Is being bilingual good for your brain?
Reams of papers have been published on the cognitive advantages of multilingualism. Beyond the conversational doors it can open, multilingualism is supposed to improve “executive function”, a loose concept that includes the ability to ignore distractions, plan complex tasks and update beliefs as new information arrives. Most striking, numerous studies have even shown that bilinguals […]
Jane Street’s sneaky retention tactic
Hedge funds will go to great lengths in pursuit of profits, whether it is by counting cars in satellite photos of parking lots or shipping gold across the Atlantic. Building a compiler—a piece of software that turns human-written code into programs a computer can execute—for your homegrown language? That still raises eyebrows.
Restoring a ZX Spectrum+ Toastrack
I talk a lot about Commodore machines in this blog; they left a bigger dent in me growing up, but like most kids of my generation living in Portugal in the 80s, the first computers I played with were actually Sinclairs—first my friend’s ZX81 and then a ZX Spectrum 48K that my parents offered me. […]
Parsing JSON in Forty Lines of Awk
JSON is not a friendly format to the Unix shell — it’s hierarchical, and cannot be reasonably split on any character (other than the newline, which is not very useful) as that character might be included in a string. There are well-known tools such as jq that let you correctly parse JSON documents in the […]
Addictions Are Being Engineered
How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention – and relationships Every few months, a new social platform promises to “fix” the problems with existing ones. BeReal would bring authenticity. Clubhouse would bring intimacy. Each follows the same trajectory: pure intentions, venture funding, growth pressure, algorithmic manipulation, inevitable corruption. I know because […]
The Coming Storm: How Mediterranean Water Collapse Could Reshape Britain
Andreas Gregoriou stands in what used to be his family’s vineyard outside Limassol, Cyprus. The January sun beats down on cracked earth where grapevines once grew. His grandfather planted these vines in 1952. His father expanded the vineyard in the 1980s. Now, Andreas is being paid €42,000 by the government to let it die. “They […]
MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
Or: The Day My Toaster Started Taking Phone Calls There’s this thing about USB-C that nobody really talks about. Not the part where we all had to buy new dongles (RIP my dongle drawer, 2010-2023). The other part. See, we all thought USB-C was just going to be about charging things and moving files around […]
Sirius: A GPU-native SQL engine
Sirius is a GPU-native SQL engine. It plugs into existing databases such as DuckDB via the standard Substrait query format, requiring no query rewrites or major system changes. Sirius currently supports DuckDB and Doris (coming soon), other systems marked with * are on our roadmap. Performance Running TPC-H on SF=100, Sirius achieves ~10x speedup over […]
Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet
Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet. The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they’re creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks […]
Antitrust defies politics’ law of gravity
In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” published in Perspectives on Politics: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B The paper’s authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page, a professor […]