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1/0 = 0
Disclaimer 2024-12-02 Since this rant is going viral again (again (again)), some disclaimers: I wrote this six years ago to “”“win”“” an ugly Twitter fight. I’m glad I anonymized the inciting tweet and hope I’m the only person still getting grief over this. The core interesting bit— why it’s mathematically valid to…
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Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)
I wrote a program to clean up scans of handwritten notes while simultaneously reducing file size.
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How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
A guide to self-hosting your email on FreeBSD using Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, and LDAP.
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How DOOM fire was done
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM features a whole chapter about DOOM console ports and the challenges they encountered. The utter failure of the 3DO, the difficulties of the Saturn due to its affine texture mapping, and the amazing "reverse-engineering-from- scratch" by Randy Linden on Super Nintendo all have rich…
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Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds
TL;DR: from Firefox 64 onwards, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.
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24-core CPU and I can’t type an email
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I wasn’t trying to compile a huge project in the background (24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse), I was just engaging in that most mundane of 21st century tasks, wr…
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An Interesting Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression
Early this year a software engineer, Shaun Gilchrist, reached out to me after reading a blog post of mine from many years ago, about my informal search for hidden patterns in the prime numbers. The Ulam Spiral revealed non-random patterns, but they didn’t quite match up. Both Shaun and I had long felt there was […]
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The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online
The Art Institute of Chicago recently unveiled a new website design. As part of their first design upgrade in 6 years, they have placed more than 52,000 high-re
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Why did I spend 1.5 months creating a Gameboy emulator? (2017)
For me, the most favorite type of a computer program is an emulator. Being able to run code from a completely different hardware architecture always seemed like a magic. The old computers are great on their own, so this kind of connection between historic machines and the modern computing environment feels almost like…
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How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
A look at the fascinating history behind the one programming language with magical powers.
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Grow the Puzzle Around You
In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley...
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The Matrix Calculus You Need for Deep Learning
Most of us last saw calculus in school, but derivatives are a critical part of machine learning, particularly deep neural networks, which are trained by optimizing a loss function. This article is an attempt to explain all the matrix calculus you need in order to understand the training of deep neural networks. We…
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Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is
Baekdal is your premium site for media reports and trend analysis. Subscribe from €7.55/month
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Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
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I’m a very slow thinker (2016)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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Why does a spray bottle work?
Exploring a simple machine I took apart a simple spray bottle to see how it kept fluid flowing only in one direction from the reservoir to the nozzle. It does so with simple check valves made of two pieces of plastic, a spring, and a small sphere. It’s a simple way to solve a tricky problem. A simple spray bottle One…
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Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS
Few weeks ago I noticed a blog post "Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly" making rounds on Twitter - talking about performance benefits of replacing plain JavaScript in the core of source-map library with a Rust version compiled to WebAssembly.
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I put all my personal data on eBay
And almost made lots of money
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Useful Mental Models (2016)
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
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How to Keep Your Job as Your Company Grows
I know a change is going to come If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing R…
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Fridge 0.2
My offgrid, solar powered, zero-battery-use fridge has sucessfully made it through spring, summer, fall, and more than enough winter.