3151
3152
The Shitty Stack System
How Microsoft's ruthless employee evaluation system annihilated team collaboration.
3153
Unpacking Elixir: Syntax
Elixir is a language with syntactical roots in Ruby. It also carries the Erlang legacy. Legacy used here as in "a great legacy" and not as in "system you don't like anymore". Ruby is an object-oriented language. Elixir is functional language. The Erlang part has an impact as Elixir was designed to provide strong…
3154
Preparing for missions in difficult places
Can I bring my emotional support dog?
3155
The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
What if you could counterfeit so much money that it stopped being illegal?
3156
Laniakea Books: Public domain books for everyone
Laniakea Books is a publishing house in London, England, which publishes public domain books only.
3157
My primality testing code is faster than Sir Roger Penrose's
But, I guess he did win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2020 so I can't really brag. However, it was a great surprise when looking at two pa...
3158
Demystifying Tupper's Formula
A book I was recently reading mentioned a mathematical curiosity I haven't seen before - Tupper's self-referential formula . There are some resources about it online, but this post is my attempt to explain how it works - along with an interactive implementation you can try in the browser.
3159
Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been…
3160
The many ways that digital minds can know – A better way to think about LLMs
LLMs do all the things people say they do at once, even if those people vociferously disagree, and they’re all useful.
3161
Real-time dreamy Cloudscapes with Volumetric Raymarching
This article is a deep dive into my experimentations with Volumetric rendering and how to leverage it to render beautiful raymarched cloudscapes in React Three Fiber and WebGL. In it, I walk you through everything from the basics of Volumetric Raymarching to the techniques used in video games to render physically…
3162
3163
Pixar was never a masterpiece factory
the studio has always played to critics instead of children and manipulated with cheap sentiment
3164
WHO aspartame brouhaha
the territory under dispute
3165
3166
The End of Front-End Development
Large language models like GPT-4 are becoming increasingly capable, at an alarming rate. Within a couple of years, we won't need developers any more! …Or at least, that's the narrative going viral on social media. I'm much more optimistic about what these AI advancements mean for the future of software development.
3167
Can you trust a compiler to optimize your code?
More or less the title this time, but first, a story about SIMD. There are three levels of understanding how SIMD works (well, at least I am level 3 at the moment):
3168
Better to micromanage than be disengaged
For a long time, I found the micromanager CEO archetype very frustrating to work with. They would often pop out of nowhere, jab holes in the work I had done without understanding the tradeoffs, and then disappear when I wanted to explain my decisions. In those moments, I wished they would trust me based on my track…
3169
IBM PC 8088 replaced with a Motorola 68000
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86…
3170
When feedback is not a gift
Feedback is the lifeblood of getting better, but be careful who you accept feedback from.
3171
Why TinyML is still so hard to get excited about
This week, I went to the tinyML Summit in Burlingame, Calif. TinyML, or running small machine learning models on constrained devices, is one of the most exciting technologies I’ve encountered. But it’s also the one most likely to put people to sleep when I talk about it. Using local computing to handle object or even…
3172
Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up …
3173
What I learned using private LLMs to write an undergraduate history essay
I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:
3174
You can't reach the brain through the ears
Why do we have to learn everything the hard way?
3175
The i.MX8 cannot be deblobbed
Devices based on the i.MX8 or i.MX8M (such as the Librem phone or MNT Reform) have received popular coverage recently. The number of firmware blobs involved in the bringup of these devices is often a point of discussion. At times, people have considered whether some of these blobs could be replaced with libre…
3176
AI and Open Source in 2023
The Highs and Lows: A Year in Review
3177
Repurposing Hugo as a wiki
As part of a project that I’m working on, I decided to see if I could repurpose the excellent Hugo website framework (which also powers this very site) as a single-user wiki of sorts.
3178
root with a single command: sudo logrotate
Starting from the constraint that only sudo logrotate * may be run, and ending at root: abusing the log file flag to overwrite root owned scripts and ride cron to privilege escalation.
3179
Fitting 44% More Data on a C64/1541 Floppy Disk
The physical data format on a Commodore 1541 5¼-inch floppy disk as used by the C64 is completely defined in software. The drive’s operating system fits 170 KB on a disk. This article explores different strategies, each with its pros and cons, to fit up to 246 KB.
3180
Mac Keyboard with Hidutil
[Update: 13-Apr-2023 with some of the background context and some things I learned from hackernews ] [Update: 18-Dec-2023] This hiduti...