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Why I’m done with Chrome
This blog is mainly reserved for cryptography, and I try to avoid filling it with random “someone is wrong on the Internet” posts. After all, that’s what Twitter is for! But from …
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Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming
My six-year-old son walked up to me yesterday. “What are you reading?” At the time, I was reading part of Janis Voigtländer’s habilitation thesis. Unsure where to even start, I decided to just ans…
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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.
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Hello, GitHub
@natfriedman
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The Machine Fired Me
It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer. I went to
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Google Memory Loss
[Update: As of Jan 1, 2023 this is fixed! Thanks to Danny Sullivan and John Mueller of Google for figuring out what was going on. Yay!] I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google’s competition is doing better. [Update, Feb. 2022: It’s still happening.]
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Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
UPDATE: Intel has resolved their microcode licensing issue which I complained about in this blog post. The new license text is here .
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Productivity
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...
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Apple's New Map
Four years in the making, it covers just 3% of the U.S.’s area and 4.9% of its population:
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LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for All Major U.S. Carriers in Real Time
On May 16th, I found a vulnerability in the LocationSmart website which allowed anyone, with no prior authentication or consent, to obtain the realtime location of any cellphone in the US to within…
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Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States
On December 21, 2018, the United States House of Representatives voted to enact H.R. 4174, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2017, in a historic win for open government in the …
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Questions
Some questions that I find interesting. I've omitted some that are related to Stripe. ( Pointers to interesting readings on these topics are always welcome, as are pointers to responses.)
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Completely Silent Computer
I’ve been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorb…
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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble
I was a contributor for OpenStreetMap for a long time, and I advocated for OpenStreetMap for a long time, but the project has stalled while the proprietary mapping world has continued to improve in data quality. For those of us who care about Free and Open data, this is a problem. In this article, I explore the…
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Hijack of Amazon’s domain service used to reroute web traffic for two hours
Between 11am until 1pm UTC today, DNS traffic — the phone book of the internet, routing you to your favourite websites — was hijacked by an…
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The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user
Gmail's "dots don't matter" feature lets scammers create an account on, say, Netflix, with your email address but different dots. Results in convincing phishing emails.
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Some terrible personal news
Cindy Cutts, my wife and best friend, passed away earlier this week. While I was traveling for work recently, Cindy went to visit her family in Omaha, Nebraska. On Sunday, while enjoying time with …
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The Bullshit Web
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten […]
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Aaron, 5 years later
I was in the back left seat of a minivan driving from New York City to Atlantic City. We were a little ways down the NJ turnpike. I was playing Zoo Keeper Battle on my newly gifted tablet. My stomach was filled with a pastrami sandwich .
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A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
Previously: security engineer at Square/Block, co-author of HackLang, put the 's' in https at Facebook/Meta. Maker of CTFs.
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AI winter is well on its way
Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to
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The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
Dave Kerr, partner and Head of Engineering at QuantumBlack Labs, McKinsey & Company. Writing on software engineering and agentic AI.
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iPhones are hard to use
I once wrote a user manual for a handheld engine-diagnostics module for Daewoo cars. I know “hard to use” when I see it. iPhones are hard to use.
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Bullshit Jobs
A surprisingly common part of my life: a patient asks me for a doctor’s note for back pain or something. Usually it’s a situation like their work chair hurts their back, and their work …
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A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics
For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today. The website for the book is pimbook.org, which has purchase links—paperback and ebook—and a preview of the first pages. You can see more snippets later in the book on the…