1321
Stop the Medicare “Advantage” Scam Before Medicare Is Dead
At the very least, let’s stop the egregiously deceptive advertising. Only Medicare should be able to call itself “Medicare.”
1322
Maximizing the Potential of LLMs: A Guide to Prompt Engineering
Language models have rapidly improved in recent years, with large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 taking center stage. These models have…
1323
My ranking of every Shakespeare play
A few years ago I set out on a personal journey to study and watch a performance of each of Shakespeare’s 37 plays. I’ve reached my goal and, though it’s not a usual topic around here, I wanted to get my thoughts down while fresh. I absolutely loved some of these plays and performances, and so I’d like to highlight…
1324
Leave work slightly unfinished for easier flow the next day
A breakdown of 4 simple software engineering and coding habits that improved my productivity. These include keyboard shortcuts, learning to say no, reaching flow state faster, and keeping a big book of commands handy.
1325
LLMs confabulate not hallucinate
Minor terminological nitpick. People often describe the LLM as ‘hallucinating’ information whenever it makes up information which seems like it should fit for a given query even when it is trivially false. While evocative, this isn’t actually correct terminology. We already have a perfect word for this precise…
1326
1327
Cases where full scans are better than indexes
Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess. Here are some cases I've…
1328
Wait, what's a bookmarklet?
How this one small browser quirk turned into a tool used by countless people for decades.
1329
On being ready to die, and yet also now being able to swallow ice cream
Part of being ready to die comes, I think, from psychedelics; I wrote in “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?”: “Bess (my wife) and psychedelics taught me to …
1330
Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”
Annotating Sam Bankman-Fried's attempts to explain the FTX collapse.
1331
A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store
Every morning, 67-year Hideyuki Akiyama drives to his store along the rural roads of Okayama in Western Japan. Today is no different. A line of excited customers queuing up before the shutters are open. “Disneyland isn’t our land of dreams, this is!” says one 20-something woman. “This”
1332
1333
Designing a programming language to speedrun Advent of Code
“shouldn’t this have been published a few months ago?” yeah, probably. I even considered submitting it to the AoC contest. time is a real beast. The title is clickbait. I did not design and implement a programming language for the sole or even primary purpose of leaderboarding on Advent of Code. It just turned out…
1334
Formally modeled Dreidel for no good reason
I can mathematically prove the game's not fun.
1335
How to Get Started with Tree-Sitter
Emacs 29 introduces tree-sitter support, a powerful parsing library that enhances its understanding of source code. With this integration, Emacs gains features like precise syntax highlighting, accurate indentation and easier extensibility. Here's how you install and configure Emacs with tree-sitter support.
1336
New make --shuffle mode
I implemented new --shuffle option for GNU make to simulate non-deterministic build order in parallel makefiles.
1337
Lessons from 5 years of running a tech meetup
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
1338
Excuse me, is there a problem?
Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem. This explains why, so you can avoid their fate.
1339
Common Beginner Mistakes with React
I used to teach React at a local coding bootcamp, and I noticed that students kept getting tripped up by the same handful of things. In this article, we're going to go through 9 of the most dastardly gotchas. I'll show you how to solve these common problems, so you can avoid a lot of potential frustration!
1340
Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario
So where might we be headed instead?
1341
Will scaling work?
Data bottlenecks, generalization benchmarks, primate evolution, intelligence as compression, world modelers, and other considerations
1342
How we turned the tables to catch my sister’s Bumble stalker
My sister’s stalker, who had used Instagram and Bumble to work out where she lived and start stalking her in real life, was recently…
1343
The fake browser update scam gets a makeover
One of the oldest malware tricks in the book — hacked websites claiming visitors need to update their Web browser before they can view any content — has roared back to life in the past few months. New research shows the attackers behind one such scheme have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware from…
1344
Immanuel Kant – What can we know?
If you are interested in truth, be it in the form of scientific knowledge or artistic beauty, there is no way around Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. In this book Kant asked the simple…
1345
Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
1346
Fake Trees: Using Indents for Simpler UIs
This is a technique I’ve used in actual for-pay software, but most recently in my text adventure game editor, Hiss .
1347
Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without her noticing (2017)
My friend gave me permission to hack her, here's how I did it and how to stop it happening to you.
1348
Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
1349
The U.S. housing market vs. the Canadian housing market
The housing market is even worse in Canada than it is here.
1350
Electric bike, stupid love of my life
Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership