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Whales dying from consuming plastics
Blame Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, the world’s worst plastic polluters, according to a new study
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The rabbit hole of adding grain to digital photos
If you don’t know already, I’m the kind of photographer who loves a lot of grain in my photos. I like it so much that I’ve made several videos about
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What do great engineering managers need to know about compensation and equity?
Understanding how companies go about figuring out compensation. And an exercise to do for your team.
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“Downthem” DDoS-for-hire boss gets 2 years in prison
A 33-year-old Illinois man was sentenced to two years in prison today following his conviction last year for operating services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hundreds of thousands of Internet users and websites.
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Lessons from Owning a Bookstore
I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but as I’ve said, the absolute craziest was deciding to open a bookstore. Running a small business is always difficult, running a small business during a pandemic is damn near impossible but a small town book store in rural Texas? But here we are, a year later, not just still…
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Exploring Google Hangouts' easter eggs
Web developer and cybersecurity researcher
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Assembly Nights
Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…
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Not as famous as they should be (2021)
Some people in computing are famous, some are not. Sometimes the fame is proportional to their contributions to computing, sometimes it's not. That's how life and the world works: the winners write the history. Financial success and personal charisma are often deemed more interesting than quietly doing your work…
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Isolates, microVMs, and WebAssembly
I’ve been thinking about WebAssembly a lot lately.
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Computers Built to Last
I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…
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Degenerate matter: How reality deals with uncertainty
Casual introduction to the uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics and how it leads to neutron stars and superfluids
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Failing in Haskell
I’m a Haskell failure, don’t tell anyone! Recently I encountered some dubious error handling code. Not only was it failing, it was failing WRONG 1. This frus
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Math on GitHub: Following Up
About six weeks ago, on May 19, 2022, GitHub released Math support on Markdown. At the time of the release, it received criticism for being ill-designed and buggy. I, too, wrote a blog post about it.
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Using the mold linker for fun and 3x-8x link time speedups
A large C++ codebase meets a new linker: The good, the bad and the performance improvements <a class="more-link" href="https://www.productive-cpp.com/using-the-mold-linker-for-fun-and-3x-8x-link-time-speedups/">... Read More</a>
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Demodulation of the LTE uplink
I have been playing with some LTE recordings to brush up my knowledge, since it isn’t a protocol I’m very familiar with. I’m specially interested in understanding the structure and properties of all the pilot signals. Textbooks and documentation are great, but nothing beats getting your hands dirty with some IQ…
3196
A tool for capturing captions and transcripts from online videos
I released a new project this weekend, built during the Bellingcat Hackathon (I came second!) It’s called Action Transcription and it’s a tool for caturing captions and transcripts from online …
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Put it on the crazy pile: Ideas and creativity
Being an academic, I am (sort of) being paid 1 to come up with new ideas about my research field, potential applications, and the future. When I was just starting out, one of my fears was that I would not be able to come up with sufficiently good ideas. All my professors had these great ideas—would I ever be at their…
3198
Tools for a Culture of Writing (2021)
A set of useful tools for cultivating a culture of writing, namely the RFC, the Decision Record and Decision Log, and the Pre-mortem/Prospective and Post-mortem/Retrospective
3199
Tao of Node – Design, Architecture and Best Practices
One of the main benefits of JavaScript is that it runs both in the browser and the server. As an engineer you need to master a single language and your skills w
3200
Understanding Convolutions in Probability
In this post we take a look a how the mathematical idea of a convolution is used in probability. In probability a convolution is a way to add two random variables. Using a slightly ridiculous, mad-science, example we walk through multiple way to compute a convolution and ultimate arrive at the formu
3201
The Buy and Hold Mindset
When markets are in turmoil, like they have been for most of this year, I like to have a buy-and-hold mindset when it comes to making new investments. It is hard to know when you’ve reached the bottom and can start buying again, but if you think about a ten or twenty-year hold, then it […]
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From Google to Twitter
Manu Cornet's personal website.
3207
How Asus and a Microsoft Bug Almost Broke Remote Work
A couple of years after it happened I'm sharing this story about the intersection of an OS bug, a network hardware quirk, and a global pandemic. A chain…
3208
Worst practices are viral for the wrong reasons (2014)
Perverse incentives surrounding best practices
3209
RIP Stack Overflow Jobs
Stack Overflow have announced they are going to kill off sunset their popular Jobs product. In this post, I talk about what Jobs was, why it was great, and why so many (myself included) will be sad…
3210
Leonardo Syndrome
Ever heard of Leonardo Syndrome? If you’ve read Peter Burke’s excellent book, The Polymath,[^1] then you will have done, but if not: Leonardo Syndrome is...