Exploting a long-standing git bug for my own amusement. And I think there is one known race: the index mtime itself is not race-free. – Linus Torvalds, Re:git bugs, 2008 A well-known race condition skulks through git’s plumbing. And I can demo it via a git magic trick 🪄1 $ tree -L 1 -a . . ├── file └── .git $ cat file okbye $ git status On branch main Changes to be committed: new file: ...
I’ve decided to intentionally take more time to play video games this year, since it’s a relatively healthy way to escape from the real world once in a while. A friend recommended one game in particular: Control: Ultimate Edition. During the Steam summer sale of 2023, I went ahead and bought it. I have liked it more than I expected to. What prompted me to cover this game wasn’t the captivating...
Announcing 'Extremely Hardcore,' Zoë Schiffer’s book on Musk’s Twitter takeover
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“[A] reverence for the natural world, and a conviction that intelligent sanity is both more difficult than unreflective complacency and more interesting than madness.” That’s how the poet Dick Davis characterized the concerns of Janet Lewis and her husband Yvor Winters in his obituary of Lewis. The poets were married for nearly forty-two years, until Winters’ death in 1968. Consider this line...
They’re almost always conservative. Whether it’s a governmental body, the strategy group at a big company or the membership panel at the local country club, we can learn a lot by seeing what they approve and when they stall. Of course, each of us know a lot about our offering, the change we seek to […]
Prioritising time to think, write and publish
From the first roundel to moquette trainers.
New book delves deep into the world of vintage collectables.
It's going to be WILD.
In the world of finance, there are a myriad of strategies employed by corporations to optimize their tax liabilities. One such method, known as transfer pricing, has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, raising concerns about fairness and equity in the global tax system.
It was a 2012 evening, and I was driving home from the office. I was worried about finishing a big project at work on time. I’d made the journey from the office to my home so many times, my car almost seemed to know the way by itself. My hands were on the wheel, but…
They're not going to disrupt everything (yet), but they're a ton of fun.
Hey, this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to share the most interesting trends, frameworks, opportunities, and ideas with you. Let's dive in! #1 💡 It's cool that smartphones have become all-in-one devices. But at the same time, there’s a reason why people buy Kindle devices.
How I find clear signals in a misinforming & disinforming noisy world; To see the future, look back in time
The five-day hospital stay breaking the month in half is likely invisible to anyone but me, but that is why the fiction list is so mystery-heavy, and for that matter so long. Many of these books, the post-surgery group, are not just short but light, well-suited for the invalid's tired hand. The invalid is feeling much better, by the way, in fact not much of an invalid, so perhaps I am ready for...
My life is pretty much like yours. Except that total strangers send me all sorts of things.
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to data analysis in business. The two approaches have different worldviews, and express different tradeoffs. Here's why that matters.
The role of a software developer often gets distilled down to a singular activity: coding. While coding is undeniably the […] The post Habits of great software engineers appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
60,000 people lost full phone service, half of AT&T's network was down, and 500 airline flights were delayed
A FAQ of sorts
You think I’m crazy, but just wait and see....
I consider database migrations one of the most annoying problems to deal with during a software engineer’s life. Not only […] The post Database Migrations appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway in the heart of the city, encountered every hurdle imaginable: ruthless politics, engineering challenges, secretive contractors, outright fraud and even the death of one motorist. It became a kind of poster child for The post The Big Dig appeared...
Last year, I started a photography hobby. Soon after, I've created a place where I can share some of my work, without any attention-driven algorithms dictating the terms. Here's a technical write-up of my journey. Table of contents: Motivation Inspiration Design Implementation Content management Loading performance Navigation RSS Accessibility Pipeline Preparation Metadata update Content...
My psychology around money has changed significantly over the last two years. While some of that is captured in my monthly portfolio updates, I thought it was worth recording some of my emotions while they are still fresh. Two years ago Turning the clock back, my financial situation was, in word, ‘flush’. The stock market… Continue reading Feeling broke →
There I was, standing in the middle of a buzzing tech event that our company organized, feeling like a fish […] The post Networking as an introvert CTO appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
Thirty-eight years since the launch of e-filing, the IRS will pilot its own tax filing system ending two decades of Intuit's regulatory capture of the tax software market
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] One of the very first documented engineering disasters happened in 27 AD in the early days of the Roman Empire. A freed slave named Atilius built a wooden amphitheater in a town called Fidenae outside of Rome. Gladiator shows in Rome were banned at the time, so people flocked from all over to the new amphitheater to attend the...
Ever wondered, "Is there an AI to see how your baby looks?" Well you're not alone! OurBabyAI is an app that shows how your future baby may look.
In a quaint bar on the outskirts of Catania (Italy), as whiskey glasses clinked and muted conversations blended into a […] The post Aging Code appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
As I suspected my energy for writing in August was diverted to more important things. Plenty of energy to read, though. With a respite in September, I should soon be able to write a bit on the Greek philosophers I have been reading. The Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics work well as a cluster. Then later a bit on Plutarch and the little philosophy project is a wrap. PHILOSOPHY Meditations (c....
A quasi-monthly feature. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. I’ve been busy helping to choose the first cohort of our blogging fellowship, so my reading has been relatively light. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me. Books Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990). I’ve...
a heretical take on "total compensation"
Google Colossus Explained Simply
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six […] The post AOL Pretends to be the Internet appeared first on The History of the Web.
See you again soon
Do birds of a feather flock together, or do opposites attract? These are both common aphorisms, which means that they are commonly offered as generally accepted truths, but also that they may by wrong. People like pithy phrases, so they spread prolifically, but that does not mean they contain any truth. Further, our natural instincts […] The post How Much Do Couples Share Traits? first appeared on...
A personal guide to Singapore for foreign friends visiting.
The differences between games development and more “standard” software engineering, roles, and how games are typically built.
small updates from me in July 2023
Caught in a series of lies about his willingness to fight Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire's disturbing spiral accelerates
Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. The post Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact first appeared on Quanta Magazine
There are a lot of different ways to be an outsider. Nobody really wants to be a misfit or a "noob." But there is wisdom in outsiders. They can be characters who challenge societal norms and reshape our understanding of what it means to belong. There are some people for whom persistent weirdness is not a weakness but a strength. One person who made this case beautifully is Paul Graham.
A while ago an old friend texted me that an unexpected event had once again reminded her how transient life can be, and she thought of me because I was one of...
The iterator proposal is a neat way to write “lazy loops”, where we never generate more results than we actually use. Let’s see what that would look like in Go programs.
A lie.
Knowing how to program has a multitude of positive effects on the brain.
I read Baldur’s book “Out of the Software Crisis” a while back and have been meaning to publish some of my highlighted excerpts and notes. It’s always hard reading a book like this because I highlight so much and have so many thoughts that I could spend hours and hours rehashing it all. But alas, there’s no time. So it will have to suffice to say: I enjoyed the book, here are a few excerpts I want...
People talk about you the way you talk about yourself.
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
What, exactly, is the skill of capital? What does it consist of? How do you recognise it? We walk through three stories, and then talk about the shape of the skill in practice.
I place a lot of value on creativity in my life, and this has been pretty consistent throughout my various life stages. For a long time it was tied to my identity...
We trace Michael Dell's skill at the art of capital in business, and use it to examine how skill at capital allows you to make moves that aren't available to a novice business operator.
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it's only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal (titanium dioxide has been in use somewhat longer...
Photography by Stetson Ybarra Multi-disciplinary design studio Daniel Joseph Chenin, Ltd. has shared photos of a modern home they completed on the edge of the Las Vegas Valley that has views of Red Rock Canyon. Photography by Stetson Ybarra Commissioned for a family embracing an active lifestyle of immersive environmental experiences, the home has a […]
How to skip the brain, bypass reason and head straight for the heart to sell
Everything about the Black Magic's acquisition + May 2023 updates
A monthly feature. As usual, recent blog posts and news stories are omitted from this; you can find them in my links digests. In all quotes below, any emphasis in bold was added by me. Books Thomas S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (1948). A classic in the field, concise and readable. Crafts (see paper below) cites this work as pointing out “the links between scientific thought and...
will he go into destroy mode if I say no
The emotional rollercoaster I experience in art supply stores can be summarised in one word: greed. I want every single pen, every brush, every quill, and a sheet of every paper, ranging from crude cardboard to magnificent handcrafted Japanese washi. And yes, I need papyrus. And no, I don’t know what for. I want it all! Which one should I pick? Here is how to find your perfect partner in crime....
The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out. Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it. First, a short description of what … The post Why AI Will Save the World appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.
https://youtu.be/qJ8aRl1UNgw I'm on an old man rant today. The world's a shitfest, and something needs to be said: Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one, and most are full of shit. So, here's my argument: people need to have fewer fucking opinions. The problem is that we're all drowning in information, and this overload causes us to mistake the quantity of knowledge for the quality of...
YR Architecture + Design has shared photos of a modern 575 square foot (53 sqm) live/work studio in Columbus, OH, that was once a 2-car garage. The homeowners were determined for their two-car garage to be an asset, with the couple seeking to maximize their property, and at the same time, offer options for leasing […]
What’s it like to be in the top 1%? According to the statistics, most of the readers of my blog are among the highest earning and/or richest people in the UK. I bet however that not many of you feel that way. Let’s start with income To be in the top 1% of earnings in… Continue reading The richest person you know →
In November 2020, I read the book Apollo’s Arrow after hearing Dr Christakis on NPR’s Fresh Air. Somewhere midway through this book, this paragraph stood out to me: “Either way, until 2022, Americans will live in an acutely changed world—they will be wearing masks, for example, and avoiding crowded places. I’ll call this the immediate […]
https://youtu.be/kDqQGogavmY What if I told you there's a hidden treasure trove of personal traits that could turn your life around? Are you curious? Are you dying to know what they are? Are you wondering why I'm asking so many questions instead of getting to the point? OK, OK—fine. Here, I'll uncover the five good qualities that I think will help you make it through this chaotic, unpredictable,...
People always talk about “P vs NP” like P problems are easy and NP problems are hard. This is a useful day-to-day model but also an oversimplification. Problems can get way, way harder than NP. (If you want a brief refresher on P and NP, check out my post NP-Complete isn’t (always) Hard.) PSPACE-complete P is the set of all problems that can be solved in polynomial time, relative to the input....
New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.” The post Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference. first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Rest of World's staff favorites, from around the globe to add to your must-read pile.
There are a growing number of AI coding tools that are alternatives to Copilot. A list of other popular, promising options.
When she wrote the following entry in her journal and imagined fleeing college to venture into the unknown, Susan Sontag was a precocious sixteen-year-old studying English at the University of California, Berkeley. By the end of the year she had indeed left—not on a bus to an undecided destination, but to the University of Chicago […]
Architecture and interior design studio Archisphere collaborated with Carbone & Kacerovsky to design a ‘Cyclist’, a modern cafe at the Hotel Andaz am Belvedere Vienna. Archisphere drew inspiration from the movement, freedom, and enjoyment associated with cycling. In addition to this, the spirit of the art collector Prince Eugen, whose influence can be found throughout […]
Surreal and otherworldly.
No you can't "have it all." You can have two things, but not three.
Chinese policy and geopolitical risk are doing a lot of the work here.
Designed by Dixon Baxi, London.
and other updates from me in Mar 2023
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
This is the first in a series of posts about new LLM-related technology associated with the Wolfram technology stack. "Color" with something like: When you set up a plugin, it can contain many endpoints, that do different things. And—in addition to sharing prompts—one reason this is particularly convenient is that (at least right now, for security reasons) […]
A lot of otherwise talented people are too pessimistic to actually do anything. They are paralyzed by risks that don’t exist and greatly exaggerate them where they do, preventing them from being one of the best. Consider this lightly edited excerpt from a conversation between Charlie Rose and Magnus Carlsen that argues it’s better to … The post The Winner’s Edge appeared first on Farnam Street.
With HBO walking away from Disney+ Hotstar, shows like Succession, The Last of Us, and Game of Thrones can no longer be streamed in the country.
More than ever, we’re pushed to have certainty. Strong opinions, tightly held and loudly proclaimed. And then, when reality intervenes, it can be stressful. The software stack, business model, career, candidate, policy, or even the social network habits that we had as part of our identity let us down. It’s not easy to say, “I […]
In the math of particle physics, every calculation should result in infinity. The set of techniques known as “resurgence” points toward an escape. The post How to Tame the Endless Infinities Hiding in the Heart of Particle Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine
We spend almost no time teaching toddlers about freedom. Instead, the lessons we teach (and learn) for our entire lives are about responsibility. It’s easy to teach freedom, but important to teach responsibility. Because if you get the responsibility taken care of, often the freedom will follow. When someone points out a lack of responsibility, […]
The clocks have sprung forward and the spring chicks are chirping: yes, April has arrived. But it’s not only those longer, lighter evenings luring us out of the house; this month’s brilliant list of cultural and culinary must-dos and -sees is equally tempting – even […]
Hi everyone! My April Cools piece is up! It’s about really weird stuff you can buy online. Now I know that’s standard SEO farm stuff, but I promise I put a lot of time into researching why people actually want to buy these things. If you ever wanted to know where carnivals buy and sell their rollercoasters, now’s your chance. Anyway, that’s just the April Cools for the blog. I’ve also got one just...
Jason Cohen’s 2013 Microconf talk, Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business with Jason Cohen, is one of the most valuable resources I’ve found for bootstrapped founders. I watched it for the first time in 2020, and I’ve revisited it repeatedly since then. If you’re new to the world of bootstrapped software business, or you’re struggling to gain traction with your business, I highly recommend this...
This week, we discovered that GitHub.com’s RSA SSH private key was briefly exposed in a public GitHub repository. – GitHub’s “We updated our RSA SSH host key” blog, 2023-03-23 Once you git push, nothing is private. Private info in git only stays private on your laptop. But once you schlep it out to a remote: all bets are off. As GitHub’s incident last week demonstrates—private repos are, at best,...
It turns out that operational excellence results from the pursuit of a certain form of knowledge. This is Part 3 of the Becoming Data Driven series, and the result of a deep dive into the field of statistical process control.
Magic: The Gathering, poker, and business strategy all have something in common: they're vulnerable to a cognitive bias known as results-oriented thinking. But to optimize for success, we should avoid this bias and strive to replace it with sound strategy.
There is something delightful about riding a bicycle. Once mastered, the simple action of pedaling to move forward and turning the handlebars to steer makes bike riding an effortless activity. In the demonstration below, you can guide the rider with the slider, and you can also drag the view around to change the camera angle: Compared to internal combustion engines or mechanical watches,...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Also, in this model, everything is flat and it's the same everywhere and eventually all the stars are dead! Today's News:
In my previous post, I was creating groups of students, and I wanted to track how many times students had worked together. I created a nested dictionary to track the pairs: pairs = { 'Alice': {'Bryony': 3, 'Caroline': 1, 'Danielle': 0, …}, 'Bryony': {'Alice': 3, 'Caroline': 2, …}, … } To find out how many times Alice and Bryony had worked together, you’d look up pairs['Alice']['Bryony']...
"Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender... Only unconditional surrender leads to real emptiness, and from that place of emptiness I can be prolific and free."
Although they only existed for seven years and released just three albums, Nirvana were a band of immeasurable influence in the music world thanks in no small part to Smells Like Teen Spirit, a single track on Nevermind, their second album. It was this song that brought them out into the open, going on to sell millions
"IBM's first computer"
Corita Kent was an artist with an innovative approach to design and education. She worked in the Immaculate Heart College Art Department, above, c. 1955. (Photo/Fred Swartz, courtesy of the Corita Art Center) “Sometimes you can take the whole of the world in, and sometimes you need a small piece to take in,” says Sister … The Legacy of Corita Kent Read More » The post The Legacy of Corita Kent...
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 3
The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 20
This story begins one day when I was assembling a map of the city of Edmonton, Alberta from OpenStreetMap data. It was going to be a big map, a 42″ (106 cm) wide poster for a wall. The data was good, but the standard OSM colours were not. They would work fine for a street … Continue reading Cartographic palettes and colour harmonies →
An insight into redesigning the Midland Appliance logotype abduzeedo0215—23 When it comes to branding, one of the most important elements is the logo. It's the visual representation of your brand, and it's the first thing that customers see when they encounter your business. So, it's no surprise that Full Punch, a design agency, was recently contacted to assist...
Neon Worms — colorful illustrations with the Blend Tool in Illustrator abduzeedo0220—23 RETOKA shared another phase of their series of illustrations titled Neon Worms. If you're an illustrator looking to add some glowing effects to your designs, you might be interested in this series with the backstory about the "neon genes" discovered by Dr. Jacqueline Johnson...
The beautiful ambiance of a McMurdo summer.
Blocking Sediment Migration from Colorado River Basin to Gulf of California I didn’t intend to map human migration for the Atlas in a Day project. My plans for a map of the migration of sediment in rivers raised some eyebrows at home, mostly wondering how the subject would fit in an atlas on migration. My wife suggested I ponder the relevance of mineral migration, especially in an age when so many...
Today is Gabriel Josipovici's 80th birthday. To mark the occasion, I'll link to various posts I've written over the years – after a brief interlude. I read him first in July 1988 after borrowing The Lessons of Modernism from the second floor of Portsmouth Central Library because it had essays on Kafka and Saul Bellow. The link explains how significant that brutalist building was for me and how...
I wrote a script that exposes browser and software platform data from hotels across the country. This data is very different from say: StatCounter or NetApplications estimates because they rely on getting their data from trackers on specific websites. The data I pulled comes from guests getting redirected by Network Access Gateways at hotel hotspots and so user agents are tracked regardless of...
I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks about making and hanging some AI art in my house. But I immediately faced some internal resistance. Like, I wasn’t (and still am not) sure whether this is the right way to “do” art. And that got me thinking what that really means. What does it mean to do art…
2022/11/01 The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents A few weeks ago, a coworker of mine was running an incident analysis in Jeli, and pointed out that the overall process was a big drag on their energy level, that it was hard to do, even if the final result was useful. They were wondering if this was a sign of learning what is significant or not as part of the analysis in order to construct a...
People are blown away that Apple keeps winning while its competitors are floundering. It’s a simple formula. Make consistently super-high-quality products that work together as part of an ecosystem. Google and Microsoft have 20X Apple’s losses in the last year. A staggering $3 trillion in combined market cap has been lost in one year from just 7 companies.…
For the past few weeks I’ve been teaching myself how to use Fusion 360, a free online cloud-based CAD/CAM program that lets you create your own 3D designs. The best way to learn how to use a new program is to build something you actually need. And my latest design is a work in progress […] The post M4 Hex Socket Thumbscrew Knob Caps appeared first on Style over Substance.
Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce have announced large layoffs in January. What will these events mean for the rest of the industry?
I've been unhappy with my [tweet rendering strategy](https://github.com/sw-yx/swyxkit/issues/61) for a while - Twitter encourages you to use their heavy JS script to render tweets, which undoubtedly heaps all sorts of tracking on the reader, docks your lighthouse performance score by ~17 points, adds ~4 seconds to Time to Interactive, occasionally gets adblocked (so _nothing_ renders!)
I was interviewed by Pete from No CS Degree on my journey, here are some extracts!
Click for printable size. Here’s a quick list of things we can do to get ready for AI’s ascendance. You can click it to get the full size to print out. This is UL Member Content Subscribe Already a member? Login
The best way to read the internet.
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When Google killed Google Reader, the bloggosphere took a severe hit and the content quality went down because there weren't enough readers to justify the effort it takes to maintain a high quality blog.
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