1981
AI Update, Late 2019
It's been 7 months since my last commentary on the field, and as it became regular appearance in this blog (and in fact many people apparently enjoy this form and keep asking for it),
1982
Racket for E-Commerce
I had originally shared a version of this post with a small, private mailing list, but then I figured there'd be no harm in sharing it with a larger audience so here it is.
1983
Ray Tracing Denoising
An overview of ray tracing denoising, reviewing filtering, spatiotemporal, sampling and AI techniques to improve convergence and temporal coherency in real time ray traced applications.
1984
Fast Perfect Hashing
A perfect hash function is one that is collision-free. By implication, the hash must be at least as many bytes as the key and the function is theoretically reversible, though not always tractably so. In other words, perfect hashing is a special case of encryption. Because the hash is no smaller than the key, the…
1985
1986
The Startup Empathy Dilemma: As power and impact grow, empathy diminishes
I remember the early days at my startup almost a decade ago. It was just me and my co-founder and we were enjoying our journey of building a small product and making a few people’s lives a bit better. The empathy we had for our early customers, for each other and for the first people […]
1987
Logic Puzzles with Prolog (2017)
Solving Logic Puzzles with Prolog
1988
Shenanigans With Hash Tables
One reason to know how your data structures work is so that when your problem has unusual constraints you can tweak how they work to fit the problem better or work faster. In this article I’ll talk about four different fun tweaks to the concept of a hash table that I made in the process of using hash tables to…
1989
Clojure and Deps.edn: A basic guide
After a rather long break from programming and Clojure I decided give them another go. When it comes to managing Clojure projects, Leiningen is de-facto standard tool. Recently, Clojure CLI tools are becoming more and more popular, though. Switching to yet-another-build-tool doesn't have any pragmatic value, but it's…
1990
The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition
The zero-sum bias occurs when people mistakenly expect gains and losses to be directly balanced in a situation where they’re not, especially in terms of one party benefiting directly at the expense of others. For example, the zero-sum bias can cause someone to think that a resource they’re interested in is limited…
1991
Using Makefile(s) for Go
Using Makefile(s) for Go — Danish Prakash
1992
The Day “/Proc” Died
Solaris'd... This morning I got an email from our group manager asking about a UNIX server...
1993
1994
Arabic and Islamic Themes in Frank Herbert's “Dune” (2004-2017)
Those who are familiar with Frank Herbert's famous novel Dune will notice his analogy for the spice, and the surrounding struggle for it, with the crude oil of the Middle East. The novel is symbolic about the dependence of the West on the oil, and the power struggles to control this valuable resource.
1995
Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a Dragon. Eat the Moon
I wrote earlier about a neural net-powered dungeon crawling text adventure game called GPT-2-Adventure in which gameplay is incoherent and dreamlike, as you encounter slippery sign text, circular passages, and unexpected lozenge rooms. A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling…
1996
1997
1998
The tech behind building an independent, internet radio station
Oscar is on the web
1999
An Orbit Map of the Solar System
A map of over 18,000 asteroids in the Solar System.
2000
2001
Better Intuition for Information Theory
Better visual explanations of information theoretic quantities like entropy and mutual information using I-diagrams. Based on Raymond W. Yeung's "A new outlook on Shannon's information measures" paper from 1991.
2002
2003
My Laptop Bit Me – The Shocking Truth (2012)
Apple aren't the only company with products that can feel tingly or buzzy to a light touch, it is all due to the widespread use of switched...
2004
Fibers: An Elegant Windows API
The Windows API — a.k.a. Win32 — is notorious for being clunky, ugly, and lacking good taste. Microsoft has done a pretty commendable job with backwards compatibility, but the trade-off is that the API is filled to the brim with historical cruft. Every hasty, poor design over the decades is carried forward forever…
2005
Lisp Macros, Delayed Evaluation and the Evolution of Smalltalk
At a recent Clojure Berlin Meetup , Veit Heller gave an interesting talk on Macros in Clojure. The meetup was very enjoyable, and the talk...
2006
How to use array reduce for more than just numbers
The array reduce method is really powerful. But people often run into trouble as soon as they step beyond the basic examples. Simple things like addition and multiplication are fine. But as soon as you try it with something more complicated, it breaks. Using it with anything other than numbers starts to get really…
2007
2008
2009
Pioneer manipulates scores to pick winners
Pioneer paints a pretty picture of a fair tournament for ambitious people of the world. In reality though, the organizers will manipulate…
2010
The iPhone and Apple's Services Strategy
Apple’s annual iPhone event may have marked Apple’s true shift into being a Services company