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A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself
It took me a few minutes to create a fake me giving a fake lecture.
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Why Learn Compilers (2021)
A sufficient understanding of computers is impossible without learning how compilers and their parts work. It is like stepping into the computer's mind and seeing how it feels from the inside. Compil...
3303
Custom Allocators in Rust
Posts and writings by Nical
3304
Link-Time Optimisation (LTO)
I recently started exploring link-time optimisation (LTO), which I used to think was just a single boolean choice in the compilation and linking workflow, and perhaps it was like that a while ago… I’ve learned that these days, there are many different dimensions of LTO across compilers and linkers today and more…
3305
Interactive Common Lisp Development
Common Lisp programming is often presented as “interactive”. In most languages, modifications to your program are applied by recompiling it and restarting it. In contrast, Common Lisp lets…
3306
My Meeting with David Bohm
June 29, 2023. Some scientists seek to clarify reality, others to mystify it. Physicist David Bohm seemed driven by both impulses. He is renowned for promoting a sensible (according to experts like Einstein, John Bell and philosopher Tim Maudlin) interpretation of quantum mechanics. But Bohm also a
3307
Coaching engineering managers to take on organizational problems
In an organization with many teams, problems will arise that span across these teams and require solutions broader than an individual manager’s purview. These types of projects include things…
3308
Conditional CSS with:has and:nth-last-child
A modern look at how to combine CSS :has, :nth-last-child, and style queries to create dynamic components.
3309
A successful example of "adversarial collaboration"
We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. . . . Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated…
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A very subtle bug (2010)
6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience…
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Upload a Godot HTML5 Game to Itch.io with GitHub Actions
Automatically upload your Android Godot game to itch.io with Github Actions godot-html-export and itchio-butler-upload
3314
A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)
Lisp in Life is a Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway’s Game of Life.
3315
Street Fighter II, subtile accurate animation (2021)
This article is the final part of a series about Street Fighter II and the CPS-1. It is recommended to read the previous entries before reading this one.
3316
Faster PostgresSQL to BigQuery Transfers
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
3317
Scaffolded LLMs as natural language computers
Recently, LLM-based agents have been all the rage – with projects like AutoGPT showing how easy it is to wrap an LLM in a simple agentic loop and prompt it to achieve real-world tasks. More generally, we can think about the class of ‘scaffolded’ 1 LLM systems – which wrap...
3318
Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit
Joel Gustafson
3319
Color of the Night Sky (2019)
What color is the night sky? Contrary to prevailing views, the moonless night sky is rarely, if ever, black or blue. It is actually much more colorful. In this article, I'll describe some of the colors and the physical reasons for those colors.
3320
Writing a Debugger from Scratch: Stacks
(New to this series? Consider starting from part 1) At the end of the last post, DbgRs could finally set breakpoints. That was the last really critical feature needed for controlling execution of a program. Now that it can stop on an arbitrary function or code location, the next step is to find more information about…
3321
Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything
Welcome to my new site, brought to you by vanilla everything. No Javascript frameworks, CSS libraries or flashy animations. Just markdown, html templa...
3322
Do you really need foreign keys?
Foreign keys are a bit like that well-intentioned friend who insists on double-checking everything you do. They’re often recommended as a must-have for enforcing referential integrity checks in your database.
3323
Why is GPT-3 15.77x more expensive for certain languages?
How large language models process multilingual data differently
3324
Apple Vision Pro – Potential hardware issues
Introduction This part will primarily cover the hardware and related human physical and visual issues with the Apple Vision Pro (AVP). In Part 3, I intend to discuss my issues with the applications…
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The Dome: A simple violation of determinism in Newtonian mechanics (2005)
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15260. Homepage: www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page is available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/goodies
3326
A Critique of the Cap'n Proto Schema Language (2019)
Historical reference to Ian Denhardt’s A Critique of the Cap'n Proto Schema Language (2019-06-25), with archive and current documentation links.
3327
YOLO-Driven Development Manifesto
YOLO-driven development - not for the faint of heart
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The PostgreSQL documentation and the limitations of community
In my opinion, the PostgreSQL documentation is simultaneously excellent and fairly poor, and both its excellence and its shortcomings are di...
3330
NVMe SSD boot with the Raspberry Pi 5
In my video about the Raspberry Pi 5, I mentioned the new external PCIe port makes it possible to boot the standard Pi 5 model B directly off NVMe storage—an option which is much faster and more reliable than standard microSD storage (even with industrial-rated cards!). Enabling NVMe boot is pretty easy, you add a…