Normalization of deviance
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe...
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Big companies v. startups
There’s a meme that’s been going around for a while now: you should join a startup because the money is better and the work is more...
Read moreFiles are hard
I haven’t used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my...
Read moreWhy use ECC?
Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory. My read is that his major...
Read moreWhat’s worked in Computer Science: 1999 v. 2015
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research”. Here are his opinions from 1999 on “what worked”. Yes...
Read moreShort Story on AI: A Cognitive Discontinuity.
The idea of writing a collection of short stories has been on my mind for a while. This post is my first ever half-serious attempt at...
Read moreInfinite disk
Hardware performance “obviously” affects software performance and affects how software is optimized. For example, the fact that caches are multiple orders of magnitude faster than RAM...
Read moreWhat a Deep Neural Network thinks about your #selfie
Convolutional Neural Networks are great: they recognize things, places and people in your personal photos, signs, people and lights in self-driving cars, crops, forests and traffic...
Read moreWhy Intel added cache partitioning
Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs. Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines. If...
Read moreNeural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming
Deep learning, despite its remarkable successes, is a young field – perhaps ten years old. While models called artificial neural networks have been studied for decades,...
Read moreVisual Information Theory
I love the feeling of having a new way to think about the world. I especially love when there’s some vague idea that gets formalized into...
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