"Prompt Engineering" emerged from the growth of language models to describe the process of applying prompting to effectively extract information from language models, typically for use in real-world applications.
We did an analysis of the Google antitrust trial. Last week, over half of the trial was held behind closed doors because the judge, Amit Mehta, is deferring to Google on the need for secrecy.
Firefox version 115.0 was released on July 4, but I'm not celebrating. I'm concerned about a new "feature" in the release notes .
Post by Eshel Yaron about changes for the worse in Emacs 30 registers feature
A call-by-call look at context switch logging with the Event Tracing for Windows API.
This article answeres the questions of how to start a rocket engine and takes you on a deep dive into spark plugs, torch ignitors and more.
There’s a little accountant named Jim that lives in my head
My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation : it's a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me – because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
All the AI design hype got me twitching enough to write about the business risks of working so high-fidelity so fast.
Tips, examples, and thoughts from an exploration of the world of fine tuning
Ever wanted more different ways to understand what’s going on in a program? Here I catalogue a huge variety of tracing methods you can use for varying types of problems. Tracing has been such a long-standing interest (and job) of mine that some of these will novel and interesting to anyone who reads this. I’ll…
The case for giving programmers private offices with doors — why open offices destroy deep work, how interruptions cost far more than floor space, and what the research actually says.
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
Best practices for conducting effective interviews and actionable insights to build an inclusive hiring culture and hire top-tier engineering talent
In the last 30 days, I have been closely monitoring the Mac App Store and have made a disturbing discovery. In the midst of the OpenAI…
Using SVG to easily create sparkline charts, and rendering them on the server side with Elixir and Phoenix.
Hunkering down for the winter!
Have you ever been told that the company’s data on laptops is protected thanks to BitLocker? Well it turns out that this depends on BitLocker’s configuration…
This month I decided to learn how to make a font to use in my comic hakum . Previously, I was drawing the text digitally with my pen tablet. The result was fine, but sometimes difficult to read(the text would grow and shrink often in one page). I didn't want to use an existing font, so I decided to make one based on…
A long-standing debate between me and a peer at work has been how we should name services. His position was always that services should be named something descriptive, so that you can infer from the name what it does. My position is that the name should definitely not be descriptive, but should be something cute and…
~Will Thompson's personal website~
Dynamicland is still going, just quietly. We closed the Oakland space for covid, but Realtalk development and collaborations have continued -- basically as originally planned, if more slowly due to our small size.
Fear, FOMO, and the scientific exodus driven by ChatGPT
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
Inside every AI is a bigger AI, trying to get out
At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business…
A common pattern is to stop short of the real finish line for your project. A little evangelism, documentation, and polish can go a long way.
