These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console or car stereo, or an old-school tray-loader in a desktop or laptop. This has …

When it comes to aviation curiosities, few machines captivate the imagination like the Fairey Rotodyne. This British hybrid aircraft was a daring attempt to combine helicopter and fixed-wing effici…

The cable car system of San Francisco is the last manually operated cable car system in the world, with three of the original twenty-three lines still operating today. With these systems being inst…

In the world of transportation, some technologies may seem to make everything else appear obsolete, whether it concerns airplanes, magnetic levitation or propelling vehicles and craft over a cushio…

Having a penchant for cheap second-hand cameras can lead to all manner of interesting equipment. You never know what the next second-hand store will provide, and thus everything from good quality r…

Hazel Weakly, you little troublemaker.  As I whined to Hazel over text, after she sweetly sent me a preview draft of her post: “PLEASE don’t post this! I feel like I spend all my time trying to hel…

Cloud repatriation might seem like a solution for high infrastructure costs, but it can prove short-sighted as an organization scales.

AWS, GCP, Azure and Oracle didn’t start out being so similar, but they’ve evolved and converged over time. Why, and what does that mean for you?

By Om MalikMike McCue, the founder of Flipboard, loves the media. He loves reading, watching, and immersing himself in what other Silicon Valley types...

Nature - All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is.

A transformative month rewrites the capabilities of AI

Some argue AI models don't truly reason. AI models can indeed just repeat their training data mindlessly. However, they are able to do more than just this.

We can only write good code together

The design of the Gregorian calendar can be explained by looking at how best to approximate 365.2422 with a rational number.

There are 14 possible calendar patterns using the Gregorian calendar. Why is that? How common is each one

Thoughts about Ruby, Rails, Hanami, Elixir, Phoenix, Javascript and Unix.

OpenAI recently published a public writeup for an incident they had on December 11, and there are lots of good details in here! Here are some of my off-the-cuff observations: Saturation With thousa…

No.337 — The alchemy that powers the modern world ⊗ Building A Circular Future ⊗ Open Source AI year in review 2024

A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.

“It’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Jeff Bezos, founder, Amazon On My Mind We, as modern humans, try to c…

Gather around the fire for another retelling of computer networking history

Ah, matrices. One of those core linear algebra concepts we all encountered in school. Despite their significance, I never had the chance…

And by "all," I mean everything: core product, failed pivots, miscellaneous

QwQ does number theory. So does GPT. And Gemma.

The Oxford University Press's word of the year is "brain rot." I believe that's two words, but whatever. Let an academic press have its moment in the sun, with headlines that, this time around, don't involve selling off its authors' IP to giant technology companies. "‘Brain rot’ is defined as

If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

Back in 2020, I wrote a piece called My skepticism towards current developer meta-productivity tools, which laid out my three core problems with developer productivity measurement tools of the time: Using productivity measures to evaluate rather than learn Instrumenting metrics required tweaks across too any different tools Generally I found tools forced an arbitrary, questionable model onto the problem Two and a half years later, I made an angel investment in DX, which at the time I largely viewed as taking a survey-driven, research-backed approach to developer productivity. I was recently chatting with Abi Noda, co-founder at DX, and thought it would be an interesting time to revise my original thesis both generally and in response to DX’s release of DX Core 4.