Adult Cooper’s hawk dispatching a house sparrow. Image: Vladimir Dinets. Dr Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, is a zoologist who studies animal behavior, ecology, and conservation. As of 2025, he also teaches mathematics at … Read more
Here’s my conclusions about the Snobol4 language itself, which get their own pages: In short, I think Snobol is fascinating. The singular focus on pattern matching kind of reminds me of Awk. Except Awk doesn’t do nearly as much with … Read more
I started writing a post called “how to write AI apps” but it was over-reach so I scaled it back to this. Who am I to tell you how to write anything? But here’s what I’ll be applying to my … Read more
Here’s a breakdown of my year in game dev, the challenges I faced, and the key takeaways that’ll shape my 2025 projects. TL;DR In 2024, I didn’t finish any games, but I learned a lot about game development. I tackled … Read more
Steve Krouse on Jan 3, 2025 Since the beginning of Val Town, our users have been clamouring for the state-of-the-art LLM code generation experience. When we launched our code hosting service in 2022, the state-of-the-art was GitHub Copilot. But soon … Read more
Each week Quanta Magazine explains one of the most important ideas driving modern research. This week, computer science staff writer Ben Brubaker unpacks what computer science is really about and discusses some highlights from his reporting over the past year. … Read more
In a nutshell Our four top charities — Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), the Against Malaria Foundation’s (AMF) insecticide-treated net (ITN) distribution, Helen Keller International’s (Helen Keller) vitamin A supplementation (VAS), and New Incentives’ conditional cash transfers to increase … Read more
We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, … Read more
Timing is everything Tracing the lineages of agricultural ants to their most recent common ancestor revealed that the ancestor probably lived through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction—the one that killed off the dinosaurs. The researchers argue that the two were almost … Read more
I like self-hosting things when I can. I have a little server running k3s at home that I run stuff on. I also have a few things in the cloud on fly.io (those cheap L40ses are great btw). I wanted … Read more