1171
Apple Watch with Android
Making Apple Watch functional with Android.
1172
Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)
I began this process on 17 December 2011 and let the tenth anniversary pass without comment, so the time has come to reflect. Firstly, I con...
1173
Finding near-duplicates with Jaccard similarity and MinHash
How do you find near-duplicates in a massive collection of documents? An exploration of the Jaccard similarity metric, and the MinHash hashing trick used to efficiently approximate it at web scale.
1174
We Can Terraform the American West
Why is there almost nothing on the left hand side of the USA? Water scarcity! We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing 30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We shoul…
1175
Timeshare owner? The Mexican drug cartels want you
The FBI is warning timeshare owners to be wary of a prevalent telemarketing scam involving a violent Mexican drug cartel that tries to trick people into believing someone wants to buy their property. This is the story of a couple who recently lost more than $50,000 to an ongoing timeshare scam that spans at least two…
1176
Clean your codebase with basic information theory
Cut out everything that's not surprising.
1177
1178
Sphere Rendering: Flat Planets
I'm a Technical Artist with over a decade of professional experience in both AAA and independent projects.
1179
1180
Reclaiming IPv4 Class E's 240.0.0.0/4
Ever since the supply of fresh IPv4 address blocks was depleted there has been a number of interesting market changes, mostly around the costs to either acquire or lease IPv4 address blocks. Since the demand for IPv4 addressing has not changed that much, prices have gone up, and more providers like AWS, Hetzner, OVH…
1181
Bring back private offices
Open Office Sucks
1182
1183
Marketing to Engineers (2001)
I am a chemical engineer and have been writing copy designed to sell products and services to engineers for 10 years. Here’s what I know about appealing to this special audience:
1184
Zig's (.{}){} Syntax
A look at some unfriendly Zig syntax
1185
You must read at least one book to ride
The first is going to sound bad in a culture where engineers are encouraged to apologize for existing while it is totally acceptable for a grifter that can't code to insist that they're a "thought leader". It is that, in my immediate professional environment, I am consistently acknowledged to be one of the best…
1186
Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal
There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the…
1187
Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format
Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable…
1188
Crafting Painterly Shaders
A detailed essay on my research and process of building a shader to mimic paint, watercolor, and aquarelle by exploring various implementations of the Kuwahara image smoothing filter.
1189
Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?
I had free access to GitHub Copilot for about a year, I used it, got used to it, and slowly started to take it for granted, until one day it was taken away. I had to re-adapt to a life without Copilot, but it also gave me a chance to look back at how I used Copilot, and reflect - had Copilot actually been helpful to…
1190
How I got an O-1 visa as a software engineer
Jump ahead • Timeline • Meeting the extraordinary ability criteria • How much does it cost? • Should you work with a lawyer?
1191
Banning open weight models would be a disaster
My comments on the NTIA AI Open Model Weights RFC
1192
Honey, I shrunk {fmt}: bringing binary size to 14k and ditching the C++ runtime
The {fmt} formatting library is known for its small binary footprint, often producing code that is several times smaller per function call compared to alternatives like IOStreams, Boost Format, or, somewhat ironically, tinyformat. This is mainly achieved through careful application of type erasure on various levels…
1193
Inside the Massive Alleged AT&T Data Breach
I hate having to use that word - "alleged" - because it's so inconclusive and I know it will leave people with many unanswered questions. (Edit: 12 days after publishing this blog post, it looks like the "alleged" caveat can be dropped, see the addition at the end of the post
1194
1195
Lisp: Icing or Cake?
The Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 ended one week ago. 48 games were submitted, a new record for the jam! This past week has been a time for participants to play and rate each other’s games. As I explored the entries, I noticed two distinct meta-patterns in how people approached building games with Lisp. I think these…
1196
Bug hunting in Btrfs
The other day I was implementing multi-threaded stat() calls in bfs . When I ran some benchmarks, I saw something that made my heart skip a beat:
1197
The sins of the 90s: Questioning a puzzling claim about mass surveillance
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, gave an interesting talk at NDSS 2024 titled "AI, Encryption, and the Sins of the 90s".
1198
It is hard to recommend Google Cloud
Discover the challenges of migrating from Google Domains and Container Registry. Explore Google Cloud's strengths and pitfalls, plus read why strategy is key.
1199
Headphone and Amp Impedance (2011)
INTRO: The output Impedance of headphone sources is one of the most common reasons the same headphones can sound different depending on wha...
1200
Anti-patterns in event-driven architecture
Event-driven architecture is great, but it can cause a lot of headaches if it is used for the wrong purpose.