I keep coming across people who consider parser technology a forbidding, scary field of programming. This is nonsense—a small parser can be very, very simple , and provide a wholesome exercise in recursive thinking. At the same time, it is true that you can make parsing extremely complicated. Mostly, this tends to…
I've long been impressed by shell one-liners. They seem like magical incantations. Pipe a few terse commands together, et voilà! Out pops the solution to a problem that would seem to require pages of code. Are these one-liners real or mythology? To some extent, they're both. Below I'll give a famous real example. Then…
I tried it out, ran through their tutorial, and built a few small things. And I can honestly say that I think writing Svelte feels even faster and easier than React. Svelte gave me the same spark, the same feeling of “wow!” that I had with React.
Get those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers! I've been reading a lot about Anthem. It's that gigantic, mega-budget looter-shooter fr...
Benjamin Tseng — startup operator, deeptech investor, and applied technologist. Writings and projects across deeptech + AI, biotech, operational models, and software systems.
On September 26, 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam held her first listening session after seventeen weeks of protest. Her government, which had spent the summer nearly incommunicado, had settled on these encounters as a way to heal social divisions and identify the mysterious goals of a movement whose five…
My friend Csongor recently published a computer science paper that’s super interesting if you’re as big a nerd as I am. The details are too much to go into here, but suffice to say, it lets us do a lot of things I’d always been told were impossible.
A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results.
A Primer on Database Replication
Microsoft’s recent licensing change for Windows Server is a great modern-day example of why so many businesses hated Microsoft two decades ago. Is this an aberration, or are they back to their old tricks?
It starts with someone posting an AWS press release in the company chat. “AWS Announces FooBar,” the headline reads. The announcement skirts around technical details, as usual, but contains a worrying amount of buzzwords that overlap with the company’s product. Somebody responds with a grimace emoji 😬. Others reply…
You've probably seen these dotted around a few places, what looks like some sort of security barrier, but wondered how such an odd thing could work.
I spent this weekend writing a Forth designed for music synthesis, and it reminded me what a joy writing programming languages is! I have a big list of programming language experiments that I want to try, but it's mostly been in my head so far. Here's a living document of some of the languages I want to write.
Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
Google Forcing Nest Cameras Visual Indicator Light To Be On
This is a story about how I lost my data when trying to prevent it by backing it up.
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…
Ruby apps can use a lot of memory. But why? Various people in the community attribute it to memory fragmentation, and provide two “hacky” solutions. Dissatisfied by the current explanations and provided solutions, I set out on a journey to discover the deeper truth and to find better solutions.
Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old.
By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article. Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo…
A site for cataloging the many technical musing of Andy Desmarais
Long ago as an undergraduate, I found myself back home on a break from school, bored and with eyes wandering idly across a family bookshelf. At school, I had started to find a calling in computing systems, and now in the den, an old book suddenly caught my eye: Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine . Taking it off…
For the first “real” post in this blog, we’ll build an x86 assembler in less than 256 lines of C code. Obviously, it won’t implement every x86 instruction, but it will implement a surprisingly useful subset: data movement, control flow, integer arithmetic, bitwise operations, and function calls. We won’t be able to…
