The author, a homeschooling parent, shares insights on teaching writing and drawing based on personal experiences and observations from teaching in Japan. The controversial idea is that copying others’ work is crucial for learning to draw and imitating correct forms is key for improving handwriting. The author advocates for a copybook method that involves copying […]
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Create your personalized link page by simply entering your username and clicking “Edit/Create”. Feel free to customize and update your page whenever you like by visiting /yourusername/edit. It’s easy and convenient to showcase your favorite links in one place. This feature allows for easy access to frequently visited websites or share interesting content with others. […]
The author paints a vivid picture of a typical day in the Pain Zone, a nightmarish enterprise data warehouse full of nonsensical processes and a culture that values speed over quality. From deciphering gibberish logs to dealing with clueless management, the author’s frustration with the dysfunctional system is palpable. Despite the daily struggle, camaraderie with […]
Hey! I’m Spawek, and my friends and I organized LAN parties for 16 years. These parties include gaming, board games, and intense discussions. Dota 2 is our main game, but team selection was always a challenge due to skill differences. We automated team selection by using Elo ratings to balance teams. We coded during the […]
The author presents a new memory-disk hybrid indexing and search system called SPANN, aimed at providing an efficient solution for approximate nearest neighbor search with reduced costs. By storing centroid points in memory and large posting lists on disk, SPANN guarantees low latency and high recall rates. Using hierarchical balanced clustering for indexing and a […]
In 2023, the author discussed how Shopify’s Ruby monolith’s garbage collector was fine-tuned, implementing out-of-band garbage collection to reduce major collection latency impact. Despite massive latency improvements, the heuristics used were unsatisfactory, prompting the disabling of major GC entirely. A new feature was developed, preventing the automatic triggering of major collection during a request cycle. […]
The author discusses the building of a “Bench Kona” in a shed, using parts from a crashed Hyundai Kona Electric for reverse engineering purposes. They detail the process of wiring together modules on the bench to simplify the complex powertrain of the Kona for an EV conversion. The author highlights challenges faced, such as dealing […]
The finite element method (FEM) celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2021 as a cornerstone of engineering design analysis and scientific modeling. FEM’s impact spans from material mechanics to medical applications, semiconductor design, and beyond, solving problems described by partial differential equations. This paper provides a historical overview of FEM’s development divided into four key time […]
In this project, the author tackles the challenge of overlaying a looping music track over a voice soundtrack using the ffmpeg command in Go. The initial function, loopBackgroundMusic, encounters a problem where the voice track is cut off when the music loop finishes. To address this, the author introduces the “abomination,” a complex solution involving […]
In his seventies, Katsushika Hokusai created stunning wood block prints of supernatural tales in the series Hyaku Monogatari, diverging from his famous depictions of Japanese landscapes. These prints were inspired by the tradition of sharing terrifying stories involving vengeful ghosts and cannibals, culminating in the appearance of a spirit after a hundred candles were blown […]