Viewing profile — _russross

I read Careless People and then Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter and they felt like a good pairing. "Character Limit" is also one of the best book titles ever. I hi…

I don't have a problem with data centers and would welcome one nearby if it was a good deal for the area. But I'd want binding contractual agreements about environmental guarantees…

Turing himself argued that trying to measure if a computer is intelligent is a fool's errand because it is so difficult to pin down definitions. He proposed what we call the "Turin…

I bought one of the first 2022 Maverick Hybrids and took delivery in January 2022. At the time my build came in at MSRP of $25k (+ tax). I just built the closest equivalent on the …

I am in the minority who thinks Raft is overrated. I tried teaching Raft one year instead of Paxos but ended up switching back. While it was much easier to understand how to implem…

Let me make sure I understood this correctly: having a CS degree will turn you into a cartoon stereotype of a technical nerd, but getting any other kind of degree in the world will…

There is an RFC for this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550

I've never really liked the look of the Tikz-generated automata. Something about them always looks a little off to me. I also dislike the use of 0 and 1 as the canonical alphabet. …

I was expecting it to be hard to recognize, but I guess all those countless hours listening to Kid A on repeat back in the day have finally paid off. The moment is unmistakable.

It seems like modern languages adopt more and more ideas from functional programming as time goes by (garbage collection, closures and higher-order functions, parametric polymorphi…

I can't wait for the rest of the series: Climate change is 99% solved. The last 1% is the hardest. We are 99% of the way to ending all wars. The last 1% will be the hardest. Scient…

In English, meaning is defined by common usage. I know the formal logic hipsters have mounted a persistent campaign to make an exception here, but the fact remains that "begging th…

I think that overstates the difference. I think a better analogy is architects vs. construction workers. Any decent architect will have a pretty strong understanding of the realiti…

I teach using xv6 and would add a couple more items to what others have already pointed out. They mainly come down to simplifications that remove distractions from the core ideas: …

I remember this was a protection scheme, but I don't remember who used it. They would use a laser to burn a small hole in the disk. At load time, the program would attempt to write…

Search for "timetabling". Googling for "scheduling" isn't very helpful because it can mean so many different things, but "timetabling" will give you lots of info on a problem very …