holy fucking shit!!!!!!!!!! I've had this in my drafts to finish writing up for a few weeks but today I made another discovery that has pushed me to finally write it up lol. My PC had a few hiccups over the past couple of years. Nothing so serious that I was…
AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.
All the easier to control you
This blog reproduces an exchange of emails I had with Bart Campolo about faith, either deconstructed or reconstructed, prompted by my memoir.
The future where humans fuel machines, but not in a physical sense
Recently, there has been push for more “female representation” in Warhammer 40.000. This includes female guardsmen as well as female Space Marines. But neither makes much sense, and especially the …
Program code is for communicating between humans, not just for instructing computers. So we strive for code to be lean. Lean code is simple and understandable. It is as concise as possible without losing clarity. It avoids lingo, over-abstraction, and obscure …
Ian Adam’s posted a working paper the other day on power analysis for analyzing counts, Power Simulations of Rare Event Counts and Introduction to the ‘Power Lift’ Metric (Adams, 2024). I have a fe…
Positional Encoding for Self Attention
I've been reflecting on our engineers’ diverse impact on our projects and the true meaning behind labels like "10x engineer". Over the years, many
Last month researchers reported that the data memory-dependent prefetcher (DMP) on Apple M1 chips can be used to break encryption. (And there are indications that similar attacks might be possible …
Let's ask ChatGPT to tell us what color it sees and compare it to human color naming in a small scale experiment.
Don't worry, we all do. So how can we get better? Let me give you the lens of someone who's built a business, someone with strong beliefs around what does and doesn't work, but otherwise has no clue what they're talking about. This is all grounded in what I'v…
An example of how you can save money, simplify your architecture and speed up the development by going back to the basics and ditching the cloud, kubernetes and whatnot.
Welcome to another issue of Dev Leader Weekly! In this issue sponsored by Zuplo, I share how I'm putting an API gateway in front of my ASCII art API!
I bought a Bambu Lab X1-Carbon 3D printer in March 2023. I'm extremely happy with this 3D printer and highly recommend it! It's more expensive than entry-level printers, but it's a very high quality machine and is very reliable. I can focus on designing and m…
Microsoft Windows 11 performance has noticeably deteriorated, a former Microsoft senior software engineer has pointed out. Some prominent user interface (UI) elements were "comically bad," while others took almost a full second to load, he noted. Important u…
Forget being fearless. This is better.
We first introduced support for dmabufs and graphics offload last fall, and it is included in GTK 4.14. Since then, some improvements have happened, so it is time for an update.
Msty is simplest way to use local and online LLMs. Its chat interface packed with powerful features make it easy to use LLMs. Run Ollama models such as Mixtral, Llama2, Qwen, or online models such as GPT-3, GPT-4, Mistral, Gemini, Groq, Claude, and more.
Two weeks ago, Apple modified their App Store guidelines to allow retro game emulators in the App Store. This week, Delta, a multi-system emulator that was previously only available via AltStore, was released on the App Store. Since these events happened, we'v…
I host a few small low-traffic websites for local interests. I do this for free - and some of them are for a friend who died last year but didn’t want all his work to vanish. They don’t get so many views, so I was surprised when I happened to glance at munin a…
Online migrations in Convex using mutations. Including a helper to track migration state!
Over the past few years, a number of states have acknowledged Computer Science as an academic area of study and have created pathways for certification. The actual requirements vary from state to state and indeed, even within a given state, there's a lot of va…
How I intend on living better.
My goal I will do tiny projects expecting them to fail. I will post updates (sometimes here, sometimes on my youtube) on what I did, how it failed, and what I learned. Rinse and repeat. If you find this framing helpful or have suggestions, feel free to com…
April 14, 2024
Weak Opinions, Strongly Held
I explain how electronic passports (eMRTDs) work.
As someone formally diagnosed with schizophrenia who happens to be a programmer, I often get questions such as,
Quill is a free, open source WYSIWYG editor built for the modern web. Completely customize it for any need with its modular architecture and expressive API.
Distributed systems offer flexibility but introduce complexity, making troubleshooting a headache. Understanding how requests flow through your system is crucial for debugging and performance optimization. OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framewor…