Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Posts on Made of Bugs
About a month ago, the CPython project merged a new implementation strategy for their bytecode interpreter. The initial headline results were very impressive, showing a 10-15% performance improvement on average across a wide range of benchmarks across a variety of platforms. Unfortunately, as I will document in this post, these impressive performance gains turned out to be primarily due to inadvertently working around a regression in LLVM 19. When benchmarked against a better baseline (such GCC, clang-18, or LLVM 19 with certain tuning flags), the performance gain drops to 1-5% or so depending on the exact setup.
Earlier this month, I used Claude to port (parts of) an Emacs package into Rust, shrinking the execution time by a factor of 1000 or more (in one concrete case: from 90s to about 15ms). This is a variety of yak-shave that I do somewhat routinely, both professionally and in service of my personal computing environment. However, this time, Claude was able to execute substantially the entire project under my supervision without me writing almost-any lines of code, speeding up the project substantially compared to doing it by hand.
Suppose we have a large collection of documents, and we wish you identify which documents are approximately the same as each other. For instance, we may have crawled the web over some period of time, and expect to have fetched the “same page” several times, but to see slight differences in metadata, or that we have several revisions of a page following small edits. In this post I want to explore the method of approximate deduplication via Jaccard similarity and the MinHash approximation trick.
I worked at Stripe for about seven years, from 2012 to 2019. Over that time, I used and contributed to many generations of Stripe’s developer environment – the tools that engineers used daily to write and test code. I think Stripe did a pretty good job designing and building that developer experience, and since leaving, I’ve found myself repeatedly describing features of that environment to friends and colleagues. This post is an attempt to record the salient features of that environment as I remember it.
I was recently introduced to the paper “Seeing the Invisible: Perceptual-Cognitive Aspects of Expertise” by Gary Klein and Robert Hoffman. It’s excellent and I recommend you read it when you have a chance. Klein and Hoffman discuss the ability of experts to “see what is not there”: in addition to observing data and cues that are present in the environment, experts perceive implications of these cues, such as the absence of expected or “typical” information, the typicality or atypicality of observed data, and likely/possible past and future time trajectories of a system based on a point-in-time snapshot or limited duration of observation.
More in technology
A Quick Look Behind the Scenes at Amstrad.
Even if we ignore intelligence, humans are able to speak when other animals — even other great apes — can’t, because of our specialized and complex vocal anatomy. Similarly, ASL (American Sign Language) wouldn’t be possible without our incredible hand and finger dexterity. Like any other complex physiological system, that is difficult to recreate artificially. […] The post A robotic hand with the dexterity to sign the whole ASL alphabet appeared first on Arduino Blog.
I use Uptime Kuma to check the availability of a few services that I run, with the most important one being my blog. It’s really nice. Today I wanted to set it up on a different machine to help troubleshoot and confirm some latency issues that I’ve observed, and for that purpose I picked the cheapest ARM-based Hetzner Cloud VM hosted in Helsinki, Finland. Hetzner provides a public IPv6 address for free, but you have to pay extra for an IPv4 address. I didn’t want to do that out of principle, so I went ahead and copied my Docker Compose definition over to the new server. For some reason, Uptime Kuma would start up on the new IPv6-only VM, but it was unsuccessful in making requests to my services, which support both IPv4 and IPv6. The requests would time out and show up as “Pending” in the UI, and the service logs complained about not being able to deliver e-mails about the failures. I confirmed IPv6 connectivity within the container by running docker exec -it uptime-kuma bash and running a few curl and ping commands with IPv6 flags, had no issues with those. When I added a public IPv4 address to the container, everything started working again. I fixed the issue by explicitly disabling the IPv4 network in the Docker Compose service definition, and that did the trick, Uptime Kuma made successful requests towards my services. It seems that the service defaults to IPv4 due to the internal Docker network giving it an IPv4 network to work with, and that causes issues when your machine doesn’t have any IPv4 network or public IPv4 address associated with it. Here’s an example Docker Compose file: name: uptime-kuma services: uptime-kuma: container_name: uptime-kuma networks: - uptime-kuma ports: - 3001:3001" volumes: - /path/to/your/storage:/app/data image: docker.io/louislam/uptime-kuma restart: always networks: uptime-kuma: enable_ipv6: true enable_ipv4: false That’s it! If you’re interested in different ways to set up IPv6 networking in Docker, check out this overview that I wrote a while ago.
In the distant past of about two decades ago, one would need to use a KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch to control multiple computers with the same mouse and keyboard — and even then, it would take a button press to move from one to the other. Today, Apple’s Universal Control feature lets users seamlessly […] The post This inexpensive adapter brings Apple Universal Control to vintage Macs appeared first on Arduino Blog.
I love 3D printing. Out of all the tech hype cycles and trends over the last decade, this one is genuinely useful. There’s simply something magical about being able to design or download a model from the internet, send it to a machine, and after a few hours you get an actual physical object in return! I don’t own a 3D printer myself, but I’ve had access to people who are happy to help out by printing something for me. So far I’ve printed the following useful things: a Makita vacuum cleaner holder a dual vertical laptop stand it’s such a simple and cheap design, and yet it works incredibly well if you add some rubberized material to the bottom and inside the laptop holder a dual HDD adapter for a Zimaboard a stand for the Steam Deck a carrying case insert for the Steam Deck a case for the Orange Pi Zero There’s so much more that I’d want to print, like various battery holders, controller stands, and IKEA SKÅDIS mounts. There’s also the option of downloading and printing a whole PC case, which is incredibly tempting. Will I finally be able to build the perfect home server according to my very specific requirements? Probably not, given how often my preferences change, but it would be incredibly cool! And yet I don’t own a 3D printer. The main obstacle for me is the time, I feel like in order to be successful with a 3D printer, I’ll need to at the very least learn the basics of filaments, their properties, what parameters to configure and how, how to maintain a 3D printer, how to fix one when it breaks, how to diagnose misalignment issues etc. I’ll also need space for one, extruding hot melting plastic seems like a thing that I’d want to host in a proper workshop and with actual ventilation. It’s a whole-ass hobby, not a half-ass one. Durability can be problematic with 3D prints, even in my limited experience. For example, I tried positioning the Makita vacuum cleaner holder differently, but ended up putting too much strain on the design, which eventually lead to it completely failing. In other cases, filaments like PLA aren’t suitable for designs where they are attached to warm or hot computer parts, they will warp like crazy. I appreciate the hell out of anyone that shares their designs with the world, and especially those that allow remixing or customizing their designs. There are fantastic designs and ideas out there on sites like Printables, and the creativity that’s on display warms my heart.
