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On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
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Cracking My Windshield and Earning $10k on the Tesla Bug Bounty Program
One of the more interesting things I've had the opportunity to hack on is the Tesla Model 3. It has a built in web browser, free premium LTE, and over-the-air software updates. It's a network connected computer on wheels that drives really fast.
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Open Letter to the Linux Foundation
To: The Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin: Executive Director Angela Brown: VP of Events Andy Updegrove: Legal Council
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Focus has become more valuable than intelligence (2018)
This may be the most important problem of our lifetime.
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Ten Years of Erlang
For my ten years in the Erlang community, I decided to cover a few topics such as hype phases and how this related to Erlang, the ladder of ideas within the language and how that can impact adoption, what changed in my decade there, and what I think Erlang still has to bring to the programming community at large.
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A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…
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The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a fan
December 2020 Update: Lo and behold, the Pi Foundation tacitly acknowledges the Pi needs a fan in the official case, because now they sell the Case Fan! The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pi 4 announcement blog post touted the Pi 4 as providing "PC-like level of performance for most users". The Foundation even offers a…
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Undocumented Catalina file access change
It's well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I've discovered that on Catalina, pasting a…
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NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…
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Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers
It is a regular occurrence to hear about open source developers selling their browser extensions, only for their users to be exploited later on by the new owners. Purchase offers for browser extensions usually range between $0.1 and $0.3 per user, depending on factors such as the geographical distribution of users…
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Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
Most people have an extremely incorrect perception about waste disposal and recycling. Here’s the reality.
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HTML is the Web
In which I lament the fact that many frontend Web engineers don't understand the end product of their work, HTML.
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Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944–2019), 4.66920160910299067185320382…
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Also a detailed discussion of his work and big discovery of a universal constant for functions approaching chaos via period doubling.
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قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
قلب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavaScript.
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How to parent more predictably (2018)
(As with anything else I write about parenting, this is mostly just my observations with my own two kids and may not generalize as well as I think it does.) A few weeks ago I wrote about why I think it's valuable for parents to be predictable. I was mostly describing an end state, though, and reasons why it's a good…
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Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)
In my opinion, the UI design of Windows peaked in the late 1990s. The classic, utilitarian icons from Windows 98 just look amazing.
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Scaling React Server Side Rendering
I had the opportunity to work on scaling a React rendering service, adapting a fixed hardware provision to deal with increasing load. Over the course of many months, incremental improvements were made to the system to enable it to cope with demand. I thought it might be useful to share the more interesting insights…
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Shopify and the Power of Platforms
It is all but impossible to beat an Aggregator head-on, as Walmart is trying to do with Amazon. The solution instead is to build a platform like Shopify.
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How to teach Git
An alternative way to teach Git
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Visual Information Theory (2015)
I love the feeling of having a new way to think about the world. I especially love when there’s some vague idea that gets formalized into a concrete concept. Information theory is a prime example of this.
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Text Rendering Hates You
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.