Creativity: it feels ecstatic when you do it right and agonizing when you do it poorly. I should know. I’ve written dozens of songs, essays, and a feature film; built software for Google, startups, an
6 min read· Sep 26, 2023 -- I decided to re-read Fahrenheit 451 with my eldest this last week. I don’t think that I have read this classic Bradbury text since high school. What I had remembered about
Right now, asyncio is one of the trendier topics in Python, and rightfully so – It’s a great way to handle I/O-bound programs! When I was learning about asyncio, It took me a while to understand how i
Published: Tue 24 August 2021 By Mark functions as async. Call them with await. All of a sudden, your program becomes asynchronous – it can do useful things while it waits for other things, such as I/
This blog post is a part of a series about our research toward the next generation of the SecureDrop whistleblowing system. If you haven’t been following along, check out our previous post for some re
2024-05-07Harlequin is a Terminal-based SQL IDE by Ted Conbeer. It is pretty popular, with over 2,500 GitHub Stars and counting. It looks like this: Harlequin is built with Textual to give a very inte
Every now and then I get asked for advice on how to learn about distributed system internals and protocols. Over the course of my career I've picked up a learning and reviewing style that works pretty
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by mediaphotos/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Unsplash. Those of us who believe in the power of books worry all the time that reading, as a pursuit, is collapsing, ec
Jacob Vosmaer's blog 2024-05-02 I have been reading some books about creativity. In this post I will talk about my impressions and what I am learning from them. Why read books about creativity I like
Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content 8th May 2024 I saw this tweet yesterday from @deepfates, and I am very on board with this: Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art.
how do i reflect and summarize the most intense, healing, and intellectually stimulating three months of my life? i will try to do so in a fun, casual, singular “blog post”. why did i want to attend r
Not too long ago, smartphones had more personality. An iPhone with a home button looked distinct from a BlackBerry with a keyboard; an HTC might have used metal instead of the plastic in a Motorola; S
This is the Third part of my 3-chapter blog post: Ten years of building open source standards Much the same as there was a common need for a columnar file format and a columnar in-memory representatio
This is the second part of my 3-chapter blog post: Ten years of building open source standards Connecting the dots In 2015, a discussion started in the Parquet community around the need for an in-memo
This is the first part of my 3-chapter blog post: Ten years of building open source standards Prologue 15 years ago (2007-2011) I was at Yahoo! working with Map/Reduce and Apache Pig, which was the be
Multics Close ⊗ Loading This page is for stories about Multics, pictures, etc. There is room for the contributions of many authors. Send yours to the editor. The 6180 at CISL, skin doors open, circa 1
May 09, 2024 I'm working on an application that needs the ability to schedule tasks. Many applications have a similar need, but requirements can vary greatly. Advanced cases might require persistence
Tom Van Vleck The history of Unix is covered in several books. I have read A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus; he is reasonably accurate about the history that I know personally (I sent him a fe
How GitHub taught me to Micromanage Feedback is critical to performing good work as a team. Good feedback cultivates quality work and professional growth. Bad feedback degrades quality and erodes rela
Search Find anything you save across the site in your account Currency November 6, 2013 Ever since inequality began rising in the U.S., in the nineteen-seventies, people have debated its causes. Some
MemoryDB: Speed, Durability, and Composition. Blocks are fun. Earlier this week, my colleagues Yacine Taleb, Kevin McGehee, Nan Yan, Shawn Wang, Stefan Mueller, and Allen Samuels published Amazon Memo
Here's some good news: The vote was 3-2 in favor of banning noncompete agreements for new workers and voiding them for all existing workers (except C-suite executives). This will eliminate the ridicul
What kind of place is the Internet? A few years ago, an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” by Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, started getting passed around on
In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe. When we look out into space, the theory goes, we’re struck by its silence. It seems like
Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps a
Introduction from Jon Haidt: Freya India is one of the most sensitive and perceptive Gen Z writers. She went through the social media maelstrom herself and now chronicles its effects on her generation
There's an interesting psychological phenomenon where programmers tend to ascribe more trust to computers run by anyone but themselves. Perhaps it's a corollary to imposter syndrome, which leads progr
Daniel Dennett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in philosophy of mind and a wide range of other philosophical areas, has died. Professor Dennett wrote ext
How is it that tiny black marks on a white page or screen can produce such enormous ripples in the heart, mind, and spirit? Why do we lose ourselves in books, only to find ourselves enlarged, enraptur
I've published a number of Open Source Python libraries, but none have seen as much buzz as Rich. Released in 2020, the Rich repo has 35,000 stars on Github. Since then I've released Textual (a work i
It took more than ten years of full-time work for Rama to go from an idea to a production system. I shudder to think of how long it would have taken without Clojure. Rama is a programming platform tha
The Unix shell is a powerful tool, and the Unix ecosystem provides an incredible array of tools for working with strings. But the shell really only knows how to work with one data structure: the files
Zig is a programming language designed by Andrew Kelley. The official website lists three principles of the language: No hidden control flow. No hidden memory allocations. No preprocessor, no macros.
It’s now nearly a year that I started writing non-trivial amounts of C code again (the first sokol_gfx.h commit was on the 14-Jul-2017), so I guess it’s time for a little retrospective. In the beginni
In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything
AHP Note: Every so often I get a great pitch for a guest interview and hand the Culture Study reins over to someone else (usually a reader who *gets it*) to handle the interview (and get paid for it,
Photo by @arnosenoner on Unsplash. Lesson one for me as hospital chaplain was that sometimes a situation is impossibly hard.* For a caring person, this can be a difficult truth to accept—that you can’
PC software pioneer Gary Kildall created CP/M in 1974 Published inCore+ · 11 min read· Apr 18, 2024 By David Laws Gary Kildall at the first West Coast Computer Faire in the San Francisco Civic Auditor
In the spring of 1988, I made a lifelong friend thanks to a video-game cheat code. As preparation for a family move to Pensacola, Florida, I visited my new school. While there, I casually told a futur
At least 21% of the 80 healthcare companies that filed for bankruptcy last year were PE-owned, according to a report from the nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP). “PE’s excessive use o
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