I'm a PhD student currently, which means that I spend most of my work life reading, or thinking about what I should read next. The timelines for my reading schedules range from what I need to read before a class or meeting next week, to what I ought to read for a paper or research trajectory that won't have any…
For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating.
Scheme to the Spec is a series on the more complex, often overlooked aspects of programming language implementation.
Five patterns to help Single Page Applications fetch data from remote sources
Suppose you have an array of floating-point numbers, and wish to sum them. You might naively think you can simply add them, e.g. in Rust:
A while back I had to deal with a bit-packed format that contained a list of integer values encoded in one of a pre-defined sets of bit widths, where both the allowed bit widths and the signed-ness…
It's hard to make progress on side projects sometimes. Getting started is easy when we see the bright future of the project. Then somewhere in the middle, we get stuck in lists of tasks to do, a long way in and still a long way from the finish line.
Follow me on Bluesky! A Log-Structured Merge tree, or LSM, is a popular data structure for storage engines. It’s what is used by RocksDB, which is sort of...
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
This post is about the AioContext lock removal in QEMU 9.0 (planned for release in 2024), how we got here, and what it means for multi-threa...
The recent move among U.S. states to add digital “age verification” to websites which serve adult content is a troubling one. Digital age verification systems are rife with privacy concerns, many requiring you to upload your government ID to third-party vendors or even directly to the website in question. Privacy…
A review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, exploring how social media and overprotective parenting affect children’s mental health.
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?
My long-time collaborator Richard Barnes [1] used to say that "in security, trust is a four letter word" , and yet the dominant experience of using any software-based system—which is, you know, pretty much anything electronic—is trusting the manufacturer. Not only is there no meaningful way to determine what software…
Large language models (LLM) have been all the rage for quite some time now. Looking beyond the hype though, they have severe limitations: hallucinations, lack o
His boundless ambition is putting AI, and the world, on a dangerous path.
On Friday we had an internal policy violation that affected three companies. I’ve been in touch with the founders and I’m appalled we made…
You should neither trust outward appearances, nor let them intimidate you. There is always a discord between the appearance that a person or organization projects, and their actual nature. For this reason, always be careful about the people and organizations in whom you place your trust.
Let’s start by defining the word Wardriving: it is the search for WIFI wireless networks from a vehicle equipped with a computer. This would be the classic definition. I define modern wardriving as the search for WIFI networks, Bluetooth devices … Continue reading →
For programmers new to cryptography, there are plenty of “known unknowns” – unfamiliar terms like “elliptic curves” and “random oracles”, and unnecessarily long acronyms (“RSASSA-PKCS-v1_5”, like really?). But what really gives cryptography its reputation is the unknown unknowns. The things that catch even experienced…
For a long time, I couldn’t quite grasp what the DOS APPEND command could possibly be good for. Until I came across a situation which APPEND was made for.
In my last post I floated the idea of writing a slow, edit-prone shell script instead as a self-rebuilding C program.
I’ve invested leisure time to save time when I’m working hard, not to save keystrokes but to save mental energy for the project at hand.
Writing an interpreter for a custom bytecode opens the door for rendering interactive custom Winamp skins in the browser
Manipulating Chess-GPT’s World Model
