seeing pink blossoms from the train. talking coffee with a barista — of speaking about origins and tasting notes. striking up conversation with people while waiting in line. imagination, and of daydreaming. reading text in a foreign language — maybe even a foreign alphabet — and being able to understand what you have read. seeing people sit outside in the evening, enjoying desserts or drinks or food. seeing something from an entirely new perspective. walking by the river on a...

I've always enjoyed reading, and for most of my life I've particularly enjoyed reading history. I've head many great things about Robert Caro's books, but was deterred by their size. Finally, with his first book newly available as an ebook, I decided to dip my toes in. The books are too good for me to escape . more… I've always enjoyed reading, and for most of my life I've particularly enjoyed reading history. I've head many great things about Robert ...

This week I was supposed to write about chapters 5 and 6 of the feedback control book but I had a busy week and so wanted to talk about something a bit more familiar. Next week will be the feedback control chapters. I wanted to revisit the idea we talked about before of bounded queries . Queries that, to execute, only use O(1) space and O(n) time, with n being the number of rows being processed. I'm specifically talking about a query processing model based on Volcano, where every oper...

PDQ Shor PDQ Shor, Peter Shor's smarter brother, passed away last week. PDQ was a Physicist/Computer Scientist/Mathematician/Astrologer/Psychic at the University of Northern South Dakota in Wakpala. Dr. Phineas Dominic Quincy Shor III, PhD, MBA, BLT, received his education at Europa U. during one of his many alien abductions. He ended up in South Dakota after having fled every other state. He was most famous for the concept of unnatural proofs, collected in his anthology Proofs from the Other B...

It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from what you usually do. For example, last year I talked about the 3400-year history of the name “Daniel”. This year I wrote about one of my hobbies in hopes it would take less time. It didn’t. The video game industry is the biggest entertainment industry in the world. In 2024, it produced almost half a trillion dollars in revenue, compared to the film industry’s “m...

Cadey Anubis is an AI scraper bot filter that puts a wall between your website and the lowest-hanging fruit of bot filtering. I developed it to protect my git server, but it's also used to protect bug trackers, Mastodon instances, and more. The goal is to help protect the small Internet so small communities can continue to exist at the scale they're currently operating at without having to resort to overly expensive servers or terrifyingly complic...

Loyal bytes toil in memory, on disk, across wires, etc. They crunch our numbers; we cast them to the garbage collector. Et tu, brutus computus. And so I've been thinking about "compassionate" compilation. How can we learn to love our languages again? How can we reduce our energy footprint? How can we tame the chaos monkeys? How can we reignite the joy of simple software? How can we share our abundance as if recycling air? The Modern Stack Modern web computing looks vaguely like this: ...

I no longer help friends and family with Windows issues 2025-03-29 08:50 For years, I was the go-to person whenever a friend or family member had a computer issue. Whether it was a slow system, mysterious pop-ups, unsupported hardware after system update, or software not behaving as expected, I would spend hours troubleshooting and fixing things. But not any more, at least not if the system in question runs Windows (or macOS). The primary reason I’ve stopped offering tech support for Win...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 312  | Apr 2, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

We spent a month across the pond last summer, from July 15 to August 15.   We started in Belfast and environs, where A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS was being filmed.  From there we went on to Amsterdam, where I paid a call on my Dutch publisher, and then London to call on Jane Johnson and the good folks at Voyager, my UK publisher.  Oxford was next.  The Oxford Writers House had invited me to deliver a talk on fantasy with Philip Pullman, the author of HIS DARK MATERIALS.  I was really loo...

Jesse Korosi , Thijs van de Kamp , Mayra Vega , Laura Futuro , Anton Margoline The journey from script to screen is full of challenges in the ever-evolving world of film and television. The industry has always innovated, and over the last decade, it started moving towards cloud-based workflows. However, unlocking cloud innovation and all its benefits on a global scale has proven to be difficult. The opportunity is clear: streamline complex media management logistics, eliminate tedious, no...

"The Birth of Britain: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume I" by Winston Churchill - yes, that Churchill :) While it was started in the 1930s, the writing of this 4-volume history of Britain and its former colonites was interrupted by WWII and Churchill's positions as prime minister. It was finished in the 1950s. The writing is very good, and the book appears to be well-researched, although occasionally the author resorts to pure speculation about historic events that weren't suffi...

Every ending marks a new beginning, and today, is the beginning of a new chapter for me. Ten years ago I took a leap into the unknown, today I take another. After a decade of working on Sentry I move on to start something new. Sentry has been more than just a job, it has been a defining part of my life. A place where I've poured my energy, my ideas, my heart. It has shaped me, just as I've shaped it. And now, as I step away, I do so with immense gratitude, a deep sense of pride, and a h...

👋 You are reading Maker Stations — your Sunday newsletter featuring desk tours with makers and creators. This project runs on good desks and good people. A shout-out to Adam, our latest Productivity Patron — a photographer and filmmaker from Sacramento, CA. His extra-long desk is split in two: one side for deep digital work (editing, research, client calls), the other for analog thinking — mostly writing scripts by hand in a notebook. “It’s been super helpful to disconnect from di...

✍️ Written by: Dennis E Taylor 🏷 Genre: Sci-fi 🗓 Published: 01 December 2022 📄 Pages: 333 🧐 My rating: ★★★★☆ (4 stars) Jack Kernigan is having a bad day…a bad year…a bad life. After being booted out of MIT, he’s back in his Ohio hometown, working for the family business, facing a life of mediocrity. Then one day, out on a delivery, h...

Let’s make a list. I’ll start.  I’m eating a really good sandwich. Soft roll, rotisserie chicken, crisp lettuce, a little mayo, gruyere cheese, candied jalapeños. Yes and amen.  Also, what did we ever do to deserve mandarin oranges?  I got to lay on a hammock for a while this afternoon and it was warm and breezy and good.  Also look at these tree branches and the sky and how they’re all just existing. Pretty nice.  Know what el...

Most of you are likely aware of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. If not, it grapples with the question of whether something is still the same object if all its parts have been replaced over time. In the original example, imagine if the sails were replaced with a new canvas, then over time the hull due to rotting wood. Is it the same ship, if it shares nothing physical with the original? How people answer that question is interesting. My circle of family, friends, and colleagues over t...

Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club : an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy these true stories, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! The mouse started moving. Not the one on the desk, the pointer on the screen! First to the left, then down to the bottom corner. *Click!* The Windows Start menu came up. " cmd " wrote a silent hand on an invisible keyboard. It downloaded a file from a random-looking URL, then...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon with its ChaSTE thermal probe deployed. Image: ISRO The Chandrayaan 3 lander touted a thermal probe called ChaSTE developed jointly by two ISRO-affiliated institutions SPL and PRL . The lander deployed and inserted ChaSTE almost 10 centimeters into the lunar soil to take pristine temperature measurements across the lunar day using ten spaced-out sensors. A new study published in Nature shows how the measurements are helping scientists learn exactly...

I recently moved to NYC since I was accepted by the Recurse Center , and today was my first day at their hub. The day started by nerding out on the retro computers, hardware labs, and 3d printers they have; followed by the first breakfast bagel of my life. I feel incredibly fortunate to be surrounded out by so many talented programmers and am looking forward to the next three months with my new friends! As part of our first day, we had a workshop about pair programming. For those who d...

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . I didn’t want to spend a year writing the book only to find out that nobody wanted to buy it, so at the beginning of March, I ran a one-month pre-sale on Kickstarter. I structured the project so that if I didn’t hit $5k in pre-orders, the project would be canceled, and I’d walk away with nothing. Over the weekend, I hit my goal. As of this writing, I’ve reac...

Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of software underneath: microcode. With microcode, instead of building the processor's control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is implemented with code known as microcode, stored in the microcode ROM. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In this p...

Random Numbers Included Mar 31, 2025 I’ve recently worked on a PRNG API for TigerBeetle , and made a surprising discovery! While most APIs work best with “half-open” intervals, for(int i = 0; i < n; i++) , it seems that random numbers really work best with closed intervals, ≤n . First , closed interval means that you can actually generate the highest-possible number: prng.range_inclusive( u32 , math.intMax( u32 ) - 9 , math.intMax( u32 ), ); T...