Anthropic publishes the ‘system prompts’ that make Claude tick
Generative AI models aren’t actually humanlike. They have no intelligence or personality — they’re simply statistical systems predicting the likeliest next words in a sentence. But like interns at a tyrannical workplace, they do follow instructions without complaint — including initial “system prompts” that prime the models with their basic qualities and what they should […]
Box64 and RISC-V in 2024: What It Takes to Run the Witcher 3 on RISC-V
It’s been over a year since our last update on the state of the RISC-V backend, and we recently successfully ran The Witcher 3 on an RISC-V PC, which I believe is the first AAA game ever to run on an RISC-V machine. So I thought this would be a perfect time to write an […]
FreeBSD-rustdate, a reimplementation of FreeBSD-update
Intro This is freebsd-rustdate , a reimplementation of freebsd-update . It’s primarily written because of how slow freebsd-update is, and is written in rust because I felt like it. In usage, it’s expected to be similar, but not identical to freebsd-update . There are probably a number of minor edge-case differences I don’t even know […]
Qualcomm Oryon CPU Core Design
Today, Qualcomm is presenting on their Oryon core. We’ve covered this core previously in a separate article, so I’ll focus on new details or differences covered in the review. Snapdragon X Elite pin given out at HC2024 At the frontend, Oryon has substantial branch prediction resources to feed the 8-wide decoder. Qualcomm has disclosed that […]
Harvard and MIT’s $800M Mistake: The Triple Failure of 2U, EdX, and Axim
In 2021, the unprofitable 2U bought edX, an unprofitable non-profit, for a staggering $800 million. Even to my untrained eye, it seemed like a questionable decision. In my analysis of the acquisition, I had highlighted the financial strain this acquisition would place on 2U, noting the additional $42 million of annual interest expense due to […]
Predicting the Future of Distributed Systems
There are significant changes happening in distributed systems. Object storage is becoming the database, tools for transactional processing and analytical processing are becoming one in the same, and there are new programming models that promise some combination of superior security, portability, management of application state, or simplification. These changes will influence how systems are operated […]
Towards a true multi-cloud offering to deliver on broken promises
On 18 November, we announced that “Scaleway will not renew its GAIA-X membership. The objectives of the Association, while initially laudable, are being sidetracked and slowed down by a polarization paradox which is reinforcing the status quo, that is an unbalanced playing field. Scaleway will focus its time, money and attention on its multi-cloud product […]
What the interns have wrought, 2024 edition
We’re once again at the end of our internship season, and it’s time do our annual review of what the interns achieved while they were here. Jane Street is a big enough place and the internship is wide-ranging enough that it’s impossible to really cover the full spread of work that interns do here. So, […]
The End of Finale
35 years ago, Coda Music Technologies, now MakeMusic, released the first version of Finale, a groundbreaking and user-centered approach to notation software. For over four decades, our engineers and product teams have passionately crafted what would quickly become the gold standard for music notation. Four decades is a very long time in the software industry. […]
Apple to Replace CFO Luca Maestri on Jan. 1
In this article AAPL Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT Luca Maestri speaks to newly graduated students during the visit of the President of the Council, Giuseppe Conte, to Apple and Cisco Academy. Marco Cantile | Lightrocket | Getty Images Apple announced Monday that it will replace Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri on Jan. 1 […]