John C. Dvorak on Intel’s First Neural Network Chip in 1990
“it is something of a breakthrough, having achieved the theoretical intelligence level of a cockroach” “Nobody at Intel knows what to make of this thing,” Very soon we’ll start a new series looking at the story of the development of chips dedicated to accelerating machine learning, with an initial post looking at the origins of […]
APL at Volvo
Hercules is a system used by the Volvo Car Corporation (Volvo) for planning car production. Its main output is the monthly Master Production Schedule (MPS) – a detailed plan on how many cars are to be produced per market, factory and week during the following 13-15 months. Migrating such a comprehensive and vital system from […]
Readyset: A MySQL and Postgres wire-compatible caching layer
{{ message }} This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository. You can’t perform that action at this time.
How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
It sure looks like the education system is melting down, doesn’t it? Just look at this: Are schools failing us? Are we getting dumber? What if I told you that the population mean was 100 throughout the entirety of the series in this image? Well, it really is. The only thing that changed was that […]
BT Tower is to be turned into a HOTEL
BT Tower is to be turned into a HOTEL The BT Tower will be open to the public again, as it has been sold for conversion into a hotel. The BT Group says that it sold the tower for £275 million to MCR Hotels, a group that already owns around 150 hotels. Payment for the […]
Data will not tell you what to do
How disappointing it is to learn that the best ideas rarely come from data after 15 years of working in the field. Data may give you a conclusive answer that changing the color of a button from yellow to green increases the conversion rate by 0.15ppts but will tell you nothing about the other ideas […]
Stop postponing things by embracing the mess
Does your day get derailed frequently because of unexpected circumstances? Do you always expect yourself to be more productive tomorrow? Do you think you will have more time in the future? Let’s dive into why, and what to do about it. Today is far from perfect, but tomorrow will be better Our brain simplifies the […]
From Fill Prefix to TRAMP
By Susam Pal on 30 Dec 2023 Our tiny book club that used to meet during the weekends and holidays and discuss the book Mastering Emacs, 2022 edition concluded today. In our final meeting today, we first discussed how to work across multiple directories in the same Dired buffer. Then we did several demos of […]
A beginner’s guide to constant-time cryptography (2017)
For programmers new to cryptography, there are plenty of “known unknowns” – unfamiliar terms like “elliptic curves” and “random oracles”, and unnecessarily long acronyms (“RSASSA-PKCS-v1_5”, like really?). But what really gives cryptography its reputation is the unknown unknowns. The things that catch even experienced developers by surprise. Quick: where’s the vulnerability in this code? (I […]
So You Want to Ship a Command-Line Tool for macOS
A word of advice: don’t. At work, I’ve written a command-line tool which sets up the developer environment. It installs the Nix package manager, sets up a local Postgres instance, and handles all the complex bits of configuration. It does all of this on Linux and macOS, and it supports bash, zsh, and fish for […]