Brown M&Ms, or Why No One Reads the Manual
One of our favorite anecdotes that illustrates just how hard it is to get people to read the docs comes from an unexpected source: Van Halen. The...
It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?
Today, the Inspector General for the Department of Defense published a report into the DoD’s handling of the JEDI contract. There is a simple explanation for Microsoft’s victory: We were rated equal or superior to Amazon in every evaluation factor. We can all agree that bid-protest cases serve an important function in…
So you want to roll your own crypto?
A coworker of mine asked: How are people supposed to learn (from mistakes) if they don't roll their own crypto? The short answer is do roll ...
If management isn't a promotion, then engineering isn't a demotion
I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets:
I went to see a movie, and instead I saw the future
A few days ago my wife and I went to see Uncut Gems at a Regal theater in Chicago. We booked our ticket online, reserved our seats, showed up 15 minutes ahead of time, and settled in. After the coi…
Gocker: Docker implemented in 1.3k lines of Go
They are popular and they are misunderstood. Containers have become the default way applications are packaged and run on servers, initially popularized by Docker. Now, Docker itself is misunderstoo…
Luhmann's Zettelkasten
We design and develop custom software solutions and websites for your business with a strong focus on usability, quality, and aesthetics.
How to identify an immoral maze
Previously in sequence: Moloch Hasn’t Won, Perfect Competition, Imperfect Competition, Does Big Business Hate Your Family?, What is Life in an Immoral Maze?, Stripping Away the Protections, What is…
Gerät 32620: the machine that powered numerous number stations
A few years ago, I first stumbled over some recordings of number stations and started reading up on their history. For most of them, we have pretty good guesses who ran them and for what purpose. One example is the Gongs and Chimes Station , known for its melody that got increasingly creepy over the years, the more…
Signs you might be a micromanager
Warning signs of micromanagement include sweating the small stuff, getting CC'ed on every email, and needing to approve everything.
California agency blocks release of police use of force, surveillance training
Under a California law that went into effect on January 1, 2020, all law enforcement training materials must be “conspicuously” published on the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) website. However, if you visit POST’s Open Data hub and try to download the officer...
Creating ad hoc microphone arrays from personal devices (2019)
Researchers in the Microsoft Speech and Dialog Research Group have made an ad hoc microphone array by allowing meeting participants to join their phones together to enable more accurate meeting transcriptions. Explore how this array outperforms a single-device system.
Pegasus Mail, 30 Years On
Sometime in the last two weeks of 1989, I sent myself an e-mail message: I no longer have it, unfortunately — it was lost in one of many system switches or crashes that happened in those early days... But it was the first message sent by a small MS-DOS application I had written, which at the time was called "ComNet…
Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week
Tips on running successful Black Friday sales for creators and Indie Hackers
PostgreSQL B-Tree index deduplication
PostgreSQL 13 development is coming along nicely, Postgres 13 Beta3 was released on 8/13/2020 . The Postgres Beta 1 and 2 releases were released in May and June 2020. One of the features that has my interest in Postgres 13 is the B-Tree deduplication effort. B-Tree indexes are the default indexing method in Postgres…
Apple reports Q3 results
Apple reported its third quarter financial results for the fiscal year after the market close on Thursday, July 30, 2020.
Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast
We’ve been writing a bit about some odd tail behavior in the Fivethirtyeight election forecast, for example that it was giving Joe Biden a 3% chance of winning Alabama (which seemed high), it was displaying Trump winning California as in “the range of scenarios our model thinks is possible” (which didn’t seem right)…
Application Load Balancers enables gRPC workloads with end to end HTTP/2 support
Discover more about what's new at AWS with Application Load Balancers enables gRPC workloads with end to end HTTP/2 support
SwiftUI Defaults Considered Harmful
A few notes on SwiftUI and why UI frameworks should not try to be “smart”
How did software get so reliable without proof?
In 1996, the Turing-award-winning computer scientist C.A.R. Hoare wrote a paper with the title How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? In this paper, Hoare grapples with the observation tha…
PowerShell 7.0
Today, we're happy to announce the Generally Available (GA) release of PowerShell 7.0! Before anything else, we'd like to thank our many, many open-source
Ennui: How to Overcome Chronic Boredom
Ennui (pronounced on-wee ) is chronic boredom that involves weariness, apathy, dissatisfaction, and lack of fulfillment. Some people experience a general sense of ennui in life, whereas others experience it in a specific domain, like their hobbies or work. For example, someone might experience ennui when it comes to a…
Apple Silicon M1 Die-Shots
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