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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.
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We’re excited to announce that the Arduino team is returning to Amsterdam as an ecosystem partner at The Things Conference 2025, the world’s leading LoRaWAN event, taking place September 23rd-24th. This year, we’re bringing more tech, more insights, and more real-world use cases than ever – to give you all the tools you need to future-proof […] The post The Things Conference 2025: shape the future of IoT with Arduino! appeared first on Arduino Blog.
Okay, I have to be doing something astronomically stupid, right? This should be working? I’m playing around with an App Clip and want to just run it on the device as a test, but no matter how I set things up nothing ever works. If you see what I’m doing wrong let me know and I’ll update this, and hopefully we can save someone else in the future a few hours of banging their head! Xcode App Clips require some setup in App Store Connect, so Apple provides a way when you’re just testing things to side step all that: App Clip Local Experiences I create a new sample project called IceCreamStore, which has the bundle ID com.christianselig.IceCreamStore. I then go to File > New > Target… > App Clip. I choose the Product Name “IceCreamClip”, and it automatically gets the bundle ID com.christianselig.IceCreamStore.Clip. I run both the main target and the app clip target on my iOS 18.6 phone and everything shows up perfectly, so let’s go onto actually configuring the Local Experience. Local Experience setup I go to Settings.app > Developer > App Clips Testing > Local Experiences > Register Local Experience, and then input the following details: URL Prefix: https://boop.com/beep/ Bundle ID: com.christianselig.IceCreamStore.Clip (note thne Apple guide above says to use the Clip’s bundle ID, but I have tried both) Title: Test1 Subtitle: Test2 Action: Open Upon saving, I then send myself a link to https://boop.com/beep/123 in iMessage, and upon tapping on it… nothing, it just tries to open that URL in Safari rather than in an App Clip (as it presumably should?). Same thing if I paste the URL into Safari’s address bar directly. Help What’s the deal here, what am I doing wrong? Is my App Store Connect account conspiring against me? I’ve tried on multiple iPhones on both iOS 18 and 26, and the incredible Matt Heaney (wrangler of App Clips) even kindly spent a bunch of time also pulling his hair out over this. We even tried to see if my devices were somehow banned from using App Clips, but nope, production apps using App Clips work fine! If you figure this out you would be my favorite person. 😛
Being chronically late to meetings sucks. Not only is it very rude, but you’re signalling that you don’t value your coworkers’ time. However, I’ve picked up a technique that works unreasonably well within a team.1 If you are late to the first meeting of the day three times within a quarter, then you will have to make pancakes for the whole team. Let’s say that you have a daily stand-up taking place at 10:00. Arriving at 10:00:59: completely OK. Arriving at 10:01:00: You’re one step closer to making pancakes! Keep in mind that you may hit some obstacles when implementing this rule, so feel free to adjust it. When proposing this idea in my current team, I learned that the office does not offer pancake-making facilities. The pancakes can be substituted for other types of cake or bringing in something else, as long as the team gives prior approval of that modification. The pancake strikes can also be pooled together and spent with your teammates if they wish to do so. If you’re struggling with your team being late to your daily meeting(s), then go ahead and add this rule to the working agreement. You do have a working agreement set up, right? Right? And a free security tech tip to close out: if you see an unlocked work laptop at the office, open your internal chat application of choice on it and try posting to a public channel that you’ll be bringing cake/beers/candy to the office. Works wonders for enforcing the habit of locking your laptop up when leaving the desk! to be fair, the sample size is two, but it has worked out really well in both! ↩︎
In the worlds of programming and robotics, turtles are entities — either virtual or physical robots— that follow commands to move around a 2D plane. Those are usually very simple commands, such as “move forward 10 units” or “rotate 90 degrees clockwise,” and they help people learn some programming fundamentals (like Logo in the ’80s!) […] The post Turtle bots, Gestalt principles, and emergent art appeared first on Arduino Blog.
