The US is breeding a new generation of avocado eaters. The industry is responding. My infant is six months old, the age when US-based pediatricians, nutritionists, and social media influencers unanimo
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that
You may have heard the exciting news about VMware Fusion and Workstation being free for personal use, but maybe you're finding the Broadcom support portal a little overwhelming... This post is for you
Many companies believe that donating a tiny percentage of their profits to charities or promoting efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is good for the bottom line. In fact, giving away 100% of a
In a recent article in the Financial Times, Markham Heid shares with us a peculiar life crisis. At 41, he has built what many would regard as the good life: he has a family; he is healthy, productive,
If you’re in need of a versatile telephoto zoom lens, there aren’t many choices for the RF mount. Unless you use the EF-RF adapter, there are only two options available, the RF 100-500mm or the RF 100
While Canonical has been investing more into the performance of Ubuntu Linux and engaged some new performance improvements in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's still not the fastest Linux distribution out there
There’s a scene late in Hi-Fi Rush, the rhythm action game by the now-defunct Tango Gameworks, in which protagonist Chai explores a museum dedicated to the antagonistic, oppressive megacorp Vandelay T
needle-in-a-needlestack GPT-4o’s Memory Breakthrough! (NIAN code) Needle in a Needlestack is a new benchmark to measure how well LLMs pay attention to the information in their context window. NIAN cre
As we complete the integration of Fusion and Workstation into Broadcom, we wanted to share with the community some changes to our product lineup and how we deliver them to our users. Most importantly
When they were still in arts school in Seattle in the early 1990s, Jesper Myrfors and Sandra Everingham would sometimes look for inspiration by exploring Fort Worden, an abandoned 19th-century militar
PIN analysis A good friend of mine, Ian, recently forwarded me an internet joke. The headline was something like: “All credit card PIN numbers in the World leaked” The body of the message simply said
Until the arrival of Elliot Noyes as IBM consulting director of design, IBM’s many office products were a confusion of styles: from 1930s-era punched card equipment—complete with steel Queen Anne legs
Do you like going to the cinema? I do. But I also like to know where I am going and which movie I am going to see. But how do you choose? You can’t go to the cinema’s website. There are just too many.
Vladimir Smirnov, a Google Switzerland Site Reliability Engineer, recently published an update saying that he was able to make the Arc A750 GPU work on his new Arm build that runs Linux, which certain
There’s a reason the most successful night of primetime used to be branded “Must See TV.” In the late 1990s, NBC’s “ER” would attract more than 30 million viewers a week in its Thursday 10 p.m. time s
Generative AI is fundamentally changing how we’re approaching learning and education, enabling powerful new ways to support educators and learners. It’s taking curiosity and understanding to the next
May 7, 2024, 6:56pm 1 Hello, First time posting here. I am the original author of the popular Go-based set GitHub - deckarep/golang-set: A simple, battle-tested and generic set type for the Go languag
LLVM used to be hailed as a great thing, but with language projects such as Rust, Zig and others complaining it's bad and slow and they're moving away from it – how bad is LLVM really? What is LLVM? L
We crave magic. It’s that feeling you got walking down the stairs on Christmas morning to see Santa’s presents sitting under the tree. That feeling you got tasting mom’s home-cooked meals after a long
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) left instructions: upon his death, all “diaries, manuscripts, letters…sketches, and so on” should be burnt.1 Kafka also left his papers to the one person he knew would not burn
Dear readers, First off, hello from Substack! I am writing from andrewchen.substack.com where you’ll find me from now on. After 15+ years of writing via wordpress on andrewchen.com (and its predecesso
Charles Clancy is the CTO of MITRE, an American not-for-profit organization managing federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) supporting various US government agencies in defense, he
Ross Bleckner, Falling Birds, 1994 Housekeeping: if you’re interested in the kinds of conversations we have on this Substack, I’m doing a workshop on conflict and friendship in SF in exactly one week
You are probably better off than you were four years ago. Not unless you like pandemics, mass death, mass unemployment, and the shutdown of much in-person work, educational and social activity. It was
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Thanks to the boom in artificia
“Buy our iPad or the piano gets it!” Screenshot: Apple I wonder if Apple CEO Tim Cook was surprised by the visceral revulsion many people felt after viewing the newest commercial for Apple’s iPad. In
Research shows kids who spend two hours a day outside are less likely to develop myopia. nazar_ab/Getty Images If you're a parent struggling to get your kids' off their devices and outdoors to play, h
I consider myself a productive and organized person. At a minimum, people come to me for things because they know I get things done. This doesn’t come naturally to me, and it’s a skill I’ve developed
As I walk around Philadelphia I often converse with Benjamin Franklin, to see what he thinks about how things have changed since 1790. Sometimes he's astounded, other times less so. The things that as
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