03/10 Why am I not terrified of AI? — Why am I not terrified of AI? –Author says: “Every week now, it seems, events on the ground make a fresh mockery of those who confidently assert what AI will never be able to do, or won’t do for centuries if ever, or is incoherent even …”

03/10 Meet Zig: The modern alternative to C — Meet Zig: The modern alternative to C –Zig is an up-and-coming systems-oriented language that could one day replace C. Here’s what you need to know about Zig.

03/10 Three-Bucket Framework for Engineering Metrics — Three-Bucket Framework for Engineering Metrics –Deciding what metrics to track and report to stakeholders. This article is common sense but very useful advice on how yo think about what metrics make sense to measure an engineering team.

03/03 The Missing Semester of Your CS Education — The Missing Semester of Your CS Education –Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

03/01 SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases — SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases –This is a nice writeup about power use of sqlite.

02/24 CheatGPT — CheatGPT –If you teach programming, this is a very insightful article. It doesnt solve anything though. From the author: “This week I stepped out of one world and landed in another.  It started while I was marking assignments in a few of my programming courses.The quality of the code I was reading was amazing!  My students were doing the sorts of things that my open source peers do.”

02/21 10 Ways to Avoid Being Fooled — 10 Ways to Avoid Being Fooled –Great useful list of mental models, biases, techniques and tips to avoid being fooled

02/20 Transformer models: an introduction and catalog — 2023 Edition — Transformer models: an introduction and catalog — 2023 Edition –Author” “I have a terrible memory for names. In the past few years we have seen the meteoric appearance of dozens of models of the Transformer family, all of which have funny, but not self-explanatory, names. The goal of this post is to offer a short and simple catalog and classification of the most popular Transformer models. In other words, I needed a Transformers cheat-sheet and couldn’t find a good enough one online, so I thought I’d write my own. I hope it can be useful to you too”

02/17 Rails initializers you don’t know about – Inflections — Rails initializers you don’t know about – Inflections –Fun Rails Esoterica. One of the features that new Rails people are amused and surprised by: “Rails come with a lot of initializers that we are not quite familiar with. One of them is the inflections initializer. In this post, we will look at what inflections.rb is and how we can use them.”

02/17 What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? — What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? –This is a pretty amazing article. Even though it’s “non technical” and I read all of it, I think I only understood about 75%: “Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what’s going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.”

02/17 How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions – Kevin Schaul — How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions – Kevin Schaul –Last week I published a story for The Washington Post that required an interactive slippy map. Lookup maps like this are a common pattern to show a geographic trend and let readers explore the data …

02/12 GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy | Jay Mody — GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy | Jay Mody –Implementing a GPT model from scratch in NumPy. This is a detailed article including python source code. Ive skimmed it and it does explain a lot. But even without my being a neural net, ai, machine learning, gpt, chatgpt expert, i think i would learn a lot. Also the article is very well written presented.

02/07 Visual design rules you can safely follow every time — Visual design rules you can safely follow every time –I love rules of thumb. Here are a set of them for graphic or visual design. I am not a designer but I fancy myself being to tell better design from worse. Anyway, this is a good tool for those of us who are wannabee designers

02/07 Inter-process communication in Linux: Using pipes and message queues — Inter-process communication in Linux: Using pipes and message queues –Learn how processes synchronize with each other in Linux.

02/05 35% Faster Than The Filesystem — 35% Faster Than The Filesystem –An interesting study of performance. It seems hard to believe.

02/05 The day I discovered vmtouch — The day I discovered vmtouch –IntroductionLast weekend I decided to take a deeper look at the famous SQLite 35% Faster Than The Filesystem benchmark. I didn’t want to do a shallow read of the post. I wanted to compile the kvtest tool and run the experiments myself and see what is going on. I recommend

02/03 The Difference Between load, autoload, require, and require_relative in Ruby 📖 — The Difference Between load, autoload, require, and require_relative in Ruby 📖 –An oldy but goodie source of confusion in Ruby. Author says: “Loading external files can get tricky in Ruby, but it doesn’t have to be. This post explains the usage of Ruby’s load, require, and require_relative methods, and when to use each.”

02/03 Unlock the Potential of VS Code for Ruby Programming — Unlock the Potential of VS Code for Ruby Programming –Lots of up to date information on how to tune VS Code for the best Ruby experience. A guide to a free Ruby development environment. Author says: “If you’re like me and your RubyMine trial version expired, you’re probably relying on VS Code. While the former is an amazing tool, it comes behind a paywall, unfortunately. Hopefully, JetBrains will reconsider at some point and have a Community Edition, just like IntelliJ.”

01/31 SuperMagnetMan – Neodymium Magnets, Many Shapes & Sizes! — SuperMagnetMan – Neodymium Magnets, Many Shapes & Sizes! –Large Selection of strong and powerful neodymium magnets. Great Prices. Discs, Rings, Cones, Cylinders, Arcs, Cubes, Rectangles, Squares, and much more.

01/30 Writing Code Without Plain Text Files — Writing Code Without Plain Text Files –Many years ago there was an ide-like tool that worked this way too. No separate source files. It was a cool approach. Glad to see it back! Author said: “The Unison programming language doesn’t store code in files, but in a database. What is that like?”