Bag of words, have mercy on us
photo cred: my dad Look, I don’t know if AI is gonna kill us or make us all rich or whatever, but I do know we’ve got the wrong metaphor. We want to understand these things as people. When you type a question to ChatGPT and it types back the answer in complete sentences, it […]
XKeyscore
National Security Agency surveillance Map of global NSA data collection as of 2007, with countries subject to the most data collection shown in red Programs Pre-1978 ECHELON MINARET SHAMROCK PROMIS Since 1978 Upstream collection BLARNEY FAIRVIEW Main Core ThinThread Genoa Since 1990 RAMPART-A Since 1998 Tailored Access Operations Since 2001 OAKSTAR STORMBREW Trailblazer Turbulence Genoa […]
Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program in Rural Peru
We are indebted to Antonio Campos and Luis Angel Mejia for directing the process to match the administrative records needed for this study. Lisseth Escalante and Alfonso Rodriguez Saldarriaga provided excellent research assistance. We recognize the contributions of Pablo Ibarrarán, Ana Santiago and Eugenio Severín in the original randomization implemented for the development of this […]
Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners
Product Owner: Hey, how long do you believe Feature F will take? Developer: Idk. We haven’t even started working on it and it’s bound to stir up some old issues. Estimates come in various disguises, but when you peek under the trench coat there is always the question: “How long — and using what amount […]
Why Fighter Jets Ban 90% of C++ Features [video]
I Tried and Failed to Rebuild the 1996 Space Jam Website with Claude
Can Claude Recreate the 1996 Space Jam Website? No. Or at least not with my prompting skills. Note: please help, because I’d like to preserve this website forever and there’s no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot. Believe me, I’m an engineering manager with a computer science […]
Locks in PostgreSQL
We’ve already discussed some object-level locks (specifically, relation-level locks), as well as row-level locks with their connection to object-level locks and also explored wait queues, which are not always fair. We have a hodgepodge this time. We’ll start with deadlocks (actually, I planned to discuss them last time, but that article was excessively long in […]
Scala 3 slowed us down?
Is this clickbait? Not really. Is this the fault of the language or the compiler? Definitely not. Rather, it was part of a rushed migration. Sharing the lessons learned in the process. I was refreshing one of our services. Part of this process was to migrate codebase from Scala 2.13 to Scala 3. I’ve done […]
Dollar-stores overcharge cash-strapped customers while promising low prices
On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop. Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf […]
Goodbye, Microsoft: Schleswig-Holstein Relies on Open Source and Saves Millions
(Bild: Imilian/Shutterstock.com) Schleswig-Holstein saves 15 million euros in license costs by migrating from Microsoft to free software. The conversion is significantly cheaper. The state administration of Schleswig-Holstein is making a remarkable U-turn in its IT strategy and consistently relying on open source [1]. After the migration from proprietary Microsoft software to free solutions was initially accompanied […]