How the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy foresaw AI chatbots, voice assistants, and irritating kitchen appliances decades before anyone else I read an article somewhere claiming that author Douglas Adams had invented the concept of the ebook … Read more
This post is an extract from my presentation at the recent GoCon spring conference in Tokyo, Japan. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to handle errors in Go programs. I really wanted there to be a single … Read more
When it comes to vector search, it’s not just about matching words. Understanding the meaning behind them is equally important. But there are challenges. Sometimes, factors like text meaning, popularity, and recency can lead to results that aren’t quite right. … Read more
If you’re still using IP geolocation to decide what language to show, stop screwing around. It’s a broken assumption dressed up as a feature. IP tells you where the request comes from, that’s it. It doesn’t tell you what language … Read more
They say you can’t truly hate someone unless you loved them first. I don’t know if that’s true as a general principle, but it certainly describes my relationship with NumPy. NumPy, by the way, is some software that does computations … Read more
I noticed that handling the None variant of Option without falling back on unwrap() is a common papercut in Rust. More specifically, the problem arises when you want to return early from a function that returns a Result if you … Read more
Being a model citizen and a person of taste, you probably don’t need this reminder, but some others do: Federal judges do not like it when lawyers electronically watermark every page of their legal PDFs with a gigantic image—purchased for … Read more
Google is usually criticized for its relentless collection of personal data. It’s an important and widely discussed topic, but I’m surprised there isn’t another common criticism: its responsibility for UI & UX design and its consequences. Any large company that … Read more
I enjoy shocking people by telling them I don’t use LLMs. This isn’t true, but it’s morally true for the reference class I’m in (people who wrote a book about em, 2024 AI PhD, ML twitter member in good standing, … Read more
SSH access is ubiquitous. It’s how engineers, scripts, and platforms across the world remotely administer Linux systems. Whether you’re running a small development server or managing a global fleet, you almost certainly rely on SSH in some form or another. … Read more