The New ROM Antics – Building the ZX Spectrum 128
Opinion Following an unlikely series of events involving British Telecom, Prince Philip and a VTX-5000 modem, your teenage protagonist found himself at a drunken dinner party in 1984’s West London. Across the table, excitingly, sat my boyhood hero Sir Clive Sinclair, and he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say about the Sinclair […]
Paul Erdős, the most prolific mathematician
The doorbell rings, and you’re surprised to find your colleague on the stoop. He’s slight, elderly, buzzing from amphetamines, unkempt and uninvited. He shoulders past you into your living room, a single suitcase containing all of his worldly possessions in tow, and declares, “My brain is open.” You have no idea how long he intends […]
Japan: Moon lander Slim comes back to life and resumes mission
Jaxa By Kelly Ng BBC News Japan’s Moon lander has resumed operations after being shut for a week due to a power supply issue. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said it re-established contact with the lander Sunday night, indicating that the glitch had been fixed. Its solar cells are working again after a shift in […]
Executing Cron Scripts Reliably at Scale
Cron scripts are responsible for critical Slack functionality. They ensure reminders execute on time, email notifications are sent, and databases are cleaned up, among other things. Over the years, both the number of cron scripts and the amount of data these scripts process have increased. While generally these cron scripts executed as expected, over time […]
41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective
Summary: Jakob Nielsen has worked in user experience since 1983. Much has changed, including his own journey from academia to practice, but the mission remains the same: to make computers suitable and pleasant for humans. I started working in user experience in 1983 — 41 years ago at the time of this writing. People often ask […]
Higher Order Derivatives of Transforms
In a previous post I discussed the relationship between derivatives, logarithms, and transforms. This blog post adds to that and explains how to find the second and higher order derivatives of a transform. The Concept of Derivatives of Transforms Let’s quickly recap my earlier blog post. Suppose we have a transform (T) and a point at the […]
Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades
Sometimes, improving your application CSS just takes a one-line upgrade or enhancement! Learn about 12 properties to start incorporating into your projects, and enjoy reducing technical debt, removing JavaScript, and scoring easy wins for user experience. Properties are explored for the following categories: Stable Upgrades: fix a hack or issue by replacing older techniques Stable […]
Why is Maxwell’s theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]
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Eagle 7B: Soaring past Transformers
An eagle, flying past a transformer-looking robot Eagle 7B is a 7.52B parameter model that: We are releasing RWKV-v5 Eagle 7B, licensed as Apache 2.0 license, under the Linux Foundation, and can be used personally or commercially without restrictions We performed multi-lingual performance across the following benchmarks: xLAMBDA, xStoryCloze, xWinograd, xCopa Across a total of […]
The Rooftop Solar Industry Could Be on the Verge of Collapse
A decade ago, someone knocking on your door to sell you solar panels would have been selling you solar panels. Now, they are probably selling you a financial product—likely a lease or a loan. Mary Ann Jones, 83, didn’t realize this had happened to her until she received a call last year from GoodLeap, a […]