When I started writing the flash attention series, embeddings were on my “I get it intuitively” list. A word becomes an N-dimensional vector, the geometry encodes meaning, cats are near dogs and not…

Still don’t like Python’s "separator".join(my_variable) v my_variable.split("separator"). Every time I walk away from Python for a year and come back, I reforget this.…

Implemented init, status, add, commit, log, show, and diff commands using Perl and OpenBSD base-system tools. Didn’t bother with collaborative workflows.

What, if anything, has the impact of OKRs been for software teams that have adopted the practice? Read blog post

When my agent produces bad output, I don't switch models. I open a markdown file. I don't comparison-shop. ChatGPT might be better than Claude this week — I genuinely don't know, because checking…

Lush Lush: my favorite small programming language A blog post all about Lush, a small language that the authors present as a "Lisp Universal SHell" whose main features are its ability to integrate…

Terraform already supports setting a module’s source argument to a git or Mercurial repository path, S3 path, and more. It even supports direct HTTP URLs, as long as you follow some guidelines.…

I am posting this here mostly because inevitably I will forget this again, and in the future, when I once more scour the internet or tear through my old notes for an answer, perhaps I’ll come across…

The designer/developer handoff has been with us for years. And even though today's AI tools are dramatically increasing everyone's output, the walls between disciplines haven't changed. So now we're…

Lately I’ve heard developers claim that it’s now OK to avoid specifying the character set when creating an InputStreamReader or String, or otherwise converting bytes into characters…

TL;DR: I went to claude.ai/settings/usage this morning to check my Claude Max (5x) plan limits and got a red error box: “Unable to load usage limits. Please try again later.”…

In the age of ChatGPT‑style assistants, a paragraph that “sounds right” can appear in seconds. Yet the very thing that makes AI so attractive, its ability to produce plausible text on…

While writing yet another if block to check whether a map had a value, I asked myself a question: could Swift’s guard statement work in Go? Go is such an if heavy language. You’re adding…

Supply chain attacks are surging. If you use pnpm, three settings can significantly reduce your exposure.

This post is about converting a C hash lookup to Zig. It covers moving from implicit (and sometimes implementation defined) C to explicit Zig.

.highlight { margin-left: 3em; } I have been wanting to find a project to try out the data-parallel language Futhark . They have a very good blog that I've been following for years, but I've never…

This is a quick guide to gaining access to a large variety of TI parts – in particular operational amplifiers – in LTspice. We’re going to export the SPICE macro […]

Last week the Perl Toolchain Summit took place in Vienna (the second time, we also hosted the event in 2010). I participated mostly in the role of local orga, helping the international team finding a

I have been doing a lot of fiddling with images lately, mostly through dired and image-dired, and one little thing has been bugging me for a while. When I open an image in Emacs, image-mode happily…

GLQuake port with MesaFX backend, with dual TMU support. -driver sources (SST1 and CVG support on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/tdfx_irix-glide2x IRIX port (SST1 on IP32)…

In the first part of this series, the project was set up using Cabal. In this second part, the library code shall be written. The library shall only contain pure, i.e. side-effect free functions.…

Not long ago, everyone wanted to be a data scientist. Now they want to be an AI engineer. It’s a fast-growing, exciting, and lucrative role. At its simplest level, an AI engineer builds software…

In this era of powerful tools to find software bugs, we now see tools find a lot of problems at a high speed. This causes problems for developers, as dealing with the growing list of issues is hard.…

Here's what I've been working on, doing, and thinking about this month. I upgraded this site's generator for Zig 0.16 and made it multithreaded. I went on a business trip to London for two weeks,…

File tracing misses runtime paths, Cloud Run changes the working directory, CloudFront eats routes, and OG images silently vanish — four failures that pass every local test.

MathJax.Hub.Config({ CommonHTML: { scale: 105 } }); table.xyz { table-layout: fixed; border-collapse: collapse; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; } table.xyz th, table.xyz td { border: 1px solid…

Last summer, I wrote a blog post about focus management with Compose. Ever since, I’ve had drafts of this post, but I didn’t get to finalize it until now. The blog post is available in: It's All…

Every PR I open goes through four people. The scribe writes the description. The lawyer handles the review. The detective investigates CI failures. The nurse watches the build until it merges. None…

That title is a bit dramatic. I’ve written infrastructure as code, pushed stuff to AWS, and supported it for over 10 years. I’ve gotten a bug report in the morning and messaged the…

References The reasoned schemer 2nd ed.

Modern GPU texture compressors have a secret (but dangerous) superpower: prefiltering (blurring). Sometimes an encoder way overfits edges, causing overall perceptual quality to collapse. One way to…

Nine months ago, I introduced Perron , an OSS Rails-based static site generator . 190 commits and 18 releases later, lots of bugfixes and many new features—by yours truly and a few others—have been…

Strict No LLM / No AI Policy No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. English is encouraged, but not required. You are welcome to…

Pin VS Code extension versions in dev containers to prevent supply chain attacks. Treat extension updates like dependency upgrades -- deliberate and reviewed.

This week the article Wasm is not quite a stack machine has been making the rounds and has caught my eye. The post claims that WASM is not a pure stack machine because it has locals and is missing…

WSL2 is incredibly convenient. However, for my use case, where I’m running a Hyper-V host with separate VMs, one key struggle was GPU acceleration. What I ended up doing in the past was just…

The post AI is Changing Data Engineering Fast! appeared first on Confessions of a Data Guy.

Educational tool for visualizing how simple rules at the grain scale give rise to dunes and ripples.

I'm happy to announce the release of diesel-async 0.9. This release changes how diesel-async expects AsyncConnection::transaction calls to be written, moving from using a closure returning a boxed…

I’ve been working on tangent space generation recently, and also pondering the tradeoffs between QTangent and normal-angle storage. So when, in a completely unrelated discussion, someone said “you…

It’s been three months since I last wrote a line of code. I still deliver features. I still solve problems, tackle architecture challenges, review PRs. I’m not a PM. I’m not a tech…

What are AI tools and agents really, and how do they keep Context in check? Let's poke around Claude Code, do a few experiments, and find out!

Visual explanations of Huffman coding

Official launch of beats.bitwrap.io as a live-performance tool — content-addressed shareable tracks, full-page Stage visuals, and a hands-free Auto-DJ that runs itself for hours.

The runtime is a Petri net — places hold tokens, transitions fire, that's the music. Same genre+seed = byte-identical output. Share URLs are CIDv1; the address is the track.

OpenAI and Anthropic are converging on the same lesson: coding agents do not become reliable because the prompt is clever. They become reliable when the repo, tools, evals, traces, browser checks,…

Author: Igor Konnov