Everything We Learned About Lockheed’s “QuadStar” Stinger Missile Replacement
The TWZ Newsletter Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy Lockheed Martin has shared new details about its QuadStar surface-to-air missile, which is taking part in the U.S. Army competition to replace the venerable Stinger. QuadStar notably leverages past work the […]
HTAP is Dead
This blog is inspired by Jordan Tigani’s blog titled “Big Data is Dead”. Jordan and I actually spent some time building a HTAP database at SingleStore. The good old days (’70s) Back in the ’70s, one relational database did everything. Transactions (OLTP) during the day and reports after hours (OLAP). Databases like Oracle V2 and […]
A visual exploration of vector embeddings
For Pycon 2025, I created a poster exploring vector embedding models, which you can download at full-size. In this post, I’ll translate that poster into words. Vector embeddings A vector embedding is a mapping from an input (like a word, list of words, or image) into a list of floating point numbers. That list of […]
A toy RTOS inside Super Mario Bros. using emulator save states
This is another post about programming, which I almost never write about. Click here to jump straight to trying this thing out for yourself. In my previous post on Threads, I made an offhand comparison: Threads are just emulator save states, coupled with a condition upon which they will be resumed. At the time, I […]
What does “Undecidable” mean, anyway
May 28, 2025 An explainer for people who don’t know computer science and are mildly curious Systems Distributed I’ll be speaking at Systems Distributed next month! The talk is brand new and will aim to showcase some of the formal methods mental models that would be useful in mainstream software development. It has added some […]
Unhappy Meals (2007)
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that […]
Ice Cream Replaced Booze in the US Navy
General Order 99One hundred and eleven years ago on July 1, 1914, Secretary of the US Navy Josephus Daniels issued General Order 99, banning “the use or introduction for drinking purposes of alcoholic liquors on board any naval vessel, or within any navy yard or station.” The US Navy had ended the rum ration in […]
Deepseek R1-0528
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528 · Hugging Face No model card Downloads last month 0 Safetensors Model size 685B params Tensor type BF16 · F8_E4M3 · F32 · Chat template Files info Inference Providers NEW Model tree for deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528 Collection including deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528 System theme Company TOS Privacy About Jobs Website Models Datasets Spaces Pricing Docs
Ray Tracing in J
Ray Tracing in J index • post archive • atom feed syndication feed icon 2020-04-18 I’ve been reading up on J and decided another small project was in order, this time I’ve written a minimal ray tracer. Brevity J is, perhaps infamously, a terse language. I think it may sometimes get unfairly discounted for this […]
Compiling a Neural Net to C for a 1,744× speedup
2025-05-27 · About 25 minutes long tl;dr: I trained a neural network (NN), with logic gates in the place of activation functions, to learn a 3×3 kernel function for Conway’s Game of Life. I wanted to see if I could speed up inference by extracting the learned logic circuit from the NN. So, I wrote […]