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On his 65th birthday, the author reflects on the past five years, which have been incredibly productive. With nine books, over a million words written, numerous podcasts, and software releases, it has been a fruitful period. The focus shifted to exploring the consequences of simple computational rules, leading to a groundbreaking Physics Project. By applying […]
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Tapedeck.org is a project celebrating the intriguing beauty and quirkiness of audio cassette tape designs throughout the decades. From the functional designs of the 60s to the colorful playfulness of the 70s and the innovative shapes of the 80s and 90s, there’s a fascinating range of designs to explore. The audio cassette, introduced by Philips […]
Subscribe to the Nautilus newsletter for captivating science and culture content. Crows and ravens are known for their intelligence and quirky behaviors, including holding grudges, doing statistics, and even hosting funerals. Hooded crows have recently shown the ability to create mental templates, a skill previously thought to be unique to humans, enabling them to reproduce […]
Part 1 of this series on automatic differentiation in Julia introduces explicit chain rules. Other parts cover automation with expressions, intermediate representation, extensions, and multi-layer perceptrons. Automatic differentiation is crucial in modern machine learning frameworks, handling forward and backward passes for model training. PyTorch and Flux.jl automate the backward pass, ensuring consistency with the forward […]
The author discusses the importance of values and goals in creative projects, comparing baking pies for personal enjoyment to presenting new research on sweet pastries at a scientific conference. The author emphasizes the need to clearly communicate intentions upfront, whether it’s for personal exploration or serious research contribution. They suggest starting with playful exploration to […]
Robert W. Bly, a chemical engineer and experienced copywriter for engineers, shares valuable insights into marketing to this unique audience. Engineers dislike gimmicky advertising and prefer informational and professional content. A straightforward, low-key approach often outperforms flashy ads and mailings. The engineer’s purchase decision is logical, heavily influenced by technical specifications. Jargon is welcomed by […]
The National Library underwent a major overhaul of its digital preservation system, transitioning from DSM to DPS for long-term preservation of its historical materials. A crucial part of this transition was the re-archiving process of 2.2 million hours of digital radio, which included born-digital and digitized radio programs from 1993-2022. Surprisingly, during the re-archiving process, […]
Read Max HQ provides updates on media appearances, discussing topics like “Explainer Movies” and “Halogencore.” The recent arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France has sparked controversy, with implications of “free speech” vs. “censorship” being debated. Durov’s interactions with various governments raise questions about the true nature of Telegram as a communication platform. The […]
In distributed systems, selecting a leader is crucial to prevent multiple nodes from performing the same task. Implementing leader election using distributed locking is essential. Often, costly stateful services are used for this purpose, but with AWS S3 recently adding support for conditional writes, a simple and efficient leader election algorithm can be implemented. This […]
Lem simplifies Common Lisp development with built-in LSP support for multiple languages. The editor is perfect for keyboard-oriented users, especially those coming from Emacs or Vim. The unique twist? John McCarthy supposedly shared alien technology with the world in 1958 when he introduced Lisp – a tradition Lem continues. With a GUI version available since […]