How to Grow a Micro Startup With Programmatic SEO
You don't need an audience or a marketing budget to get visitors. Here's how to grow a micro startup for free when you're a solopreneur who loves coding.
Refurb weekend: Data General/One (and the worst LCD in the world)
I mentioned earlier that while I prefer specializing in non-x86 laptops, that doesn't mean I don't collect interesting or unusual x86 laptop...
[HOWTO] Calculate distance between two points (coordinates) on Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server offers the STDistance method to calculate the shortest distance between two geography points with high accuracy.
Satisfaction and progress in open-ended work
When we’re in execution mode, we swim in signs of our progress. A day’s work stands crisply in some endless checklist: four problems solved; three features added; check and check. Am I on track? Did I...
Overview - FontMagic
FontMagic is a font (ttf, woff, woff2) processing software that can be used on macOS and Windows platforms.
XD1 Log entries. Begin... · Backups and bitrot
Last night I killed my linux installation. It refused to come back to life even after chrooting and reinstalling everything. Something broke irreparably, to the best of my knowledge.
Mental Health in Software Engineering
I want to talk about something we don't discuss enough in our field: the mental health of software engineers, especially those of us who've taken on the
Tips for LLM Pretraining and Evaluating Reward Models
It’s another month in AI research, and it’s hard to pick favorites.
Daylight Saving Time is a perfect test for UI designer
Unique challenges that DST presents for clock/watch designers
Memory access patterns and performance | Benjamin Dicken
How does a programs memory access pattern and the underlying virtual memory system affect performance?
Reverse Mode Differentiation is Kind of Like a Lens II
Reverse mode automatic differentiation is kind of like a lens. Here is the type for a non-fancy lens
Franklin Pezzuti Dyer
Lately I've been continuing my adventures in dependent type theory and computer-verified proofs by working with the Idris language. I've really enjoyed using Agda, but I think that Idris has started to appeal to me more because it feels like it strikes nice ba…
ServiceRouter: Hyperscale and Minimal Cost Service Mesh at Meta
ServiceRouter: Hyperscale and Minimal Cost Service Mesh at Meta
Explaining the internals of async-task from the ground up
async-task is one of the most complicated crates in the smol ecosystem. But, fundamentally, it’s just a future on the heap.
Choosing a backend database: SQL vs Document vs Columnar
In the evolving landscape of databases, the lines distinguishing one type from another have blurred as features converge. How do you pick the right one for your needs? Here's a venn diagram showing which features are shared and which are unique.
xorvoid
So, this article is trending on the top of Hacker News. And while I'm pretty ambivalent about it, I've decided to not comment on the parts I think are short-sighted. Instead, its given me motivation to finally write up my feelings on the issue. I've been a sys…
Shutting down the letsblock.it project and its official instance · letsblockit/letsblockit · Discussion #663
The letsblock.it project enables users to remove low-quality content and useless nags, to tailor their online experience and focus on what matters. It has been running for more than two years now a...
MyRGB
A simple RGB color guessing game.
Helix
A post-modern modal text editor.
Facebook/Meta class action discovery
FILED UNDER SEAL May 31, 2023 Via CM/ECF Re: Klein v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 3:20-cv-08570-JD (N.D. Cal.) Dear Judge Donato: Advertiser Plaintiffs (“Advertisers”) respectfully request that the Court …
Collection Initializer Performance in C# - Get An 87% Boost!
Check out these benchmarks measuring collection initializer performance in C#. How the heck did I speed up C# collection initialization by 87%?!
Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser
I attended the Story Discovery At Scale data journalism conference at Stanford this week. One of the perennial hot topics at any journalism conference concerns data extraction: how can we …
A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects
Originally a thread on Twitter about the xz/liblzma vulnerability, when I finished typing it, I realized I had a real world slice of Open Source interaction that deserved more attention.
xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained
Yesterday Andres Freund emailed oss-security@ informing the community of the discovery of a backdoor in xz/liblzma, which affected OpenSSH server (huge respect for noticing and investigating this). Andres' email is an amazing summary of the whole drama, so I'l…
git.tukaani.org - xz.git/summary
Technologist vs spy: the xz backdoor debate
Well — we just witnessed one of the most daring infosec capers of my career. Here’s what we know so far: some time ago, an unknown party evidently noticed that liblzma (aka xz) — a relatively obscure open-source compression library — was a dependency of
Roll-Invert-Unroll: An Easier Way to Replace a Duvet Cover
This way of putting a cover onto a duvet might save you effort and time!
Talking Hot Dog gives new meaning to 'Ham radio'
...except it was a beef frank. Make your wurst jokes in the comments.
Notes on El Salvador
In 1995, El Salvador had an intentional homicide rate of 139 per 100,000, the highest in the world and one of the highest rates recorded in modern history. Like all educated middle-class Americans,…
Adam Fuhrer | Frontend Engineer
A Toronto-based frontend engineer with a passion for art & creative coding.
Lessons of a first time founder
The de-nerdification of programming
Programming with LLMs, and building systems with LLMs, has completed the long de-nerdification of the field. The programmers at the dawn of computing were nerds. They had no abstractions. They dealt with raw hardware – switches, circuits, currents. Binary code…
Tell the LLM the business context
Employees do better when they have more business context. The same is true of LLMs! To do its best work, the LLM needs to know why it’s being prompted, where its input came from, how its output will be used, and how its output will be judged. Many prompters tr…
Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
Django: Write-up on optimizing the system check framework - Adam Johnson
Django’s system check framework provides fantastic protection for configuration mishaps. It’s like a targeted linter that runs when you start Django commands. It takes advantage of runtime setup to inspect the true state rather than infer it from the source.
The Reasonable Effectiveness of Using Old Phones as Servers
I installed linux on a OnePlus6T. Setup took less than an hour, technical issues included. Why $90 for 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, 2.8GHz 8-core CPU Linux on the OnePlus 6T is well documented Low power consumption Tiny footprint No additional cables Built-in batte…
My laptop is faster than your Elastic cluster
How well a single laptop can handle a task of an Elastic cluster? Surprisingly well.
Say something that will surprise people and be useful
As I understand it, there are just certain things in my life that I can't stop doing. I've been writing in some fashion since I was 12. Writing seems to be an experience that is growing richer and I appear to be improving. There are other things in my life tho…
My Ideal Libre Computer+Phone
I have a very clear idea of what my “ideal” computer would be. It would incorporate all of the best aspects of the different computers (including smartphones!) I already use today, into a single machine. The What First, it would have the form factor of a typic…
xz and my thoughts on supply chain attacks against FOSS
Note: These are just an assortment of random thoughts. Don’t expect structure or good / well thought out reasoning.