Tue Aug 29
A post talking about point-and-shoot digital cameras (digicams) and how they are still fun today.
A few years ago I walked into a bookstore and noticed something peculiar: I found that every book was okay. In fact, books had gotten pretty damn good! A random book in a random bookstore is likely to have an interesting cover with good typography inside. They’re not beautiful objects or anything and, sure, the...
This is a companion page to my blog post on global warming (which is currently not yet ready). I put up this post already as a teaser for my upcoming global warming post, which desperately needs expert review before I dare put it online. If you are an experienced climate/atmospheric scientist, would you please...
One thing that’s worth remembering. The pandemic proved that states can meaningfully change the lives of people, providing massive resources to make change happen. They will make us pay for this. Not because there’s somehow a real debt which needs to be paid, but because we need to be made to suffer, to be shown...
So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus. It’s...
In my previous post I wanted to run a keepalive green thread on the wide while doing work to let the coordination framework (in this case just a plain old Postgres database) which workers were around and still processing work. Now, I have a long-running block of synchronous code. Herein lies the problem: synchronous...