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Every programmer knows Donald Knuth’s famous quote that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, from his 1974 Turing Award lecture (pdf). A fuller quotation of the surrounding context gives a rounder view: I am sorry to say that many people nowadays are condemning program efficiency, telling us that it is in bad taste. […]
4 months ago

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More from Neil Madden

Digital signatures and how to avoid them

Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is: A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a message gives a recipient confidence that the message came from a sender known to the recipient. —Wikipedia They also have a handy diagram of the process […]

7 months ago 19 votes
Machine Learning and the triumph of GOFAI

I’ve been slowly reading Brian Cantwell Smith’s “The Promise of Artificial Intelligence” recently. I haven’t finished reading it yet, and like much of BCS’s writing, it’ll probably take me 3 or 4 read-throughs to really understand it, but there’s one point that I want to pick up on. It is the idea that “Good Old-Fashioned […]

10 months ago 22 votes
Galois/Counter Mode and random nonces

It turns out you can encrypt more than 2^32 messages with AES-GCM with a random nonce under certain conditions. It’s still not a good idea, but you can just about do it. #cryptography

11 months ago 20 votes
SipHash-based encryption for constrained devices

I see a lot of attempts to define encryption schemes for constrained devices with short authentication tags (e.g., 64 bits) using universal hashing. For example, there’s a proposal in CFRG at the moment for a version of AES-GCM with short tags for this kind of use-case. In my (admittedly limited) experience, these kinds of constrained […]

11 months ago 16 votes

More in technology

The Intuit vs the government cage fight

Daniel Boguslaw: Intuit, Owner of TurboTax, Wins Battle Against America’s Taxpayers Even when the Biden administration broke through in the Inflation Reduction Act to fund a pilot program for Direct File, which expanded to 25 states this tax season, Intuit didn’t stop fighting. Instead, it continued

5 days ago 7 votes
Eurorack Knob Idea

[Hardware] An idea for knobs for synthesizers.

5 days ago 14 votes
Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard

You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting someone trying to build humanoid robots.

5 days ago 12 votes
Fire In The Hole, We’re Breaching The Vault - Commvault Remote Code Execution (CVE-2025-34028)

As we pack our bags and prepare for the adult-er version of BlackHat (that apparently doesn’t require us to print out stolen mailspoolz to hand to people at their talks), we want to tell you about a recent adventure - a heist, if you will. No heist story

5 days ago 12 votes
Reflecting

I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from. The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so … Continue reading Reflecting →

5 days ago 10 votes