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22861

Haiku package management

I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere. The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative…

22871

NP-complete isn't always hard

A common assumption I see on the ‘net is that NP-complete problems are impossible to solve. I recently read that dependency management in Python is hard because package resolution is NP-complete. This is true in principle, but the reality is more complicated. When we say “NP-complete is hard” we’re talking about…

22872

CheatGPT

This week I stepped out of one world and landed in another. It started while I was marking assignments in a few of my programming courses.The quality of the code I was reading was amazing! My students were doing the sorts of things that my open source peers do:

22879

Creation happens in silence

It’s Saturday, and I’m enjoying the last sunlight for the day in my studio. The house is silent now; my family is taking a nap downstairs. And I’m here, writing, in silence. There’s a thought that kept coming in the last few weeks. As painful as it is, any creation happens in isolation without any signals or external…

22888

Writing an engineering strategy

Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just…