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These years in Common Lisp: 2023-2024 in review
This is a personal pick of the most interesting projects, tools, libraries and articles that popped-up in Common Lisp land in the last two years.Newcomers might not realize how the Common Lisp ecosystem, though stable in many ways, actually evolves, sharpens, tries new solutions, proposes new tools, ships new…
The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach
The description suggests that this is some kind of extended metaphor about work. It appears to be written in that _Choose Your Own Adventure_ style second-person voice, yet there are no choices to be found within. Against your better judgment, you follow the link.
Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal
Last year, I urged furries to stop using Telegram because it doesn’t actually provide them with any of the privacy guarantees they think it gives them. Instead of improving Telegram’s c…
XOR
Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved.
The Generative AI Con
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built
My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation
I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
Sony FX-300 Jackal: A technological marvel of the late 70s (2021)
I’m a child of the 1970s and I’m glad I never knew about the Sony FX-300 “Jackal 300.” It would have been the ultimate unobtainable machine of my dreams…this, even des…
Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate
Rune Skovbo Johansen has a really sweet Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering technique, where the dither dots “stick” to 3D surfaces, yet the dot density adapts to the view distance and zoom level.
Have you ever seen a goth downtown?
Creativity after AI
Programming with chronic pain
The challenges of programming with chronic pain and what worked for me
Setting up a trusted, self-signed SSL/TLS certificate authority in Linux
With OpenSSL, it’s pretty easy to generate a simple self-signed TLS certificate . Just run the following command:
Find Your 2%Ers (2023)
then do life with them.
Privacy Is Not Dead: Beware the All-or-Nothing Mindset
Privacy is only dead if we let it die. Be careful about the all-or-nothing mindset in data privacy, it can do more damage than good to the cause. While striving for improvements, do not forget to cheer and celebrate each small win.
Why I'm writing a Scheme implementation in 2025: Async Rust
I really love Rust. I’ve been using it as my language of choice for about ten years now. I believe that it is a remarkably well designed language, and that includes the parts that are often most criticized, most notably async.
Debugging an Undebuggable App
This app has a surprising number of anti-debugging protections. Let's figure out how to bypass them.
Open source projects could sell SBOM fragments
Musings on SBOMs and licensing woes.
Mistral Saba
The most powerful AI platform for enterprises. Customize, fine-tune, and deploy AI assistants, autonomous agents, and multimodal AI with open models.
Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL
Some tricks and techniques for working with graph or tree like data in Postgresql
0+0 > 0: C++ thread-local storage performance
We discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast, and how the presence of constructors and shared libraries affects the access time.
Searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours
searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably one of the largest in the world, at least for a public facing website. It’s actual size is 6.4 TB. Which is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours. …
A tail calling interpreter for Python (already landed in CPython)
It’s been nearly four years since I published Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/s: HowI Learned To Love Tail Calls inC.In that article, I presented a technique I co-d...
The secret ingredients of word2vec (2016)
Word2vec is a pervasive tool for learning word embeddings. Its success, however, is mostly due to particular architecture choices. Transferring these choices to traditional distributional methods makes them competitive with popular word embedding methods.
My Time at MIT
Twenty years ago, in 2004-2005, I spent a year at MIT’s Computer Science department as a postdoc working with Professor Nancy Lynch. It was ...
New junior developers can’t code
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs learn and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re…
Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?
Oh look what you just made there.
Oklch in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL (2024)
CSS Color Module 4 adds oklch(), and we gain P3 wide-gamut support, boost code readability, and improve developer-designer communication.
Homemade polarimetric synthetic aperture radar drone
Designing a cheap synthetic aperture radar mounted on FPV drone.