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
Plants of all kinds are quite infamous for their inability to move, and this can be especially problematic for houseplants that rely on consistently sunny locations within a room in order to get enough light. Driven by wanting their plant to have the best possible growing conditions in their north-facing room, GitHub user MarinaXP has […] The post This plant always gets enough sunlight thanks to its robotic legs appeared first on Arduino Blog.
We’re heading to Automate 2025, the largest robotics and automation event in the Americas, happening May 12-15 at Huntington Place in Detroit – and we’re bringing a lineup of fresh innovations, live demos, and exciting new launches. You’ll find us in Booth #6632, right next to our partners at Weintek. This year is extra special […] The post Join Arduino at Automate 2025 to explore the future of automation appeared first on Arduino Blog.
The gang gets to work defending their Mac login items. Who has the most minimal startup? Who's got the craziest apps? This episode has more new apps mentioned in any episode of Comfort Zone ever! Watch or listen now. Other Things Discussed Chris's hyper key video
Introduction Finding the Display Tuning Potentiometers The Result Hardcopy Preview Mode Introduction Less than a week after finishing my TDS 684B analog memory blog post, a TDS 684C landed on my lab bench with a very dim CRT. If you follow the lives the 3-digit TDS oscilloscope series, you probably know that this is normally a bit of death sentence of the CRT: after years of use, the cathode ray loses its strength and there’s nothing you can do about it other than replace the CRT with an LCD screen. I was totally ready to go that route, and if I ever need to do it, here are 3 possible LCD upgrade options that I list for later reference: The most common one is to buy a $350 Newscope-T1 LCD display kit by SimmConn Labs. A cheaper hobbyist alternative is to hack something together with a VGA to LVDS interface board and some generic LCD panel, as described in this build report. He uses a VGA LCD Controller Board KYV-N2 V2 with a 7” A070SN02 LCD panel. As I write this, the cost is $75, but I assume this used to be a lot cheaper before tariffs were in place. If you really want to go hard-core, you could make your own interface board with an FPGA that snoops the RAMDAC digital signals and converts them to LVDS, just like the Newscope-T1. There is a whole thread about this the EEVblog forum. But this blog post is not about installing an LCD panel! Before going that route, you should try to increase the brightness of the CRT by turning a potentiometer on the display board. It sounds like an obvious thing to try, but didn’t a lot of reference to online. And in my case, it just worked. Finding the Display Tuning Potentiometers In the Display Assembly Adjustment section of chapter 5 of the TDS 500D, TDS 600C, TDS 700D and TDS 714L Service Manual, page 5-23, you’ll find the instructions on how to change rotation, brightness and contrast. It says to remove the cabinet and then turn some potentiometer, but I just couldn’t find them! They’re supposed to be next to the fan. Somewhere around there: Well, I couldn’t see any. It’s only the next day, when I was ready to take the whole thing apart that I noticed these dust covered holes: A few minutes and a vaccum cleaning operation later reveals 5 glorious potentiometers: From left to right: horizontal position rotation vertical position brightness contrast Rotate the last 2 at will and if you’re lucky, your dim CRT will look brand new again. It did for me! The Result The weird colors in the picture above is a photography artifact that’s caused by Tektronix NuColor display technology: it uses a monochrome CRT with an R/G/B shutter in front of it. You can read more about it in this Hackaday article. In real life, the image looks perfectly fine! Hardcopy Preview Mode If dialing up the brightness doesn’t work and you don’t want to spend money on an LCD upgrade, there is the option of switching the display to Hardcopy mode, like this: [Display] -> [Settings <Color>] -> [Palette] -> [Hardcopy preview] Instead of a black, you will now get a white background. It made the scope usable before I made the brightness adjustment.
