On the nature of Computing Science Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective Its official theme: Control Flow and Data flow: Concepts
This is the twenty-second post in the Fastmail Advent 2024 series. The previous post was Dec 21: Fastmail In A Box. Check back tomorrow for another post. Why we use our own hardware There has recently
Almost a month ago, I created a telegram channel with the goal of reading tech books consistently, and sharing summaries of them.This week, I have finished reading the first book - “A Philosophy of So
Tech The legacy of NeXT lives on in OS X NeXTSTEP technologies still fuel Macs, iPhones, and iPads 16 years later. Chris Foresman – Dec 19, 2012 1:00 pm | 215 Credit: Aurich Lawson Credit: Aurich Laws
Summary Improve startup time by making the classes of an application instantly available, in a loaded and linked state, when the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine starts. Achieve this by monitoring the app
After using Nix for a decade, I dislike that it describes itself as a “purely functional package manager”; that causes all sorts of confusion, since it has far more in common with something like Make
Click here for more of my Nix/NixOS pages This page describes what Nix fundamentally is, at its core; what it is actually doing when it runs; and why it makes the choices that it does. This won’t tell
What is Technical Debt? Some people see technical debt as a list of missing features, but it should be a list of the problems that you know you have to vs want to solve. The list can vary but should i
Back to Articles Finally, a Replacement for BERT Published December 19, 2024 Update on GitHub Upvote 121 TL;DR This blog post introduces ModernBERT, a family of state-of-the-art encoder-only models re
Asif Kapadia takes on big subjects in a vehement drama-doc fantasy of just 85 minutes: climate change, corporate fascism, the global erosion of democracy. And if the result feels occasionally strident
Explore To do philosophy, you don’t need expensive labs or equipment. You don’t need a huge team. You can do it all by yourself. The downside is that philosophers are often lonely. Reading in solitude
In April last year we published The Productivity Impact of AI Coding Tools based on a survey of subscribers to this newsletter, about how new AI tools were helping developers with coding. Back then, C
Greenblatt et al investigate: if Anthropic tried to turn Claude evil, would Claude fight back? (if you're just joining us - Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4; Anthropic is its parent company) The
Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. This year was different — a time
Another weekend, another weekend read, this time all about the question of what exactly is “stateless” In this issue of The Weekend Read, we'll explore a concept that's frequently discussed in softwar
In early September 2022, Alivia Bienko and her husband, Liam, were driving through Stamford Bridge, an idyllic village on the River Derwent, near York, when a shuttered pub caught their eye. Stuck to
Image Credits:Peter Wang Startups Meet Skyseed, a VC fund and incubator backing the Bluesky and AT Protocol ecosystem Paul Sawers 6:00 AM PST · December 21, 2024 On November 15, Peter Wang posted a me
In late June 2024 I got asked to take over the work started by Jerry Wu creating a systemd-sysupdate plugin for Software. The goal was to allow Software to update sysupdate targets, such as base syste
I have been writing Python for 14 years next month. When I started, people were still using easy_install to install egg-based packages for Python 2.7 and nobody had heard about Conda yet, much less uv
By now, it’s clear that artificial intelligence will radically alter our economic, political and social lives. It’s less clear what these changes will entail. Are we hurtling ineluctably toward violen
How concurrecy works: A visual guide Dec 12, 2024 Concurrent programming is hard. Mentally enumerating all the possible states that complex concurrent code might go through is far from easy. Visualizi
Analysis Nvidia is facing its stiffest competition in years with new accelerators from Intel and AMD that challenge its best chips on memory capacity, performance, and price. However, it's not enough
TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom". This blo
I’m from a very specific generation, the first one in which learning how to use the open Internet was a skill taught in childhood. There’s not much that’s good about being from this generation (I will
I talked to my friend for an hour and a half yesterday. She\’s a year or so post-cancer treatment and is wondering why the hell she was saddled with really yucky one, which required her to lose her a
Open source initiative The Tango Desktop Project's Color Palette The Tango Desktop Project was an open-source initiative to create a set of design guidelines and to provide a consistent user experienc
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
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