https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
Another one of those people I brought up in a conversation that I think more people should know about. There may not be anyone less well known who's had as big an impact as Norman Borlaug. If you're alive today, that's partly the fault of Norman Borlaug. Truly one of the greats.
https://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-non-anthropomorphized-view-of-llms.html
Less a learning and more a plea. It's so cringe listening to people talk about statistics like they're omnipotent, going to wipe out all life on earth, or obsolete the terrain for a map. Conversations become much more productive when sophists stop trying to bear witness to the next coming in the output of gradient descent. It's just a tool. It's not magic. Yes, this has significantly surpassed the state-of-the-art NLP models of just a few years ago. No, you shouldn't be using it in lieu of actually learning how statistics work and then picking the right model for the job.
As someone who's been using computational statistics and machine learning for about a decade, I'd years ago written off large parts of the literature as mostly non-replicable p-hacking by people running the software equivalent of the egg-drop experiment. So many "advances" boil down to either moving the goal post by making up a benchmark you're conveniently the best at, overfitting a model and declaring it state-of-the-art, Frankensteining an ensemble for a 1% improvement at 10x the cost, or one of a few other shenanigans researchers have been routinely pulling since AlexNet really shook things up.
As it turns out, I was right that Attention Is All You Need was, in fact, game changing. The game I wasn't really paying attention to was BERT, a model so bloated and of such limited utility, I thought it was mostly a joke at the time. Turns out, if you just keep going with the joke, well past reason, until your model begins to use so much energy that it competes with the fossil fuel industry to see who can cook the planet faster, there's some interesting and useful properties to the joke.
Just please stop telling me it's thinking or alive or concious, or any other biological adjective. We still have neither a scientific nor philosophical understanding of what thinking even is. It's just statistically likely unstructured data. Is it useful? Yeah, in some applications. Is it reliable? It's reliable enough for some applications. Is it efficient? Mostly no, but some applications don't yet seem to have efficient alternatives. Using it for those we do, seems pretty foolish given the situation.
Just try and stop it with the pareidolia.
https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
Great breakdown on how to handle memory without uncontrolled malloc()/new everywhere. Instead, create a manager for a subsystem that has its own memory pool. It can then use array indices (either on the pool or a lookup structure) which it issues and accepts through its API.
I'd heard about the technique before elsewhere but this breaks it down and gives some great examples. You've already been doing this with files, windows, and other resources the operating system provides you, so you may even understand the idea intuitively. Either way, a great piece on the technique.
https://antranigv.am/posts/2021/08/2021-08-13-13-37/
I'm the type of person to go listen to a live symphony orchestra once every few years. I went to a performance of a famous classic symphony that was preceded by the premier of a brand new symphony. A brand new symphony, delightful, and all I could think while listening was, oh, it's just a movie score.
When the only work for composers is scoring movies, new symphonies are going to sound a lot like movie scores.
When the only work for developers is SaaS, software's going to all start to look like web shit.
So now the Windows start menu is written in React, otherwise promising image viewers require setting up a database and docker, and developers expect you to install their applications by intentionally opening yourself to remote code execution.
Unless a market and/or business model is soon found to bring about a renascence of desktop application development, I'm finding I have to agree with Casey Muratori that gaming really will become the Irish Monasteries of software development.
https://ericwbailey.website/published/you-must-listen-to-rfc-2119/
This is pretty funny. I love when someone pays an artist just to bring something fun into the world. I do it now and again but we can always use more of that.
Art and fun aside, if you don't know RFC 2199, now's your chance to learn one of the most influential RFCs ever written.
Already know that one by heart? Do you know about the related RFC 6919?
If you already know both of those, well then perhaps I could interest you in RFC 3339, what people usually mean when they say ISO 8601.
I could go on, but I won't.