A defense of boring languages
Boring languages are underrated. Many appear to be rated quite highly, at least if you look at market share. But even so, they’re underrated. Despite the...
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Advantages of monorepos
Here’s a conversation I keep having: Someone: Did you hear that Facebook/Google uses a giant monorepo? WTF! Me: Yeah! It’s really convenient, don’t you think? Someone:...
Read moreWe used to build steel mills near cheap power. Now that’s where we build datacenters
Why are people so concerned with hardware power consumption nowadays? Some common answers to this question are that power is critically important for phones, tablets, and...
Read moreReading citations is easier than most people think
It’s really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns...
Read moreGiven that we spend little effort on testing, how should we test software?
I’ve been reading a lot about software testing, lately. Coming from a hardware background (CPUs and hardware accelerators), it’s interesting how different software testing is. Bugs...
Read moreWhat happens when you load a URL?
I’ve been hearing this question a lot lately, and when I do, it reminds me how much I don’t know. Here are some questions this question...
Read moreGoodhearting IQ, cholesterol, and tail latency
Most real-world problems are big enough that you can’t just head for the end goal, you have to break them down into smaller parts and set...
Read moreAI doesn’t have to be very good to displace humans
There’s an ongoing debate over whether “AI” will ever be good enough to displace humans and, if so, when it will happen. In this debate, the...
Read moreCPU backdoors
It’s generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer, which had a backdoor built-in to...
Read moreBlog monetization
Does it make sense for me to run ads on my blog? I’ve been thinking about this lately, since Carbon Ads contacted me about putting an...
Read moreVisualizing Representations: Deep Learning and Human Beings
In a previous post, we explored techniques for visualizing high-dimensional data. Trying to visualize high dimensional data is, by itself, very interesting, but my real goal...
Read moreWhat’s new in CPUs since the 80s?
This is a response to the following question from David Albert: My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic,...
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