This blog post explores an alternative formulation of Rust’s type system that eschews lifetimes in favor of places . The TL;DR is that instead of having 'a represent a lifetime in the code, it can represent a set of loans , like shared(a.b.c) or mut(x) . If this sounds familiar, it should, it’s the basis for polonius…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
I’ve been on a weird kick lately making images using Excel. [Here’s one post. I hope to post more soon.] If you add a background color to each cell in a spreadsheet and resize the cell …
Part 1 is mostly about what happened as Bess and I raced against tumor growth to find a new clinical trial that might keep me alive. Part 2 is here, and it is mostly about how this process feels an…
Now is a good time to start a service business. Maybe you should try it! A service business is one where your company sells its work output directly instead of selling a product. Dentists, plumbers, design agencies, pool cleaner, consultants: these are all service businesses. The opposite of a service business is a…
Steve Baker, an engineer in the search quality group at Google, just did a nice post about synonyms on the Google blog. A lot of people seem to think that Google only does simple-minded matching of…
A closer look at op-amp feedback loops and the stability criteria for circuits that use them.
An interactive introduction to Turing machines, the theoretical foundation of modern computing.
Tiny diatoms in the ocean are masters at capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment. They fix up to 20 percent of the Earth’s CO2. A research team at the University of Basel has now discovered a protein shell in these algae that is necessary for efficient CO2 fixation. This groundbreaking discovery can…
In my previous post , I mentioned that I found a number of oddities when digging through the details of various Atari 8-bit file systems. I...
In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used…
You can make regions of an image clickable with a number of techniques, from overlaying an SVG that contains onclick JavaScript handlers all the way to using image maps. I love this idea. I started to think about how I could create an image of my bookshelves that you could click to learn more about each book I am…
Quickwit 0.8 brings indexing and search at an unprecedented scale, indexing at 1PB/day and searching through 50 PB is a reality.
Following my previous post on rate limiting with GCRA, leaky buckets without the buckets , I reviewed my old notes on rate limiting for Exim . I thought I should do a new write-up of the ideas that I hope will be more broadly interesting.
Quick overview of a new blog feature.
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
Exploring different ways to make sense of OpenStreetMap data.
How is tail recursion different from regular recursion? What do continuations have to do with this, what is CPS, and how do trampolines help? This article provides an introduction, with code samples in Python and Clojure.
It gives my brain a pleasant thrum to learn new mathematics which mimics the algebra I learned in middle school. Basically this means that the new system has operations with properties that match those of regular numbers as much as possible. Two pretty important operations are addition and multiplication with the…
The groundbreaking new iPad Pro features a stunningly thin and light design, taking portability and performance to the next level.
This is part 4 of a 5-part series detailing what I wish I had known as an American programmer moving to Berlin. This page details cultural differences and things I wasn’t aware of until I stumbled on them. Politics One thing about Germany, and Europe in general, is that it’s relatively left-wing when compared to the…
Cache all the things. How React Compiler works under-the-hood.
Recently, we had a discussion in our team about undefined behaviour (UB) in C. For those unfamiliar: We say that a program has undefined behaviour when we write code where the language specification doesn't define what should happen during execution. That means compilers can do whatever they like if they encounter…
Studies from two very different cities showed the same result.
Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple, the most valuable company on the planet. Apple contributes nothing to their work, but it will get to steal a third of their wages:
In November 1996, Apple released the Power Macintosh 4400 with a starting price of $1,725. Also sold as the Power Macintosh 7220, it’d be easy to write this machine off as just another grain of sand on the beige beach that was Apple’s product line in the 1990s. I mean, just look at this thing, pictured here with an…
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