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“To iterate is human, to recurse divine.” -Peter DeutschRecursion is a natural idea. When humans perform repetitive tasks, we don't assign state variables, and we generally don't keep counters. We just keep doing the same thing over and over until we arrive at some kind of terminating condition. This “pattern” forms...

A quick programming announcement. This is the first of two shorter posts this week. This is a follow-on from last week’s The Paradox of x86. The next will look at a historic moment in the development of modern semiconductors.Last week’s post on x86 was well-timed as it coincided with writing about whether the x86 In...

In the last few months, I’ve started to realize that there have been several strange anomalies that have popped up with the government’s employment numbers. For years, we have grown accustomed to issues with the CPI, due to the constant moving of goalposts undertaken by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency. Bu...

The Russo-Ukrainian war has been going on for more than 2 years now with no clear end in sight. The borders have come to a standstill; the conflict on land is largely a stalemate. However, Ukraine has achieved a massive victory in the naval theatre.Map of the current situation in UkraineYou might wonder how this is ...

Sculpture by Alicia MartinOne thing the PRH/SS merger trial revealed is that publishing has a lot of problems. This is very true! At the same time, many of the problems seem to have mutated into unbelievable chimeras as they made their way around the discourse. Today, for example, much of the literary internet was d...

Sima Qian (145–86 BC) is considered the foremost Chinese historian for his work, Records of the Grand Historian (in Chinese, Shiji). The work was started by his father, Sima Tan, an astrologer to the imperial court, and finished by Sima Qian in 94 BC. It covers a period of approximately 2000 years right until Han em...

It was all quiet. Then it wasn’t.Note the timestamps on both of these.Dwarkesh Patel did a podcast with Mark Zuckerberg on the 18th. It was timed to coincide with the release of much of Llama-3, very much the approach of telling your story directly. Dwarkesh is now the true tech media. A meteoric rise, and well earn...

Originally posted February 2009. This is a level of deeply geeky geeking about the tactics & philosophy of programming that I don’t often cover these days. I’m not sure why not. More to come.Summary: To debug non-terminating object programs, successively inline the methods on the stack until you have a self-referenc...

A cel setup from Banjo the Woodpile Cat (1979), courtesy of Heritage AuctionsHappy Sunday! This is our lineup for the latest edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter:1) How Don Bluth started an animation revolution in his garage.2) The animation news worldwide.A tidbit before we start — a legal YouTube channel ...

O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, t...

In today’s episode, let’s talk about fractals, floating point numbers, and why that one guy on Wikipedia is wrong.First things first: if you’re unfamiliar with the term, fractals are a loosely-defined class of geometric shapes with a complex, endlessly-repeating structure that’s visible no matter how much you zoom i...

In 1983, Personal Computers were quite the up and coming thing. You could buy your own for a few thousand dollars. Though they were mostly considered toys by many East Coast programmers (more expensive "workstations" were the rage), there had already been some interesting and promising applications developed for it....

I walked into the hospital room of “Gladys,” 54-year-old woman who, like practically a quarter of ER patients, had belly pain, but something didn’t seem right. I’m not trying to be deliberately, annoyingly vague: something I couldn’t articulate kept me in her room.Her vital signs looked normal and she wasn’t in terr...

When I review code from more junior developers or even tenured developers, I find a tendency to either overengineer or overcomplicate solutions. When I ask them to explain the rationale behind their implementation, I get an answer that feels like this was their first thought, and they implemented it without analysin...

A common claim from supply truthers is that homes per capita is at all time highs, so there can’t be a supply crisis. For some number of reasons, a lot of people are just resistant to the supply story. To someone seeking anti-supply talking points, it seems like a really good point. I have written a little bit befor...

Every talented person likes to think that they’re spending their life doing very important work.If you’re a scientist, I’m sure you’ll tell me about how science has transformed the world we live in. The role scientists play in expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. The opportunities scientists have to speak on ...

This is undefended / undefeated, a newsletter by Sara Hendren on design, education, disability, technology, and related ideas. At some point you signed up for it; to unsubscribe, head to the bottom of this post. For my subscribers using screenreaders and others who love audio: I’ve got a voiced version of this post ...

Hey — I’m Noemie (no-ey-me); nice to meet you! 🇫🇷 🥐 I run the On Deck Founders (ODF) program. Our mission is to help more people start the best startups. We help you find the missing pieces to get started — what to build, how you’ll build it, who you’ll build it with, and what needs to happen for you to start. Many ...

We’ve had RunLLM in users’ hands for 4 months now, and we’ve learned a lot. Most of what we’ve learned has obviously turned into product improvements, but we’ve also started to notice some clear trends in how customers are evaluating products. These observations are mostly to help teams selling early-stage AI produc...

A friend has spent the last three years hounding me about seed oils. Every time I thought I was safe, he’d wait a couple months and renew his attack:“When are you going to write about seed oils?”“Did you know that seed oils are why there’s so much {obesity, heart disease, diabetes, inflammation, cancer, dementia}?”“...

An email I recently got from Alexa. I expect I am one of a very small number of people who read it.I still have an Amazon Alexa, which I find somewhat embarrassing to admit. But it was cheap and functional and I like to be able to play music with my voice or set an alarm without looking at a screen. I even occasiona...

Bodiam Castle and its moat in Sussex in England. That moat looks hard to cross in either direction! By WyrdLight.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7910287The ‘moat’ is a familiar business concept. It’s a barrier that protects you from would-be competitors. Everyone wants their busine...

The Cyc group at MCC is attempting to build a single intelligent agent whose knowledge base contains […] tens of millions of entries. We believe such a system will be a useful, perhaps necessary, platform on which to undertake the next generation of work in expert systems, natural language understanding, and machine...

Vector embeddings have been an Overton window shifting experience for me, not because they’re sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, but the opposite. Once I started using them, it felt obvious that this was what the search experience was always supposed to be: less “How did you do that?” and...