Julia's multiple dispatch explained with Pokemons
T hese days, I find myself evangelizing for Julia quite a bit. It’s a good language, especially for scientific computing, but I believe its focus on performance also makes it a good general language as well. At some level, programmers who know multiple languages have an abstract understanding of the constructs used…
Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
My approach to creating OKR for the personal life.
Plunge in lithium-ion battery costs
The cost of lithium-ion batteries for phones, laptops, and cars has plunged over the years, and an MIT study shows just how dramatic that drop has been. The change is akin to that of solar and wind energy, and further declines may yet be possible, the researchers say.
Sustainable coffee grown in Finland with cellular agriculture
VTT has successfully produced coffee cells in a bioreactor through cellular agriculture. The innovation can help to make the production of coffee more sustainable. The first batches produced by VTT in a laboratory in Finland smell and taste like conventional coffee.
Some useful regular expressions for programmers
In my blog post, My programming setup, I stressed how important regular expressions are to my programming activities. Regular expressions can look intimidating and outright ugly. However, they should not be underestimated. Someone asked for examples of regular expressions that I rely upon. Here a few. It is commonly…
Cheap and simple way to mount a smartphone directly above a laptop display
with David Santiano, Deyin Mia Zhang, Xinran Azena Fan, and Yunru Casey Pan, NYU Shanghai; Barak Chamo, New York; Paolo Salvagione…
Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks
We’ve discovered neurons in CLIP that respond to the same concept whether presented literally, symbolically, or conceptually. This may explain CLIP’s accuracy in classifying surprising visual renditions of concepts, and is also an important step toward understanding the associations and biases that CLIP and similar…
A USB Fan Controller that now works under Linux
Relying on the built-in motherboard headers on server grade motherboards to reliably control fans with Linux has been a crapshoot since forever. I'm pleased to report that last summer the Corsair Commander Pro received native Linux kernel driver support in the 5.9 release.
Rolling your own minimal embedded Linux for the Raspberry Pi
Introducing a series of articles on building a custom Linux installation for the Raspberry Pi, for appliance applications.
Branchless Coding in Go
So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I…
Evidence of fraud in an influential field experiment about dishonesty
This post is co-authored with a team of researchers who have chosen to remain anonymous. They uncovered most of the evidence reported in this post. These researchers are not connected in any way to…
Gradient Descent Models Are Kernel Machines
This paper shows that models which result from gradient descent training (e.g., deep neural nets) can be expressed as a weighted sum of simi...
IoT Nixie Tubes
Every day I make a cup of coffee, organize a list of the things I want to do that day, and try to work through it. Every time I finish one of the tasks, I mark it as complete. By the end of the day, ideally there are no things left on the list, but if there are, I’ll move them into a backlog and start fresh the next…
First Ever Image of a Multi-Planet System Around a Sun-Like Star (2020)
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has taken the first ever image of a young, Sun-like star accompanied by two giant exoplanets. Images of systems with multiple exoplanets are extremely rare, and — until now — astronomers had never directly observed more than one planet orbiting a…
Tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode64
A few months ago I got a report from a service owner that their service was crashing when trying to access certain files stored in tmpfs. This service provid...
Interfacing with Zig, a BDFL-run project
Loris Cro's Blog
Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
Texts on this and that.
Twitter.com's HTML, which is produced by React Native for Web, explained
Engineering and thoughts.
Amazon’s HR Failures
The cruelty is the point