If monads are the solution, what is the problem?
Monads have exerted a curious fascination on programmers who turn to Haskell. The incomprehension of the newbies is matched in intensity onl...
MPEG: A crisis, the causes and a solution
Why this post? Because there are rumours spreading about a presumed “MPEG-Video collapse” and Brownian motion-like initiatives trying to remedy – in some cases by the very people who have contributed to creating the “crisis”. Who is the author of this post? Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and chairman of MPEG, but…
Norris Numbers – Walls you hit in program size (2014)
My friend Clift Norris has identified a fundamental constant that I call Norris’ number, the average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean…
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
My favorite principle for code quality
The Embedded Design principle, Jimmy Koppel's favorite principle for code quality, shown via caching code that looks fine but invites bugs.
Email marketing for e-commerce
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Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush
A few weeks before Christmas, an impish chart appeared on the Bank of England’s unofficial blog. It compared plunging productivity with the soaring shipments of smartphones. Typical productivity gr…
KeePassXC 2.3.0 released
KeePassXC Password Manager
Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success
Skill stacking is a strategy that you can use to achieve career success. You can use it whether you want to build a business or have a dream job.
The New Brave Is 22% Faster
Newly Redesigned Chromium-Based Brave Browser Has 22% Faster Load Time than Brave Muon Version, on Average
Kubernetes Containerd Integration Goes GA
Kubernetes Containerd Integration Goes GAIn a previous blog - Containerd Brings More Container Runtime Options for Kubernetes, we introduced the alpha version of the Kubernetes containerd integration. With another 6 months of development, the integration with containerd is now generally available! You can now use…
How I wound up finding a bug in GNU Tar
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Shedding Too Much Light on a Microcontroller's Firmware Protection (2017)
Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT '17) - Vancouver, BC, Canada CVE number 2017-18347
A Small Look into the GameCube’s Copy Filter
A while back I was going through Dolphin’s issues page out of sheer boredom. I eventually came across issue 726 – Gamma setting has no effect. Out of curiosity, I clicked.
Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
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City street orientations around the world
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
Sounding the Alarm: Now Is the Time to Be a Cockroach
I build businesses that high-flying tech startup investors generally don’t like. The businesses I build are profitable, focus on cash flow, and sell commoditized services. They’re considered unexciting to tech startup investors, who want to invest in the new hotness. I’ve tried to contort myself into building that…
Rainway takes a game running on one system and streams it to another device
BUILDING FOR HUMANITY
Microsoft disables Windows Update when Meltdown/Spectre registry key isn't set
Last week, Microsoft issued January’s cumulative security fixes for January 2018. Although the media focus has been around “Meltdown” and…
Sourcegraph Server 2.4: free, powerful search for private code
Sourcegraph 2.4 is here. It is now free for unlimited users and repositories, can be installed in minutes with a single docker run command, and is easily configurable in the new web-based site admin.
Interview with Sam Altman from the High Growth Handbook
Elad Gil [https://twitter.com/eladgil] is a serial entrepreneur (Mixer Labs – acquired by Twitter, and Color Genomics [https://www.color.com/]), operator (Google, Twitter) and an investor in a number of YC companies including Airbnb (W09), Checkr (S14), Coinbase (S12), Front (S14), Gusto (W12), Instacart (S12), Stripe…
Firefox 64 built with GCC and Clang
One of my tasks (as GCC maintainer of the inter-procedural optimization framework) is to make sure that it works well with real world progra...
AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary. I just came back from CASP13, the…
AVX-512: when and how to use these new instructions
Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…
Let’s build a browser engine (2014)
I’m building a toy HTML rendering engine, and I think you should too. This is the first in a series of articles: