More from Home on Erik Bernhardsson
Writing code for a computer is hard enough. You take something big and fuzzy, some large vague business outcome you want to achive. Then you break it down recursively and think about all the cases until you have clear logical statements a computer can follow.
As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python. It turns out, ignoring some minor coordinate system head-banging, I was able to get something half-decent working in a couple of hours.
CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity of a company. Some of the advice is timeless, for instance the section about “General interference with Organizations and Production”:
Long story short: I'm working on a super cool tool called Modal. Please check it out — it lets you run things in the cloud without having to think about infrastructure. Scaling out, scheduling, containerization, using GPUs, setting up webhooks, and all kinds of other stuff.
This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my head into something sort of wider.
More in technology
Apple made AirTag randomly chirp when bumped or moved when out of bluetooth range of your iPhone. That's great, but if your bike is stolen - the very last thing you would want is for the thief to hear the AirTag and throw it away. That's why we designed The AirTag Silencer - a patented precision tool that helps you disable AirTag's speaker in seconds - all you need is a hammer. Easy to Use - Remove AirTag's battery & set on the baseplate, place silencer, and hit piercer flush with a hammer. Disconnects the coil that powers AirTag's speaker. Works on multiple AirTags. Invaluable for expensive bikes, camera bags, purses, electronics, backpacks, etc... Anything you wouldn't want a thief tipped off by AirTag's chirp. And its great for pets too - no chirping on their collar in the middle of the night. Also available on Amazon.
Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well. We're back. Sorry. We've been watching the onslaught of vulnerabilities flood the internet. Every man, dog, and their grandmas (apparently?) are now using LLMs to find and reproduce vulnerabilities - it’
You want less of them. That’s the reason. You may find that it’s too hard to stop people from doing the thing, literally blood, sweat, and tears trying to prosecute people, but that’s a different thing.