2311
Operating well – what I learned at Stripe
Over the last few years, I’ve grown from a fine to a good operator.
2312
Power, frequency, management: how M1 E cores win
macOS manages the loading and frequency of M1 cores according to the QoS set, and rules which differ between the original M1 and the M1 Pro.
2313
Why “process substitution” is a late feature in Unix shells
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
2314
Linux Kernel vs. DPDK: HTTP Performance Showdown
A head-to-head performance comparison between the Linux kernel's network stack, and a kernel-bypass stack powered by DPDK.
2315
Results of 500 MicroSD Benchmarks on SBCs
I've tested over 20 microSD cards on every Raspberry Pi model to help you find the fastest one for your Raspberry Pi Single Board Computer
2316
Deep work. Essentialism in asynchronous culture
Deep work Nowadays, we are getting accustomed to working in a continuously interrupting environment. Smartphone notifications, hundreds of e-mails, open spaces, and meetings slicing our workday. We are feeling busy, and overworked, but are we more productive? If I am a salesman or project coordinator that way of…
2317
When Your Smart ID Card Reader Comes With Malware
Millions of U.S. government employees and contractors have been issued a secure smart ID card that enables physical access to buildings and controlled spaces, and provides access to government computer networks and systems at the cardholder’s appropriate security level. But many government employees aren’t issued an…
2318
The essence of Reed-Solomon coding
Let’s say we want to store some data on multiple drives, so that we can recover from drive failures.
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Tetsuji: Remote Code Execution on a GameBoy Colour 22 Years Later
Introduction It’s that time of year again - the Binary Golf Grand Prix is back for a third year running! You can also check out my entries to the first and second times this amazing competition ran. The theme this year was to produce a binary that crashes a given program. Bonus points for hijacking execution…
2322
Crimes against transhumanity
(Disclaimer: I am a transhumanist skeptic these days, not to mention a singularity curmudgeon and a critic of Mars colonization, but I still find these ideas nice to chew on sometimes.)
2323
I plan to leave tech to pursue art
I've spent 240 hours the past 6 months drawing, and I'm eager to go all-in. I'm planning to apply to Sheridan's animation undergrad program in February, and have been busy preparing a portfolio for it. Here's some of my recent work, and a lil music video featuring my progress over the months.
2324
Political Chips
Chips are the clearest example that economic efficiencies will not be the ultimate decider of technology’s end state: politics will play an important role.
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Parsing JSON faster with Intel AVX-512
Many recent Intel processors benefit from a new family of instructions called AVX-512. These instructions operate over wide registers (up to 512 bits) and follow the Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) paradigm. These new AVX-512 instructions allow you to break some speed records, such as decoding base64 data at…
2327
Using SBCL Common Lisp as a Dynamic Library
Have you ever wanted to call into your Lisp library from C? Have you ever written your nice scientific application in Lisp, only to be requ...
2328
Prioritization, multiple work streams, unplanned work
On development teams, balancing priorities while keeping focus is hard. Without an intentional approach you can quickly find your team submerged in a lot of different work, hurting progress on your most important goals. But the real world is messy. Prioritization is hard. Work comes in many shapes and sizes. Unplanned…
2329
Books That Changed How I Hear Music
But none of them are music books
2330
Avoid exception throwing in performance-sensitive code
There are various ways in software to handle error conditions. In C or Go, one returns error code. Other programming languages like C++ or Java prefer to throw exceptions. One benefit of using exceptions is that it keeps your code mostly clean since the error-handling code is often separate. It is debatable whether…
2331
Lisp, Smalltalk, and the power of symmetry (2014)
Like many hackers, my first real programming language love was Lisp. Paul Graham, who inspired my own explorations of the language, is a particular advocate and has written quite a bit about Lisp a…
2332
Against Discipline
And for play!
2333
Bizarre Talmudic Scenarios
On this page of Talmud we read of a very bizarre case: יבמות נד, א אָמַר רַבָּה: נָפַל מִן הַגָּג וְנִתְקַע — חַיָּיב בְּאַרְבָּעָה דְּבָרִים, וּבִיבִמְתּוֹ לֹא קָנָה. בְּנֵזֶק, בְּצַעַר, בְּשֶׁבֶת, בְּרִפּוּי. אֲבָל בּוֹשֶׁת לָא מִיחַיַּיב, דְּאָמַר מָר: אֵין חַיָּיב עַל הַבּוֹשֶׁת עַד
2334
Battle with bots prompts purge of Amazon, Apple employee accounts on LinkedIn
On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in…
2335
Don’t mock what you don’t own
A common issue when writing tests for real-world software is how to deal with third-party dependencies. Let’s examine an old, but counter-intuitive principle.
2336
The Many Branches of the Fediverse
As more and more people are asking me about Mastodon I felt a need for a picture to point at, showcasing how the software known as Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse. I made this infographic to help myself and others explain the many different use-
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Multiple assignment and tuple unpacking improve Python code readability (2018)
Whether I’m teaching new Pythonistas or long-time Python programmers, I frequently find that Python programmers underutilize multiple assignment....
2338
What ID3v2 could have been
Speculations and specifications. If you were a Winamp user back in the day, or curate an MP3 collection currently, you might recognize the humble ID3 tag. It is what the metadata in the MP3 file is made up of. First it was pretty limited in the version later dubbed ID3v1. Like any good 2.0 they added a ton more…
2339
Debugging bare-metal STM32 from the seventh level of hell
Here’s a not-so-brief story about troubleshooting a problem that was at times vexing, impossible, incredibly challenging, frustrating, and all around just a terrible time with the bare-metal STM32G4 firmware for the moteus brushless motor controller. Background First, some things for context: moteus has a variety of…
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