27 March 2023

38 links · Monday

Berlin’s U-Bahn Expansion Plan

An obscure change in German benefit-cost analysis regulations has led to expansive proposals for urban rail construction in Germany. In Berlin, where ongoing coalition negotiations between CDU and …

Model-View-Controller, a classic architectural pattern in Clojure

I'm sure for some of you Model-View-Controller (MVC) resembles more of an anti-pattern than something to reach for when writing Clojure, but I think it's a great example of what architecture should accomplish, especially what can be accomplished in Clojure. M…

Things I Don't Know About AGI

Is a photocopier alive? I think it's pretty safe to say that it is not. However, the more I think about it, the more I realize I can't prove that humans are in fact alive.

Synology NAS Backups with Minimal Bus Factor

If you're wanting to backup your Synology NAS, you probably just want to use one of their off-the-shelf solutions in their Package Center. However, if you're stubborn like me and want to use the same CLI tool you use elsewhere, this post is for you. I'll descr…

12 Steps to Better Tests

12 steps you can take to have tests that are not a chore to maintain.

Can LLMs Critique and Iterate on Their Own Outputs?

Avi Singh told me yesterday about a recent arxiv preprint, Reflexion, that proposes the following idea: use a LLM to examine whether the output of another generative model is “on the right track” during generation. According to the paper, “the reflection loop …

Banks should fail much more often

Bank failures are not the problem. They are the solution. Banks should fail much more often.

Zig And Rust Mar 26, 2023

This post will be a bit all over the place. Several months ago, I wrote Hard Mode Rust, exploring an allocation-conscious style of programming. In the ensuing discussion, @jamii name-dropped TigerBeetle, a reliable, distributed, fast, and small database writte…

I climbed inside a giant robotic parking garage

I was going to film a video about a robot bicycle park. And then GIKEN, the company who built it, said: you know we do this for cars as well, right? ■ More d...

The Best .NET Mapper to Use in 2023

Check out my courses: https://nickchapsas.comBecome a Patreon and get source code access: https://www.patreon.com/nickchapsasHello everybody I'm Nick and in ...

351: What are F# Discriminated Unions?

Frank tries to explain his favorite F# feature and also discussion the C# proposal for union types!

C# Source Generators: How to get build information?

Source generators are a powerful feature introduced to C#, allowing developers to generate additional code during the compilation process automatically. They can help reduce boilerplate, improve performance, and simplify your codebase. This blog post will intr…

Azure AD cross-tenant synchronization

The article looks at and explores the new Azure AD cross-tenant synchronization. The feature makes it really easy to implement the technical part of synchronization between different Azure AD tenan…

How Microsoft Edge Updates

When you see the update notifier in Edge (a green or red arrow on the … button): … this means an update is ready for use and you simply need to restart the browser to have it applied. W…

MongoDB, C# and DateTime's

Storing DateTime in MongoDB using C# is easy. Just add a property of DateTime and off you go. Easy. Right? Well, MongoDB stores all date times as UTC, but you can tell the driver to deserialize back as e.g DateTimeKind.Local, but nevertheless, it will be store…

WYSIWYGPT | Christian Heilmann

When GPT-4 was announced earlier this month, one of the demos made a massive splash: painting a web app on a napkin and getting the “AI” to create the HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make it work.