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Google's advanced music generation model and two new AI experiments
Announcing our most advanced music generation model and two new AI experiments, designed to open a new playground for creativity
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,904 posts.
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Last Post, Please Read
Good morning. This is Zandar's Dad. I am sorry to tell you that he passed away over the weekend, peacefully in his sleep. Fortunately, his c...
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How to build trust as a new engineering manager
New managers often want to get everything right from the get-go. But, ironically, that would be their first mistake. Why? Because that's the total opposite of authenticity.
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More people should write (2012)
More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.
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Push ifs up and fors down
A short note on two related rules of thumb.
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The Decline of Usability: Revisited
Three years ago, I wrote a rant about the problems of our current UI paradigm. The complaints I voiced were hardly new or unique, neither was the text what I'd consider my best writing. It was, honestly, mostly a way to blow off steam. It seems I struck a nerve, though, because it's proven to be one of the most…
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B-trees in Factorio
learning about B-Trees...in factorio
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Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?
The biggest announcement from last week’s OpenAI DevDay (and there were a LOT of announcements) was GPTs. Users of ChatGPT Plus can now create their own, custom GPT chat bots …
18219
The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021)
There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion. It is an unfortunate…
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The truth is always made of details
If you were instructed to draw a leaf, you might draw a green, vaguely eye-shaped thing with a stem. But when you study a real leaf, say an elm leaf, it’s got much more g...
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Operating on a minimal two-core Postgres instance: Query optimization insights
In an era where the costs for cloud services continue to soar, I want to outline how our data team has successfully managed to run the infrastructure of our energy trading company within the first year using only two PostgreSQL database instances - each equipped with just two CPU cores and four GB of RAM. Despite this…
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Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer
Introduction After struggling a lot with my mental health (anxiety, depressive condition) for several years, I was diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, commonly known as ADHD, at the age of 44. This diagnosis shocked me a lot: I wasn’t a wild child, in fact, I was even a good pupil. With the help…
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My primality testing code is faster than Sir Roger Penrose's
But, I guess he did win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2020 so I can't really brag. However, it was a great surprise when looking at two pa...
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Curl on 100 Operating Systems
In a recent pull-request for curl, I clarified to the contributor that their change would only be accepted and merged into curl's git code repository if they made sure that the change was done in a way so that it did not break (testing) for and on legacy platforms. In that thread, I could almost … Continue reading…
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The Architecture of Serverless Data Systems
I recently blogged about why I believe the future of cloud data services is large-scale and multi-tenant, citing, among others, S3. “ Top tier SaaS services like S3 are able to deliver amazing simplicity, reliability, durability, scalability, and low price because their technologies are s
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ARRL hails FCC action to remove symbol rate restrictions
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
18230
Why do people still use VBA?
Introduction Recently, I watched a video by YouTuber ThePrimeTime which details a dev’s frustrations with business culture. Prime is an ex-entrepreneur who currently works in software development at Netflix. His views in this video have been criticised for being jaded by FAANG business cultures he has worked in. I…
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Summing columns in remote Parquet files using DuckDB
vivym/midjourney-messages on Hugging Face is a large (~8GB) dataset consisting of 55,082,563 Midjourney images - each one with the prompt and a URL to the image hosted on Discord.
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Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym
Curious what the first ‘unused’ alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym ‘CQK’, with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused. Exploratory analysis suggests…
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Is the reversal curse in LLMs real?
A recent paper The Reversal Curse points out an apparent failure in large large language models like GPT-4. From the abstract: We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is
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How to write a cold email (2020)
Some tips on writing a cold email.
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Bring Back Webrings
I built a webring for personal websites.
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'Reptar', a new CPU vulnerability
A new CPU vulnerability, ‘Reptar,’ found by Google researchers, has been patched by Google and Intel. Here’s what you need to know.
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Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians
Vehicles with especially tall front ends are most dangerous to pedestrians, but a blunt profile makes medium-height vehicles deadly too.
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Reptar
We have a CPU mystery! We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?
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Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been…
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YJIT is the most memory-efficient Ruby JIT
This year, the YJIT team and I have gotten a paper accepted at MPLR 2023 (Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes), which is now freely available through ACM open access. The paper, titled “Evaluating YJIT’s Performance in a Production Context: A Pragmatic Approach”, goes into details of the strategy taken to…