17 January 2024

81 links · Wednesday

White space does matter in C23

Usually in C identifiers are not directly followed by strings. But when U prefixed literals were introduced in C. there still were some rare clashes with existing code. This happened were a macro U…

systemd: enable indefinite service restarts

When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between s…

You Can Have an Open Source Personal Assistant in 2024

Smart assistants should be more than just heavily commercialized products, we need private, conversational assistants that can genuinely help us get things done. All the pieces seem to be there right now if we put them together...

Getting started with GDB

Most programmers prefer to write code over debugging it. Unfortunately, code breaks a lot more often than we would like and it often breaks in situations that are hard to debug. Therefore, an essen…

Everything that I learned about Embeddings

I will write a follow up blog about Regression and Random Forest, today completes the half of the first month of 2024, I learned lots of stuffs that I am interested and participated on a Kaggle compe, predicing Energy consumption and production using solar pan…

RSA is deceptively simple (and fun)

While reading Real-World Cryptography, I came across the "million message attack". This is an attack that Daniel Bleichenbacher demonstrated in 1998, which effectively broke RSA with a particular encoding function called PKCS #1. It was only mentioned briefly,…

Shipping Blended Diffs

It’s been a whopping five years since I last shipped one of my Shipping blog posts, and boy do I have a good one to come back with. I’ve been working on Pierre for most of the last year and we’ve been shipping some amazing stuff.

Why Optimize Code for Performance

Why Optimize Code For Performance Answer .NET DotNet C# CSharp Coding Programming Software Design Development Engineering Architecture

Willow Specifications - Willow

A protocol for peer-to-peer data stores. The best parts? Fine-grained permissions, a keen approach to privacy, destructive edits, and a dainty bandwidth and memory footprint.

Goodbye long procedural code! Fix it with workflows

We've all written long procedural code that has many branches and has to handle failures because it's trying to execute a long business process with many act...

Use gradients in your UI | .NET MAUI Minutes

Sometimes a solid color isn't enough, and your app's UI calls for gradients everywhere! Join Maddy for a quick crash course on how to create both linear and ...

Meta Blog: Blogging ergonomics in 2024

I've been writing this blog since 2004. That means I have been doing this for twenty years, which is frankly unbelievable to me. The actual date is somet...

How Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases

Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.

.NET CONF 2023 - Tuxtla Gutiérrez

¡Únete al evento más grande de desarrolladores .NET en Tuxtla Gutiérrez! Disfruta de ponentes de primer nivel, con charlas sobre las últimas novedades del mundo del desarrollo en .NET. Entre los temas a tratar se encuentran: * Novedades en el lenguaje C# * Nov…

Stable Code 3B: Coding on the Edge — Stability AI

Stable Code, an upgrade from Stable Code Alpha 3B, specializes in code completion and outperforms predecessors in efficiency and multi-language support. It is compatible with standard laptops, including non-GPU models, and features capabilities like FIM and ex…

Kagi.com is unstable for all regions

Investigating - We are experiencing issues following a deploy. Team is working on resolving this.. (16:45 UTC — Jan 12) Monitoring - We have are reverting a configuration change that we believe to be the culprit, and are continuing to monitor as service is com…

Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change

“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” –Georgia O’Keeffe * Someone at the dinner table wanted to know what everyone’s turning point on climate was, which is to say she w…

Estimating your memory bandwidth

One of the limitations of a compute is the memory bandwidth. For the scope of this article, I define “memory bandwidth” as the maximal number of bytes you can bring from memory to the CPU per unit of time. E.g., if your system has 5 GB/s of bandwidth, you can …

10 Beautiful SaaS Landing Pages Without Product Images

Ever been told, 'First validate your idea – make a landing page with a waitlist to see if people actually want what you're building'? That is clearly a good idea, right? But here’s where I hit a snag: how do you whip up a landing page that is compelling enough

Maybe don't use Blake3 on Short Inputs

I needed to hash some relatively short data (the length of an English word) and couldn't really find any benchmarks that fit my purpose. So, I ran them myself, and some of the results were actually kind of surprising to me.

Letter to HEY

December 11, 2023

RSS is dead, subscribe through email

This is a story of how a random person on the internet set me thinking and eventually triggered a change to this blog. It started last September, when someone suggested offering email subscriptions in addition to the existing RSS feed. The thing is… I was purp…

What makes an entrepreneur succeed?

It's a path of vision, hard work, and overcoming hurdles. Discover the essential skills and debunk myths about entrepreneurship. Are you up for it?

Progress Report December 2023

Happy New Year! We hope everyone is having a great start to 2024 and that you’re all rejuvenated for another year of listening to these (mostly) regular rambles. We’ve got a fair bit to go through, including the usual sprinkling of graphical fixes, a nice mea…

Enhancing Dired Sorting With Transient

Out of the box, sorting a Dired buffer is rather underwhelming. In this post I describe how to improve that. But before we get into details, let’s see what the end-result looks like. For the...

I regret selling my startup

Selling my company was a milestone that many entrepreneurs dream of. But today, I get to look back on all of that nearly two years later with the benefit of hindsight.

Observer Teams

Software teams that have not mastered the technical language invent their own observer language together with the adoption of legions of tools and procesess

I miss human curation

Where are my internet friends? And where are their weird blogs?