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Why I am learning category theory
Category theory is a domain of mathematics that exerts a strange influence over programmers. One thing that can be said for sure about category theory is tha...
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Levenshtein Automata
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python , tech , coding , damn-cool-algorithms
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Neural network from scratch
In this edition of Napkin Math, we’ll invoke the spirit of the Napkin Math series to establish a mental model for how a neural network works by building one from scratch. In a future issue we will do napkin math on performance, as establishing the first-principle understanding is plenty of ground to cover for today!
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Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon
The transition to Apple Silicon brought about many exciting things, but one of the capabilities left behind was access to the world of Intel-based virtual machines. X86_64 just isn't a trivial architecture to emulate, and it may never be feasible to do so on Apple Silicon at a useful speed as the operating systems you…
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It’s a Unix system I know this
I think the average person knows that programming isn’t quite the same as it is in the movies. But, sometimes, it is.
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Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad
I've been thinking about supplementing another language to Python for some time – mainly to cope with areas Python struggles with, or is a pain to use (which I'll go over in a minute). I had used C/C++ some years ago, but don't want to go back to them. C
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Reddit’s database has two tables (2012)
Steve Huffman talks about Reddit’s approach to data storage in a High Scalability post from 2010. I was surprised to learn that they only have two tables in their database.
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Criticizing Computers
Do you ever get really mad at your computer?
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Using Java's Project Loom to build more reliable distributed systems
Building distributed databases is very difficult. There are lots of clever ideas you can put into a distributed database, but making the ideas work well together in a real system can be very challenging because different decompositions of the same problem can massively affect how difficult it is to solve, and bugs are…
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Building a BFT JSON CRDT
CRDTs are a family of data structures that are designed to be replicated across multiple computers without needing to worry about conflicts when people write data to the same place.
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Building games through natural language using OpenAI’s code-DaVinci model
TL;DR: OpenAI has a new code generating model that’s improved in a number of ways and can handle nearly two times as much text (4,000 tokens.) I built several small games and applications without t…
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Curious lack of sprintf scaling
Some days ago I noticed that on a Mac, doing snprintf calls from multiple threads shows curious lack of scaling ( see tweet ). Replacing snprintf with {fmt} library can speed up the OBJ exporter in Blender 3.2 by 3-4 times . This could have been the end of the story, filed under a “eh, sprintf is bad!” drawer, but I…
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A lazy way to solve differential equations
Looking at Taylor series as streams of real numbers, solving differential equations becomes as easy as writing them.
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Win16 Retro Development
Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new ones. This blog entry is based on notes I made during development.
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Templating in HTML
A technical write-up about using the template HTML element
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Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
Hey all, I’ve been enjoying wordle, the puzzle game recently but also wondered how a program might do at it.
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How “let it fail” leads to simpler code
The biggest lesson I learned from the "Let it fail" philosophy, is to distinguish expected errors and unexpected errors. So we can safely ignore the unexpected, and only handle the expected errors in our business logic.
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Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages (1991)
Short version: the full text of my Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages book (second printing, 1991) is now available. This page has more details including the table of chapters, and a link to the PDF (3.3MB, 448 + xvi pages). The book is a survey of methods for language description, particularly…
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What's Great about Julia?
A post about all the things I find good about Julia.
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Structuring Clojure applications
Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development
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Re-implementing an old DOS game in C++ 17 (2019)
Back in 2016, I started a side project to reverse engineer the game Duke Nukem II and build an open source reimplementation of its engine from scratch – called Rigel Engine (Check it out on GitHub)…
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The Perfect Commit
For the last few years I’ve been trying to center my work around creating what I consider to be the Perfect Commit. This is a single commit that contains all …
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What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon
You’ve probably heard that the Rust type checker can be a great “co-pilot”, helping you to avoid subtle bugs that would have been a royal pain in the !@#!$! to debug. This is truly awesome! But what you may not realize is how it feels in the moment when this happens. The answer typically is: really, really…