Typesetting and printing a family memoir (2017)
July 17, 2017 In the 1980s, my great-uncle, André Klat, wrote his memoirs on a typewriter. The memoirs included the family history going back to 1760 and charming stories of his youth and adulthood in Egypt. The copy that made its way into my hands had been photocopied so many times that some pages were […]
Keycloak took 10 months to fix a 2FA bypass
Earlier this year, I was working with my colleague Ema on a source-assisted application and architecture assessment for a client who was using Keycloak to implement single sign-on on their applications. The purpose of the assessment was not to audit Keycloak itself. However, being it at the core of the authentication system, we took a […]
MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
November 12, 2024 Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display has worked extremely well during those two years, so I’m sharing the basic set-up in case others find it useful for similar situations. Note: unless […]
Waiting for many things at once with io_uring
When doing systems programming we often need to wait for something to happen. Common examples might be waiting for some data to come through a socket or waiting on a lock. We also often want to wait on any of several conditions to become true. A web server might be handling many sockets at once, […]
The geometry of data: the missing metric tensor and the Stein score [Part II]
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Rigby. / The James Webb Space Telescope captures gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that can be modeled using differential geometry. Note: This is a continuation of the previous post: Thoughts on Riemannian metrics and its connection with diffusion/score matching [Part I], so if you haven’t read it yet, please consider […]
FireDucks: Pandas but 100x Faster
FireDucks : Pandas but 100x faster | *ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ* ✨✨ HWisnu’s blog ✨✨ о ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ Home Low Level High Level Game Dev Tools & Misc Dev Ops Zig Snippets 10 Nov, 2024 Introduction My main background is a hedge fund professional, so I deal with finance data all the time and so far the Pandas library […]
SQLite Index Visualization
After learning about indexes, I understood their basic structure, but I wanted to dig deeper — to explore the data structure, understand the algorithm, and learn how the index data is stored on disk.The theory and actual implementation can differ, so I decided to explore this topic further. I wanted to see how a database […]
Gwern Branwen – How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI’s Trajectory
Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you’ve read his blog, you know he’s one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive. In order to protect Gwern’s anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over […]
BERTs Are Generative In-Context Learners
Abstract:While in-context learning is commonly associated with causal language models, such as GPT, we demonstrate that this capability also ’emerges’ in masked language models. Through an embarrassingly simple inference technique, we enable an existing masked model, DeBERTa, to perform generative tasks without additional training or architectural changes. Our evaluation reveals that the masked and causal […]
Lessons from My First Exit
In April of this year, I sold TinyPilot, the bootstrapped hardware company I founded and ran for four years. I wrote a post in May that told the story of the sale, but I’d like to share more about the practical lessons I learned from the experience. In this post, I’m sharing what went well, […]