Recently updated blogs

Garbage Collection and Metastability Cleaning up is hard to do. I’ve written a lot about stability and metastability, but haven’t touched on one other common cause of metastability in large-scale systems: garbage collection. GC is great. Garbage collected languages like Javascript, Java, Python, and Go power a big chunk of the internet’s infrastructure. Until Rust came along, choosing memory safety typically implied choosing garbage collection. For almost all applications, languages …

Shed Build - Part 3: Walls, Window, Paint This is part three of the shed building series. Previously: Part 1: Foundations Part 2: Framing and Roofing Walls Last time, we left the shed in a very see through state, having a roof and a door, but no walls. To change that, we used tongue and grove boards to face the walls. The boards went up relatively quickly using brad nails …

This word means the tendency to forget names. This is something I’ve struggled with a LOT in recent years. I’m not sure what the cause is: the fact that my jobs at YOW and AWS meant meeting so many people? Did I get long Covid? Or is it one of the many joys of perimenopause? Or maybe it’s just getting older… At any rate, it’s incredibly frustrating to be able …

Kew is one of London’s leafy surburban neighbourhoods. Situated on a long curve of the River Thames, ot is of course famous for Kew Gardens,

Today we take for granted that we can instantly access images of almost any part of the Earth taken from space using an ever growing collection of satellites. These images, in addition to supplying information for numerous practical applications ranging from weather to intelligence gathering to the assessment of Earth resources, also provide the general public with inspiring views our home planet from a unique perspective. But such images did …

The Chicago Surface Lines ran a fantrip on October 23, 1938 using PCC #4002, then just two years old. It toured the city carrying many railfans, and was credited as giving the fledgling Central Electric Railfans’ Association a big membership boost. The excursion was also covered extensively in Surface Service, the CSL’s employee publication. This scan was taken from an original 3 1/4 x 5 1/2″ negative. The photographer is …

Another year full of being surrounded by my family . The post This is 33 appeared first on @Kevuhnn.

A few weeks back I released a web component to enable you to add requirement rules to checkbox groups. Continuing in the form utility space, I’ve created a new web component that allows you to make fields required based on the values of other fields: form-required-if.The form-required-if web component, which is based on a jQuery plugin I’d written in 2012, looks like this:<form-required-ifconditions=“email=“><label>Required if there’s an email value<inputname=”depends-on-email"></label></form-required-if>You wrap any …

We’re thrilled to announce our second cohort of our Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship! This year’s fellows are a group 25 of impressive progress thinkers and writers, selected from a pool of over 350 applicants. They are founders, researchers, academics, policy-makers, capital allocators, and journalists from across the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, the U.K., and Hong Kong. They will be writing about nuclear fusion, reproductive longevity, space manufacturing, housing reform, urban …

A short, legally-bound note on Josh O’Kane’s recent book ‘Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy’ (2022), about Sidewalk LabsContinue reading on But what was the question? »

In the first half of this year, I’ve presented several versions of a brief talk on participatory AI. I figured I would post an amalgam of these to the blog for future reference. (Previously, on the blog, I posted a brief lit review on the same topic; this talk builds on that.) So, to start, the main point of this talk is that many participatory approaches to AI don’t engage …

Meet Murphy! a 13 month old Working Cocker Spaniel who we have rehomed after owners realised how much time outdoors a Spaniel needs. He has been well trained so far and has a couple of small possesion issues we are ironing out (Socks, Mail, Books) and recall is good but not perfect yet but he is a cracker!Pedigree so docked tail and we see improvements daily as he settles in …

Your browser does not support the video tag. Rare AT post with audio, thanks Siri! Personally I thought that Despicable Me 4 inches was almost a return to form after the rather disappointing Despicable Me 3 centimeters. Movie reviews aside I’d love know why it ignores the opening quotation marks in "Despicable Me 4". What does this algorithm look like? Is it even using the same title that’s displayed, or …

After seeing Howard Hawks’s 1962 film Hatari!, I want a baby elephant as a pet. Baby elephants are about the most adorable little things out there—although I use the word “little” in a relative sense, being a baby elephant is about the size of a Shetland pony and probably weighs a bit more (although, come to think of it, I’d also like a Shetland pony…). I realize complications might arise …

Cheers, Pete