2941
iAPX432: Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC Failure
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
2942
What does a research grant pay for?
People don't usually share what a research grant pays for, so here are the budgets from mine.
2943
There is no software maintenance
Every time I hear about software maintenance as a distinct activity, I cringe. That’s because it is based on the outdated notion that first software is developed, then it is maintained. But t…
2944
Kevin Mitnick Hacked California Law in 1983
Early in his career, Kevin Mitnick successfully hacked California law. He told me the story when he heard about my new book, which he partially recounts his 2012 book, Ghost in the Wires. The setup is that he just discovered that there’s warrant for his arrest by the California Youth Authority, and he’s trying to…
2945
The Decade of Deep Learning
As the 2010’s draw to a close, it’s worth taking a look back at the monumental progress that has been made in Deep Learning in this decade.[1] Driven by the development of ever-more powerful comput
2946
Oil-Canning
Flat sheetmetal is the hardest to fabricate - and keep flat! There is a reason old cars were rounded. When I was a student at GMI, one of o...
2947
GitHub Actions and vanity metrics
The measure of a modern software engineer in our attention economy is easily calculable thanks to companies like Microsoft acting both as bastion and companion in demonstrating one's prowess.
2948
Compiling ML models to C for fun
We make micrograd fly with a little compiler magic. In this post, we’ll write a ML compiler from scratch.
2949
Resilience and Waste in Software Teams
Resilience is coping with unexpected events and environmental change. To have resilience, you need slack. Slack in software development lets people do the little tasks that keep the work moving smo…
2950
Who reads your email?
A look at diversity of MX records across all gTLDs and the Top 1M domains, indicating where SMTP is concentrated and what organizations might have broad access to the world's emails.
2951
The Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generati...
2952
Was BASIC that horrible or better?
Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…
2953
What We Need Instead of "Web Components"
Stop trying to make customElement happen. Do this instead.
2954
Iceland: The emerging tech-ecosystem of the Nordics
An overlooked part of the Nordic tech-ecosystem
2955
2956
Netheads vs. bellheads redux: the strange victory of SIP over the telephone
How much do you know about how the PSTN (that is, the public telephone network) works? At some point long long ago, it was signalled using in-band frequencies, which facilitated the infamous phreaking using so-called “blue boxes”. This led to a switch to out of band signalling, ultimately culminating in something…
2957
2958
Google Maps Testing New Apple Maps-Inspired Map Style
Back in August 2020 , Google began testing a seemingly Apple Maps-inspired map style that added darker and deeper landcover colors throughout the world:
2959
The time SUSE, the German Linux company, banned mentioning Jewish holidays
And then punished the Jew who objected to that action.
2960
Cold restart whole system after total outage
"What are folks’ views on systems so large where cold-starting the whole system is almost impossible?"... — M'colleague, Shivam, In A Slackroom Next Door.
2961
The C++20 Naughty and Nice List for Game Devs
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
2962
SSD as Long Term Storage Testing
2022 September 10 What is the best media for long term storage is a question that I read frequently from online forums. First and foremost, as far as I’m aware there is no real “set it and forget it” long term storage. In this digital age, data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years…
2963
The seven specification ur-languages
A brief overview of the formal specification landscape
2964
I'm Not Invidious
TheFrenchGhosty's Blog
2965
Modern Polars: A comparison of the Polars and Pandas dataframe libraries
A side-by-side comparison of the Polars and Pandas libraries.
2966
Sequential modeling enables scalable learning for large vision models
We introduce a novel sequential modeling approach which enables learning a Large Vision Model ( LVM ) without making use of any linguistic data. To do this, we define a common format, "visual sentences", in which we can represent raw images and videos as well as annotated data sources such as semantic segmentations…
2967
The convolution empire strikes back
ConvNets Match Vision Transformers at Scale
2968
When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster
When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece. The logic was this: the outcome for blog posts is a heavy-tailed statistical distribution—most pieces will be read by barely anyone, but a small subset of outliers will do hundreds if not thousands of times…
2969
A systematic approach to debugging
I've got a reputation at work as being a skilled debugger. It's a frequent occurrence that the weird stuff lands on my desk [1] after it goes through another skilled engineer or two. To say my job is substantially "debug the weird shit" would not be an understatement and I'm here for it.
2970
Blog-cells: Interactive code cells for static sites
blog-cells can turn any web page into an interactive code notebook, similar to Jupyter notebooks, but powered by JavaScript and running entirely in the browser.