In Ukraine suicide drones strike critical infrastructure regularly. Some outages are caused directly by the attacks - destroyed power plants, substations, transformers, power lines, some are scheduled in advance - power grid wasn’t designed to work while some of its power plants and transformers are destroyed and are…
For sure easier than solving it in SAT!
Why network effects and distribution will be king, once more
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We explore language models that recursively call themselves or other LLMs before providing a final answer. The aim is essentially unbounded context, and a way through context rot.
Or four kinds, or six kinds, I'm not picky about how you count them
Gradient descent is the preferred way to optimize neural networks and many other machine learning algorithms but is often used as a black box. This post explores how many of the most popular gradient-based optimization algorithms such as Momentum, Adagrad, and Adam actually work.
Four years after my post on doing network captures on macOS with Process ID, Wireshark 4.6.0 has been released which includes support for parsing this…
Writing a Hypervisor in 1,000 Lines
As we saw in the opening post, SQLite stores metadata about tables in a special "schema table" starting on page 1. We've been reading records from this…
A look at the experiences of activists in East Germany (GDR) dealing with Stasi informants and infiltration before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Here’s a Mastodon thread from a year ago. Just a quick check on how ChatGPT’s getting on … Me: Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when? ChatGPT…
I define "intelligence" as being capable of knowing or understanding, at least within some domain. ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence. It does not know what its output means. It has no idea that words can mean anything.
How building edge-case first led to bloated, overly-granular libraries and what we can do about it
Within free open source software (and free content more generally), there are two major categories of copyright licenses:
A friend called me last week. Someone who’d built web applications back for a long time before moving exclusively to backend and infra work. He’d just opened a modern React codebase for the first time in over a decade.
At one level, this question is not very fair, because an answer to it as stated would be that one simply does not use doubly linked lists. They have been popular in introductory computer science lectures because they are a neat way to explain pointers in a data structure that's easy to draw on a whiteboard, but they…
The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning. New years get people in a reflective...
Using LLMs doesn't make a product special anymore
The gophers nested too greedily and too deep.
Timeline & Responsible Disclosure
Recently a colleague mentioned building NixOS images that run unchanged on multiple architectures. Given the past adventures on this blog with systemd-repart and cross-compiling NixOS, I decide to give this a go.
The one constant that I have observed in my professional life is that people underestimate the need to move fast. Of course, doing good work takes time. I once spent six months writing a URL parser. But the fact that it took so long is not a feature, it is not a positive, it is … Continue reading Why speed matters
Stephen Wolfram explains the rich ruliology of lambdas, made particularly significant by their connection to practical computing. Covers basic computations to undecidability to multiway graphs and evaluation strategies.
I have a spicy git alias that allows me to "archive" old git branches by converting them to tags, making them less visible across git tooling. # ~/.gitconfig…
To start off, we can leverage the STL for this calculation. std::count_if() more precisely:
Pydantic’s JSON loading uses a huge amount of memory; here’s how to reduce it.
Jeffrey Yasskin recently pointed out an interesting security bug: The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google products) would have displayed it as Google.net, potentially tricking users into thinking they were really interacting with Google. To see how…
AWS Senior Principal Engineers, Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes, take us inside Aurora DSQL's development: scaling write operations without two-phase commit, overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and embracing Rust for both data and control planes.
In a service with capacity $\mu$ requests per second and background load $\lambda_0$, the usable headroom is $H = \mu - \lambda_0 > 0$. When $M$ clients align, e.g., after a cache expiry, at a cron boundary, or as a service returns from an outage, the bucketed arrival rate can
