Reading 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...
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Given 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...
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What 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,...
Read moreA review of the Julia language
Here’s a language that gives near-C performance that feels like Python or Ruby with optional type annotations (that you can feed to one of two static...
Read moreInteger overflow checking cost
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check...
Read moreMalloc tutorial
Let’s write a malloc and see how it works with existing programs! This is basically an expanded explanation of what I did after reading this tutorial...
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