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How to spend money on your friends without it looking like bribery
Owning things is more socially acceptable than renting them.
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Hey, computer, make me a font
This is a story of my journey learning to build generative ML models from scratch and teaching a computer to create fonts in the process.
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A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials
Exploring the Applecore style
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The Reluctant Sysadmin's Guide to Securing a Linux Server
I wrote a follow-up to this guide, which you should probably consider along with this article.
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IPinside: Korea’s Mandatory Spyware
Banking websites in South Korea can only be used with IPinside installed. This application collects lots of data about the user, and it makes that data accessible to each and every website. The protection is inadequate.
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I Made Stable Diffusion XL Smarter by Finetuning It on Bad AI-Generated Images
And then telling it to not generate those images!
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I don't need your query language
Seriously, I don't. I'd prefer SQL.
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Coffee in a Can
Life’s inconveniences, when they happen to you and me, are just that. Inconveniences. When they happen to some people though they end up becoming multi-billion dollar businesses. This is the story of Japan’s canned coffee. One finds at least one vending machine in almost every street in
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Coroutines for Go
This post is about why we need a coroutine package for Go, and what it would look like. But first, what are coroutines?
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B-trees in Factorio
learning about B-Trees...in factorio
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No Source Code == No Patent
How we know you "have' the invention
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The Door Close Button
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while, but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible length.
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Install Windows the Arch Linux Way
Installing Windows strictly through the Command Line is an important tool to have. If windows changes the installer or out of box experience, you can bypass any changes with this guide!
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Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency
Elixir is the thing I do most of my public writing and speaking about. It is my default programming language for the last 5-6 years. It suits my brain. Performs well for the kind of work I typically do. And using it I have experienced very few drawbacks. Rather than writing yet another post trying to widely summarize…
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50 years later, is two-phase locking the best we can do?
Two phase locking (2PL) was the first of the general-purpose Concurrency Controls to be invented which provided Serializability. In fact, 2P...
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Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning
What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. cover songs to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine.
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How does Linux NAT a ping?
A few months ago, I found myself wondering how a command like ping 1.1.1.1 works from within a private network. In most private networks, multiple hosts connect to the Internet through a router. For IPv4, the router performs network address translation (NAT) by rewriting the original host’s source address to the…
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Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
Remembering the retro-futuristic voyeur bar that was way ahead of it's time.
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If you have first-hand knowledge of the FDA’s torpor, get in touch
The title says it: if you’re involved in drug or medical development and have experienced the FDA’s torpor, or vengeance, consider getting in touch; anonymously is fine. I want to make …
770
The end of a myth: Distributed transactions can scale
This paper appeared in VLDB'17. The paper presents NAM-DB, a scalable distributed database system that uses RDMA (mostly 1-way RDMA) and a ...
771
Hyperscale in your Homelab: The Compute Blade arrives
This is the Compute Blade, and I'm test driving it in a four-node cluster: I'm testing the Dev version, and @Merocle from Uptime Lab sent four Blades, a 3D-printed 4-bay case (a metal 1U rackmount enclosure is in the works), and two fan modules. He's been testing 40 of these in a rack at Jetbrains for months, and…
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We invested 10% to pay back tech debt
Why and how we continuously invested the team bandwidth to pay back tech debt and what were the results?
773
UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps—including Signal and WhatsApp—point out that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: As currently drafted, the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of…
774
Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups
A rant about websites that collect user data before revealing that a sign-up is required to see the results.
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Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the…
776
Career Advice (2013)
To my great surprise, young people now somewhat frequently contact me in order to solicit career advice.They are usually in college or highschool, and want to know what the best next steps are for a career in security or software development.This is, honestly, a really complicated question, mostl...
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A Blog Post with Every HTML Element
Patrick Weaver’s Website
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Does Google need a new CEO?
Whether it is botched and haphazard layoffs, anti-trust regulators baying for its blood, or opportunistic saber-rattling by long-time rival Microsoft and its outsourced AI unit, OpenAI — 2023 has b…
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The decline of net neutrality activism
For many years, telecom and Net Neutrality-related policies have been a hot-button political issue for me, to the extent that I, an ordinary software engineer at Microsoft have been blocked on Twitter by former FCC chairman Ajit Pai because I tweeted support for Net Neutrality publicly. I also noticed that Net…