Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from EXPLAIN EXTENDED
Regular readers of my blog will be aware that SQL is an excellent tool for graphics. You can use it to draw snowflakes, fractals, ray-traced 3D pictures, and many other things. SQL art is beautiful, albeit slow to generate. These days they say AI is taking over, and human-made art will soon go the way […] The post Happy New Year: Diffusion Model image generator in about 700 lines of pure SQL appeared first on EXPLAIN EXTENDED.
Translations: Russian This year, the talk of the town was AI and how it can do everything for you. I like it when someone or something does everything for me. To this end, I decided to ask ChatGPT to write my New Year's post: "Hey ChatGPT. Can you implement a large language model in SQL?" […] The post Happy New Year: GPT in 500 lines of SQL appeared first on EXPLAIN EXTENDED.
Explain Extended New Year's post solving the Rubik's Cube in SQL The post Happy New Year: solving the Rubik’s Cube in SQL appeared first on EXPLAIN EXTENDED.
Ok, I gave in to the fad and took up Wordle. For those who have been living under a rock for the past few weeks, Wordle is a relatively new online word game which has become viral. It is a variation of Bulls and Cows. You have six tries to guess a five-letter word. Each […] The post A good first word for Wordle appeared first on EXPLAIN EXTENDED.
Last year, my good friend and colleague Matt Ward challenged me to implement a quantum computer emulator in SQL. Challenge accepted! This year we will be building an SQL query which will emulate a quantum computer. This query will process quantum assembly, build the circuit, run the emulation and make the measurements. First things first, […] The post Happy New Year: quantum computer emulator in SQL appeared first on EXPLAIN EXTENDED.
More in programming
A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good. And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well. So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
