The Wired Guide to Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. He’s vowed to jail his political foes and journalists. A Republican-controlled government could further restrict abortion and transgender rights. Influential conservatives have called for a crackdown on left-leaning activist groups, a replay of Trump’s hardline attitude against protesters in his first administration. To carry […]
A stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom
So in 2006, Nvidia announced the CUDA platform. CUDA allows programmers to write “kernels,” short programs designed to run on a single execution unit. Kernels allow a big computing task to be split up into bite-sized chunks that can be processed in parallel. This allows certain kinds of calculations to be completed far faster than […]
Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
Traditionally, it’s always been standard practice for programmers to wrap long lines of code so they don’t span more than 80 characters across the screen. This is because, back in the bad old days, most computer terminals could only display 25 rows of 80 columns of text on screen at once. Any lines that were […]
Emit-C: A time travelling programming language
A time travelling programming language emiT is a language all about parallel timelines. At any given point you can send a variable back in time, and make it change things about the past, starting a new timeline where the result is different. You can kill variables, which destroys them permanantly- at least until you send […]
I’m a neurology ICU nurse. The creep of AI in our hospitals terrifies me
The healthcare landscape is changing fast thanks to the introduction of artificial intelligence. These technologies have shifted decision-making power away from nurses and on to the robots. Michael Kennedy, who works as a neuro-intensive care nurse in San Diego, believes AI could destroy nurses’ intuition, skills, and training. The result being that patients are left […]
Jepsen: Bufstream 0.1.0
Kafka is a popular streaming system which provides replicated, sharded, append-only logs. Bufstream is a drop-in replacement for Kafka designed to prioritize data governance and cost efficiency in cloud environments. Like Kafka, Bufstream provides a collection of named, partially ordered logs called topics. Each topic is divided into partitions. Each partition is a totally ordered, […]
The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch: When smartphones and social media platforms swept into teens’ lives in the early 2010s, schools experienced their own digital revolution, with 1-to-1 laptops, tablets, and iPads becoming staples in classrooms across the Western world. (1-to-1 means one device for every student.) A decade later, the revolutionary optimism is […]
When muscles work out, they help neurons to grow, a new study shows
There’s no doubt that exercise does a body good. Regular activity not only strengthens muscles but can bolster our bones, blood vessels, and immune system. Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of […]
Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation [pdf]
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Unit Testing Numerical Routines
Published 2024-11-12 Reading Time 7 minutes. How would you unit test this function? std::tuple ecef_to_lla(const Eigen::Vector3d& position_ecef_m); This prototype takes a position expressed as cartesian coordinates in the Earth Centered, Earth Fixed (ECEF) reference frame and converts it into latitude, longitude, and altitude. If you are not familiar with aerospace coordinate systems you will still […]