1201
How Bear does analytics with CSS
Bear Blog has a few design constraints for speed, efficiency, and stability. There are many great open-source, privacy-focussed analytics platforms out there...
1202
BBC Modi Documentary Removal
We have observed some confusion about the Internet Archive’s removal of links to a BBC documentary about Indian PM Narendra Modi ("India: the Modi Question"). Internet Archive can confirm that it has removed links in response to DMCA takedown requests from the BBC.
1203
GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
1204
Organic Maps: An open-source maps app that doesn't suck
Organic Maps impressed me with its elegant UI, effective routing, and good ethics.
1205
Treemaps are awesome
An alternative to pprint for generically visualizing heterogeneous, hierarchical data
1206
Ok, it’s time to freak out about AI
There are at least two kinds of catastrophe scenarios, and both are getting more plausible
1207
Why does 0.1 and 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?
Why does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?
1208
GCP Incidents
Over the last 18 months we've had more than a handful of issues with Google Cloud. The incidents, in detail, ahead of our move off Google.
1209
ChatGPT in an iOS Shortcut: Smart HomeKit Voice Assistant
Ever since I tried ChatGPT and GPT-3, everything else feels painfully dumb and useless: Siri, Alexa, Google Home and all other “smart”…
1210
π in Other Universes
How the value of π depends on the definition of distance.
1211
The “three things” exercise for getting things out of talks (2011)
(More general advice on going to talks is here . As with all my webpages, feedback is more than welcome!)
1212
Creating Isometric RPG Game Backgrounds
Using Stable Diffusion techniques to create 2D game environments
1213
IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)
An article on why IRC is still the only chat protocol worth using, and a positive look at the surprisingly autistic-friendly Microsoft Comic Chat IRC client.
1214
The right to use adblockers
Companies increasingly aim to control how users interact with their content online, threatening user freedom. As more companies crack down on browser exten...
1215
Programming languages going above and beyond
Dafny is a programming language which often genuinely amazes me.
1216
Still Love Telnet
How to use the telnet command on the bash command line to debug network problems.
1217
Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
FISA Reform §702 Is a Threat to Democracy At Home and Abroad.
1218
Open source solution replicates ChatGPT training process
Colossal-AI offers an open-source solution to efficiently replicate ChatGPT-like model training at high speed and low cost.
1219
Fastest branchless binary search
Fastest general and simple binary search C++ implementation
1220
1221
How I Made a Heap Overflow in Curl
In association with the release of curl 8.4.0, we publish a security advisory and all the details for CVE-2023-38545. This problem is the worst security problem found in curl in a long time. We set it to severity HIGH. While the advisory contains all the necessary details. I figured I would use a few additional ……
1222
Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
1223
LSD: Not Even Once
Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. […] – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple
1224
Purple Llama: Towards open trust and safety in generative AI
Meta AI announces Purple Llama, a project for open trust and safety in generative AI, with tools for cybersecurity and input/output filtering.
1225
Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money
Learn how psychological biases are used to trick players into gambling money in the new Mario Kart Tour game, raising ethical questions.
1226
1227
A glitch in the SEO matrix
Or: A comprehensive ecosystem of open-source software for big data management
1228
Go 1.21 Release Candidate
Go 1.21 RC brings language improvements, new standard library packages, PGO GA, backward and forward compatibility in the toolchain and faster builds.
1229
Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
I’d read a few times that bringing the temperature of a failing drive down will increase its reliability long enough to salvage important files. When the drive in my trusty Powerbook decided one day last week to stop booting and make horrible clicking sounds, I decided to test the theory.
1230
The undocumented Android change that led to aCropalypse was reported during beta
The bug lies in closed-source Google-proprietary code so it’s a bit hard to inspect, but after some patch-diffing I concluded that the root cause was due to this horrible bit of API ‘design’: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/180526528 .