Summary – Oh TL;DR

The Vatican’s Latinist: On the Career of Reginald Foster. (2017)

In 1970, promising American priest Reginald Foster was tapped to write papal correspondence in Latin. Despite resistance from his superiors, Foster spent forty years at the Vatican composing the pope’s correspondence. Foster was uniquely positioned between the Vatican and his religious order, leading to a colorful career marked by controversial statements and a loose association […]

RDNA 4’s “Out-of-Order” Memory Accesses

AMD’s RDNA 4 introduces memory subsystem enhancements, with a focus on resolving false cross-wave memory dependencies. Prior to RDNA 4, RDNA 3 had strict ordering on data returns which could result in delays between waves. The new architecture allows requests from different shaders to be satisfied out-of-order, breaking the shared memory access queue into per-thread […]

Feral pig meat transmits rare bacteria

B. suis, a highly infectious bacteria commonly found in pigs, can cause the insidious infection brucellosis in humans. The bacteria was recently removed from the US select agents list, which flags pathogens that could be used in bioterror attacks. Humans typically contract brucellosis from consuming unpasteurized dairy products or through close contact with infected animals, […]

All Placebos are not created equal (2021)

Summary: Perkins Tractors were used as placebos in the 18th century and demonstrated the placebo effect for the first time. Different types of placebos have varying effect sizes, with injections being more effective than pills. Physician characteristics also play a role in the effectiveness of placebos. The placebo effect has become stronger over time in […]

America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish labor lawyer, fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and wrote a manuscript titled The Dual State, explaining how the Nazis maintained a facade of normalcy while establishing a domain of lawlessness. The book reveals how a lawless dictatorship operates alongside a normative legal system, slowly eroding it. The author warns that the […]

The case of the critical section that let multiple threads enter a block of code

In a weekly debug session that left more questions than answers, we discovered a critical issue where two threads were entering the same block of code due to a failure in handling the critical section. Despite initial confusion in the crash dump analysis, we uncovered that the critical section was being reinitialized every time a […]

Improving recommendation systems and search in the age of LLMs

The evolution of search and recommendation systems has seen the integration of language models and multimodal content to address traditional limitations. Semantic IDs are replacing hash-based IDs in recommendation models, significantly improving prediction efficiency. M3CSR introduces multimodal content embeddings clustered into trainable category IDs, outperforming other baselines and showing improved performance in cold-start scenarios. FLIP […]

The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)

The author discusses the importance of measuring developer productivity and shares a story about the worst programmer, Tim Mackinnon, who consistently scored zero in productivity metrics. However, the author fought to keep Tim on the team because of his unique approach of pairing with teammates to enhance their skills and deliver better results as a […]

I built website for sharing Drum Patterns

Discover and share drum machine patterns like Adonis’ “No Way Back,” Ashley’s Roachclip,” “The Big Beat,” and more. Play at different BPMs like 125, 95, 102, 92, 96, 109, 112. Surprisingly, “Impeach The President” and “The Funky Drummer” are included, potentially controversial choices. Unique patterns like “Funk Break” and “House Music – House 3” add […]

Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds

The author discusses the stunning background art of the sci-fi game Homeworld 2. They express admiration for the creators’ work and analyze the unique sketched style of the backgrounds. The author delves into a discussion about the use of vertex color gradients in the creation of the backgrounds, exploring the innovative techniques used to generate […]