Website: https://infosecforactivists.org/ Introduction America has a strong tradition of activism, dating back to slave revolts and indigenous uprisings even before the founding of the United States. Today, activism in the US remains critical. Street protests are an essential tool that activists use…

Brian “Beej Jorgensen” Hall v1.0.3, Copyright © February 4, 2025 1 Foreword Hello again, everyone! In my role as an industry professional-turned-college instructor, I definitely see my fair share of students struggling with Git. And who can blame ’em? It’s a seemingly-overcomplicated system with…

So there's a thing we use at work which I call a ratchet. In our codebase, there are "patterns" which we used to use all the time, but we decided to stop using them, but removing all of the existing instances at once is too much work. We want to remove all of these instances eventually, and in the…

April 2007 A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of…

Software engineers are deeply split on the subject of large language models. Many believe they’re the most transformative technology to ever hit the industry. Others believe they’re the latest in a long line of hype-only products: exciting to think about, but ultimately not useful to professionals…

February 03, 2025 at 06:22 Tags Python , Compilation , Machine Learning Spend enough time looking at Python programs and packages for machine learning, and you'll notice that the "JIT decorator" pattern is pretty popular. For example, this JAX snippet: import jax.numpy as jnp import jax @jax.jit def…

You can have your cake and eat it, as long as you bake it carefully. ‘We can do this the quick way and pay later, or the thorough way and pay now.’ This seems to be a fundamental dichotomy in software development, between ‘perfectionism’ and ‘pragmatism’, but I do not think it has to be a trade-off…