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I got a computer science degree in 3 months for less than $5000 (2020)
Software developer based in Montréal, Canada
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The GPT Architecture, on a Napkin
There are so many brilliant posts on GPT-3, demonstrating what it can do , pondering its consequences , vizualizing how it works . With all these out there, it still took a crawl through several papers and blogs before I was confident that I had grasped the architecture.
393
Dear JetBrains, Don't mess with your UI
So we have yet a new UI overhaul. This time, bringing consumer-grade UI practices to the world of professionals. Announcement: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new-ui-preview-for-your-jetbrains-ide/ We're professionals. We can handle the complexity and the density
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What are you doing, WordPress.com?
Be sure to check out the update at the bottom. I recently wrote that I've stuck with WordPress.com for so long, for all its purported limitations, because its features fully suffice the committed blogger whose content is textual for the most part and because the company behind WordPress.com is running a good business…
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I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
Organizing my thoughts regarding an argument about the Dunning-Kruger study and statistics in general
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Principles of Engineering Management
More than 2 years ago, I decided to try to create a brief, digestible manual on the expectations of management for senior engineers at my company who are considering making the shift. At the time, …
397
The Factorio Mindset
Plus! The Carbon Rally; The Bridge; Housing and Rates; Full Stack Media; Buying Out Contracts; Diff Jobs
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Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)
When Calvin and Hobbes went out of print twenty years ago, I think most people assumed it would return at some point. I know I certainly did. Calvin and Hobbes was a formative part of my youth - the sly brilliant writing and stark black and white illustrations providing color to my sense of
399
I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
Here’s a scenario. First, you download an app for a service that has some sort of in-person component, like picking up an order or meeting a driver at the curb. When using that app for the goal, be it that order or that meeting, it’s very helpful to have notifications, since they give you the current status and it can…
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Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven
Why software organizations should prefer genuinely good arguments to weak arguments dressed up with data and metrics.
402
The coming tsunami of fakery
How the Dead Internet Theory is fast becoming reality thanks to zero, marginal-cost content generated at infinite scale
403
I stopped working on black hole information loss
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
404
My essential Firefox fixes in 2022
Despite Mozilla’s best efforts, I’m still using their browser nearly 20 years on. Here are my tips.
405
Make the “semantic web” web 3.0 again – with the help of SQLite
Before the term was hijacked by crypto-grifters (and, admittedly, a few genuinely neat projects), web 3 (point oh) referred to Tim Berners-Lee's project to promote a standard way to expose and parse metadata on the web. It never took off. In this piece, I'll argue that a breakthrough idea introduced last year by HN…
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I won free load testing
Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went “well, let’s see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle”, and suddenly I was on th...
408
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When I made another Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
410
I'm done with Google
My auntie is in hospital for christmas this year. It's been identified as flu, but it seriously affected her because she has a lot of heath problems inclu...
411
Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” synth sounds
Breaking down the Fairlight and Yamaha CS-80 sounds of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill from Hounds of Love.
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Doors of McMurdo
Doors, in a variety of shapes and styles.
414
Xilem: An Architecture for UI in Rust
Rust is an appealing language for building user interfaces for a variety of reasons, especially the promise of delivering both performance and safety. However, finding a good architecture is challenging. Architectures that work well in other languages generally don’t adapt well to Rust, mostly because they rely on…
415
Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux?
In the ELF format there are two ways of providing a hash table of symbols. DT_HASH and DT_GNU_HASH . The first one is part of SYSV generic ABI and is well documented and marked as mandatory. DT_GNU_HASH is a newer, smaller, and faster replacement that is not documented , implemented in a few places (Glibc, GNU ld…
416
My ADHD founder toolbox
Since I last wrote about ADHD at length, I’ve had a zillion conversations with people about it and heard from over a dozen people who’d pursued diagnosis after reading some of my yammer…
417
Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
I love Wordle. I play it pretty much every single day. I also play the portuguese version immediately afterwards too. It is now part of my morning routine. Wordle is one of those ideas that just click and immediately have you wishing you were the one to have them. If you don’t know what Wordle is, just click here and…
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Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.
419
The $8 Linux Computer
Yes, you read that right... for $8 you can run linux on a RISC-V computer. And not just a stripped down kernel without an MMU. No, t...
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Redis explained
A deep technical dive into all things Redis. Covering various Redis topologies, data persistence and process forking.