American and European semi-trucks are very different. You don‘t have to be a truck enthusiast or have brilliant understanding of the mechanical part of these machines to see that semi-trucks used in USA and Europe look very different. But why? Why different ideas about what the truck should look like prevailed in…
You'll often see instructions for creating and using disk images on Unix systems making use of the dd command. This is a strange program of [obscure provenance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)) that somehow, still manages to survive in the 21st century.
This post lists the internet communication targets of the Microsoft Windows operating system, including its various services and UWP apps. This post is a part of my application network connection monitoring series, a group of articles that explain how to analyze the network traffic of any Windows or macOS app.
This week, I felt pretty depressed and lost my motivation and focus. After launching Space4 , I got some signups from HackerNews , but no one was really using the app. Including myself.
The Dirty Work Theory: The lamentable work that many people avoid are great places to look for high impact, low hanging fruit.
Anyone can build their own amusement park here, or find one that's just right for them. A city of parks by Levan Kvirkvelia.
The true dystopia of AI is that it can make Ugly Sonic look cool.
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
As a Director of Engineering, I have monthly 1:1s with all of my direct reports. A 1:1 (one-on-one) is a recurring meeting with no set agenda between a manager and one of their reports. The internet is full of valuable insight into how to run them from my perspective, (ex. The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster) but…
Clayton Christensen famously demonstrated the Innovator's Dilemma by using data from the hard drive industry in the 1980s. At every point, companies failed to make the switch from 8-inch drives, to 5-inch drives, to 3...
We've been making compromises to the limits of fossil fuels for so long that we've forgotten they're compromises.
Understand the core problems state management libraries need to solve. And how the proliferation of modern libraries address them in new ways.
It’s been about nine months since I left Mapbox and the circumstances of my exit didn’t offer much opportunity for closure. I feel a combination of gratitude and resentment that I’m still sorting out. Last week was the one year anniversary of the Mapbox Worker’s Union going public, the event that lead to my departure…
...or at least, not without a lot of patience or a fat wallet. But why? And are there any signs Raspberry Pis will become available to the general public again soon? To be clear, I'm speaking of the mainstream SBC Raspberry Pis, like the Pi 4 model B, the Compute Module 4, the Pi Zero 2 W, and even in many cases the…
Disclaimer: I have had access to some confidential information about some of the matter discussed in this page. However, everything written here is derived form publicly available sources, and references to these sources are also provided.
Let’s overengineer a childhood game.
Just a few months ago, it seemed that the biggest social media news of the year would be Elon Musk’s flirtations with buying Twitter (see, ... Read more
Looking back, and forward
Update (Dec. 6): I’m having a blast at the Workshop on Spacetime and Quantum Information at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I’m learning a huge amount from the talks and …
Bidding farewell to classic experiments.
Edit: I feel compelled to make a small clarification; I'm not arguing for purging all files greater than X MiB (even though I still think LibGen has a non-negligible amount of junk and duplicate content but neither are easy to remove without significant manpower and LibGen lacks mechanisms to crowdsource the work)…
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Laughing All The Way To Peace, Harmony, and Focus
Basecamp has had one foot in the cloud for well over a decade, and HEY has been running there exclusively since it was launched two years ago. We've run extensively in both Amazon's cloud and Google's cloud. We've run on bare virtual machines, we've run on Kubernetes. We've seen all the cloud has to offer, and tried…
I'm on a bit of a mission this year to bring back the spirit of the old web. The creativity and flair of the late 90s and early 2000s. So I've recreated some of that old web magic, in modern HTML, CSS and JS.
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
But these browsers have one great feature: They give a very good indication whether a page is worth reading. If these browsers don't display anything, or the display looks shitty, there usually is not much content, either (In a few cases I looked up the page with something more advanced (e.g., Arena), and I was always…
