2071
Using email wrong
If you don’t like email, try a different strategy.
2072
Code doesn’t have to be a mess
High-level strategies to keep software simple as it evolves over time.
2073
What have we got to lose? (1998)
Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. The Sony Walkman , for instance, added nothing significantly new to the cassette player, it just left out the amplifier and speakers, thus creating a whole new way of listening to…
2074
Death by hockey sticks
You may be familiar with the term “hockey stick curve,” used describe a trend that has been flat/stable for a very long time, but shoots up at the end of the series in dramatic fashion, resembling the shape of a hockey stick. Hockey can be a violent sport, and it’s easy to get hurt by even one well-aimed swing…
2075
The disproportionate influence of early tech decisions
On how software that survives first encounter with production tends to live longer than we think it should.
2076
Setting up my new laptop: Nix style
Brian McGee's personal profile and blog
2077
Leveraging mispriced AWS spot instances
AWS creates a market for spot instance pricing, but this market is inefficient as customers don’t consider all instance types available. Leveraging this mispricing can save even more than spot pricing already does.
2078
RISC in 2022
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
2079
Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified
Anyone trying to disassemble the PC DOS 1.1 boot sector soon notices that at offsets 1A3h through 1BEh there is a byte sequence that just does not belong. It appears to be a fragment of code, but it has no purpose in the boot sector and is never executed. So why is the sequence of junk bytes there, and where did it…
2080
2081
Internals of Go's new fuzzing system
Go 1.18 is coming out soon. It's a huge release, but native fuzzing has a special place in my heart. Not much has been written yet on how Go's fuzzing system actually works, so I'll talk a bit about that here.
2082
2083
A Journey into the Linux Scheduler
Two years ago more or less I started my journey in Linux. I was scared at first and I didn’t know where to start from. But then I decided to buy a book - and what a book! - in order to follow a path. Along the way, I integrated the material with up-to-date documentation from kernel.org and source code. In the…
2084
2085
Phrases in computing that might need retiring
The upcoming issue of the SICPers newsletter is all about phrases that were introduced to computing to mean one thing, but seem to get used in practice to mean another. This annoys purists, pedants, and historians: it also annoys the kind of software engineer who dives into the literature to see how ideas were…
2086
You can't afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected
Us denizens of the Internet have become familiar with concepts that were foreign more than a decade ago, one of the most that causes the most influence is going viral. There’s so much variety on the web with content providing the impression that anything could essentially make you rich. However, hid
2087
Why Quantum Mechanics?
In the past few months, I’ve twice injured the same ankle while playing with my kids. This, perhaps combined with covid, led me to several indisputable realizations: I am mortal.Despite my se…
2088
Analyzing Carbon Dioxide levels while attending IETF-115 in London, UK
is it safe to travel these days?
2089
Two Vexing Problems in Functional Programming
Matthew Butterick
2090
How to work with me
A user guide for David Bauer. About this document If you start working with a new person, wouldn’t it be nice if you had some sort of user guide that gives you a basic understanding of how to work with them? This document is exactly that. It captures my guiding principles, how I work as […]
2091
I Love My PinePhone
An attempt to document my experiences and rationale for wanting to use a PinePhone, as well as my thoughts on mobile Linux in general.
2092
A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
I was just reminded of an event I inadvertently caused. I found some screenshots I took of a few websites. The websites all touched on a joke I made. I wrote it on a subreddit dedicated to finding comedy in programming topics: /r/ProgrammerHumor.
2093
Photoshop for Text
In the near future, transforming text over an entire document will become as commonplace as filtering images.
2094
Entropy Is Fatal
Like a lot of people, I used to be a pathological maximalist. A phone with more features is necessarily better, a company with more people is better, a program with more lines of code is better, a house with more stuff is better. Until the day when reality hit me
2095
Get root on macOS 13.0.1 the macOS Dirty Cow bug
Get root on macOS 13.0.1 with CVE-2022-46689 (macOS equivalent of the Dirty Cow bug), using the testcase extracted from Apple’s XNU source.
2096
2097
In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)
tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.
2098
On the dangers of cryptocurrencies and the uselessness of blockchain
Earlier this month, I and others wrote a letter to Congress, basically saying that cryptocurrencies are an complete and total disaster, and urging them to regulate the space. Nothing in that letter is out of the ordinary, and is in line with what I wrote about blockchain in 2019. In response, Matthew Green has…
2099
2100
Tcl the Misunderstood (2006)
In an article recently linked from reddit entitled Tour de Babel you can read (among lots of other nonsense): Heck, people still use Tcl as an embedded interpreter, even though Python is far superior to Tcl in every conceivable way -- except, that is, for the frost thing.