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Unicode Dicks
One of the things that has always slightly amused and puzzled me is that unicode lacks a "cock" glyph. I mean, it seems to have characters a...
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IBM’s Old Playbook
IBM has bought Red Hat in an attempt to recreate its success in the 90s; it’s not clear, though, that the company or the market is the same.
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Don't give away historic details about yourself
Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away…
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GPU Fluid
Benedikt Bitterli's Portfolio
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I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores
Summary : Turning a web app into a Progressive Web App (PWA) and submitting it to 3 app stores requires about a month of work, a few hundred dollars, and lots of red tape.
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JVM Internals (2013)
Explains the internal architecture of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in simple terms using showing key components and how memory is updated during execution.
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Today Is My Wife’s First Birthday Since She Died
Some advice about love & death followed by a meandering eulogy.
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The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40
In my last post, I wrote about my adventure of requesting metadata for both phone calls and emails from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. The work there - and its associated frustration - sent me down a path of sending requests throughout the US to both learn whether these sorts of problems are systemic…
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The insane amount of backward compatibility in Google Maps
I still keep a couple of my favorite old smartphones. Sometimes I use one of them as my primary device for fun. Phones are among the fastest evolving markets, even a year makes a whole lot of differences. One of the biggest challenges with using old phones is the software: they don't run modern software. And old…
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NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner
(Spanner vs. Calvin, Part 2) [TL;DR I wrote a post in 2017 that discussed Spanner vs. Calvin that focused on performance differences. Th...
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My one-liner Linux Dropbox client
In this blog post, I want to discuss one of my recent attempts to create asimple one-liner Linux Dropbox client using only free and open-sourcecomponents, in...
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Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status
By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it …
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Keeping a plaintext “did” file
Time flies by when you’re learning how to code. Its super important to take a second every once in a while to simple write down what you did during the past mental sprint. Writing down what you learned solidifies the knowledge.
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End-to-end implementation of a machine learning pipeline (2017)
In the fall of 2016, I was a Teaching Fellow (Harvard's version of TA) for the graduate class on "Advanced Topics in Data Science (CS209/109)" at Harvard University. I was in-charge of designing the class project given to the students, and this tutorial has been built on top of the project I designed for the class.
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Shipping a Neural Network on iOS with CoreML, PyTorch, and React Native
This is the story of how I trained a simple neural network to solve a well-defined yet novel challenge in a real iOS app. The problem is unique, but most of what I cover should apply to any task in any iOS app. That’s the beauty of neural networks.
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Who Are My Investors?
I got an email from the CEO of one of our portfolio companies last week. It asked a very basic question, but one that I don’t recall being asked before: I need to know if any of your LPs include ………. entities/interests. The CEO asked his VCs because questions were coming up internally and he […]
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Why Not to Use Quora
Forget about Quora's security breach. Their ongoing efforts to block access to their content, including a multi-year ban on the Internet Archive, are reason enough to never use them.