Recently updated blogs

In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies. In this article, we’ll learn about the Moon and its path around our planet, but to experience that journey first-hand, we have to enter the cosmos itself.This article has many interactive demonstrations which are best seen …

Recollections / December 17, 2024 ROBERTS: I can’t believe I let you guys talk me into this, but I suppose it has to be done. A few months ago my dad sent me a whole bunch of pictures on a flash drive. This was one of them. It’s my bedroom in 1987. I’m 15. I think it’s winter: you can see a couple of LPs on the bed—Mad Parade’s A …

My favorite end-of-year recap is back! All this has done is make me miss baseball.

That Doctorow Story 2024-12-16T00:00:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 I’ll preface this by doubling down on my belief that healthcare, along with shelter, food, and education are basic human rights. These are some of the table stakes that the US fails at by design. Our systems make ghouls of executives and rewards them for it. Also, I hope that Cory Doctorow was not accosted, questioned, or harassed by …

Snapshot Isolation vs Serializability Getting into some fundamentals. In my re:Invent talk on the internals of Aurora DSQL I mentioned that I think snapshot isolation is a sweet spot in the database isolation spectrum for most kinds of applications. Today, I want to dive in a little deeper into why I think that, and some of the trade-offs of going stronger and weaker. This post is going to be a …

Back when I started working in Filipino NLP, my standard approach in training models is to encode linguistics knowledge via meticulous data annotation, feature engineering, and extensive testing. Take calamanCy for example: we spent countless hours annotating named-entity recognition (NER) datasets and validating dependency parsing treebanks to train statistical models using frameworks like spaCy. Back then, these components typically power larger systems that handle tasks like information extraction and question …

We’ve recently returned from Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, a mountain habitat of the world’s oldest living trees. Time feels different up there at 11,000 feet, nestled among these ancient organisms that have borne witness to centuries of comings and goings.It was an ideal place to reflect on the founding of The Long Now Foundation as a community where memory, imagination, and the long view could be fostered over millennia. …

When iterating through lists or other iterables in Python, there are often situations where you need not only the value of each item but also its index. Enter the enumerate() function—a powerful, built-in feature of Python that simplifies this task and makes your loops both cleaner and more Pythonic. What Is enumerate()? The enumerate() function lets you iterate through an iterable (like a list, tuple, or string) while keeping track …

33 1/3 South Asia – the newest of our 33 1/3 Global series is here! From the films of Bollywood and Lollywood, to home-grown bhangra hip-hop, Hindu devotional pop and Sufi rock, Sri Lankan rap, Indo jazz and disco, new-wave electronica and diasporic Asian Underground scene, 33 1/3 South Asia takes you on a sonically diverse journey through the most significant soundtracks and albums from the 20th and 21st centuries.This …

This year, Letterform Archive hosted 24 presentations on typography and graphic design. You can still watch them all. All Letterform Lecture videos All Archive Salon videos We presented two dozen lectures and salons in 2024, both online and onsite at the Archive. Unless you’re our biggest fans (thank you!), you likely didn’t get to catch them all. So, here are a few videos that are worth some of your holiday …

Glasgow’s finest punk rockers Dead Pony have released music video for new single ‘Everything Burns’. Following on from the four-piece’s critically acclaimed debut album ‘Ignore This’, they are wasting no time with new music. Captioned as “It’s not about the money. It’s about sending a message…” the video is inspired by the Batman franchise as the band explain: “‘Everything Burns’ is our most fun and adventurous song to date. Perspective …

I’m pretty proud that I managed to keep my iPhone 8 going for over five years (with one battery replacement in that time). But recently it’s been increasingly unreliable, switching itself off at random times, and spontaneously draining the battery after doing anything remotely taxing. This combined with the fact that software updates are no longer available for this model led me to the conclusion that buying a new phone …

After constantly checking the weather and the river levels for what felt like weeks it finally looked as if I would have an opportunity to get out after some grayling. The "hump" caused by Storm Darragh was finally out of the way, the main rivers were fining down nicely and it even looked as if the wind was going to behave as well, albeit until the weekend! Friday therefore saw …

Laravel Nova 5.0 is now ready for upgrade. This release focuses on modernizing Nova's core dependencies while introducing several useful features to improve resource management and field handling.