a startup brainstorming partner. From product description to building the product on AWS and GCP, crafting an elevat...
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FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi
How to install FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi, one step in building an Active Directory server with Samba and FreeBSD.
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How to estimate an SSD’s working life
The life of an SSD should be more predictable than a hard disk. All you need is its TBW, and the total amount of data written to it so far.
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Activision’s faulty anti-cheat software
Activision’s blind faith in the infallibility of their RICOCHET anti-cheat software , combined with a buggy and unstable Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II release, has resulted in faulty, permanent, and unappealable player account bans that prevent users from starting even the single-player game. These bans leave…
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Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy
Or, Why Google keeps killing products