2023 - To Read

“We have built up the capacity to do this at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company.”

A collection of postmortems. Sorry for the delay in merging PRs!

From the programmer

bare minimum atw-style interpreter for learning purposes

I was writing a tutorial earlier today on oriented bounding boxes object detection models. Object detection models identify the location of an object in an image (i.e. the location of a solar panel in an aerial image). Oriented bounding box models identify the coordinates of objects more precisely than traditional object detection models, whose boxes are horizontally aligned.

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a greater fool. While we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job. Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity. https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms by @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Some Memories of Niklaus Wirth https://odersky.github.io/blog/2024-01-04-post.html

Still in love with this record #theStudio https://nabihahiqbal.bandcamp.com/track/this-world-couldn-t-see-us

null

All Smalltalkers know how simple and consistent Smalltalk is, those are some of the reasons we love it but sometimes we take it for granted and forget about it. Do we really know how complicated and inconsistent are other programming languages? In this talk I'll show some traits of Smalltalk that make it unique and compared that with other programming languages, without any intention to rant other languages but to boost how beautiful is the Smalltalk design. #Smalltalks2022

null

TL;DR: This is a call to action to create a Global Design System that provides the world's web designers & developers a library of common UI components. A Global Design System would improve the quality and accessibility of the world's web experiences, save the world's web designers and developer

9,388 engineers polled by Motherboard and Blind said AI will lead to less hiring. Only 6% were confident they'd get another job with the same pay.

null

Content warning: This essay discusses anxiety and mental health.

‘Boredom boreout syndrome’ happens when workers are mentally underloaded and it can cause actual physical illness. Figuring out how to engage people would benefit all of us

[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…

Recently I had a phone interview where I got asked a variety of Java questions. This kind of thing is standard, and most of the questions were somewhat standard: * What is polymorphism? * What’s the difference between a List and a Set? When would you use one over the other?

Not long ago I was part of a discussion about using mechanical things to demonstrate computing concepts (such as building a learning Tic-Tac-Toe game out of matchboxes). This got my head spinning on …

Some C++ folk seem to think so, but they're wrong!

Programming language for ternary computing. Contribute to nirvanasupermind/owlet development by creating an account on GitHub.

Plus Power’s Kapolei battery is officially online. The pioneering project is a leading example of how to shift crucial grid functions from fossil-fueled plants to clean energy.

As noted in Cory's review, Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora makes an undeniable case for ecological stewardship through a rigorous, gripping technological speculation about climate science, biology, space propulsion and sociodynamic factors. In this exclusive feature essay, Robinson explains the technology behind the best science fiction novel of 2015.

null

Narcissism involves an unrealistic sense of grandiosity and superiority, manifested in the form of vanity, self-admiration and delusions of talent. This is commonly found in bosses, according to psychology professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. But it doesn't always have to be a bad thing.