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Visualizing Attention, a Transformer's Heart [video]
Demystifying attention, the key mechanism inside transformers and LLMs.
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Printing Music with CSS Grid
Music notation should be as accessible and as fluid as text is on the web. CSS Grid helps us get there.
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Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past …
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Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites
In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites
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A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
The Map Happenings series on the hugely impactful events that forever changed our world. This week: the story of a little known company called ‘Etak’. I think you’ll find it a fas…
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Controlling the Taylor Swift Eras Tour wristbands with Flipper Zero
Many large concerts feature wristbands that light up on command. They are used to produce varied visual effects across a stadium. One compan...
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Building LLMs from the Ground Up: A 3-Hour Coding Workshop
If your weekend plans include catching up on AI developments and understanding Large Language Models (LLMs), I've prepared a 1-hour presentation on the development cycle of LLMs, covering everything from architectural implementation to the finetuning stages.
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Passkeys: A shattered dream
Firstyear's blog
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Please don't mention AI again
The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.
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MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diver…
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A forged Apple employee badge
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
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Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
In mid-2022 I bought a new domain name.
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How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections . Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds , making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't…
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The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
To use the Montreal subway (the Métro), you tap a paper ticket against the turnstile and it opens. The ticket works through a system called ...
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French court issues damages award for violation of GPL
On February 14, 2024, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued an order stating that Orange, a major French telecom provider, had infringed the copyight of Entr’Ouvert’s Lasso software and violate…
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Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform
Like Heroku, but you own it.
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Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
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PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate.
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CSS gets a new logo and it uses the color `rebeccapurple`
A community vote in the CSS-Next repository on GitHub decided on a new official logo for CSS. The design follows the design language of the logos of other web technologies like JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly. A demonstration of the new rebeccapurple colored CSS logo alongside the logos from JavaScript…
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NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective
Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where …
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Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
Instead of doom-scrolling through my phone in the morning, I built an alternative with a Raspberry Pi, a dot matrix printer, and some PHP.
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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election
Here’s a little “fake stats in the wild” gem that I think you and your followers will find at the least somewhat amusing.
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Hacking 700M Electronic Arts accounts
(Ethically). Here's how I did it.
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Hacking millions of modems and investigating who hacked my modem
Two years ago, something very strange happened to me while working from my home network. I was exploiting a blind XXE vulnerability that required an external HTTP server to smuggle out files, so I spun up an AWS box and ran a simple Python webserver to receive the traffic from the vulnerable server.
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Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)
Pretend you have a really great programming day. You only have to attend a few meetings, have only a few off-topic conversations, don'...
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You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it
Here’s Dave Rupert ( from my notes ): the goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking. I have to constantly remind myself of…
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It's always TCP_NODELAY
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps…