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The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior
“Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.”
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Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
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The Value of In-House Expertise
An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple…
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How The Expanse went from game concept to blockbuster TV series
The story of how James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse went from game concept to blockbuster TV series
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Google’s new popup will further weaken Facebook’s advertisement business
Android 12’s privacy-focused permission deepens the woes of Facebook by vowing to end invasive location-targeted marketing
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Remote Culture War Has Begun, Executives Pumping Out "Back to Work" Propaganda
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at. Click to read DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at, by Ed Zitron, a Substack publication.
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How to Evaluate Startup Offers
If you're joining a startup for money, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't mean that money shouldn't factor into your decision. You can build financial models around salaries and equity, and I'll show you how to do that below.
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Optimizations Enabled by -ffast-Math
This blog post describes the optimizations enabled by -ffast-math when compiling C or C++ code with GCC 11 for x86_64 Linux (other languages/operating systems/CPU architectures may enable slightly different optimizations).
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Notes on My Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy after colon cancer at age 34
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The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions
The OODA Loop is a four-step process for making effective decisions in high-stakes situations. It involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding, and acting, then repeating the process with new information. Read on to learn how to use the OODA Loop.
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Are deep neural networks dramatically overfitted? (2019)
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Making is show business now (2020)
Nadia Eghbal’s new book, Working In Public: the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, may not have been on your short list of books to read this year. It’s admittedly a nerdy topic: …
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The Mathematics of 2048: Optimal Play with Markov Decision Processes (2018)
Finding provably optimal strategies for 2048 using Markov Decision Processes
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Finding a kernel regression in half an hour with git bisect run (2018)
The git bisect command helps you identify the first commit in a range that broke something. You give it a good commit and a bad one, and it will do a binary search between the two to find the first bad commit. At each step, you say either git bisect …
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Is Web3 Bullshit?
And is that even the right question?
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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
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First stage POWER9 Firefox JIT passes tests
Yeah, so about that OpenPOWER Minimum Viable Product JavaScript JIT for Firefox. This happened (all timings from an unoptimized debug build ...
1583
Encrypted Backup Shootout
Recently I have been spending time on improving the performance of bupstash (my encrypted backup tool), and wanted to compare it to some existing tools to try and find its relative performance in the backup tool landscape.
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Do nothing (2020)
The unreasonable effectiveness of doing nothing.
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Machine learning’s crumbling foundations
Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that's unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that's insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.
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Go 1.18 will embed source version information into binaries
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…
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Speculating the entire x86-64 instruction set in seconds with one weird trick
As cheesy as the title sounds, I promise it cannot beat the cheesiness of the technique I’ll be telling you about in this post. The morning I saw Mark …
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I wrote a linker everyone can understand
When we wrote our assembler we made many design choices that helped us cut down on the complexity of the assembler itself. One of those decisions was to have the assembler directly output executables. That was a good choice in that it allowed us to quickly test as we were developing: once we implemented an opcode, we…
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Build a Business, Not an Audience
If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the following pattern over and over again:
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Science fiction hasn’t prepared us to imagine machine learning
It resembles the Library of Babel more than HAL.