I spent 3 months earlier this year at Recurse Center in New York. Here’s a summary of the highlights of my time there! The view from the Empire State Building, one of the few tourist attractions I vis
or, I don't know what I've been told, rustaceans done stole Guy Steele's gold Table of Contents Some make the claim that "all languages depend on C";1 not only is this statement ill-typed, as implemen
Hazy ResearchAI uses an awful lot of compute. In the last few years we’ve focused a great deal of our work on making AI use less compute (e.g. Based, Monarch Mixer, H3, Hyena, S4, among others) and ru
Setting the stage Being a polyglot is a problem of definition first. Who can be described as a polyglot? At what level do you actually “speak” the given language? Some sources cite that polyglot means
Back when I was managing at Digg and Uber, I spent a lot of time delivering feedback to my management chain about issues in our organization. My intentions were good, but I alienated my management cha
David Baron put this up in Mozilla’s San Francisco office a while back: This is cute way of saying that writing safe concurrent code is, at present, rocket science. This is unfortunate, because the fu
As photographers, we often find ourselves searching for inspiration to fuel our creativity and improve our craft. This pursuit of inspiration can be both exciting and challenging, regardless of where
More than one third of 18 to 24 year olds reported no income through wages or a salary in 2022, according to a recent report out of the St. Louis Fed. That figure is up from about 22% in 1990. Why it
DevStats (sponsored) The best Engineering Leaders know their metrics. Do you know yours? With DevStats, you can get the metrics you need to ship better products faster and answer questions like: How c
Art by GPT-4. Prompt: “The death of the Internet” The internet as we know it has already died once. In the 2010s, the rise of smartphones and mass social media (Twitter/Facebook/Instagram) caused what
It’s that time again; a summary of interesting and useful concepts to spur your curiosity. Click the titles for more information. “Every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively mor
"A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance." —Hunter S. Thompson In our age of abundance we’re constantly faced with choices, which we must
I recently switched my writing from my own domain (running wordpress) to Substack. You can now find me at: andrewchen.substack.com Here's why I did it, and some notes on how I did the migration too. F
Making Sense of Acquire-Release Semantics February 2023 Multiprocessor Synchronization was one of my favorite classes during my undergrad — it had a clear progression from theory to practice, starting
A note from the Editor in Chief: Scientific American is celebrating its 166th year. Given its history as the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S., it's probably no surprise that it has
Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience w
I joined LinkedIn about six years ago at a particularly interesting time. We were just beginning to run up against the limits of our monolithic, centralized database and needed to start the transition
A year of publishing the MDN Blog The MDN TeamMay 3, 20245 minute read When we launched the MDN Blog in May 2023, we were excited and curious to see what our readers would think and how the blog would
Hello! I know I just wrote a blog post about HEAD in git, but I’ve been thinking more about what the term “current branch” means in git and it’s a little weirder than I thought. four possible definiti
↤ S3-Compatible Cloud Storage Costs ↑ Blog ↑ dbdiag: ophistory ↦ Posted 2023-09-20 It’s easy to find documents containing "large" and "elephant". It’s hard to find documents in German which have "larg
I'm sure you agree that it has become impossible to ignore Generative AI (GenAI), as we are constantly bombarded with mainstream news about Large Language Models (LLMs). Very likely you have tried Cha
Around half of all software engineers are self-taught,One way to approximate this number is via the Stack Overflow developer survey. Another rough approximation comes from the fact that over the last
This chain can continue for any number of commands or programs. A very simple example of the benefits of piping is provided by the dmesg command, which repeats the startup messages that scroll through
Published inBradfield · 13 min read· Apr 24, 2016 Adapted from bradfieldcs.com/knives Behold the Thermomix®. Home cooks love it, because it does everything! It has an electric heating element and moto
Beware of the Turing Tar-Pit …in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. Alan J. Perlis What is the Turing tar-pit? It’s the place where a program has become so powerful, so gene
Japan has 140 businesses that are at least 500 years old. A few claim to have been operating continuously for more than 1,000 years. It’s astounding to think what these businesses have endured – dozen
Creativity: it feels ecstatic when you do it right and agonizing when you do it poorly. I should know. I’ve written dozens of songs, essays, and a feature film; built software for Google, startups, an
6 min read· Sep 26, 2023 -- I decided to re-read Fahrenheit 451 with my eldest this last week. I don’t think that I have read this classic Bradbury text since high school. What I had remembered about
Right now, asyncio is one of the trendier topics in Python, and rightfully so – It’s a great way to handle I/O-bound programs! When I was learning about asyncio, It took me a while to understand how i
Published: Tue 24 August 2021 By Mark functions as async. Call them with await. All of a sudden, your program becomes asynchronous – it can do useful things while it waits for other things, such as I/
This blog post is a part of a series about our research toward the next generation of the SecureDrop whistleblowing system. If you haven’t been following along, check out our previous post for some re
2024-05-07Harlequin is a Terminal-based SQL IDE by Ted Conbeer. It is pretty popular, with over 2,500 GitHub Stars and counting. It looks like this: Harlequin is built with Textual to give a very inte
Every now and then I get asked for advice on how to learn about distributed system internals and protocols. Over the course of my career I've picked up a learning and reviewing style that works pretty
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by mediaphotos/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Unsplash. Those of us who believe in the power of books worry all the time that reading, as a pursuit, is collapsing, ec
Jacob Vosmaer's blog 2024-05-02 I have been reading some books about creativity. In this post I will talk about my impressions and what I am learning from them. Why read books about creativity I like
Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content 8th May 2024 I saw this tweet yesterday from @deepfates, and I am very on board with this: Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art.
how do i reflect and summarize the most intense, healing, and intellectually stimulating three months of my life? i will try to do so in a fun, casual, singular “blog post”. why did i want to attend r
Not too long ago, smartphones had more personality. An iPhone with a home button looked distinct from a BlackBerry with a keyboard; an HTC might have used metal instead of the plastic in a Motorola; S
This is the Third part of my 3-chapter blog post: Ten years of building open source standards Much the same as there was a common need for a columnar file format and a columnar in-memory representatio
This is the second part of my 3-chapter blog post: Ten years of building open source standards Connecting the dots In 2015, a discussion started in the Parquet community around the need for an in-memo
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