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Htmx Is the Future
Chris James, London - Software Engineer
92
We have used too many levels of abstractions
A big percentage of so-called experts today only know how to configure tools, but they understand nothing about how things work at the deeper level. This is a real challenge and a big problem for the future.
93
Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet
If you enjoyed the old web of the 90s and 00s; if you love tinkering with your personal website; or if you just like quirky, fun things on the internet, you will love this.
94
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I booted Linux 293k times in 21 hours
And it only took 21 hours. Linux 6.4 has a bug where it hangs on boot, but probably only 1 in 1000 boots (and rarer if using Intel hardware for some reason). It’s surprising to me that no one…
96
Why Not Mars
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
97
How big is YouTube?
How big is YouTube? It's not easy to find out, but we did two years of research and figured out how...
98
Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment
The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the …
99
Code is run more than read
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
100
Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
We often hear that making small incremental improvements every day can lead to great things. This popular piece of advice rings true, and it’s a powerful reminder to keep pushing ourselves forward.
101
Hacking my “smart” toothbrush
After buying a new Philips Sonicare toothbrush I was surprised to see that it reacts to the insertion of a brush head by blinking an LED. A quick online search reveals that the head communicates with the toothbrush handle to remind you when it’s time to buy a new one. From the Philips product page: seems to be REALLY…
102
Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
103
Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date
nikitonsky: Why is nobody excited about these “yesterday”/“2 days ago”/“a week ago” labels?
104
Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job
Last weekend I had a chance to talk with some students who just got their degree. They are pursuing their first software engineer job. In conversation with them, I learned that they have a pretty wrong perception of this job.
105
Cursorless is alien magic from the future
Xe Iaso's personal website.
106
I would rather see my books get pirated than this
Amazon and Goodreads must take steps to combat the flood of AI-generated content that will mislead readers and damage author reputations.
107
Simulating fluids, fire, and smoke in real-time
Fire is an interesting graphics problem. Past approaches generally faked it. For example, Lord of the Rings used sprites with lots and lots of smoke (the fluid sim was too expensive at the time, even for movies). Real-time applications like video games have pretty much exclusively used non-physical approaches.
108
The Camera-Shy Hoodie
A DIY wearable for avoiding recognition on IR security cameras.
109
Credit card debt collection
Credit card debt is the waste stream of consumer finance. The debt collection industry ends up being sordid, for complex structural and microeconomic reasons.
110
ARM64 Linux Workstation
My personal website and blog
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Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
In this post I’ll attempt the fun stunt of designing a system that could serve the full production load of Twitter with most of the features intact on a single (very powerful) machine. I’ll start by showing off a Rust prototype of the core tweet distribution data structure handling 35x full load by fitting the hot set…
112
Apple allows some iOS apps to track user locations via lists of nearby SSIDs
苹果公司自诩为用户隐私的捍卫者，然而这并非事实。 在近十年的时间里，苹果允许应用程序具备跟踪用户位置的能力，而不提供关闭此功能或引起用户对此的关注的选项。 而且这是「只有苹果可以做到的」（Only Apple Can Do）！
113
Database Fundamentals
The fundamental problems a database engineer thinks about in the shower
114
Choose Postgres queue technology
Introduction Postgres queue tech is a thing of beauty, but far from mainstream. Its relative obscurity is partially attributable to the cargo cult of “scale”. The scalability cult has decreed that there are several queue technologies with greater “scalability” than Postgres, and for that reason alone, Postgres isn’t…
115
I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
Or "that time I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it like a week after launch"
116
Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
An exploration into customizing LLMs for personal use
117
Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users
Microsoft announces vague changes to the default web browser setting for Windows Insider. Nothing but wishful thinking. Still force-opens web links in Edge.
118
Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres
Personal website of Phil Booth
119
“Clean” code, horrible performance
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
120
The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
"We have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it." The FTC and states are going after Amazon, largely for stopping merchants from offering discounts elsewhere.