As most of you know, I just took three days completely offline so that I could discover what would be difficult about it. I have so much to say about that three days, and first thing I would like to … Read more
This piece originally ran on Casey Newton’s Substack, Platformer. We’re republishing it here because it offers a lot of great detail about what it’s like to leave a media company and start your own publication. A year ago, I quit the … Read more
A BigCo Story Welcome to BigCo Inc! It’s your first day as a software engineer and you’re excited to start your first commit. As your new co-worker Bill shows you around the codebase, you can’t help but notice how often … Read more
Current ideas about the best way of building a software system are heavily influenced by the ideas that captured the attention of previous generations of developers. Can anything of practical use be learned from studying long gone techniques for building … Read more
The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over and it might yet kill more than ten million people worldwide. From the beginning, the institutional response has been lethargic. While officials (including, regrettably, prominent scientific officeholders) provided public assurances, the U.S. did virtually no … Read more
I’m hoping that this blog post could be helpful to someone who has decided to work in the area of symmetric key crypto. During my symmetric-key cryptanalysis journey in my grad school I had a fair amount of zig-zag-ing. Here, … Read more
And now to the present day. Two weeks ago, my former New York Times science news colleague Nicholas Wade wrote an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (and on Medium) arguing that the lab-leak theory deserves a harder … Read more
I put in my earbuds, fired up a podcast, and started going line by line through the list. That took about 2 months. I would open the PDF, see if it was a form, and log it. I also reviewed … Read more