January 2025 Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick 3 or Get None The usual saying is a bit different: Good, fast, cheap — pick two. Engineering is is a game of compromises: we can’t have it all, if we optimise for
Matthew Rocklin 2025-01-02 12 min read Hello Users, Teammates, and General Well-Wishers! It’s that time of year where companies issue year-end summaries, looking back on the past twelve months, acclaiming success, and forecasting incredible growth for the next year. I thought I’d do something…
John Stuart Mill The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence…
Sociological concept Myth of meritocracy is a phrase arguing that meritocracy, or achieving upward social mobility through one's own merits regardless of one's social position, is not widely attainable in capitalist societies because of inherent contradictions. Meritocracy is argued to be a myth…
The following is an excerpt from a private exchange. I am sharing it with permission, without disclosing the personal details of my correspondent. The idea is to share thoughts that others may have as well. The quoted/indented parts are from my correspondent. Living in isolation and having sincere…
The prolonged fight for net neutrality in America has shifted once again, with the FCC's resurrected regulations struck down by a panel of appeals court judges today. The decision from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, filed today, formally killed the FCC's April order that once again classified…
Continued from Part 1 where we explored Jonze’s allegory on the consequences of capitalism, society’s struggle to move away from self-interest, and the potential for boundless progress once freed from economic pressures Leftist Ideology & Public Transportation Favoring a free public transportation…
The politics in Spike Jonze’s Her are not the primary focus of the film. In fact, there is no specific mention of any notion of sociopolitical landscape throughout the film. Rather, eagle-eyed viewers may notice various breadcrumbs throughout Her that allude to Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) and…
Illustration by Erik Carter “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam,” author Frederik Pohl once wrote. AI has been the subject of sci-fi for so long it’s nearly cliche. Decades before anything resembling large language models arrived, creative…
In November 2023, after OpenAI added the ability for ChatGPT to generate images from DALL-E 3 within the ChatGPT web interface, there was a short-lived meme where users gave the LLM a base image and kept asking the model to “make it more X”, where X can be anything. A regular guy becomes more “bro”…
If you are a coffee-lover, you understand the welcoming feeling coffee provides when you’re trying to wake up. For those who love the taste, a cup of coffee can be enjoyed at any point throughout the day and is often used as a comfort, or for the pick-me-up the caffeine inside provides when you’re…
Photos by Laurence von der Weid. Remove Ads One thing is clear from the get-go: Werner Herzog, the enigmatic German icon of all things Art, likes for things to be precise. He makes sure I know this wi
Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, we cover topics related to Big Tech and startups through the lens of software engineers and engineering lea
Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is as much an ode to lost collaborators and a confrontation with death as it is a making-of doc to 2023’s The Boy and the Heron. Director: Kaku Arakawa Genre: Documentary Run Time: 120′ Global Release Date: December 9, 2024 Where to Watch: Max (US), Netflix (UK), on…
I want to get back into writing more regularly this year, so in light of that, here’s my last year in review. Evaluating LLMs Like many of us in tech, I spent a large portion of 2024 thinking about and working with LLMs, but I was lucky enough to do it for work. I spent the year designing, building,…
“You should actually go out and build the thing you want to see exist—not just say ‘oh, that’s gonna happen. I’m just going to sit back and wait for somebody else to do it’… Things don’t just automatically show up. There are great men and women who go out there and create these things. So try to be…
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that “consuming any type of alcohol — beer, wine, or spirits — increases the risk for at least seven types of cancer.”AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Jan. 3, 2025 Europe Correspondent The U.S. surgeon general on Friday called for alcoholic beverages to carry labels warning…
Over the weekend, the European Union (EU) implemented a new law that makes the USB-C port mandatory for a range of electronic devices including smartphones. As of Saturday (December 28), the EU officially adopted the USB-C as the common standard. The mandate means that all small and medium-sized…
Street Address City, State, Zip Phone Number Featured Aug 19, 2019 3-Hour ‘Midsommar' Director's Cut Screened in NYC Aug 19, 2019 This year’s 12th edition of the Scary Movies festival at Film at Lincoln Center premiered Ari Aster’s extended version of “Midsommar” this past Saturday. Aug 19, 2019…
Technology What Is USB Type C, And What Can It Do? By Jan. 2, 2025 12:15 pm EST Yalcin Sonat/Shutterstock To younger computer users, this may come as a shock, but connectivity used to be a lot more complicated. Before USB (short for Universal Serial Bus) took hold as the common standard for…
Photo: Artwork by Ayatgali Tuleubek In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their…
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Abstract Startup companies solve many of today’s most challenging problems, such as the decarbonisation of the economy or the development of novel life-saving vaccines. Startups are a vital source of innovation, yet the most innovative are also the least likely to survive. The probability of success…
Software companies are touting something called the ‘Rule of 40,’ but some are more flash than substance Whatever numbers investors want to see, management will supply them. Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images Like hemlines and haircuts, stocks go in and out of fashion. So do the…
The year is 2025. The internet in the shape that we’ve known it in the early 2000s is no longer there. Or, not quite in the shape that we’ve seen it before. This is not just plain nostalgia talking - the vibrant ecosystem of blogs, feeds, personal sites, and forums has been usurped by a few…
Table of Contents I've used Linux containers directly and indirectly for years, but I wanted to become more familiar with them. So I wrote some code. This used to be 500 lines of code, I swear, but I've revised it some since publishing; I've ended up with about 70 lines more. I wanted specifically…
‘No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario’ Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91) and author of Armageddon and Paranoia: the Nuclear Confrontation (Profile, 2017). People still argue about the fall of the Roman Empire. They are not going to agree quickly…
TPM (Trusted Platform Module) is an international standard that enables trust in computing platforms in general, providing several security-related features for computer systems, including hashing, encryption, signing, random number generation, and many more! It was created by a computer industry…
In this article, we will learn how asymmetric-key encryption and digital signatures work from a practical perspective. In the previous article, we learned the basics of symmetric-key encryption, including how to generate keys using a password-based key derivation function called PBKDF2, how block…
CLEARWATER — When he jumped into the car that Sunday, Stanley knew where they were going. He started wagging his tail, and his mouth widened into a grin. Usually when they go for rides, his sister, another pit bull, comes along. But when it’s just mom and him, Stanley knows he’s heading to that…
As part of their "Defective by Design" anti-DRM campaign, the FSF recently made the following claim: Today, most of the major streaming media platforms utilize the TPM to decrypt media streams, forcefully placing the decryption out of the user's control (from here).This is part of an overall…
What happens when USB-D arrives? USB-C gets a bit more universal as the EU’s mandate goes into effect Apple has already pulled devices to comply with the Common Charger Directive. Kevin Purdy – Updated Jan 2, 2025 2:49 pm | 330 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story text Size Width * Links…
American Margaux Isaksen smiles during the women's fencing in the Modern Pentathlon on Aug. 19 at the Rio Olympics. She finished fourth in London in 2012 and 20th in Rio. "It makes you feel sort of worthless," Isaksen says of her performance. She calls this current period a "post-Olympic…
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. In Dante’s Inferno, the Roman writer Virgil leads the story’s narrator down through the circles of hell. Each circle is more grotesque and frightening than the last, until finally the pair reach…
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. My father-in-law, with whom I was very close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody civil war taking place…
Protected Media Path Article03/03/2021 In this article This topic discusses three interrelated topics: protected environment, media interoperability gateway, and revocation and renewal. A protected environment (PE) is a set of technologies that enables protected content to flow from and through…
Set of technologies The Protected Media Path is a set of technologies creating a "Protected Environment," first included in Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, that is used to enforce digital rights management (DRM) protections on content. Its subsets are Protected Video Path (PVP) and…
1991 film by Krzysztof Kieślowski The Double Life of Veronique (French: La double vie de Véronique, Polish: Podwójne życie Weroniki) is a 1991 drama film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, and starring Irène Jacob and Philippe Volter. Written by Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, the film explores…
I've been using LUKS for full disk encryption on all my computers for many years. The main benefit is that if someone steals my computer, they don't get access to any of my personal data (unless they are very smart or have a $5 wrench). The main downside is that every time I reboot my computer, I…
Outside Vancouver's Metro Theatre is a plaque commemorating a play that at least two people thought was terrible. It describes how writer Raymond Hull was complaining about the atrocious production he had been watching while standing in the theatre's lobby during an intermission. A tall stranger who…
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