TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder explore the concept of the BIG BALL OF MUD software architecture in their paper. This informal, haphazard structure is widely popular despite its lack of design. The authors analyze why such architectures are prevalent and how they emerge from factors like throwaway code and piecemeal growth. They offer seven patterns […]
Read more »
dut is a robust disk usage calculator for Linux, offering accurate counting of hard links with an output inspired by NCDU and fully compatible with plain Linux tty. The tool provides customizable output formats and allows easy changes to the maximum depth of files shown. Surprisingly fast, dut outperforms other programs once Linux’s disk caches […]
In a groundbreaking discovery, researchers from Northwestern Medicine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have identified two cellular defects that drive disease in lupus, a condition affecting over 1.5 million people in the U.S. The study, published in Nature, reveals that reversing a specific molecular defect could potentially lead to a cure for lupus. The current […]
Astrobiologist and science-fiction writer Seven Rasmussen from Tacoma Community College explores humanity in unfamiliar ways through short stories touching on space and the future. Her debut book focusing on the Drake Equation is set to be published in 2025. Rasmussen draws inspiration from authors like Ray Bradbury and stresses the importance of storytelling in science. […]
This piece discusses the reliability of garbage collectors in the context of Whippet development, focusing on semi-space collectors and block-structured heaps. The simple semi-space collector is praised for its reliability and performance predictability, making it ideal for resource-constrained systems. However, the reliability of a copying collector with a block-structured heap is questioned due to non-commutative […]
Vision language models (VLMs) like GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Pro power image-text applications but struggle with tasks humans find easy, such as identifying overlapping circles and counting letter intersections. VLMs perform well on some tasks but fail miserably on others, performing poorly even on basic tasks like counting line intersections accurately. Despite their strength in answering […]
This post delves into the world of x86 and amd64 emulation, showcasing various intriguing facts learned while working on a CPU emulator for Time Travel Debugging. The evolution from assembly code to C++ for enhancing maintainability and performance is highlighted. The intricate details of x86 encoding and instruction quirks are explored, shedding light on the […]
Physical neural networks (PNNs) utilize physical properties to compute, showing potential to revolutionize AI. This niche area has shown promise in scaling AI models up to 1000x larger for local, private edge device inference. Current research explores backpropagation-based and backpropagation-free training methods impacting scalability and performance. While no method matches the widely used backpropagation algorithm […]
Summary: The author shares their experience developing an internal tool for NixOS users, highlighting the complexity of dealing with dynamic library dependencies when building executables. They describe the challenges faced in ensuring compatibility across different Linux systems, especially regarding glibc versions and the location of ld-linux.so. They propose a solution involving patchelf and a meta-loader […]
The author explores the reproducibility of official binary packages in Debian and Ubuntu, noting that rebuilds often do not match the official releases. They introduce debdistrebuild, which rebuilds top packages from different distributions to test reproducibility. The results show varying levels of success in achieving identical rebuilds due to differences in build environments, build paths, […]