7th December 2024 I’ve been putting the new o1 model from OpenAI through its paces, in particular for code. I’m very impressed—it feels like it’s giving me a similar code quality to Claude 3.5 Sonnet,
Former President Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2024 Obama Democracy Forum on Thursday night in Chicago. This year’s theme was “pluralism.” In classic Obama style, he illustrated th
We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some d
Prefect has been a remote company since day 15. For the first 14 days, our small team worked side by side in DC, building what I envisioned as the city’s next great tech company. Then, when our CTO Ch
14 min read· Nov 1, 2024 The third law of photodynamics: For every piece of loudly-spoken advice, there is a piece of equal and opposite counter-advice. It’s natural for humans to consider the first w
People commute to work in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, Aug. 21, 2023. Shoko Takayasu/Bloomberg/Getty Images Tokyo CNN — The Japanese capital is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employee
The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. It describes a library made up of an “indefinite, perhaps infinite” number hexagonal of rooms, each lined on four sides by a bookshelf of fi
The United States has one of the most expensive health systems in the world, hampering the country’s fiscal and economic well-being. In 2021, U.S. healthcare spending totaled $4.3 trillion, which aver
Share You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dent
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Before getting on to the usual business I wanted to note that a few days ago I was more than a little surprised to discover
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology, culture, and the moral life. This post about LLMs, the labor of articulation, and memory began as what I t
I finally sat down and learned about it. Published inData Engineer Things · 10 min read· Aug 24, 2024 -- Image created by the author. This was originally published at https://vutr.substack.com. Intro
21 min read· Nov 6, 2017 -- I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhe
No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren’t really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no mea
On Tuesday night, my daughter and her friends went down to Claremont, New Hampshire to see Donald Trump in action. She and her chums range from the not terribly political to those with the usual enthu
Last year I read a book titled “The Nature of Technology” by one W. Brian Arthur. After finishing it, it was one of those books that I wish everyone read. Especially if you’re interested in technology
Image Credits:Sean Gallup / Getty Images Startups Key leaders behind Google’s viral NotebookLM are leaving to create their own startup Charles Rollet 12:39 PM PST · December 4, 2024 Three members of G
I'm crazy about all of the Philips Hue smart lights I use in my home. I'm not so crazy about several of the ways I have to control them: from my smartphone, smart speaker or display. If you really wan
Developers writing enough unit tests? Sure, and my code never has bugs on a Friday afternoon. Whether you’re an early-career developer or a seasoned professional, writing tests—or writing enough tests
The shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was met by many people online with a morbid sense of inevitability. The often callous nature of the US health care system has long been a point of w
This is an interview I did with Professor Martha Nussbaum back in 2009, for The Stoic Registry (a web magazine for Stoics. No, really!) Professor Nussbaum, who is the Ernst Freund distinguished profes
You have joined a new startup. You are a multi-talented mega-being. You can work 60, 70, 80 hours per week to get the job done. You are a top-notch coder and designer. You won’t fall into the traps th
People shelter under umbrellas from the wind and rain as they cross a road near Shinjuku train station on October 12, 2019 in Tokyo, Japan ahead of Typhoon Hagibis’ expected landfal later in the eveni
When the lights went out on the BCS East-West Interlink fiber optic cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden on 17 November, the biggest question wasn’t when internet service would be restored. (That’d c
In what has become a bit of an annual tradition, I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent this week. Another annual tradition now is that Vogels, who joined Amazon in 2004, publishes
In a previous post, I’ve shown how to use the rayon framework in Rust to automatically parallelize a loop computation across multiple CPU cores. Disappointingly, my benchmarks showed that this only pr
I have noticed a pattern across my work in search and on static site generators: in both cases, the key to offering good performance for users is to precompute as much information as you can. Text sea
Over the past year, Heroku has been on a journey of reflection as we rebase the platform to address the changing needs of app teams toward the future without disrupting your business. In the Heroku wa
Twelve-Factor App Methodology is now Open Source 12 Nov, 2024 Yehuda Katz Join us in modernizing the twelve-factor app manifesto together. As a community of app, framework and platform developers, we’
Classic vs. Cloud Native Buildpacks Last updated December 03, 2024 Table of Contents Cedar-generation apps on Heroku use classic buildpacks, while Fir-generation apps use Cloud Native Buildpacks. This
OCI Containers on FreeBSD These Work-in-progress notes will be updated over time, and merged into the FreeBSD HandBook once they are complete. For the moment, have fun, and send feedback to dch@FreeBS
Shortly after he turned forty, Joseph Brodsky wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion: “May 24, 1980,” in its English translation; in Russian, with just its opening line as a title, “Я входил вместо
Black Friday and Cyber Monday offered many deals for photographers looking to upgrade their equipment while saving a few dollars in the process. Typically, this online promotion on steroids allows bra
If a computer can be connected to the internet, someone has tried to run a container on it. From quantum computers to smart toasters, from phones in AWS racks to CI pipelines, there’s many ways to dep
Threads Bluesky Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud by Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips Yale University Press, 218 pp.,
Famous Quote This AWS API is so intuitive it’s awesome. My whole team uses it. -– no one ever Introduction Recently I was chatting with an investor about the market and they asked: What do you see com
From Alex Payne's Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup: A startup is just a means to an end. Consider the end, and don’t seek to revel in the means. What do you care about? Who do you wa
We are in the wildest moment. Sometimes you just have to let go of the anxiety and marvel at the level of realignment in the tech world right now. I recently saw a solid deck on the state of AI, by Be
Silicon Valley visionaries dream of making mega-money out of cool, futuristic products that thrill consumers, such as the metaverse, self-driving cars or health-monitoring apps. The duller reality is
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP is a way
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