To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell
Four months ago I decided to buy a Tesla Model 3. What promised to be an exciting adventure in the world of electric cars, and some of the most advanced technology brought directly from Silicon Valley, ended up becoming a nightmare from which I still have not found my way out.
Why Nextcloud feels slow to use
No amount of tuning the backend service performance helped, and then I learned why. Oh no. Oh no no no no.
Hacker News Hug of Deaf
About three years ago, I set up a tiny netcat loop on one of my Debian servers to accept arbitrary connections from the Hacker News (HN) community. The loop ran for 24 hours and did exactly three things whenever a client connected:
There is no memory safety without thread safety
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
My dad could still be alive, but he's not
cw: death dad died this summer, from his first heart attack, barely a week after his 57th birthday. i get the first call at 11:30pm from mom, who lived...
The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience. For mov...
Building supercomputers for autocrats probably isn't good for democracy
The shameless spin around Stargate UAE
My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
Romance fraud has been growing as an issue for years. It's not uncommon to see news stories with bewildered victims explaining just how deeply they'd been sucked in. After receiving a number of opener
BERT is just a single text diffusion step
A while back, Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini Diffusion, an experimental language model that generates text using diffusion. Unlike traditional GPT-style models …
An interactive guide to SVG paths
SVG gives us many different primitives to work with, but by far the most powerful is the element. Unfortunately, it’s also the most inscrutable, with its compact Regex-style syntax. In this tutorial, we’ll demystify this infamous element and see some of the cool things we can do with it!
The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?
Markov chains are the original language models
Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.
Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip
I'm in the process of rebuilding my homelab from the ground up, moving from a 24U full-size 4-post rack to a mini rack. One of the most difficult devices to downsize (especially economically) is a NAS. But as my needs have changed, I'm bucking the trend of all datahoarders and I need less storage than the 120 TB (80…
Examples are the best documentation
Examples are the best documentation | exotext
Blurry rendering of games on Mac
ProblemSolutionAffected GamesWhat Apple could do Problem I’ve submitted the issue described in this post to Apple as FB13375033. This issue has been open since September of 2023. If you game …
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
An 8-bay DIY NAS with 10GbE networking, TrueNAS 25.10.0.1, an Intel N300 CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a smallish form factor that occupies less than 20 liters of your office space.
Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with
An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.
Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)
Great mentors help, but purposeful tinkering and grit tend to forge the strongest software engineers.
If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
A client once responded to one of my questions by saying, "Oh Greg, I am too busy living to think about life!” His off-the-cuff comment named a trap al ...
Photographs of 19th Century Japan
A world of dew
Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig
What do each of these languages value most?
Building the mouse Logitech won't make
Modifying the MX Ergo trackball mouse to fix its micro-USB charging, loud switches, and bloated software issues.
O3 beats a master-level GeoGuessr player, even with fake EXIF data
In Which I Try to Maintain Human Supremacy for a Bit Longer
TPU Deep Dive
I've been working with TPUs a lot recently and it's fun to see how they had such different design philosophies compared to GPUs.
Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
“These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It's a very fundamental thing.”
Indefinite Backpack Travel
In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in a laptop backpack, and I’ve been living at this level of minimalism since. The idea is to only own what I need, which allows me to focus more, spend less, travel spontaneously and simplify my life.
Obituary for Cyc
After 40 years, 30 million rules, 200 million dollars, 2000 person-years, and many promises, Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will. Exacerbated by the secrecy and insularity of Cycorp, there remains no evidence of its general intelligence.
Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (2016)
When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex...
Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game
an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other