Rust 2018 is here, but what is it?
Starting today, the Rust 2018 edition is in its first release. With this edition, we’ve focused on making Rust developers as productive as they can be. Most of the language ...
Repl.it 1.0: IDE that Grows from Playgrounds to Fullstack Apps
At Repl.it we come to work every day to explore a single idea—what if programming just worked? What if instead of fiddling around with packages, configurations, and mismatching versions, you just open your IDE and start coding. What if developers can go from an idea to coding and shipping software with no time in…
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...
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.
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…
GPU Fluid
Benedikt Bitterli's Portfolio
Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X
The experiments conducted from July until November at the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald have achieved higher values for the density and the energy content of the plasma and long discharge times of up to 100 seconds – record results for devices of the…
Can Beethoven send takedown requests?
Imagine you are a teacher at a public school, and you want to use a free recording of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in your classroom. As an author of music textbooks and a music theory professor, I am always looking for creative ways to develop teaching materials as Open Educational Resources (oer-musik.de), so that…
Private by Design: How We Built Firefox Sync
Firefox Sync by default protects all your synced data so Mozilla can’t read it. We built Sync this way because we put user privacy first. How it works is...
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.
Introducing Cloudflare Registrar
“I love my domain registrar.” Has anyone ever said this? Before Cloudflare even launched in 2010, our early beta customers were literally begging us: "Will you please launch a registrar too?!"
1 in 4 Statisticians Say They Were Asked to Commit Scientific Fraud
As the saying goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." We know that's true because statisticians themselves just said so. A jaw-dropping study reveals that nearly 1 in 4 of them report being asked to remove or alter data to better support a hypothesis. That is called scientific fraud.
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.
Sen. Wyden Confirms Cell-Site Simulators Disrupt Emergency Calls
Sen. Ron Wyden has sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice concerning disruptions to 911 emergency services caused by law enforcement’s use of cell-site simulators (CSS, also known as IMSI catchers or Stingrays). In the letter, Sen. Wyden states that:Senior officials from the Harris...
Today Is My Wife’s First Birthday Since She Died
Some advice about love & death followed by a meandering eulogy.
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…