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In this web content, the author discusses their initial confusion regarding Python’s variable argument operators (* and **) and how to properly use them when adding type hints. The author explains that * captures variable positional arguments in a tuple and ** captures variable keyword arguments in a dictionary. The author then explores the incorrect […]
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Here are some error messages generated by Apple’s MPW C compiler. These are all genuine error messages that I discovered by decompiling the String resources for the compiler. Keep in mind that these error messages are just a small selection from the larger 324k-sized compiler. I’m not entirely sure about the copyright implications of my […]
Cindy Thomason, a nurse in suburban Virginia, received a surprising call from Warner Bros. Entertainment ten years ago, informing her that a font she designed would be featured in The Great Gatsby film adaptation. Despite the excitement, Thomason only received a meager $12 for her design, highlighting the challenges faced by independent font designers. The […]
Goffstown, New Hampshire is home to a growing trend in education called microschools. These “schools” are actually centers where home-schooled students gather to learn together. Prenda, a company that connects home-school families with microschool leaders, compares its service to Airbnb for education. The surge in demand for home schooling has led to an influx of […]
In this web content, the author reflects on their childhood experience with an Atari 800XL and how it sparked their interest in programming. They express their dream of having artificial general intelligence on their Atari and how it became a reality in 2023 when they obtained a TRS-80 Model III computer and discovered ChatGPT. The […]
Computer science pioneer Edsger Dijkstra’s algorithms are widely used due to their efficiency, but they can fail to provide accurate answers when requirements change. Negative weights in a network can confound Dijkstra’s shortest-path algorithm, which does not consider the potential benefit of high weights combined with negative weights. In a recent breakthrough, researchers developed a […]
Solbourne Computer was a significant competitor to Sun in the early days of SPARC-based systems. They were the first to release multiprocessing SPARC servers in 1989 and even developed their own SPARC CPU, the MN10501 “KAP” Kick-Ass Processor. Solbourne’s hardware development and executive management in the 1990s can be seen in rare VHS tapes of […]
Summary: Slack has migrated its critical user-facing services from a monolithic to a cell-based architecture to increase redundancy and limit the impact of site failures. During a recent outage caused by a network disruption in one availability zone, the company realized the complexity of detecting failures in distributed systems. To mitigate such failures, Slack developed […]
The jambiya and khanjar daggers are culturally significant in the Middle East, with their design remaining largely unchanged over the years. While they are popular and studied in the Middle East, they are less known in the West. These daggers were historically used as self-defense weapons and status symbols, with the design and quality of […]
Gojekyll is a project created by Oliver Steele and currently maintained by Daniil Gentili. It is a partially-compatible clone of the Jekyll static site generator written in Go programming language. Gojekyll offers build and serve commands with directory watch and live reload functionalities. It is stable and fast, providing around 20 times the speed of […]