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
One of the many lies in Silver Lake and WP Engine’s C&D was their claim that Automattic demanded money from them moments before our CEO Matt Mullenweg gave his keynote at WordCamp US. Tha…
In my job I get to speak to lots of people about Rust. Some are just starting out, some have barely ever heard of it, and then some people are running Rust silently in production at a very large company in a very serious product.
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…
This specification defines a new HTTP method, QUERY, as a safe, idempotent request method that can carry request content.
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…
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software.
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.
Long awaited community update is here! Introducing PineVox and bone conduction headset (help us find a name!), IronOS progress, PineNote insights, and PineTime news! We also cover cluster failure, state of services, and the future of the community updates. See you in the upcoming Q&A!
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.
Explore Tandem NonStop architecture principles and their relevance to high availability in software systems like Elixir, Gleam, and Erlang.
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
When I started learning about loss functions, I could always understand the intuition behind them. For example, the mean squared error (MSE) for regression seemed logical—penalizing large deviations from the ground-truth makes sense. But one thing always bothered me: I could never come up with those loss functions on…
A real explanation of discrete Fourier transform (DFT, FFT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and their inverses.
Is DNA all you need?
We respond to Pinecone's recent blog post comparing Postgres and Pinecone. We show that Postgres can outperform Pinecone in the same benchmarks Pinecone covered in their article.
The query optimizer is an important part of any analytical database system as it provides considerable performance improvements compared to hand-optimized queries, even as the state of your data changes.
Interactive Mathematical Applets and Animations
A hands-on introduction to database internals. Build an LSM storage engine with SSTables, compaction, WAL recovery, MVCC, and transactions.
The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family.
You can now connect to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage via IPv6. Here's the story of how we deployed it and why that matters for you.
