Reverse engineering an unfamiliar data file could be described as the bootstrapping of understanding. In many ways the process resembles the scientific method, only applied to human-made, abstract objects instead of the natural world. You begin by gathering data, and then you use that information to put forth one or…
Unless you have been out of touch with the Deep Learning world, chances are that you have heard about BERT — it has been the talk of the town for the last one year. At the end of 2018 researchers …
I learned to program with BASIC back when I was twelve. I would write elaborate programs and run them. Invariably, they would surprise me by failing to do what I expect. I would struggle for a time, but I'd eventually give up and just accept that whatever "bugs" I had created were there to stay. … Continue reading I…
Very roughly speaking, functional programming (“FP”) and object-oriented programming (“OOP”) have similar levels of expressive power and similar abilities to encapsulate programs into smaller parts that can be combined and recombined.
I've been thinking about graphical shells recently. One of the great things about open source desktops is there is a plethora of choice when it comes to graphical shells. However they seem to fall into two camps: Full featured desktop environments that stick to the conventional stacking window metaphor. Narrowly…
What it’s really like.
Building progressive and performant sites with React
Why managing configuration has become so complex and how data configuration languages like CUE offer a path forward.
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…
Photos of the Los Angeles River
I rely on Google Calendar to tell me where I am supposed to be, when and with whom. When the service collapsed for an afternoon last month, it felt like a teachable moment. For a few seconds, I pan…
On March 26, 2019, a malicious version of the popular bootstrap-sass package, that has been downloaded a total of 28 million times to date, was published to the official RubyGems repository.
Read how we built a flexible, high-performance columnar compression mechanism for PostgreSQL to add scalability to our favorite database.
Cornell engineers have constructed a DNA material with capabilities of metabolism, in addition to self-assembly and organization – three key traits of life.
Encryption is privacy incarnate – don’t ban it
Tim Rocktäschel — Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Recursive; Professor of AI at UCL. Artificial General Intelligence, Open-Endedness, and Recursive Self-Improvement.
Stack Overflow traffic during DEF CON shows what technologies are trending in the hacker community
31 Jul 2019 | self-Amos , glass art , kiln casting , fabrication , kilncasting , lost-resin , lost-wax
It is with sadness WDC/I announce that on December 15, 2019, Chuck Peddle passed away. We send our heartfelt condolences to his family, friends and the personal computer industry. We have lost a pioneer with Chuck’s passing.
Addendum: I've added a few additional tips for conference papers chairs, papers committee members, and papers sorters .
A little while ago I was doing some research into the state-of-the-art for approximating subsurface scattering effects in real-time (mainly for skin rendering), and I had taken a bunch of loose notes to help me keep all of the details straight. I thought it might be useful to turn those notes into a full blog post, in…
Machine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.
As discussed in Pattern Matching and Recursion , a well-known programming puzzle is to write a function that determines whether a string of parentheses is “balanced,” i.e. each opening parenthesis has a corresponding closing parenthesis, and the parentheses are properly nested.
