The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory. Cache is seen as an optimization for small data: if it fits in L2, it’s going to be processed faster; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do. Most likely, you believe that code like this is the fastest way to shard data (I’m…
If I asked you to name the most common chronic disease in children, what would you say? Asthma comes top of mind, but there is something five times more common in kids: cavities. We don’t typically think of dental cavities as a chronic disease—in part because of the separation between medicine and dentistry—but it is…
A grab bag of less frequently talked about git adjacent points.
Edit : A better title would've been " commit every day that you work ". I don't mean you should work on weekends or not take time off, and whatever you work on doesn't need to "ship to prod".
Apple Intelligence makes a lot of sense when you get out of the AI bubble. Plus, the cool technical details Apple shared about their language models "thinking different."
noyb has filed a GDPR complaint regarding transparency issues, the right of access and the use of inaccurate information about users
understanding how actions taken with the best of intentions can put your organization in a straightjacket
Earlier this year, a user at Practical ZFS asked a deceptively simple question: I have a Proxmox pool of three four-wide RAIDz1 vdevs. Whenever my VM is running, all twelve... Read More
Unboxing the dark arts of finance
When first seeing an Amiga 500 computer, it wasn't the games but a copy of the painting program Deluxe Paint II that really got me hooked. Since then, computers and visual art have forever been linked in my mind. Apart from dreaming of an Amiga of my own, my boyhood interest in technical marvels was never about…
The Apple II line of computers had an amazing run, from 1977 to 1993. In that time, hundreds of thousands of pieces of software were written for it, including many tens of thousands of games. Like any platform, however, the number of truly great games within that range is much smaller. If you ask any former (or…
https://blog.packagecloud.io/illustrated-guide-monitoring-tuning-linux-networking-stack-receiving-data/
How to infer character encodings with statistics
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses to the initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the si…
Fructose is a sweetener added to ultra-processed foods, typically in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. WashU research shows that the liver turns fructose into lipids that many types of cancers crave.
The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Wh…
A rack-scale design that drives data center power efficiency.
Tim and Neal’s thoughts on the definition of the “Metaverse,” its technological and economic growth, Neal’s reaction on the day Facebook changed its name to Meta, the future of Fortnite , their thoughts on Apple’s Vision Pro, blockchains, and the ethics of Generative AI, plus “Snow Crash 2," a
1974 MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in Shawn Buckleys IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.
In the 1990s, computers were magic and we were wizards. Want proof? I offer below, Larry Wall’s foreword to Learning Perl from 1993. It greatly inspired a very young me who wandered into a book shop, picked up an odd book with llama on the cover and a seemingly misspelled title. The first few pages had me hooked and…
In modern times, everyone knows that writing assembly is a fool's errand: compilers are the result of literal engineer-centuries of work, and they know the processor much better than you do.
The Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped appliance is an integrated hardware and software solution that lets you run workloads at the tactical edge.
Almost nobody understands how traceroute works. Worse, it's not a real tool
LlamaIndex introduces LlamaParse and LlamaParse for production-grade RAG. Unlock complex PDF data to improve LLM response quality. Discover how today.
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
I wanted to add an internal USB port to my ThinkPad X1 Nano which should have been a fairly easy thing to do, but it wasn't.
