Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
January 2023
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2023-01-26
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2023-01-22
Simple sabotage field manual
Simple sabotage field manual –This fascinating reproduction of a CIA sabotage manual contains great tips on how to sabotage organizational effectiveness. Many of the tips seem to be universally in force in academia!
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2023-01-17
Laurence Tratt: Why We Need to Know LR and Recursive Descent Parsing Techniques
Laurence Tratt: Why We Need to Know LR and Recursive Descent Parsing Techniques –Nice article about something I learned and actually really enjoyed in college but havet thought much about over the years. All about top down and bottom up parsers. About unambiguous and ambiguius grammars. About LR and recursive descent parsers. And more…
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2023-01-17
Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready
Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready –My question is what does the Y in YJIT stand for? From the author: “YJIT, a just-in-time (JIT) implementation on top of CRuby built at Shopify, is now production-ready and delivering major improvements to performance and speed. Maxime shares the updates that have been made in this newest version of YJIT, and future plans for further optimization.”
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2023-01-15
GitHub – volution/z-tokens: z-tokens — random tokens generation and related tools
GitHub – volution/z-tokens: z-tokens — random tokens generation and related tools –This is a standalone password generator. I think that because it does’t know the email or account name that the password is used with, the risk that the app itself is malware is small… i think… Author says: “z-tokens — random tokens generation and related tools – GitHub – volution/z-tokens: z-tokens — random tokens generation and related tools”
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2023-01-13
Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists
Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists –Researchers cannot always differentiate between AI-generated and original abstracts.
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2023-01-13
Make your own assembler simulator in JavaScript (Part 1)
Make your own assembler simulator in JavaScript (Part 1) –A nice series of posts explaining how the assembly simulator was implemented: “The goal of this blog post is to create a simple simulator which is able to assemble your code into cpu instructions and run them inside a virtual computer”
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2023-01-13
Simple 8-bit Assembler Simulator in Javascript
Simple 8-bit Assembler Simulator in Javascript –One of many simple CPU simulators. I’m teaching a course in Operating Systems and I’ve been looking for a really simple and clear visual simulator for a CPU. This one is the best one yet. But I would like a better one. This one is missing any kind of support for IO or System calls or something like that. But it’s usable.
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2023-01-11
Create a Business Language for a Rails Application | AppSignal Blog
Create a Business Language for a Rails Application | AppSignal Blog –This is a very useful package to be aware if… assuming youre a rubyist 😀 Author says: “Build and parse a programming language to extend your Rails application’s functionality.”
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2023-01-11
karpathy/nanoGPT: The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs.
karpathy/nanoGPT: The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs. –This looks useful, which is why I am linking to it, I haven’t tried it or anything: “The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs. – karpathy/nanoGPT: The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs.
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2023-01-09
VSCode Marketplace can be abused to host malicious extensions
VSCode Marketplace can be abused to host malicious extensions –It seems that no one and nowhere is safe from hackers: “Threat analysts at AquaSec have experimented with the security of VSCode Marketplace and found that it’s surprisingly easy to upload malicious extensions from accounts that appear verified on the platform.”
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2023-01-08
Docker on MacOS is slow and how to fix it · Paolo Mainardi
Docker on MacOS is slow and how to fix it · Paolo Mainardi –Thanks to the DALL·E 2, we finally have a very nice graphic representation of the feelings of a Docker container inside a macOS environment, I will try with this article to make this poor container safe to the coast. TL;DR Link to heading At the time of writing, the only viable option to have a decent performance and a good DX are: VirtioFS to share the filesystem (Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Colima) – There are still some issues.
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2023-01-08
The stats gap
The stats gap –Students understand just enough statistics to get by
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2023-01-02
Opinion | The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It.
Opinion | The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It. –Another interesting continuation of the debate on the impact of chatGPT and Stable diffusion and the other newest ai based creative genetors. I think these new tools are a big thing, a game changer. Will it bring on a series of new and common ways tomdigitslly sign content produced? This idea sounds ok but there are a lot of issues with bringing it about. Will it bring out a new, singular, ethical concept sitting along side “original work” and “plagiarism”? Here is the author: “My drawings are a reflection of my soul. What happens when artificial intelligence — and anyone with access to it — can replicate them?”
December 2022
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2022-12-30
Regexp Preprocessor
Regexp Preprocessor –Interesting but not for me. I know regexps are arcane and confusing but they are well documented and people know them. I put this in the same bucket as scss and sass and many other helpful pre-processors. Not for me. Of course, you may not know that C++ started out literally as a C pre-processor (called cfront) that would generate C. So… The author says: “Summary of what pomsky is and what it looks like. Pomsky is a language that compiles to regular expressions. It is currently in an alpha stage and will likely change in the next few releases.”
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2022-12-30
Heroku alternatives: Free Hosting Providers in 2023
Heroku alternatives: Free Hosting Providers in 2023 –Now that heroku eliminated their generous free tier (an understanable business decision) all of us “freeloaders” are scrambling to find alternatives. This article revies what they consider to be “Top Free Hosting Providers in 2023”
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2022-12-29
What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround?
What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround? –I was in a Barnes and Nobel again after many years. Actually many years before that I would go to a B&N more than once a week. Then between Amazon and terrible inventories at B&N and Kindle and Nook I stopped going. Then a few weeks ago I visited one and it was a revelation. I had a great time browsing books and books and books. Great article:”Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?”
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2022-12-29
A closer look at Acorn, our open source precision farming rover – Research Blog – Twisted Fields community
A closer look at Acorn, our open source precision farming rover – Research Blog – Twisted Fields community –Too cool. Let the author speak: “Hello Acorn fans! We recently released a new video, linked below. The rest of this post is an article version of the video for those that want to quickly scroll through the screenshots or prefer to read. If you’re new here, make sure to check out our announcement post where we talk more about the motivations and goals of the project. A closer look at Acorn, our open source precision farming rover Hello everyone and welcome to Twisted Fields, our research farm in San Gregorio …”
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2022-12-28
TSPSIs and How I Write
TSPSIs and How I Write –Useful advice and framework for structuring your academic or technical writing. Author says: “TL;DR: Writing about writing and having written, and self-referentiality. Complementary musings on AI.”
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2022-12-28
A Nibble of Geohashes in Go – by Kurt – Get Code
A Nibble of Geohashes in Go – by Kurt – Get Code –This is a really cool algorithm that i never heard of. Also geohashes are not too hard to compute and have very useful and unteresting properties. the concept of a z-order curve is explained. That too is a useful model and concept. The author says: “Latitude and longitude as a locality-preserving string.”