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Caching is an abstraction, not an optimization
I've always been told that caching is a tool to make software faster. That, given some careful considerations to consistency, caching makes it so that when...
3212
Big tech has disrupted the social contract
I rented a car from Turo this weekend and it might as well have exploded...
3213
No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons
Part 3 of my 12-year journey—what my first rocky job taught me about boundaries and value.
3214
Autodesk's John Walker Explained HP and IBM in 1991 (2015)
One reader of this column in particular has been urging me to abandon for a moment my obsession with IBM and look, instead, at his employer -- Hewlett Packard. HP, he tells me, suffers from all the same problems as IBM while lacking IBM’s depth and resources. And he’s correct: HP is a shadow of
3215
Past, present, and future of Sorbet type syntax
A discussion of how Sorbet's type syntax came to be, the problems it solves, and how it could improve.
3216
Perpetual futures, explained
Crypto’s most popular product offers capital efficiency for professionals, leveraged exposure for the masses, rich yields for market makers — and a poorly understood failure mode.
3217
The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and final…
3218
Encrypting files with passkeys and age
Encrypting files with passkeys, using the WebAuthn prf extension and the TypeScript age implementation.
3219
How exchanges turn order books into distributed logs
Every modern exchange is a distributed database in disguise. This article reveals how trading engines transform chaotic streams of buy and sell orders into a perfectly ordered, replayable log, ensuring fairness, determinism, and market data reliability.
3220
Nix Derivations, Without Guessing
I went on a little low-level Nix adventure yesterday and early this morning because of this excellent blog post. In it, Farid builds up the simplest possible Nix derivation—making a file that has the contents “hello world”. Here’s what I like about it:
3221
A triangle whose interior angles sum to zero
In hyperbolic geometry, the sum of a the interior angles of a triangle can be any value less than π. If the sum is zero the triangle has area π.
3222
Why the Sanitizer API is just `setHTML()`
Why the Sanitizer API is just <code>setHTML()</code>
3223
Train and Weather Tracker with Raspberry Pi and E-Ink
A dashboard with the weather forecast and top headlines is an easy, but useful little project.
3224
The Block Stacking Problem
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/jdnorton.html
3225
Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook
Hermann Ludwig Heinrich Count of Pückler-Muskau was born in 1785 to the Earl Pückler and was later granted sovereignty over his land by King Friedrich III. His fame is unbroken today, but not because of his political power, but because his house chef named a dessert after him. In German and Dutch, the now popular…
3226
Bilinear down/upsampling, aligning pixel grids, and that infamous GPU half pixel (2021)
See this ugly pixel shift when upsampling a downsampled image? My post describes where it can come from and how to avoid those! It’s been more than two decades of me using bilinear texture filterin…
3227
How much do electric car batteries degrade?
Many electric cars will still have more than 80% of their initial capacity after 200,000 miles.
3228
California needs to learn from Houston and Dallas about homelessness
Houston and Dallas reduced street homelessness dramatically not by being more compassionate or cruel than California, but by building working systems
3229
The problem with "vibe coding"
An article from dylanbeattie.net
3230
Firefox Forcing LLM Features
Mozilla forcing llm features and providing no gui for users to disable them
3231
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The Humble Programmer (1972)
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
3234
Raising Kids to Have an Analog Childhood in a Digital World
Kids were not meant to be brought up in the digital world that exists today as it is incompatible with human neurological development.
3235
Comparing Claude System Prompts Reveal Anthropic's Priorities
Reviewing the few changes in the Claude 4.0 system prompts, we get a sense for how system prompts program chatbot applications.
3236
The lottery ticket hypothesis: why neural networks work
The lottery ticket hypothesis explains why massive neural networks succeed despite centuries of theory predicting they should fail
3237
The best worst hack that saved our bacon
No-one really likes engineering war stories, but this one's relevant because there's a moral to it. I've talked before about defining technical debt as technical decisions that provide immediate value, but with long-term negative impact if they aren't cleaned up. Sometimes introducing technical debt
3238
How did Facebook intercept competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic? (2024)
A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.
3239
Pretty State Machine Patterns in Rust (2016)
A computer scientist working in open source towards a more hopeful future.
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