Viewing profile — davidad_

For those interested, the jury originally ruled in favor of Led Zeppelin, but this year the 9th Circuit partially vacated the judgment and recommended a new jury trial. https://www…

Did anyone else notice the claim that “The computers had never been connected to the Internet,” followed in the next paragraph by “On another screen, Obermayer opened iHub, the enc…

As a bonus, .rs is the filename extension for Rust source (as well as the TLD of Lobste.rs)

Those mining memory-bandwidth-hard cryptocurrencies, like zcash, may consider evaluating these. According to the article, they’ll have 1200 GB/s, vs 900 GB/s for the top nVidia Vol…

I’m embodying an archetype here, but I can’t resist. The use of QTermWidget makes this almost entirely an exercise in building a hello-world Qt app and very little about building a…

“Everything being subsumed by TensorFlow” doesn’t seem to me like a particularly worrisome outcome. The status quo is “everything being a Python library,” and people generally seem…

From what I can tell, it's worse than just Intel being a gatekeeper - every execution of "remote attestation" essentially relies upon the Intel Attestation Service to actually perf…

What's the situation with control of TrustZone on this chip? In particular, are there any manufacturer-fused keys, and are there any user-fusable signing keys?

I have many problems with this analysis, perhaps enough to write my own blog post, but I am lazy so I will just outline my disagreements here (at least for now). First: I claim tha…

I do wish energy were priced per megajoule. But I suppose this is probably a symptom, like miles-per-hour vs meters-per-second, of the non-metrication of time units at the relevant…

FWIW, I do find Interface to be subjectively noticeably more pleasant than Roboto in the comparison here.

The specific problem described in the "encapsulation" section is solved in modern C++ (11/14) by std::unique_ptr. While this may seem like a trivial quibble, I think it's part of w…

The latter (it's been there for many hours). See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5990015 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11333686 .

Supersonic-capable aircraft tend to be absurdly fuel-inefficient when operating subsonic (for aerodynamic reasons I don't really understand).

Here's the differentiable stack/queue/deque paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02516 It is indeed similar to some work from FAIR, where one of the tasks was binary addition: http://a…

I submitted the OP essay with an attribution ("see Chris Olah's blog for a fuller treatment") but it was removed by the editors of Edge before publication (apparently their policy …

This is a fair point which deserves a response. Before text was invented, people communicated using spoken language. Text was a major breakthrough because once some communication w…

I am very glad that Urbit exists and is being funded. I have corresponded with the author and differ with him on some design decisions that I consider significant. Nonetheless, it …

My entire article is about things that happened between 1955 and 1969. The part where I state my thesis literally concludes "With a solid historical perspective we can dare to do b…

I included a footnote to address this criticism. http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/03/12/the-operating-syste...

I am very happy that you get the point! :-) To address your criticism: Internetworking fundamentally required new hardware, Interactivity and Hypermedia depended on advances in dis…

This indirection already happens in present systems. Check out my previous blog post about it: http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/02/19/relocatable-vs-posi... Modern hardware is op…

Yes. I am working on it, but it is "kind of hard" to do by oneself. Also, writing about it is a good step, regardless of who might be convinced or not, simply because it forces me …