A decision that arises over and over when designing concurrent programs is whether to represent program state in control flow or as data. This post is about what that decision means and how to approach it. Done well, taking program state stored in data and storing it instead in control flow can make programs much…
Open-source research project that explores the design space of binary search trees to implement persistent and concurrent linear list data structures.
I came across a random tweet, found a Wikipedia page and bumped into some smart people and long story short, apparently compression is equivalent to general intelligence.
This is a fun challenge: The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who picked them, Dr. Jerry Solinas, passed away in…
I will demonstrate FPGA-based 64-bit RISC-V computer, capable of booting and running the riscv64 port of Fedora. Using Free/Libre packages available as part of the Fedora repositories, this machine is capable of recompiling not only its own software (e.g., kernel, glibc, gcc), but also its own gateware (i.e., FPGA…
Over the course of my Spring 2020 semester at Harvey Mudd College , I developed a self-hosting compiler entirely from scratch. This article walks through many interesting parts of the project. It’s laid out so you can just read from beginning to end, but if you’re more interested in a particular topic, feel free to…
Graphing TLA+ state spaces for fun and profit.
I lived in New York City for 8 years and never had anything major stolen. In San Francisco, it took 2 weeks…
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
The copy-paste library, containing various Lodash replacement functions, a copy-paste framework, and more.
The recent Ohio train derailment and subsequent fire that released vinyl chloride into the environment has been a terrifying experience for the nearby population. The accident rekindles memories of the 1979 train accident in Mississauga, Ontario, when over 200,000 people had to be evacuated after a wheel bearing…
Why is the US military ceding ground to China? As a new DOD report shows, big defense contractors are middlemen whose main purpose is stock buybacks and dividends.
Software is weird. In its basic form, software is this very abstract thing with seemingly little connection to the real world. Yet graphical applications running on a hardware device like a modern phone feel very real, even to people who have no appreciation of what happens within this “black box”. Some pieces of…
A short tale of how horrible code yields clean performance.
Even though I don't respect podcasts as an information delivery system, I recently listened to a podcast that felt like having an epiphany.
A few weeks back, I asked the Norwegian public what the year looks like inside their heads. It led to a deluge of responses. Here's a summary of more than 75 000 month placements, and nearly 40 000 questionnaire responses.
img {border-style: groove; border-width: 1px;} I love Autohotkey so much that it keeps me on Windows. It’s the best GUI automation tool out there. Here’s a shortcut that opens my current browser tab in the Wayback Machine: #HotIf WinActive("ahk_exe firefox.exe") >!^s:: { Keywait("RControl") Keywait("RAlt")…
How to give GPT access to large amounts of data
The other night I was mindlessly scrolling about on my phone through Instagram, as one does when they really ought to go to bed but are stuck being entertained instead of resting, when I came upon …
Pay attention to how people are talking about freedom. It's a leading indicator of cultural (and economic) trends.
As a VyOS evangelist, maintainer, and more, I’ve been meaning to write a simple series of “how-to” guides for VyOS for a while. Sure, there are plenty of guides out there, but I think a lot of them fall short in demonstrating WHY you are entering specific commands.
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Falling down a rabbit hole
I parse HackerNews (HN) “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” posts from 2013 to time of writing and analyse them to better understand the trends in the data job market with a focus on the fate of data science. Here are my main conclusions:
Learn how Nix Flakes improve the composability and reproducibility of builds in Nix and Devbox.
