zomia.news

10nov2023

Monaspace Fonts

In recent years I have seen a trend towards the creation of special "programmer fonts". These are designed to make working with code more comfortable. Reading the code has become so widespread that it is no longer enough to have few standard Monotype fonts. Now we have tons of them: for a different products and for different applications.

Here is the new step: a family of typefaces designed to work together. You can use one for function names and another for variables for example.

8nov2023

Intel 80386, a revolutionary CPU

Story about Intel 386 processor and how Intel starts to control the whole PC market. The interesting thing is how people in the company changed their minds and came to believe in the x86 as the main architecture of the future computer.

The gist point of the story: 386 was not the best processor on the market but it has the best timing for the features it has and good backward compatibility. As a result, it give the Intel the crown of the PC market.

Immanuel Kant—What can we know?

In other words, how we see the world is shaped by how we see and think. We can not know the world as it truly is because we can only experience it through our own senses and thoughts. Our mind filters and shapes what we can know about the world. So we must understand how our mind works. And this is what Kant’s book is about.

… a monumental bedrock for inquiries into the nature of knowledge in Science, Art and of course the current endeavors of Artificial Intelligence

7nov2023

GPT Builder for subscriber of ChatGPT

Looks like a chatbot builder. There was a first idea for startup that I had after announcing the ChatGPT.

AI generated Audiobooks on Amazon Invites only and US-only :(

We did something similar in Litres, but without AI and with real human voices. It worked well. The main problem was compliance/rights for the books. So Amazon is just for Kindle Direct Publishing.

I see it as an intermediate step: we are moving to real-time, high-quality text-to-speech generation. It solves everything. End users can listen to their own books, there is no rights issue, and there is a lot more popular content.

1nov2023

Apple unveils M3

A few things I noticed, as I'm seeing the variety of SKUs becoming more complex.

  • Note that memory bandwidth is down. M2 Pro had 200GB/s, M3 Pro only has 150GB/s. M3 Max only has 400GB/s on the higher binned part.
  • Just like the low-spec M3 14" has one fewer Thunderbolt port, it also doesn't officially support Thunderbolt 4 (like M1/M2 before it)
  • The M3 Pro loses the option for an 8TB SSD. Likely because it was a low volume part for that spec.
  • The M3 Pro actually has more E-cores than the Max (6 vs 4). Interesting to see them take this away on a higher-specced part; seems like Intel wouldn't do this

Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation with YouGlish

Good alternative to reverso.net in many situations, especially when you need to say something

Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming

  • Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.
  • Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
  • Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)
  • Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.
  • Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Pike's rules 1 and 2 restate Tony Hoare's famous maxim "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Ken Thompson rephrased Pike's rules 3 and 4 as "When in doubt, use brute force.". Rules 3 and 4 are instances of the design philosophy KISS. Rule 5 was previously stated by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month. Rule 5 is often shortened to "write stupid code that uses smart objects".

31oct2023

Romance book covers evolution throughout history

The thing nobody talks about with engineering management is this:

Every 3-4 months every person experiences some sort of personal crisis. A family member dies, they have a bad illness, they get into an argument with another person at work, etc. etc. Sadly, that is just life. Normally after a month or so things settle down and life goes on.

But when you are managing 6+ people it means there is always a crisis you are helping someone work through. You are always carrying a bit of emotional burden or worry around with you.

Twitter of Chris Albon