Nix is a tool for configuring software environments according to source files. I’ve been hearing more and more about Nix on Hacker News and Twitter. The idea of it appeals to me, so I’ve been tinkering with it over the past few weeks.
Source: My First Impressions of Nix, an article by Michael Lynch.
This article describes some principles I’ve found useful for designing good Python library APIs, including structure, naming, error handling, type annotations, and more. It’s a written version of a talk I gave in June 2023 at the Christchurch Python meetup.
Source: Designing Pythonic library APIs, an article by Ben Hoyt.
Search capabilities span from free text (think Google) to raw data access (think SQL). In between, there’s a wide range of options for narrowing a search that are often provided with UI elements. But what if there are too many fields for a UI to search on? Search DSLs can give a user more granular access to searching without exposing an overly complicated interface.
Source: Building Search DSLs with Django, an article by Dan Lamanna.
In the evening I finished Cruel and Unusual, Book 4 in the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell. I liked the story. Cornwell is getting better and better with each book in the Kay Scarpetta series.
Earth failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carried its precious human cargo to a potential new paradise. Generations later, this fragile colony has managed to survive, eking out a hardy existence. Yet life is tough, and much technological knowledge has been lost.
Then strangers appear. They possess unparalleled knowledge and thrilling technology – and they've arrived from another world to help humanity’s colonies. But not all is as it seems, and the price of the strangers' help may be the colony itself.
In the evening I started in Children of Memory, Children of Time book 3 by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
In the acknowledgements the author gives a nod to his research sources which include the fantastic book The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. I read this book several years ago while living in Mexico and highly recommend it.
Instead of having to limit sanity checks to the boundaries of the program, we could re-use those as function contracts using the
assertkeyword. Indeed, settingPYTHONOPTIMIZEremoves allassert, making the check useful in dev, and free in production.Unfortunately, the community doesn't know about the feature, and use
assertfor things that should never be removed, so using the flag would likely introduce bugs into your program.
In my recent post about data archiving to removable media, I laid out the difference between backing up and archiving, and also said I’d evaluate git-annex and dar. This post evaluates git-annex.
Source: Using git-annex for Data Archiving, an article by John Goerzen.
This article discusses the technical details of static initialization for map data in Go binaries, and some alternative strategies for dealing with the performance impacts.
Source: Initializing Large Static Maps in Go, an article by Aaron Son.
As his wedding day approaches, Ben heads to Miami with his soon-to-be brother-in-law James to bring down a drug dealer who's supplying the dealers of Atlanta with product.
In the evening Adam, Alice, Esme, and I watched Ride Along 2. I liked the movie and give it a 7 out of 10.
Let me repeat: gitflow is just a poor branching flow hack indicating low level of your team’s engineering practices.
Source: Gitflow is a Poor Branching Model Hack, an article by Vadim Samokhin.
Machine learning (ML) lets computers learn from data on their own without requiring software developers to write out all the logic by hand. Given enough data, the machine can learn useful patterns in the data, which turns out to be quite powerful.
The earliest ML algorithms go back to the 1960’s but machine learning started being commonly used in the early 2000’s. In 2012, “deep learning” involving large neural networks became practical and their usage and capabilities has grown exponentially since then.
Source: How does Machine Learning work?.
The recent breakthroughs in Large Language Model (LLM) technology are positioned to transition many areas of software. Search and Database technologies particularly have an interesting entanglement with LLMs. There are cases where Search improves the capabilities of LLMs as well as where inversely, LLMs improve the capabilities of Search. In this blog post, we will break down 5 key components of the intersection between LLMs and Search.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Query Understanding
- Index Construction
- LLMs in Re-Ranking
- Search Result Compression
We will also conclude with some thoughts on how Generative Feedback Loops fit into this picture.
Source: Large Language Models and Search, an article by Connor Shorten and Erika Cardenas.
Security guard Ben must prove himself to his girlfriend's brother, top police officer James. He rides along James on a 24-hour patrol of Atlanta.
In the evening Adam, Esme, and I watched Ride Along. I liked the movie and give it a 7 out of 10.
Recently I’ve been working in static analysis land and as a part of that have been familiarizing myself with data flow analysis. I look at a fair amount of MIR and so decided to delve into the
rustc_mir_dataflowcrate to see how these things are handled in the rust compiler. There is a helpful introduction to this topic in therustc dev guide, and this post fleshes things out a bit.
Source: Exploring Dataflow Analysis in the Rust Compiler, an article by David Anekstein.
Large language models (LLMs) have powerful general capabilities out of the box: they can answer questions, write poems and stories, invent recipes, and write code. But they may not precisely fit your use case. Their answers may be too vague, poorly formatted, or even incorrect.
Fortunately, you can adapt LLMs to meet your needs. There are three levels of LLM customization:
- Prompt engineering
- Embeddings via vector databases
- Fine-tuning
Each level is an order of magnitude more difficult and expensive than the previous, but offers far more customization.
Source: Three techniques to adapt LLMs for any use case, an article by Philip Kiely.
Emacs is one of those magical pieces of technology that manages to bridge the gap between being a tool that does useful work, and becoming a deeply personal component in a software developer’s life. It is one half of the editor war and is one of the longest running examples of programmers elevating their personal choices to moral imperatives. But beyond that, it is also a piece of software that has seen decades of iteration. It’s old enough that parts of it were contributed by people that have long since passed. They may be gone, but their code still lives on, making our lives just a bit easier.
Source: An Ode to Emacs. The Greatest Operating System, an article by Diego Crespo.
Ensuring your application can handle failures and outages is crucial, and the availability of your application is only as good as the availability of your PostgreSQL instance. With that in mind, you may be wondering which PostgreSQL high availability (HA) deployment option is best for your application.
Let’s review several popular solutions that increase the high availability of PostgreSQL deployments and, as a result, the availability overall of your application. Why several and not one? Well, there’s no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to high availability and PostgreSQL. So, walk through the options for a highly available deployment of PostgreSQL and then you can make a choice that fits your use case.
A Bloom filter is a standard data structure in computer science to approximate a set. Basically, you start with a large array of bits, all initialized at zero. Each time you want to add an element to the set, you compute k different hash values and you set the bits at the k corresponding locations to one.
Source: Expected performance of a Bloom filter, an article by Daniel Lemire.
Dired buffers can be made editable, and both filenames and permission bits can be edited like plain text.
Source: WDired: Editable Dired Buffers, an article by Mickey Petersen.
I also wrote about WDired mode back in 2009 in Using Emacs Dired to rename files the easy way.
A storm rages. A young girl is kidnapped. Her mother teams up with the mysterious woman next door to pursue the kidnapper, a journey that tests their limits and exposes shocking secrets from their pasts.
In the evening I watched Lou. I liked the movie and give it a 7 out of 10.
Tig is an ncurses-based text-mode interface for git. It functions mainly as a Git repository browser, but can also assist in staging changes for commit at chunk level and act as a pager for output from various Git commands.
Source: Tig - Text-mode interface for Git.
Last week I managed to glean more insights into Apple’s continuing evolution of their passkeys support from other places online, though, so I decided to pull it all together. Here’s the latest news on changes coming in iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS 14 to Apple’s passkeys experience.
Source: WWDC23: Passkeys, an article by Matthew Miller.
In the spirit of “everything old is new again,” browsers are once again supporting the ability to style the scrollbar. Much like custom CSS mouse cursors, I feel this is also a mistake.
Source: Don’t use custom CSS scrollbars, an article by Eric Bailey.
The fingerprints say the murderer is the man who's just been executed . . .
At 11.05 one December evening in Richmond, Virginia, convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell is pronounced dead in the electric chair. At the morgue Dr Kay Scarpetta waits for Waddell's body. Preparing to perform a post-mortem before the subject is dead is a strange feeling, but Scarpetta has been here before. And Waddell's death is not the only newsworthy event on this freezing night: the grotesquely wounded body of a young boy is found propped against a rubbish skip. To Scarpetta the two cases seem unrelated, until she recalls that the body of Waddell's victim had been arranged in a strikingly similar position . . .
In the evening I started in Cruel and Unusual, Book 4 in the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell.
By any measure, CSS has gotten a lot better in recent years. It’s gotten more useful features, better interoperability between browsers, and become easier to learn thanks to a concerted push toward making CSS a cohesive system free of quirks and hacks.
Source: Modern CSS in Real Life, an article by Chris Coyier.
In this post, I go over what monad transformers are and how to use them. I go into the internals of some common transformers, and we see how monad transformers are essentially functions that take in a monad and return an "augmented" monad with extra capabilities. We finish with a discussion of two different ways of using monad transformers, mtl-style and transformers-style.
Source: Monad Transformers 101, an article by William Yao.
Perl actually has two encodings that get the letters u, t, f, and 8. One will happily let you do bad things, and the other will let you do bad things but with a warning that you can make fatal.
Source: Know the difference between utf8 and UTF-8, an article by brian d foy.