I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is g
A sort of preface There’s a phrase that’s been living inside my head lately, a brain parasite, some burrowing larva covered in thorns and barbs of words. When it moves around in there it churns at the
This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. Programmers have spent decades writing code for AI models, and now, in a full circle moment, AI is bein
American right-wing advocacy group The John Birch Society (JBS) is an American right-wing political advocacy group. Founded in 1958, it is anti-communist, supports social conservatism, and is associat
Are you one of those people who spend countless hours tinkering with configuration for their editors, IDEs, terminals, or other applications? Do you find yourself spending more time on this never-endi
Linus Torvalds once wrote in a book that he created Linux just for fun, but it ended up sparking a revolution. Git, his second major creation, also an accidental revolution. It’s now a standard tool f
BlogHow to use the Bitwarden forwarded email alias generator Bitwarden includes a very handy integration that you may not be aware of called forwarded email aliases. Essentially, they make it possibl
The ideal word count for your web page depends on the type of piece, your audience, and many other factors. Ask three different writers what the best word count is for an article, blog post, or web pa
July 2024 Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does. Mere obstinacy, on the other
All of the United States’ most important governing institutions are failing at once. Congress, of course, has long been barely able to function. Every year, it struggles merely to fund the rest of the
The plan for the day — a radiant Monday at the end of June, with no classes to teach — included two hours writing his new book, one preparing the next program of his podcast, two more to record it, an
"Undying love at our wedding," the author writes. Courtesy of Jeffrey D. Boldt My wife Rebecca and I celebrated our 26th anniversary while she was getting in-patient care at a hospice center for pain
Economic programs of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt This article is about the United States economic program and public services program. For other uses, see New Deal (disambiguation).
The Unix background of Linux's 'file-max' and nr_open kernel limits on file descriptors June 19, 2021 Somewhat recently, Lennart Poettering wrote about File Descriptor Limits. In passing, Poettering s
In the 2010s, the national unemployment rate dropped from a high of 9.9 percent to its current rate of just 3.5 percent. The economy expanded each and every year. Wages picked up for high-income worke
The above picture, from a cafe where I rested after a sixteen-mile walk, isn’t anything special. Neither is the town it’s in, Tournon-sur-Rhône, which is my least favorite of the string of mid-sized a
Training in ideology and correct political thinking have long been a part of the political culture of the CCP, stretching back into the 1940s, and drawing also on lessons from the Soviet Union. Report
At the end of every year, I write up the major lessons of the past year and send it to the Scale AI team. This year, given the degree to which AI has become a global topic, I wanted to share it broadl
Everyone’s familiar with arguments about who gets to have an article on Wikipedia, but you don’t hear as much about arguments over who gets to be a source on Wikipedia. That changed a bit last week wh
Posted by on under As of this week and after almost four years, I'm not a Twilio employee anymore. I'm writing this while I work through a range of conflicting emotions, and try to adapt to new daily
Systematic decline in online platform quality Enshittification is a pattern where online services and products experience a decline in quality over time. It is observed as platforms transition through
I don’t know if there are dedicated teams at Apple or other companies to deal with death, but there probably should be. Though I was happy to see the Legacy Contact feature introduced a couple years a
It was eight years ago that I lived through some of the worst weeks of my life as a professional software engineer. I was working for a small startup that was about to be acquired. Or about to go bank
Published in 2014, Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies has shaped the debate on AI alignment for the past decade. More than any other book on the topic, it is responsible
Practice Computer History Open source is not a goal as much as a means to an end. By Posted Jul 3 2024 Economists and others focused on money—like my bank—have had a lot of trouble figuring out the fr
August 2016 This article describes my experience contributing a medium-sized feature to Python. In short: I wrote PEP 471 and contributed os.scandir() to the Python standard library and the CPython co
June 2023 Summary: This article describes some principles I’ve found useful for designing good Python library APIs, including structure, naming, error handling, type annotations, and more. It’s a writ
In late February 2014, Daniel was at his computer trading bitcoin on Tokyo-based crypto exchange Mt. Gox. Suddenly, the website flashed white and became unresponsive. In a panic, Daniel turned for ans
This article first appeared in Computer magazine and is brought to you by InfoQ & IEEE Computer Society. The CAP theorem asserts that any networked shared-data system can have only two of three desir
March 2021 Summary: I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for
April 2017 Summary: Recently I wrote approximately 500 lines of Python code that implements just enough of a Git client to create a repository, add files to the index, commit, and push itself to GitHu
March 2017 Go to: | | | Recently we implemented a duplicate image detector to avoid importing dupes into Jetsetter’s large image store. To achieve this, we wrote a Python implementation of the dHash p
Posted December 14, 2023 As software has eaten the world, it has become integral to every industry and nearly every endeavor in our society. As a result, the governments around the world have become i
Photographs by Gena Steffens In the steamy heat of afternoon, Yamit Diaz Romero steered our motorized longboat around overhanging bamboo branches and islets in the Claro Cocorná Sur River, in western
Earlier this year, I moved from San Francisco to New York with my dogs, kids, and husband. My family rented an apartment. And once we figured out that we liked it here and wanted to stay, we looked to
Marble Arch Mound prepares to open to the public, July 2021. (Hollie Adams/Stringer.) This July 4th, would you consider becoming a paid member of Persuasion? It’s the support of our paying members tha
(Image credit: ilgmyzin/Unsplash) ChatGPT has inadvertently revealed a set of internal instructions embedded by OpenAI to a user who shared what they discovered on Reddit. OpenAI has since shut down t
In 1968, at the first NATO Software Engineering conference, the term "software crisis" was coined. These conferences were pivotal moments in computing history, as they were some of the first efforts t
In 2015, Dan McKinley laid out a model for software teams selecting technologies. He proposed that each team have a limited supply of “innovation tokens”, and, when selecting a technology, they can ch
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