9 April 2024

38 links · Tuesday

Does A Software Engineer Have Scorpion Nature? — Ludicity

A scorpion wants to sell some software but cannot code, so it asks a frog to write the application. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might start running Scrum, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that they would both be out of work if th…

The Simple Beauty of XOR Floating Point Compression

I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…

Using Claude Opus to analyze Shakespeare - Jonathan Garelick

Recently, I wanted to find the origin of the idiom “My word is my bond.” Unfortunately, the legendary Quote Investigator® had nothing to say. Some articles also suggested that the saying had its basis in the Hip Hop movement, but I had a feeling it existed ear…

Vaxry's Blog

A programming blog written by Vaxry.

A Gentle Primer for Nonparametric Density Estimation: Histograms

Parametric density estimation, a.k.a fitting probability distribution to observed data by tweaking the parameters of the distribution’s functional form, is all the rage now with generative modeling and LLMs. I think nonparametric methods deserve some love too …

Open Source Financial Sponsorship Breakdown for 2023

Certainly, no contributors get into projects with the sole purpose to get a financial gain out of them. Open source has never been about money either. But for you as an author, the lack of funds to sustain your ideas and pay for even a small portion of the tim…

Fractals in Pure Lambda Calculus

Lambda Screen allows you to draw images using terms of pure lambda calculus. By using fixed-point combinators, you can even create infinitely detailed fractals.

Converting C437 to XNA-style Spritesheets

I’ve been struggling to get C437 PNG fonts loaded in Raylib due to its default PNG loader using a slightly different format. Here, I’ll detail a simple way of converting C437 PNGs to the format Raylib expects.

Beeper

Beeper has been acquired! The team has joined Automattic and will continue to build Beeper.

Hello OLMo: A truly open LLM

As the world races to deploy AI models that are effective and safe, the demand for Open Large Language Models (LLMs) has exploded. The…

6 Types of Constructors in C# - Coding Sonata

Constructors are an essential part when writing code in the OOP approach. Check here to learn about the 6 types of constructors in C#.

Actually Talking about Modular Monoliths

That’s Winterfell from a Game of Thrones if you were curious. I have no earthly idea whether or not this mini-series of posts will be the slightest bit useful for anyone else, but it’s …