You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Many years ago, Google applied for the .zip Top Level Domain. ICANN, in its infinite wisdom, granted it. And now, I think, bad things are going to happen. You see computers try to be helpful. They see you wrote "visit example.com" and autolink the thing which looks like a domain name. That's handy - especially as most…
I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings [5]. Children
In this article we will learn how to deploy Keycloak with PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. We will first do everything manually with separate YAMLs and then later with Helm. Our k8s environment will run i…
The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene, and unoriginal.
Fast Fibonacci Computations With a Linear Algebra Twist
This function doesn't know the value being multiplied until it is called. The compiler (gcc, O2) emits a generic integer multiply instruction in its loop body.
This is an attempt to write down a very simple example I’ve been using to explain the profound impact the language we use has on thought, discussion and ultimately code. Imagine you have a co…
Welcome to part 1 of this narrative series about writing a complete video game from scratch, using the PICO-8. This is actually the second part, because in this house (unlike Lua) we index from 0, so if you’re new here you may want to consult the introductory stuff and table of contents in part zero. If you’ve been…
A blog about software development and programming.
This post explains how Amazon replaced ISBNs with ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers) for its Catalog Database Key
When you generate an SSH key (like I did when looking at signing commits with SSH keys ), you get a “randomart image” from ssh-keygen . These things:
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023158 points44 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the second section of the third part of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries, t…
Step-by-step tutorial explaining scaled dot-product self-attention for large language models, with Python code that builds the mechanism from scratch.
This week we (me & Anton Kovsharov) published Paperproof, a Gentzen-tree-like proof interface for Lean 4. In this post I'll review proof visualisations from o...
In the Soyuz space missions, cosmonauts tracked their position above the Earth with a remarkable electromechanical device with a rotating ...
Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder . Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it's creative coding and simulated cities , code poetry and bulletin board systems . It's websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart…
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Raiding the Global South like a piggy bank.
“Clean code” is so over: all the cool kids are switching to CRISP code . I’ll show you how to achieve it in five catchy, T-shirt-friendly slogans.
I share my story about stress and anxiety and how I managed to overcome it. I also share practical tips and resources that will help you begin your healing journey today!
I see a lot of new terms like Command-Event, Event-Based Compute, etc., presented around Event-Driven Architecture. Let me clear that up because there are no such things…
I find myself thinking about a particular design principle of Rust today. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it named specifically before, but it gets referred to from…
This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster. I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we'll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro. 128 cores—that's five times more cores, I'm also going to…
The myth A few years ago I saw a StackOverflow question (but I cannot find it now): allegedly Andrew Gelman blogged that Bayesian models would not overfit and would only underfit (I also cannot find Andrew’s blog post now but I think what he meant by “Bayesian models only underfits” is that you can never fully model…
As a reaction to the previous article on how to write a scientific paper, I got some reactions from friends and colleagues, the underlying message being that they would rather like to understand why writing can be important. There is indeed a tendency to see academic writing as a tedious task that one should try to…
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978, and its influence still remains through the popular x86 architecture. The 8086 was a fai...
Elixir was built on Erlang. Erlang was built to provide "consistently low latency" and a few other audacious goals. Note, this is not a hard realtime constraint. It is soft, squishy and yet, important and real. It makes Erlang unusually suitable to systems where latency matters and where a near-realtime experience is…
