Understanding DeepMind's Sorting Algorithm

A few days ago, DeepMind published a blog post talking about a paper they wrote, where they discovered tinier kernels for sorting algorithms.

How to go to war with your employer

There is a power differential between you and your employer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your working conditions. Today I’d like to offer a little bit of advice on how to frame your relationship with your employer in terms which empower you and afford you more agency. I’m going to talk about the typical working conditions of the average white-collar job in a neo-liberal political environment where you are mostly happy to begin with and financially stable enough to take risks, and I’m specifically going to talk about individual action or the actions of small groups rather than large-scale collective action (e.g. unions).

I wish to subvert...

Vision Zero — безопасные улицы

Смертность на дорогах можно уменьшить. Для этого вовсе не нужны сложные компьютерные системы, беспилотники, монорельс и прочая ерунда. Но нужно будет поменять подход к проектированию городской среды.

Наиболее успешным подходом сейчас считается норвежская инициатива Vision Zero (ноль смертей), которая постепенно распространяется в Европе. На хабре уже была разгромная статья про нее. Теперь пришло время, наоборот, похвалить Vision Zero и подчеркнуть ее плюсы.

Водитель не виноват

Виновата инфраструктура. Один из главных принципов Vision Zero - участники дорожного движения будут иногда ошибаться, а инфраструктура никогда не должна ошибаться.

Back to C++

I learned C++ in the late 1990s, back then with Microsoft's Visual Studio C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes. When I left Windows behind and embraced Linux and macOS, I concentrated on Objective-C, Vala, and (since 2020, being late to the game) Swift. Just recently I started getting into MCU programming (notably the ESP32-series). As I'm (still) not very fond of C, I was pleasantly surprised to see that C++ was supported well. I didn't look at C++ for almost two decades, but I like what the committee did since 2014. Type inference, move semantics, coroutines, ranges, and all that...

Building a Hacker News ChatGPT Plugin

I recently received access to develop and use ChatGPT plugins, and embarked on a project to build a Hacker News integration as a learning exercise. My goal was to enable retrieval of content from HN to answer questions and produce insights in conversations with ChatGPT.

You can experience the plugin in one of three ways:

Simple Demo ...

Driving Compilers

Burnout

It kind of crept up on me. One day, sitting at my workstation, I stopped typing, stared blankly at the screen for a few seconds, and a switch flipped in my head.

On the night of New Year’s Eve, my backpack was stolen from me on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam, and with it about $2000 worth of equipment, clothes, and so on. A portent for the year that was to come. I generally keep my private and public lives carefully separated, but perhaps I will offer you a peek behind the curtain today.

It seems like every week or two this year, another crisis presented...

Tax brackets visualizations

Who should lead us?

Consider these two people, each captured in the midst of delivering a technical talk.

Based on appearances alone, what do you think of them?

The person on the left is a woman. She’s also pretty young, one might infer something about her level of experience accordingly. I imagine that she has led a much different life than I have, and may have a much different perspective, worldview, identity, and politics than I. Does she complain about sexism and discrimination in her work? Is she a feminist? Does she lean left or right on the political spectrum?

The person on the right looks like most of...

rc: a new shell for Unix

rc is a Unix shell I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks, though it’s been in the design stages for a while longer than that. It’s not done or ready for general use yet, but it is interesting, so let’s talk about it.

As the name (which is subject to change) implies, rc is inspired by the Plan 9 rc shell. It’s not an implementation of Plan 9 rc, however: it departs in many notable ways. I’ll assume most readers are more familiar with POSIX shell or Bash and skip many of the direct comparisons to Plan 9. Also, though most of the features...