I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset
The meeting stakes are high when you can get hung up on As you may remember, or completely not know, I have a bit of a fascination with old rotary phones. Occasionally, when people learn about this fascination, they donate their old rotary phones to me, so I have ended up with a small collection. […]
What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
Transmeta was the last big IPO of the dotcom era, launching Nov 7, 2000. Some analysts call its $273 million IPO the last successful tech IPO until the Google IPO in 2004. Transmeta didn’t completely fit in to the dotcom era, because they were a hardware company. But they were still a technology company, and […]
Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k
The NTP Project conducts Research and Development in NTP, a protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a network to a common timebase. NTP is what ensures the reliability of billions of devices around the world, under the sea, and even in space. Accurate timekeeping is vital to the many applications which have […]
Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on ‘world models’
(RTTNews) – Meta’s (META) chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun, plans to leave the company to launch his own AI start-up, marking a major shift inside Meta as CEO Mark Zuckerberg doubles down on “superintelligence” initiatives to compete with OpenAI and Google, according to people familiar with the matter. LeCun, a Turing Award-winning pioneer of […]
Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1 (2022)
Cubemap-Overlap-Based Approaches Frustrated with the poor performance of my polygonal approach, I began to research Unity’s performance optimization tools. I chunked up and parallelized the Voronoi tessellation to no avail. I tried rearranging memory to no avail. Clearly, something about doing this amount of math on the CPU was beyond current processing capabilities… but what […]
Blame as a Service
Productized scapegoating Instagram and Twitter were the defining cultural companies of the 2010s. These platforms created explicit status games where users compete for social capital via metrics such as followers and likes, creating a world where online perception is upstream of real-world outcomes. The social dynamics of these platforms has been extensively written about. Companies […]
You will own nothing and be (un)happy
You will own nothing and be (un)happy | Raccoon’s Trash Can 11 Nov, 2025 Yesterday, I checked out the Goodnotes app because I’m planning to buy an iPad to give note-taking on it a try again. I opened it and I saw that it has updated to Goodnotes 6. I looked through the changelogs, and […]
Bjarne fix your freaking language
About 23 minutes into his talk about Safe C++ [1], Bjarne shows a slide with this code: void f(const char* p) { FILE *f = fopen(p, “r”); fclose(f); } He shows this code to demonstrate how easy it is to miss resource cleanup. Any code that exits the function inside // use f that doesn’t […]
Perkeep lets you permanently keep your stuff, for life
Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem. Perkeep is under active development. If you’re a […]
The Uselessness of “Fast” and “Slow” in Programming
Every field of human activity has its unique characteristics, and programming is no exception. One of the unique aspects of software is how it spans such a large number of orders of magnitude. A software engineer may be slicing and dicing nanoseconds, or they may be trying to accelerate a computation that will run across […]