It’s not news that many Americans dislike health insurance companies. In fact, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare who was murdered two weeks ago, reportedly warned his colleagues months ago t
In the spring of 1969, Hannah Arendt solicited funding to write a book. “You may remember that more than 10 years ago I published, under the title The Human Condition, a book that dealt with the three
The first time I can remember logging on to the net was around 1998, when I was five years old. My father was with me; I remember him working his magic, getting the modem to hum its infamous atonal tu
Download PDF The Internet is a vast ocean of human knowledge, but it isn’t infinite. And artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have nearly sucked it dry. The past decade of explosive improvement in
Opinion Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Why it is unlikely new developments in machine intelligence will eventually make programming obsolete. By Posted Dec 4 2024 Much has been made of t
EYES WIDE SHUT: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT An In-Depth Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s Misunderstood Masterpiece Mask on the pillow—one of the most enduring images in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
16 November 2022 – Baldur Bjarnason (What follows is an extract from Out of the Software Crisis) Programming as theory-building The building of the program is the same as the building of the theory of
A lot happened for me this year. I continued learning the details of fund accounting at Carta, which is likely the most complex product domain I’ve worked in. My third book was published, and I did a
A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well
Introduction In case you missed it, there’s a whole new generation of low-level programming languages being created right now. Rust demonstrated vividly in 2016 that there is a massive unmet need in t
After 20 years, and 3283 posts adding up to 1,577,106 words I am wrapping up my time as the lead blogger on the AWS News Blog. It has been a privilege to be able to “live in the future” and to get to
Nietzsche and the Postmodern Condition (1991) Rick Roderick, Ph. D. Lecture One: Nietzsche as Myth and Mythmaker Things to know about Nietzsche The is a difference between Nietzsche’s text and his lif
What follows is an essay by Rick’s son, Max Roderick about Rick’s legacy as a teacher and a father. It answers many of the questions that come up in the comments from time to time, and plenty that don
In the spring of 2021, Fredric Jameson, the greatest American Marxist critic who ever lived, found himself at home, observing Covid protocols in Killingworth, Connecticut, where (legend has it) he spe
On September 12, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel agreed unanimously that phenylephrine, a common decongestant that’s part of many over-the-counter cough and cold medications, is in
With the arrival of cooler weather, the season of hacking and sniffling is here. Once again, haggard-looking people roam the aisles of American pharmacies, clutching tissues and looking for relief — a
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down. (Hector Berlioz) There were many occasions early in my career when I read, heard about,
Photo: Matthew Salacuse/Redux A couple of years ago, Paul Schrader was convinced he was dying. He had just finished his 2022 film Master Gardener and was suffering from a variety of ailments that conv
Do you remember as a child that kid on the block that always went to your school, shopped with her mom at the same store, and hung around where you wanted to play but was never exactly a ‘friend’? May
The Scoop In an exclusive interview, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Semafor he’s ready to work on a “Manhattan Project” for AI when Donald Trump moves into the White House next year. “I th
NotebookLM is the ultimate tool for understanding the information that matters most to you. Globally, millions of people and tens of thousands of organizations are using our AI-powered research assist
Ilya Sutskever. Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images OpenAI’s cofounder and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, made headlines earlier this year after he left to start his own AI lab called Saf
Today, we’re sharing the latest updates to Gemini, your AI assistant, including Deep Research — our new agentic feature in Gemini Advanced — and access to try Gemini 2.0 Flash, our latest experimental
statistical physics What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know. December 13, 2024 Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexo
We imagine software efforts that go through a clean, neat flow: We write a design doc. Then make small incremental changes in a PR to rollout the functionality. Our git histories look clean and orderl
⇐ previous Posted 2024-12-14 next ⇒ I was a big proponent of MOOCs when they first emerged. Why have thousands of teachers deliver mediocre lessons when instead we could make the best teachers present
LMAX is a new retail financial trading platform. As a result it has to process many trades with low latency. The system is built on the JVM platform and centers on a Business Logic Processor that can
Over the last ~24 months I’ve taken up running. I work in an industry that’s not synonymous with fitness. And so I get asked on occasion by people who’d like to get into running, “How do I get into ru
New York State New York Focus traveled across the state to meet with communities about their local news needs. Alex Arriaga and Kate Harloe · December 11, 2024 New York Focus traveled to Rochester, Al
To wake up one morning and learn that one’s job might soon be “disrupted,” or outright eliminated, by the emergence of an overhyped new technology that excites rich people is – let’s start here – a pr
November 16, 2017 Be sure to check out these Sketchnotes from a 15 minute version of this talk from Codeland by Stephanie Nemeth I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill
By Marc Brooker PDF Kindle Failures Happen Whenever one service or system calls another, failures can happen. These failures can come from a variety of factors. They include servers, networks, load ba
In early August, Hunter Dunlap, a professor and librarian at Western Illinois University, was with his wife to celebrate her final chemotherapy session when he opened an email from work. He was being
To interview Monica Padman is to interview an interviewer. Padman is the cohost of the astronomically popular podcast Armchair Expert, cohosted by actor Dax Shepard, of the television shows Parenthood
On a recent sunny afternoon in Southern California, Aaron Kunin’s class at Pomona College is tackling The Witlings by Frances Burney, an 18th-century comedy of manners that pokes fun at the literary w
When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard University a decade ago, one of my students missed a final exam because he forgot to set his alarm. I didn’t learn about this because he told me, in
Threads Bluesky Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers by Robert Lighthizer Broads
Automation, Distributed Systems, Storage
Here is a letter to all friends who are or aspire to be open-source maintainers. I have repeated many of these core ideas in various places. I believe it’s better to write them in a letter so that I don’t have to repeat myself again. This letter includes…
Let’s start this month with an interview. Larry Tesler helped lay the foundation for the computer interfaces we use today while working at Xerox PARC and Apple. He conceived the idea of “copy and past
amontalenti