2221
Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail
Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail.
2222
Weird Expressions in Rust
Rust has a very powerful type system, but as a result it has some quirks, some would say cursed expressions. There’s a test file, weird-expr.rs , in the rust repository that tests for some of these and makes sure there consistent between updates. So I wanted to go over each of these and explain how it’s valid rust.
2223
Why LLMs Can't Write Q/Kdb+: Writing Code Right-to-Left
In my previous post I showed how LLMs struggle with coding in q/kdb+; having immediate feedback loops using the q-MCP server does help a…
2224
Attention is a luxury good
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to. Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability …
2225
A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine
How the Darwin-Gödel Machine rewrites its own code to improve, and whether we can trust it
2226
An open-source maintainer's guide to saying “no”
Stewardship in the age of cheap code
2227
Rails on SQLite: new ways to cause outages
This post was originally given as a talk for Friendly.rb and Kaigi on Rails. The slides are also available. Between Litestack and the Rails 8 trifecta of Solid Cable, Solid Cache, and Solid Queue, it’s easier than ever to spin up a Rails app that doesn’t need a database service, or a redis service, or a file storage…
2228
Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog
I hate ads. I also hate tracking and bloat. But I didn't actually hate the latter quite enough to get rid of Disqus for comments. It was a free, good service, and you could turn off ads for the users (which I did).
2229
How do interruptions impact different software engineering activities
Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.
2230
Faster substring search with SIMD in Zig
I've been learning a lot about low level programming languages lately, and for a long time there has been one thing that has interested me: SIMD (or 'single ins…
2231
My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)
TeX and related systems are often associated with their default fonts, Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern (CM) typefaces. While these fonts are excellent, they have become so ubiquitous in the scientific community that many LaTeX users have sought alternative fonts for their documents. As a result, a plethora of font…
2232
Why are smokestacks so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] “The big black stacks of the Illium Works of the Federal Apparatus Corporation spewed acid fumes and soot over the hundreds of men and women who were lined up before the red-brick employment office.” That’s the first line of one
2233
RIP Usenix ATC
USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference . When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I…
2234
Optimizing a 6502 image decoder, from 70 minutes to 1 minute
A little walkthrough on an image decoder algorithm's high-level optimization, in order to make more digestable for a 6502 processor.
2235
A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
2236
2237
2238
Slow social media
How can we design better platforms?
2239
Revisiting Knuth's “Premature Optimization” Paper
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste e…
2240
A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
2241
LLMs and coding agents are a security nightmare
Things are about to get wild
2242
It Awaits Your Experiments
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016 [1] —“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing…
2243
AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery
<no value>
2244
Particle Life simulation in browser using WebGPU
If you don't care about the explanation and want a direct link to the simulation, here you go .
2245
Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE
Notes on installing and netbooting Windows 11 over iSCSI
2246
Solving SICP
This report is written as a post-mortem of a project that has, perhaps, been the author’s most extensive personal project: creating a complete and comprehensive solution to one of the most fa…
2247
Static sites enable a good time travel experience
A static site with version control history enables me to travel into any point in the project’s past and serve the site as it was back in the day.
2248
My 25-year adventure in AI and ML
This is the 25-year story of how I fell into the field of AI.
2249
I uncovered an ACPI bug in my Dell Inspiron 5567. It was plaguing me for 8 years
Imagine you close your laptop lid to put it to sleep, but instead of pausing, it reboots. Not every time, just often enough to be infuriating. You try to save your work, but the machine decides to start over.
2250
The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Niagara Falls is one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world. With a vertical drop of more than 50 meters or 164 feet and a flow rate that often exceeds 2800 cubic meters per second or 100,000 cubic feet per second, it’s