An underwater landslide knocked out two critical submarine cables serving Africa
On Sunday, August 6, an undersea landslide in one of the world’s longest submarine canyons knocked out two of the most important submarine cables serving the African internet. The loss of these cables knocked out international internet bandwidth along the west coast of Africa. In this blog post, we review some history…
Upload a Godot HTML5 Game to Itch.io with GitHub Actions
Automatically upload your Android Godot game to itch.io with Github Actions godot-html-export and itchio-butler-upload
A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)
Lisp in Life is a Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway’s Game of Life.
Street Fighter II, subtile accurate animation (2021)
This article is the final part of a series about Street Fighter II and the CPS-1. It is recommended to read the previous entries before reading this one.
Faster PostgresSQL to BigQuery Transfers
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Scaffolded LLMs as natural language computers
Recently, LLM-based agents have been all the rage – with projects like AutoGPT showing how easy it is to wrap an LLM in a simple agentic loop and prompt it to achieve real-world tasks. More generally, we can think about the class of ‘scaffolded’ 1 LLM systems – which wrap...
Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit
Joel Gustafson
Eytzinger Binary Search
This tutorial is loosely based on a 46-page paper by Paul-Virak Khuong and Pat Morin “Array layouts for comparison-based searching” and describes one particular way of performing efficient binary search by rearranging elements of a sorted array in a cache-friendly way.
Color of the Night Sky (2019)
What color is the night sky? Contrary to prevailing views, the moonless night sky is rarely, if ever, black or blue. It is actually much more colorful. In this article, I'll describe some of the colors and the physical reasons for those colors.
Babashka Babooka: Write Command-Line Clojure
There are two types of programmers in the world: the practical, sensible, shell-resigned people who need to google the correct argument order for ln -s ; and those twisted, Stockholmed souls who will gleefully run their company’s entire infrastructure on 57 commands stitched together into a single-line bash script.
Writing a Debugger from Scratch: Stacks
(New to this series? Consider starting from part 1) At the end of the last post, DbgRs could finally set breakpoints. That was the last really critical feature needed for controlling execution of a program. Now that it can stop on an arbitrary function or code location, the next step is to find more information about…
Look ma, no React: I recoded my portfolio site with vanilla everything
Welcome to my new site, brought to you by vanilla everything. No Javascript frameworks, CSS libraries or flashy animations. Just markdown, html templa...
Do you really need foreign keys?
Foreign keys are a bit like that well-intentioned friend who insists on double-checking everything you do. They’re often recommended as a must-have for enforcing referential integrity checks in your database.
Why is GPT-3 15.77x more expensive for certain languages?
How large language models process multilingual data differently
Apple Vision Pro – Potential hardware issues
Introduction This part will primarily cover the hardware and related human physical and visual issues with the Apple Vision Pro (AVP). In Part 3, I intend to discuss my issues with the applications…
The Dome: A simple violation of determinism in Newtonian mechanics (2005)
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15260. Homepage: www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page is available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/goodies
Amazon officially becomes a health care provider after purchase of One Medical
Together, Amazon and One Medical will help more people get better care, when and how they need it.
George Orwell's 6 rules for writing (2018; originally published in 1946)
George Orwell was greatly concerned with truth and language and how deliberately misleading language is used to conceal disagreeable political facts. To guide writers into writing clearly and truthfully, he proposed six writing rules.
Nix Survival Mode: macOS upgrades won't break Nix anymore
For years, macOS upgrades have broken Nix. We've updated the Determinate Nix Installer to ensure that this no longer happens, eliminating yet another annoyance for macOS users.
Researchers mined Erowid and fed the entries to an AI
Researchers mined an old drug forum and fed the entries to an AI. The result could augur a new class of psychedelic-based antidepressants.
Envisioning a Simplified Intel Architecture
Intel investigated architectural enhancements and modifications for a 64-bit mode-only architecture.
A Critique of the Cap'n Proto Schema Language (2019)
Historical reference to Ian Denhardt’s A Critique of the Cap'n Proto Schema Language (2019-06-25), with archive and current documentation links.
YOLO-Driven Development Manifesto
YOLO-driven development - not for the faint of heart
The PostgreSQL documentation and the limitations of community
In my opinion, the PostgreSQL documentation is simultaneously excellent and fairly poor, and both its excellence and its shortcomings are di...
NVMe SSD boot with the Raspberry Pi 5
In my video about the Raspberry Pi 5, I mentioned the new external PCIe port makes it possible to boot the standard Pi 5 model B directly off NVMe storage—an option which is much faster and more reliable than standard microSD storage (even with industrial-rated cards!). Enabling NVMe boot is pretty easy, you add a…
Consortium launched to build the largest open LLM
The University of Turku and one of Europe’s largest private AI labs Silo AI, with its large language model (LLM) arm SiloGen, are today announcing a large-scale initiative on open and trustworthy L