For the last four months I’ve been developing a custom container image builder, collaborating with Outerbounds1. The technical details of the builder itself might be the topic of a future article, but there’s something surprising I wanted to share already: you can use S3 as a container registry! You heard it right…
A comprehensive comparison between Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL for search workloads.
This article explains the mechanics behind traceroute, from IP headers and TTL fields to ICMP messages. Learn why traceroute is a crucial tool for network diagnostics, how it differs from ping, and how to interpret its output. Ideal for network administrators, IT professionals, and curious users looking to understand…
I built a magical meme search engine using siglip/CLIP and vector encoding images. It was a fun way to learn about this powerful technology. I'm sharing the …
The photo to the right is of the Staples parking lot behind the York Road store in Baltimore, a classic example of a place that needs to be turned back to urban forest — or developed into a m…
We're going to speed up some numpy code by 100x using "unsafe Python." Which is not quite the same as unsafe Rust, but it's a bit similar, and I'm not sure what else to call it... you'll see. It's not something you'd use in most Python code, but it's handy on occasion, and I think it shows "the nature of Python” from…
The Championnats d’Europe d’Escalade (climbing) in Villars-sur-Ollon has just finished. I couldn’t make it to all the events, but did see the finals of the “Speed” event. It’s a series of head-to-head elimination races up a 15m tall wall, resulting in an eventual victor after enough rounds.
Apple today introduced the new iPad mini, supercharged by the A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence.
I talk a lot here about using computers freely , how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such infrastructure, because there isn't a lot of it out there. As I do so, I'm always acutely aware that I'm…
After operating for almost two years, Ondsel has made the difficult decision to cease operations and close down.
Occurrence of Hyrum's law in Golang
A new Northeastern study delves deep into how parrots use touchscreen devices, with the help of a bespoke gaming app.
Something missing from this series on estimation, until now, has been a discussion of how to “break down” a project into a well-defined task list. I’d not previously written about this because, to me, it’s largely intuitive. But it isn’t for everyone, so this post fills the gap, and explains in detail how I break down…
Text is the medium of digital interaction, and text rendering has an outsized impact on the overall fit and finish of any system. It therefore pains me that axle has for years relied on a low-resolution 8x8 bitmap font. Let’s fix it! Take a look at the characters composing this sentence. Note the curves, the negative…
Rasmus Kyng has written the near-perfect algorithm. It computes the maximum transport flow at minimum cost for any kind of network – be it rail, road or electricity – at a speed that is, mathematically speaking, impossible to beat.
Apple Vision Pro will be available beginning Friday, February 2, at all U.S. Apple Store locations and the U.S. Apple Store online.
The highly controversial indiscriminate child sexual abuse regulation (so-called chat control) could still be endorsed by EU governments after all, as France could give up its previous veto. This is reported by Euractiv and confirmed by internal documents. France considers the new "upload moderation
DrivAerNet++, the largest open-source dataset for car aerodynamics developed to date, can be used to quickly train an AI model to generate novel car designs. This process could potentially lead to more fuel-efficient cars and electric vehicles with longer range.
Scrapscript is a small, pure, functional, content-addressable, network-first programming language. It’s designed to allow creating small, simply shareable programs. The language was created by Taylor Troesh and the main implementation was created by me and Chris.
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.
It's not often that you find yourself staring at code that few people have ever seen, code that was an important part in bringing down the a...
Stable Code, an upgrade from Stable Code Alpha 3B, specializes in code completion and outperforms predecessors in efficiency and multi-language support. It is compatible with standard laptops, including non-GPU models, and features capabilities like FIM and expanded context size.
Google Cloud shares details of an incident impacting one Australian customer's use of Google Cloud VMware Engine. Learn what happened and how we're preventing it from happening again.
We walk through the incremental backup feature committed to the Postgres 17 development branch by Robert Haas. We show an example on our local machine.
I spent 2022 learning to draw and was blindsided by the rise of AI art There is lots to say about this, whether it has been or will be a good thing for artists and society in the long run. I hope to write about it in another post. models like Stable Diffusion. Suddenly, the computer was a better artist than I could…
A fullstack crossplatform app framework for Rust. Supports Web, Desktop, SSR, Liveview, and Mobile.
Matthew Bird Portfolio
