5881
Ruby's switch statement is flexible
Ruby's switch statement is very versatile and flexible, especially due to the dynamic nature of Ruby. This post shows how it works with examples.
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5882
Gradle still sucks
I wrote a blog post a while ago complaining about Gradle, mostly from a position of ignorance: I had never really taken the time to properly learn the tool and I was frustrated while trying to stumble my way through working with it. But luckily, my company encourages learning and experimentation so I was given an…
5883
You could have invented futexes
The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…
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Debugging a Mixed Python and C Language Stack
Debugging is difficult. Debugging across multiple languages is especially challenging, and debugging across devices often requires a team with varying skill sets and expertise to reveal the underlying…
5885
Use Gröbner bases to solve polynomial equations
A self-contained introduction to Gröbner bases and solving polynomial systems
5886
My thoughts on OCaml
Since 2013 I’ve had the chance to use OCaml a few times in different jobs, and I got frustrated and disappointed every time I had to use it. I just don’t enjoy writing OCaml.
5887
Transformers from Scratch (2021)
I procrastinated a deep dive into transformers for a few years. Finally the discomfort of not knowing what makes them tick grew too great for me. Here is that dive.
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GCC 13 and the State of Gccrs
The first official GCC 13 release is just around the corner, and you may be a bit surprised to find out that gccrs will not be included in it. The aim of this blogpost is to go into a little bit more detail as to why this was done and how you can still try out our compiler if you’d like to.
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Fedora 38 LLVM vs. Team Fortress 2
F38 just released and seeing a bunch of people complain that TF2 dies on AMD or other platforms when lavapipe is installed. Who's at fault? ...
5891
Haiku's (Kernel) Condition Variables API: Design and Implementation
A few months after my contract with Haiku, Inc. began, I rewrote the implementation of the Haiku kernel’s condition variables (as opposed to our userspace condition variables, which are from POSIX.) As this new implementation has run in Haiku …
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QEMU 8.0
We’d like to announce the availability of the QEMU 8.0.0 release. This release contains 2800+ commits from 238 authors.
5893
Deleting System32\curl.exe
Let me tell you a story about how Windows users are deleting files from their installation and as a consequence end up in tears. Background The real and actual curl tool has been shipped as part of Windows 10 and Windows 11 for many years already. It is called curl.exe and is located in the … Continue reading deleting…
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Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres
Personal website of Phil Booth
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Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
The Z Garbage Collector (ZGC)—a scalable, low-latency garbage collector providing sub-millisecond max pause times—continues to evolve. This session will review the design goals behind ZGC and provide a look into the impact of the upcoming support for multiple generations. It will also present general guidance on…
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Two types of C programmers
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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I Wrote an Activitypub Server in OCaml: Lessons Learnt, Weekends Lost
It was way back in the summer of 2019 when I first became a member ( i.e. a Fedizen!) of the Fediverse, the distributed social network formed by various Free and Libre servers communicating using the Activitypub protocol.
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WTF is a KDF?
Earlier this week a letter from an activist imprisoned in France was posted to the internet. Contained within Ivan Alococo’s dispatch from the Villepinte prison
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My shell setup with Fish and Tmux (2021)
I’ve recently been asked to share my shell setup, which if you ask me, that’s one of the highest levels of praise you can achieve as a software developer 🤣
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Prompt engineering vs. blind prompting
"Prompt Engineering" emerged from the growth of language models to describe the process of applying prompting to effectively extract information from language models, typically for use in real-world applications.
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Finetuning Large Language Models
An introduction to the core ideas and approaches
5903
The weird world of Windows file paths
File system paths on Windows are stranger than you might think. On any Unix-derived system, a path is an admirably simple thing: if it starts with a /, it’s a path. Not so on Windows, which serves up a bewildering variety of schemes for composing a path.
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Bard coding update with Colab exporting
Bard can now help with programming and software development tasks, across more than 20 programming languages.
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Introducing 'Trusted Publishers'
Announcing a new, more secure way to publish to PyPI
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Revisiting the Fast Inverse Square Root – Is It Still Useful?
In 2005, id Software released the source code for their 1999 game Quake III Arena under the GPL-2 license. In the file code/game/q_math.c , there is a function for calculating the reciprocal square root of a number which at first glance seems to use a very peculiar algorithm:
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Current issues with the Qt project from the outside looking in
I want to start with that Qt is still IMHO the best way to develop C++ apps. This post is not supposed to be a rant. This is for the decision maker at Qt. If you have any question about Qt feel free to join our /r/QtFramework subreddit! The Qt developers are wonderful to work with, and every new Qt version makes it…
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Building a ChatGPT-enhanced Python REPL
In this blog I share my experience in building a Python REPL augmented with ChatGPT. I explore how the application is built, and speculate on software engineering patterns and paradigms that might emerge in systems built on Large Language Models (LLMs). GEPL - Generate, Evaluate, Print, Loop Link to this section…
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How to train your own large language models
From raw code to a model serving users: the data pipelines, training infrastructure, and evaluation work behind Replit’s language models.
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Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.