For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it's very real.
Virtually nobody is pricing in what's coming in AI. I wrote an essay series on the AGI strategic picture: from the trendiness in deep learning and counting the OOMs, to the international situation and The Project.
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvements over the previous processor, the Intel 486, including a faster floating-point division algorithm. A year later, Professor Nicely, a number theory professor, was researching reciprocals of twin prime numbers when he noticed a problem: his Pentium sometimes generated the wrong result when performing floating-point division. Intel considered this "an extremely minor technical problem", but much to Intel's surprise, the bug became a large media story. After weeks of criticism, mockery, and bad publicity, Intel agreed to replace everyone's faulty Pentium chips, costing the company $475 million.
The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write.
Fortunately, I've seen patterns emerge over the past couple years.
So, I've decided to replace myself with a shell script.
In particular, I've created shell scripts for catching three problems:
abuse of the passive voice,
weasel words, and
lexical illusions.
At the start of WWII, the US armed forces used various means for enciphering their confidential traffic. At the lowest level were hand ciphers. Above that were the M-94 and M-138 strip ciphers and at the top level a small number of highly advanced SIGABA cipher machines.
NIST’s second draft of its “SP 800-63-4“—its digital identify guidelines—finally contains some really good rules about passwords.
Inspired by this thread on Hacker News about the C++ diff-pdf tool I decided to see what it would take to produce a web-based PDF diff visualization tool using Claude …
A month ago Coleman Hughes, a young writer whose name I recognized from his many thoughtful essays in Quillette and elsewhere, set up a virtual "AI safety roundtable" with Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gary Marcus, and, err, yours truly, for his Conversations with Coleman podcast series. Maybe Coleman was looking for three people with the most widely…
A decision that arises over and over when designing concurrent programs is whether to represent program state in control flow or as data. This post is about what that decision means and how to approach it. Done well, taking program state stored in data and storing it instead in control flow can make programs much clearer and more maintainable than they otherwise would be.
Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google and OpenAI
Buone intenzioni, implementazione proposta pessima.
Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012. This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go...