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Why to Not Write a Book
A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,866 posts.
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FreeBSD 13.4-Release
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/13 branch.
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The Subprime AI Crisis
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
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macOS Sequoia is available today
macOS Sequoia, the latest version of the world’s most advanced desktop operating system, is available today as a free software update for Mac.
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A Spreadsheet and a Debugger Walk into a Shell
Here we continue the series of posts on the development of a command-line shell which defies terminal emulation by using the display server API locally and a purpose built network protocol remotely…
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Datomic and Content Addressable Techniques
Datomic and Content Addressable Techniques: An Ultimate Data Wonderland
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How Chainalysis made their way into popular Monero wallets
An investigation into how malicious nodes run by Chainalysis made their way into defaults of popular Monero wallets.
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The HTTP Query Method
This specification defines a new HTTP method, QUERY, as a safe, idempotent request method that can carry request content.
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18 Months with a Framework 13
I've been using a Framework 13 laptop as my main/only computer for a little over 18 months now.
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How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
Wartime can be extremely demanding for Engineering Managers. But by ruthlessly focusing on delivery, building a resilient team, investing in individuals, and maintaining their own strength, an EM can lead their people to not just survive but thrive under pressure.
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How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos (here’s a 2022 Rolling Stone profile if you’re unfamiliar), this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company …
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Declarative Programming with AI/LLMs
What Is Declarative Programming Broadly speaking, there are two ways to program/instruct a computer to perform a task, they are imperative...
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Randomness extractors: making fair coins out of biased coins
I discuss various models of biased bit sequences, and how to extract uniform random (or close to it) output bit sequences from them, illustrated with Python code.
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The Death of the Magazine
Or what happens when journalism forgets about quality writing
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OpenTelemetry and vendor neutrality: how to build an observability strategy
In this post, we explore how the OpenTelemetry project has carried out its vision for vendor neutrality in the observability space.
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Fractran: Computer architecture based on the multiplication of fractions
By Devine Lu Linvega
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D&D is Anti-Medieval
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
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Dissecting the gzip format (2011)
In this article I describe the DEFLATE algorithm that GZIP implements and depends on. The DEFLATE algorithm uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman codes and run-length-encoding; this article describes each in detail by walking through an example and developing source code to implement the algorithm. My aim is to…
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AT&T's Hobbit Microprocessor (2023)
An unexpected journey for AT&T with it's own low power processor
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The Waterfall Model was a straw man argument from the beginning (2015)
Over the years, I've read a lot of books on software engineering. Agile books in particular like to refute the "Waterfall Model". Every t...
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Lazarus Group laundered $200M from 25 crypto hacks to fiat
Bluenoroff or APT38, more commonly referred to as Lazarus Group is a threat group which has been tied to the North Korean government since as early as 2009 primarily being financially motivated utilizing malware custom built for each target.
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Why Scrum is stressing you out
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
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To forget is an ethical act
On and off for the last several years I’ve been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on a
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How America's universities became debt factories
This essay first appeared in my newsletter. Sign up here if interested in F'ing up the status quo and fixing education. Here's a puzzle: how do you create a trillion-dollar debt bubble that can't be popped? Answer: make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Now, here's a trickier one: how do you fix this mess…
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Making a rickroll laser: A parametric speaker
Most speakers emit sound in all directions because they are relatively small compared to the wavelength. Audible sounds have wavelengths of up to several meters, so an acoustically "large" speaker might not even fit in your house.
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Factor 0.100 Now Available
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Kierkegaard