Visualizing World War II
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human experience, the millions of twisting threads of time that created the world we live in today. And I […]
Homage to Alexander Grothendieck
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The online sports gambling experiment
Related: Book Review: On the Edge: The Gamblers I have previously been heavily involved in sports betting. That world was very good to me. The times were good, as were the profits. It was a skill game, and a form of positive-sum entertainment, and I was happy to participate and help ensure the sophisticated customer […]
Security Is a Useless Controls Problem
We’re all a bunch of chimps in a cage In this blog, I cover: A somewhat popular StackOverflow answer to introduce a metaphor about useless security posts How to tell if a control is probably useless Why useless bad for the industry, advising where to go from here, and tease a future series of blogs […]
Testing the Z80 Chip with a 1970s Beauty
The Fairchild Sentry 610 was optimized for engineers This article was originally published at MTSI. To read more of our case studies visit our website for Micro Technology Services, Inc. by FRED BECKHUSEN If you used a Z80 chip back in the 1980s, it almost certainly passed through a single room and its Fairchild Sentry […]
Every Arthouse Buff You Know Is Pirating Films
Earlier this year, Daniel, a filmmaker from England, wanted to watch Béla Tarr’s take on Macbeth, a TV movie by the Hungarian auteur that had aired in 1982 on the Magyar Televízió network. On arthouse subreddits like /ObscureMedia and /Criterion, the film had become the subject of intrigue. It’s composed of just two takes, the […]
Magic Circle tries to track down first female member – who posed as a man
The council meeting of the Magic Circle on 9 October 1991 was a historic occasion, marking the moment when the first cohort of women, including Debbie McGee and Fay Presto, were admitted to its previously male-only ranks of magicians. But the meeting was also memorable for another, lesser known, reason. The council voted to expel […]
ML in Go with a Python Sidecar
Machine learning models are rapidly becoming more capable; how can we make use of these powerful new tools in our Go applications? For top-of-the-line commercial LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, the models are exposed as language agnostic REST APIs. We can hand-craft HTTP requests or use client libraries (SDKs) provided by the LLM vendors. […]
Making a trading Gameboy: A pocket exchange and algo trading platform
QuestDB is a next-generation database for market data. It offers premium ingestion throughput, enhanced SQL analytics that can power through analysis, and cost-saving hardware efficiency. It’s open source, applies open formats, and is ideal for tick data. So in a nutshell I made this: A trading Gameboy The story I didn’t wake up one day […]
Optimizing a WebGPU Kernel to 1TFLOP of Performance
Building Surfgrad, a high-performant, WebGPU-powered autograd library I work at Nomic, where many of my colleagues work on building large TSNE-like visualizations work in the browser1. Showing tens of millions of data points in the browser without rendering your computer an oven is no easy challenge. I overhear many of the scaling problems solved by […]