Compiling a Lisp
Many thanks to Kartik Agaram and Leonard Schütz for proofreading these posts. In my last series, I wrote about building a Lisp interpreter. This time, we’re going to write a Lisp compiler. This series is an adaptation of Abdulaziz Ghuloum’s excellent paper An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction, with several key differences: Our implementation is […]
What Makes for ‘Good’ Mathematics?
Introduction We tend to think of mathematics as purely logical, but the teaching of math, its values, its usefulness and its workings are packed with nuance. So what is “good” mathematics? In 2007, the mathematician Terence Tao wrote an essay for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society that sought to answer this question. Today, […]
‘I should not have written ‘A Clockwork Orange”
British author Anthony Burgess was inspired to write his best-known novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), by the uncivil drift that he perceived among the youth of his time. That is why, a decade later, when headlines in the vein of “Police hunt the Clockwork Orange rapist gang” or “Child dies in Clockwork Orange war” started […]
Damn Small Linux 2024
Home Download DSL 2024 DSL Forums Support DSL Historic DSL The New DSL 2024 has been reborn as a compact Linux distribution tailored for low-spec x86 computers. It packs a lot of applications into a small package. All the applications are chosen for their functionality, small size, and low dependencies. DSL 2024 also has many […]
Oil firms forced to consider climate effects of new drilling, rules Norway court
Norway’s district court in Oslo recently made a decision on fossil fuels that deserves the attention of every person concerned about climate change. This ruling, which compels energy firms to account for the industry’s entire carbon footprint, could change the way oil and gas licenses are awarded in Norway – and inspire similar legal challenges […]
Launch HN: Escape (YC W23) – Discover and secure all your APIs
Hey HN! We’re Tristan and Antoine, co-founders of Escape (https://escape.tech). We use AI inspired by chess to help security engineers and developers discover and secure APIs created by their organizations. Here is our demo: https://youtu.be/qcCaegVElTY Typical modern large orgs have hundreds if not thousands of APIs, and many of those handle sensitive data or are […]
Notcurses: Blingful character graphics/TUI library
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FreeBSD 4 Bug may be present in Playstation 4/5
What initially looked like a troll might turn out to be an actual PS4/PS5 vulnerability. While people shouldn’t get their hopes up just right now as this might fizzle, it’s more interesting than it initially looked on the surface. Discussions about an 18 year old CVE have been making the rounds of PS4/PS5 hacking discords, […]
The VAE Used for Stable Diffusion Is Flawed
Short summary for those who are technically inclined: CompVis fucked up the KL divergence loss on the KL-F8 VAE that is used by SD1.x, SD2.x, SVD, DALL-E 3, and probably other models. As a result, the latent space created by it has a massive KL divergence and is smuggling global information about the image through […]
Easy Introduction to Vector Databases
Using pg_vector in Postgres As part of the massive shift into AI, vector databases have been increasing in popularity. Also known as vectorized databases, they play a crucial role in the context of AI, so it’s important to understand how they work. To do so, we’ll need first to understand what vectors are. What are […]