3331
Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics
Is mental illness a thing? What kind of thing is it?
3332
Automatic Video Editing
Amongst the many consequences of COVID-19 has been the suspension of in-person talks: suddenly, people like me have had to think about how to produce prerecorded videos. In this article I’m going to explain what I’ve come to understand about video recording and the “automatic video editing” technique I’ve used for…
3333
Entropy and Algebra and Topology = ?
Today I'd like to share some math connecting ideas from information theory, algebra, and topology. It's all in a new paper I've recently uploaded to the arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09581), which describes a correspondence between Shannon entropy and functions on topological simplices that obey a version of the…
3334
Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC (2019)
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
3335
The digital natives are not who you think they are
I have heard the term "digital natives" applied to todays youth, but when it comes down to the meat and potatoes, they do not know jack shit.
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Congress demands tech CEOs censor the internet even more aggressively
The repressive objective of the Democratic-controlled Congress is to transfer the power to police and censor political discourse from these tech giants to themselves.
3338
Back to Linux
Background Note: I’ve started writing this article about one year ago (September 2020), but I dropped it at some point. Its final version is way less ambitious than my original plans for it, mostly because I forgot some of things that were on mind back then. Still, better than nothing. A long time ago (in 2011) I…
3339
The 74,000 numbers of Barclays Bank
The UK faces an epidemic of telephone scams. Fraudsters are constantly calling people up pretending to be their bank. But how can you be sure the number displayed on your screen in genuine? You can't. The telecom system is hopelessly insecure and shouldn't be trusted for anything more complicated than dialling the…
3340
Let's stop building APIs around a network hack (2017)
JSON-API has been one of the most popular standards for API development for a while now. It was conceived in 2013, battled through some rather different RC versions (changing drastically as it went), finally stabilizing with v1.0 back in mid-2015. My interest in JSON-API has changed
3341
3342
Coreutils Gotchas (2015)
Confusing corners of the unix utilities
3343
Interview with Hansen Hsu, engineer at Apple during transition from OS 9 to OS X
The last episode, I said I wasn't sure there was such a thing as culture, but that's not the case. Every place I've worked has been a bit different, and often those differences had huge impacts on the software we built. The team where people roll their eyes at UX feedback will not have as simple of a product as a team…
3344
Staying on the path to high performing teams (2018)
A friend is six months into supporting a sixty person engineering group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of their teams believe they have urgent hiring needs. It’s a great question, and captures a deeply challenging aspect of leading an organization: keeping the path after you’ve established a strategy and while it’s…
3345
Computing the number of digits of an integer even faster
I my previous blog post, I documented how one might proceed to compute the number of digits of an integer quickly. E.g., given the integer 999, you want 3 but given the integer 1000, you want 4. It is effectively the integer logarithm in base 10. On computers, you can quickly compute the integer logarithm … Continue…
3346
An Inconsistent Truth: Next.js and Typesafety
Next.js is a great framework. The frontend and backend have never been closer. Can we bridge the remaining gap in a typesafe way?
3347
3348
Big problems at the timezone database
The last time I wrote about the timezone database on this blog, the database was under threat from a lawsuit. Fortunately that lawsuit w...
3349
Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope
The stakes are incredibly high, and Apple knows it. Whatever you think of Apple’s decision to implement these features, they’re not doing so lightly.
3350
Upgrading a motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI (the hard way)
A couple of weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Socket AM4 motherboard that supports the newest AMD Ryzen CPUs. The motherboard is an ASRock A520M/ac . It’s a very basic motherboard which doesn’t appear to be sold by any of the usual retailers anymore, but I couldn’t pass up on the deal, especially with the…
3351
Bit Patterns of Float
I’ve spent too many hours repeatedly trying to find this information on the Web. Time to write it down.
3352
Methods for Array Initialization in Rust (2018)
Arrays in Rust are fixed size, and Rust requires that every element in an array is initialized to a valid value when the array is initialized. The result of these requirements is array initialization in Rust is a much deeper topic than it would seem.
3353
Reinforcement Learning at Facebook
If you ever wanted to learn about machine learning you could do worse than have Jason Gauci teach you. Jason has worked on YouTube recommendations. He was an early contributor to TensorFlow the open-source machine learning platform. His thesis work was cited by DeepMind. But what I find so fascinating with Jason is he…
3354
Good and Bad Monitoring
You remember that time you passive-aggressively completed a story in the most useless way possible to check that checkbox? That’s most…
3355
3356
Engineering a Chess Match
This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the…
3357
Demystifying programs that create programs, part 1: A disassembler
People appear to enjoy the blog posts about me porting different compilers to OpenBSD . What I would like to do for the next couple of posts beginning with this one is to take a step back and de-complexify these programs. Both the D compiler and the GNU Modula-2 compiler are highly complex pieces of software. But at…
3358
Economics of Innovation: Detailed Reading List (2019)
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3359
The Ambiguity of Real Work
All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professo…
3360
Basic Scripting with Awk and Gnuplot
Posted to HN. Comments and discussion highly encouraged. Introduction This will be a short example-based guide to (a) awk (b) gnuplot and (c) using them in a script. I needed to graph some data based on the output of a command run a couple times. So what better way to solve that five minute task than to spend an hour…