Nathan Upchurch, 11 June 2024 GNU/Linux FOSS/FLOSS KDE Stallman was right; in the wake of Microsoft’s announcement of its much-maligned Recall feature and widespread public backlash to the terms and c
Around 6-8 months ago I started exploring MicroVMs out of curiosity. Around the same time, I saw an opportunity to fix self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions. Actuated is now in pilot and aims to solv
In 1984 John Gage of Sun Microsystems was credited as saying "The Network is the computer." Almost four decades ago, John had a vision of distributed systems working together to be greater than the su
Contents So far, we've seen many ways to read a file from different programming languages, we've learned about syscalls, how to make those from assembly, then we've learned about memory mapping, virtu
Developing a database is a lot like building a company. At its core, a database is only as good as the way it’s built, the data people put into it, and the use cases built on top of it. Similarly, a c
Interview Big data is no longer hailed as the "new oil." It has gone out of fashion, both in terms of hype and because its foundational technology – Apache Hadoop – was surpassed by cloud-based blob s
Some years ago, I happened to meet a survivalist and conspiracy theorist. He told me he had weapons stashed inside the walls of his house, was ready to use them in defence of “English” women and child
The latest version of the systemd init system is out, with the openly confrontational tag line: "Available soon in your nearest distro, now with 42 percent less Unix philosophy." As Lennart Poettering
At Meta, Bento, our internal Jupyter notebooks platform, is a popular tool that allows our engineers to mix code, text, and multimedia in a single document. Use cases run the entire spectrum from what
The Boom movement in the mid-20th century marked a literary renaissance in Latin America, drawing global attention to writers from all across the continent. With magical realism at the forefront, lite
Image Credit: Python Foundation (Logo) Joining Strings in Python: A "Huh" Moment June 15, 2024 10 min, 2.07k words Programming I just love it when random conversations on Mastodon result in a “Huh, I
Table of Contents Docker is extremely popular these days. Too bad it's not very good. A note in advance: This is absolutely not about Docker being too "opinionated" for me, or other tools being more f
by V.R. I am not sure I am such a big fan of reimplementing NetworkManager… – Lennart Poettering’s famous last words, March 2011 10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of t
The experiences and views of each site’s users – from how much political content they see to the platforms’ impact on democracy Pew Research Center illustration The Pew-Knight Initiative supports new
June 14, 2024 The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffu
Your email inbox is full of spam. Your letterbox is full of junk mail. Now, your web browser has its own affliction: slop. “Slop” is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated mater
In his farewell address, Ronald Reagan described America as the “shining city on a hill”, open to “anyone with the will and heart to get here”. I was one of those inspired to try, and today the dynami
A widely shared definition of “freedom” is tough to agree upon, but until the 1930s, a broad group of Americans, from poets and architects to business owners and conservative politicians, shared a vis
In the valiant effort to combat imposter syndrome and gatekeeping, the programming world has taken a bad turn down a blind alley by celebrating incompetence. You don't have to reduce an entire profess
In most of the business world — and the world in general — the default setting is caution, consensus, and, above all, a low tolerance for bad bets. Venture capitalists are not wired this way. In their
When developing web apps, we often need to call different web services. When configuring the communication and connection of different web services, we frequently encounter the concepts of URI, URL, a
Why Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs matters Brian HarveyUniversity of California, Berkeley In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the mos
Heroku made it easy for any developer to build and run applications in the cloud without managing their own infrastructure. Now 15 years later, it continues to inspire the next generation of developer
Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen2024-06-03 TL;DR: The DuckDB team is very happy to announce that today we’re releasing DuckDB version 1.0.0, codename “Snow Duck” (anas nivis). To install the new ve
Did you know that some Python modules can double-up as handy command-line tools? For example, you can run Python's webbrowser module from the command-line to open up a given URL in your default web br
I ran into this fascinating article (I wrote another blog post discussing it) and that got me thinking. How would I approach building a dead-drop implementation? For that matter, what do we need from
A few years ago, I came across a particularly evocative description of the website Are.na. I’ll describe Are.na in the plainest possible fashion first: it’s a website where you can privately or collab
Tools For Thought April, 2000: a revised edition of Tools for Thought is available from MIT Press including a revised chapter with 1999 interviews of Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, Brenda Laure
A librarian in Louisiana – one of the first in the US to file a lawsuit for defamation against her detractors – is speaking out about the fight she’s been part of as censorship and books bans escalate
Illustration: The Verge Google launched its note-taking app NotebookLM last year for researchers, students, and anyone who needs to organize the information they’ve gathered. Now, users can now upload
Assumed Audience: Programmers, hackers, software engineers and technology executives. Discuss on Hacker News. Epistemic Status: Confident and maybe a little cocky. tl;dr: C is the only existing langua
GitHub is ecstatic to unveil ArmⓇ-based Linux and Windows runners for GitHub Actions. This new addition to our suite of hosted runners provides power, performance and sustainability improvements for a
By Zed A. ShawWhen you think think of the word "robber" what comes to your mind? Do you imagine this guy? No, of course not. You imagine someone low class, poor, desperate, or crazy. Someone who needs
Written by David Anderson on June 5, 2024 What is PID 0? I get nerd-sniped a lot. People offhandedly ask something innocent, and I lose the next several hours (or in this case, days) comprehensively f
It's AdamW Essay Time again! If you're looking for something short and snappy, look elsewhere. Kamil Paral kindly informs me I'm a chronic sufferer of Graphomania. Always nice to know what's wrong wit
Can moral judgments be true or false, or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might hav
Rene Haas is chief executive of Arm, the chip designer behind the processors in 99 per cent of all smartphones. After being bought by SoftBank in 2016, the UK-headquartered company became last year’s
Published 20 March 2017 Share page About sharing Image source, Getty Images Image caption, Shipowners and traders meet in shipping agency Lloyd's of London's coffeehouse in 1863 By Tim Harford BBC Wor