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The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
2252
RNA Memory Hypothesis
There’s an old theory that memory is actually encoded in part in RNA. The argument is pretty simple: there’s no obvious way for all that sensory data to be captured in synapses as long …
2253
Clever vs. Insightful Code
“Don’t write clever code.” Why not? “Because it’s hard to understand.” People who say this think of clever code such as Duff’s Device: Duff's Device send(to, from, count) registershort*to, *from; registercount; { registern =(count +7) /8; switch(count %8) { case0: do{ *to =*from++; case7: *to =*from++; case6: *to…
2254
What Happened to Treehouse?
In September 2021, online coding school Treehouse laid off close to 90% of its staff without severance pay.
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2256
How I Build Web Apps As A Freelancer
It's now roughly seven or eight years that I'm building dynamic front ends for the web. From digital art wallets to games (1, 2) and synthesizers, I've seen it all. And since my process
2257
Git ls-files is Faster Than Fd and Find
Git ls-files is up to 5 times faster than fd or find in this benchmark, but why?
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2259
Reality Check for Cloudflare Wasm Workers and Rust
With native Rust support announced for Cloudflare Workers, one may be eager to jump in head first. I know I wanted to. However, I tested out a few use cases and found it too limiting. Either the desired APIs weren’t available, code size was too large, or the program couldn’t run within resource constraints. I remain…
2260
How I Learned Symmetric-Key Cryptanalysis
personal web-log
2261
JSON with Commas and Comments
Summary: JWCC is a minimal extension to the widely used JSON file format with (1) optional commas after the final element of arrays and objects and (2) C/C++ style comments. These two features make it more suitable for human-editable configuration files, without adding so many features that it’s incompatible with…
2262
“Static Linking Considered Harmful” Considered Harmful
The maintainer of glibc, Ulrich Drepper, wrote an article called "Static Linking Considered Harmful". This is why his post is wrong.
2263
We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages (2020)
“If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?”
2264
Prions
Editor’s Note 4/4/21: A few weeks after this article was published, a mysterious prion disease was identified in New Brunswick, Canada. I do not have to say that viruses have dominated every level of public conversation for the past year. Ancient and odd but relatively easy to talk about,
2265
How the Canadian Tech Scene Encourages Finite Gameplay
Toronto is not the next great startup scene. Neither is Waterloo, or Vancouver, or anywhere in Canada. I’m sorry that I have to write this. I really am. I want it to work. But the growing cho…
2266
The greatest resume I've ever seen
He had zero cloud experience ... or did he?
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2269
Reading code is a skill (2020)
I’m inspired to write this post because Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. Of course a more accurate statement would be “I disagree with some aspects of what someone on the internet said, even though they have an entirely valid point of view”. But that’s less catchy. I saw a Tweet I violently agreed with, so I…
2270
Moral lessons from free software and GNU Emacs
Video blog on the five lessons I learnt in my life as a computer user, including when I switched to free software and GNU Emacs.
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2272
There is no “us” in team
I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy and collaboration is minimised. I talked about the deleterious effect on…
2273
Let's Build a Regex Engine (2019)
How to understand the language of <\/?[\w\s]*>|<.+[\W]>
2274
Path Tracing Quake in Blender
This week twenty-five years ago, Quake broke new ground in game engine realism. It was one of the first commercial games to have fully texture mapped 3D scenes rendered in real-time, with pre-computed lightmaps adding an extra layer of atmosphere.
2275
Right-to-Left Styling 101
An extensive guide on how to style for RTL in CSS
2276
Implementing a LLVM Micro C compiler in Haskell
In this series, we will explore how to write a compiler for a small subset of C to LLVM in Haskell. Our language, Micro C, is basically a small subset of real C. We'll have basic numeric types, a real bool type, pointers, and structs. At the end of the series, we'll have a beautiful executable, mcc (Micro C…
2277
Is content moderation a dead end?
Can we get content moderation to work, or is it as much of a dead end as virus scanning? Do we need to change the whole model of social instead?
2278
XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought
A couple months back I switched my terminal from xfce4-terminal to the venerable xterm. For some reason I always put xterm in the same bucket as xclock, xmessage, or any other prehistoric command starting with X that comes pre-installed on any graphical Linux distribution.
2279
Is The World Deglobalising?
Read Time: 5 min
2280
Epic vs. Apple injunction doesn't allow for alternative in-app payment mechanism
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