This essay is adapted from a talk given at California’s Novato Public Library earlier this year. There are ecological reasons to question how books are made out of trees but metaphysical reasons to re
Alex Garland has been working on “Devs” for more than two years, and there are still months of work ahead before the show’s spring 2020 release. Knowing the commitment required for his mysterious FX l
On March 29, 2024, a single message on the Openwall OSS-security mailing list marked an important discovery for the information security, open source and Linux communities: the discovery of a maliciou
I have been thinking about programming language scalability. I am not talking about performance here, but organizational scalability. Let us start with a bit of background. One of the reasons I origin
Some readers might have heard of CHERI. Of those who’ve heard of it, most have probably got the rough idea that it’s a “more secure” CPU — but, after that, I find that most people start to get rather
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung, the
I’m a surgeon. I’d like to think that I’m resilient and well adjusted, having gone through medical school and rigorous surgical training. I’ve been a doctor for 13 years and much of that period has be
Axion is but the latest in a long line of custom Google silicon. Since 2015 we’ve released five generations of Tensor Processing Units (TPU); in 2018 we released our first Video Coding Unit (VCU), ach
Notion cofounder Ivan Zhao captivated Silicon Valley investors and everyday consumers alike with a sleek productivity app that went so viral its servers crashed. Now, the profitable startup’s CEO sees
Philosophy and science haven’t always gone hand-in-hand. Here’s why that should change. Daniel Dennett, an Emeritus Professor from Tufts University and prolific author, provides an overview of his work at the intersection of philosophy and science. Many of today’s philosophers are too isolated in…
A man passes away without a word in the mountains of North Carolina, and his grandson sets out to write about the importance of a seemingly unimportant life. Essay by Jeremy B. Jones June 6, 2023 My g
artificial intelligence How Do Machines ‘Grok’ Data? April 12, 2024 By apparently overtraining them, researchers have seen neural networks discover novel solutions to problems. Read Later Irene Pérez
I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it on
I have been coding since I was eight or nine years old. I started with drag-and-drop programming, trying to figure out how to make a game in a tool called Microsoft TouchDevelop. I recall making one o
November 23, 2021 systemd by example Part 1: Minimization Series overview This article is part of the series systemd by example. The following articles are available. Part 1: Minimization (this articl
Our last newsletter on our shifting perspective on blockchains forced us to ask the question: what caused us to see merit in that technology in the first place? And one answer was that we thought the
My friend sent me a tunnel link where he had to manually set it up with socat and his nginx ingress controller in his k8s cluster. He made an offhand comment about needing a better way to setup tunnel
Greased by lobbying and campaign cash, tax breaks for retirement savings are one thing Congress agrees on. But they also blow out the deficit and add to income inequality. Illustrations by Audrey Malo
They might be an awesome sight to see from a safe distance on safari as they lumber around with their big, lopping ears and long trunks, but for those who live side by side with elephants, these mamma
Keywords: Financial crisis, 2008, corruption, economic disparity, accountability Introduction "The Men Who Stole The World," directed by Benoit Bringer and released in 2018, is a compelling documentar
On an elegant residential block in Brooklyn Heights stands what once may have been the most famous church in America. Plymouth Church, on Orange Street, was founded in 1847 with just twenty-one member
At the bottom right of my computer screen, just out of my direct line of vision, lurks an animated scold: a cartoon giraffe named Rafi. He is the playful icon of an app called Posture Pal, which works
For the past five years or so, I’ve read books on my phone. The practice started innocently enough. I write book reviews from time to time, and so publishers sometimes send me upcoming titles that fal
2024-03-29 software Python The catch in the Rye. One of my least popular takes as a Professional Python Developer™ seems to be that I don’t actually consider the Python ecosystem and its tooling to be
04 June 2022 · 13235 views · Updated 16 March 2024 This is a comprehensive guide designed for current and aspiring CTOs. What I aimed with this guide is to bridge the gap in traditional engineering ed
SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, includin
Every spring I bring my students to the desert of northwestern New Mexico, just north of Chaco Canyon, where the ancestral Pueblo people built a great city out of rocks a millennium ago. As we hike ac
It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops,
Hi folks, The events of the last week have been utterly terrifying as we’ve seen a highly sophisticated targeted attack on open source infrastructure play out in public, in the form of the liblzma bac
In 2006 I chronicled an ugly clash between the Ford Foundation and leading pro-Israel organizations, which had accused Ford of funding Palestinian NGOs guilty of anti-Semitic behavior. It was a feroci
Pandoc has a feature to covert links to footnotes. Unfortunately, this only applies to LaTeX documents. Since I want to stay away from LaTeX for reasons of bloat, I was looking for a more universal ap
U.S. Foreign Policy Science and Technology United States April 4, 2024, 12:30 PM Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are not only shaping our economy, but our society—with questions of privacy
The paradox of approaching an article which compares and contrasts unikernels and containers, I think, is that at Unikraft, we’ve embraced containers as one of our own. We are of course a unikernel co
I'm excited to share that I've joined Polar as an advisor. The opening text of the Polar website at the time of writing is "Get paid coding on your passion." This is a deeply personal mission to me. I
I’m a big fan of revealed preference: watch what people do, not what they say. Especially in a world where survey research is increasingly coming into question, sometimes unfairly, seeing how people v
TAMPA — Since 2009, J.C. Newman Cigar Co. has been Tampa’s last operational cigar factory. Recently, the 129-year-old business located inside Ybor City’s El Regensburg Cigar Factory learned they have
Lately on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, my timeline is filled with vapid posts orbiting the same few topics like water whirlpooling down a drain. Last week, for instance, the chatter was
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Ayla Rain Eilert was an artist. Vibrant and warm, she had moved to New York City — first Queens, then Brooklyn, then Manhattan — from her family’s home in New Jersey after high s
Pages launched in 2021 with the goal of empowering developers to go seamlessly from idea to production. With built-in CI/CD, Preview Deployments, integration with GitHub and GitLab, and support for al
For her 90th birthday on Wednesday, animal rights champion Dr. Jane Goodall has made a video in which she and many famous friends plead for compassion for animals. “I’m sure all of you will agree you