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
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
11th December 2024 Huge announcment from Google this morning: Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era. There’s a ton of stuff in there (including updates on Project Astra and the
Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly one million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. Th
In our pursuit of becoming a better full service research firm, we’ve moved off Substack. For any questions please read https://semianalysis.com/faq/#substack There has been an increasing amount of fe
× Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP A Fox News ad is displayed outside the Fiserv Forum on the eve of the Republican National Convention, July 14, 2024, in Milwaukee. The intra-Democratic argum
Progress used to be glamorous. For the first two thirds of the twentieth-century, the terms modern, future, and world of tomorrow shimmered with promise. Glamour is more than a synonym for fashion or
Recently I’ve been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal is some combination of: Your operating system’s job Your shell’s job Your terminal emulator’s job The job of whatever prog
The saga of the UnitedHealth Care CEO assassination has, as could be expected, now turned into a discussion of our health care system. Elizabeth Warren, for instance, is making the obvious point that
Search 2024 in Review Health insurers and hospitals increasingly treat patients less as humans in need of care than consumers who generate profit. December 12, 2024 Illustration by Sean Dong In 2010,
Computer science staff writer Ben Brubaker unpacks what computer science is all about and discusses highlights from his reporting over the past year. Math and Science News from Quanta Magazine View th
Published by Lars Kappert on June 28, 2024 This is a story in 3 parts about OSS and me: how it started, how we got here, and how it’s going. Soon after the first “View Source” in Internet Explorer 5.0
More aspirants of high status than society can sustain A university graduation ceremony in Ottawa, Canada (2016) Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the conditi
In a startup that sells software, what is the “business” side of the company? When I worked in retail, developing software for internal use, there was a clear division between the engineering teams in
For new folk here, hi, I’m Alex Mackenzie, a partner at Tapestry. I’d love to hear from any of you reading along: alex@tapestry.vc A special thanks to Simon and the cool folk at turbopuffer for the pl
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