30 November 2023

55 links · Thursday

You Must Fuck Around and Find Out

You should take much more risk, and try new things much more often. Much of your comfort with risk is hard-coded genetically, a variable carefully tuned by millions of years of evolution, balancing the upside and downside of risk. But this is one of these ca…

Visual Anagrams

Optical illusions zero-shot from diffusion models.

Analyzing long win streaks in online chess

TL;DR: In-depth analysis of recent data suggests a high likelihood of Hikaru Nakamura achieving a 55-game winning streak in online blitz, based on thousands of his games played this year (and even more likely given that Hikaru just crossed 35,000 blitz games m…

Say it again: values not expressions

Sometimes you can explain a simple thing for the thousandth time, and come away with a deeper understanding yourself. It happened to me the other day with Python mutable argument default values.

SQLSync - Stop building databases

Join me as we take a look at common application data patterns, and how they relate to the inner-workings of databases. In this post, we discuss data caching, indexing, optimistic mutations, and recursive cache invalidation. We will see how life might be easier…

I found a funny charge on my credit card - Aggressively Paraphrasing Me

I just got back from a road trip, which means I have a LOT of charges on my credit card and I like to categorize them to track my budget. Here's a fun one I found! I use the "You Need A Budget" app (YNAB) to track my spending across my different accounts. Usua…

The Weirdest Bug I’ve Seen Yet

In an investigation for an on call issue, we followed a series of incorrect hypotheses before ultimately discovering a surprise at the end of the debugging rainbow.

Unix linguistics

Looking at patterns in the syntax of Unix utilities. Approaching the Unix ecosystem from a linguistic perspective.

Mastering Skills: The 1% Formula

This article gives you a formula you can follow to become an expert in something. It's a new mental model for building expertise in a way that's practical, approachable and fun.

Why is curation of web search results important?

Mwmbl is the first search engine to allow users to change the search results: You can add results, delete them, and rerank them. The changes you made are saved instantly to the index and will be shown to other users who run the same query. But what is the poin…

Web developers: remarkably untalented and careless?

This passage here from John Gruber’s review of some new macs struck me in particular: Web browser rendering is surprisingly resource-intensive — partially because modern HTML, CSS, and Javascript are remarkably complex, and partially because most web develope…

Brickception

A fun take on the classic bricks breakout game with popup windows!

xCurl | daniel.haxx.se

It is often said that Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery.

.NET MAUI and Visual States

Unlock the potential of .NET MAUI with Visual States and Visual State Manager in this quick tutorial! 🚀 I will show both how to use the common states and yo...

.NET Conf 2023 - Puebla

El mayor evento sobre .NET en la ciudad de Puebla, México. Diciembre 2, 2023

.NET Conf 2023

.NET Conf is an annual conference dedicated to the world of Microsoft's .NET framework and related technologies. In 2023, .NET Conf promises to be an exciting event, bringing together developers, engineers, and tech enthusiasts from around the globe. Attendees…

My favorite features in Visual Studio 17.8 - Visual Studio Blog

It was a busy week for the Visual Studio team, preparing for both Ignite and .NET Conf. And releasing the latest version of Visual Studio 2022 which is now up to version 17.8. There were lots of announcements of cool new features,

.NET Rocks! Applied Large Language Models with Vishwas Lele

How do we put large language models to work? Carl and Richard talk to Vishwas Lele about his work using LLMs with his customers. Vishwas talks about focusing on specific data sets for building LLMs and how size matters - things are simple when the source data …

Who Makes the Most Reliable New Cars? - Consumer Reports

To determine who makes the most reliable new cars, Consumer Reports' latest car reliability survey ranks the brands and reveals how regions compare.

Why Should I Upgrade My .NET Application?

Why should I upgrade my application to the latest .NET version? If I am on the .NET Framework, why should I upgrade to .NET 8? What benefits are there to out...

Is c# underhyped?

I watch a lot of tech youtube channels and there seems to be languages that are quite "trendy" right now, like Go, Rust, the Javascript + NodeJs...