2611
In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
examines claims that the big five personality traits is more scientifically valid than the myers briggs personality indicator
2612
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
2613
American trains need more than railfan nostalgia
A review of "Amtrak, America's Railroad"
2614
Apple, FedEx and the cookie apocalypse
As cookie-based ads go away, does the targeting move from the cloud to the client, or from the reader to the content? Does this make the strong stronger? Or does the money go to Fedex instead?
2615
Signed integers are asymmetrical
An edge case in integer safety.
2616
Apple Won a Battle to Lose the War
Apple v. Epic indeed…
2617
Links are not buttons (2013)
Quick: what is this? If the word “Button” comes to mind, you might be right. Unfortunately we’ve been seeing a lot of instances in our testing where an image or CSS styling is used to trigger an action of some kind. Here are some markup samples:
2618
2619
M4 as a templating language (2020)
m4 is a macro processor, in the sense that it copies its input to the output, expanding macros as it goes
2620
Am I stuck in a local maximum?
On long-standing controversies, biases, and failures of communication.
2621
Explainer: .DS_Store Files
Many folders have them. They’re so invisible that you can’t even see them when you show hidden files. And the only way you know they’re there is when they cause problems.
2622
I've decided not to work with Aubrey de Grey or SENS
I've decided not to work with Aubrey de Grey or SENS in any capacity moving forward. I had one bad experience with him when I was 17 - he told me in writing that he had an ‘adventurous love life’...
2623
2624
I Read the Entire Cybersecurity Executive Order; Here's What You Need to Know
Cybersecurity is hard enough. Doing it across federal agencies is a mammoth task.
2625
Book Review: Fussell on Class
Summary and commentary on Paul Fussell's "Class: A Guide Through The American Status System"
2626
Is This a Branch?
Let’s try a new format – “shorts”; small blog posts where I elaborate on ideas that I’d discuss at my twitter, but they either come back over and over, or the short form doesn’t convey all th…
2627
2628
TikTok and the network effects of creativity
TikTok’s Warp Scan filter is a bizarre concept for a filter in and of itself, but the myriad of ways TikTok users put it to use just shows what happens when you throw random tools to the masses and allow for emergent creativity. It only takes a handful of innovators to unleash a meme tsunami.
2629
The Perfect Voxel Engine
What is it about voxels that makes people go crazy? Throughout the past decade, there have been SO many developers obsessed with shrinking them down to have as many as possible ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ), admittedly including myself. It’s exciting both as a developer and to the gaming community to see amazing algorithms…
2630
Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside
The quartz oscillator is an important electronic circuit, providing highly-accurate timing signals at a low cost. A quartz crystal has the...
2631
One of these JPEGs is not like the other
“JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file. The amount of content encoded in JPEGs must be surely biblical by now. If there is one thing that is going to…
2632
I could send any text message from Indian government IDs
Sometimes, you don’t necessarily need to hack a system to exploit it.
2633
2634
Debugging random slow writes in PostgreSQL
Understanding & mitigating randomly slow writes in PostgreSQL
2635
Building a Magical 3D Button with Vanilla HTML/CSS
Every action we take on the web starts with a button click, and yet most buttons are ho-hum and uninspired. In this tutorial, we'll build an animated 3D button with HTML and CSS that sparks joy.
2636
Graphics Pipelines for Young Bloods
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
2637
Facebook Political Problems
Facebook’s political problems stem directly from its size and drive for growth; they are societal issues, not antitrust ones.
2638
The world needs a software bill of materials
“Sunburst” was the most sophisticated hack the world has ever seen. One of the most urgent lessons so far learned from the attack: we need…
2639
The case against crisis-mongering
We face problems. As have all societies ever.
2640
SQLite Is Dynamically Typed (2020)
A small, cool fact about SQLite is that its columns are flexibly typed. You can store any value in any column! Try it out: sqlite> create table t1 (v1 int, v2 varchar(10)); sqlite> insert into t1 values ("abc", "this string is longer than 10 characters!"); sqlite> select * from t1; abc|this string is longer than 10…