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Calculus professors with no experience in numerical computing will tell students that computers calculate trig functions with power series. They don’t. I worked on the implementation of trig functions in hardware, and I can assure you we didn’t just use power series. Power series are an excellent way calculate functions near the center of the […]

The post How not to calculate cosine first appeared on John D. Cook.

Shortly after Apple launched the budget MacBook Neo, Dell announced their response, a new low-end XPS 13.

Matching the Neo's current pricing, it starts at $699, or $599 with an educational discount. That discount is currently set to expire on November 2, and with the current component pricing insanity, I'd be surprised if we don't see a price increase on both laptops by next year.

I ran the XPS 13 through my gauntlet of benchmarks, and published a review on my YouTube channel:

Cheating with std::unique_ptr.

The post Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 5 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In a footnote to the previous post, I said that Python’s math library can calculate the logarithm of extremely large numbers but not the cosine. This post will expand on that comment. In this post I’ll use n = 200! as my example rather than 1000! nbecause this value of N is larger than the […]

The post cos(200!) first appeared on John D. Cook.

How do you tell users that the text they're about to read has been synthetically generated? It is polite to readers that you don't waste their time, it's also important that LLMs don't feed on their own regurgitated slurry lest they pollute their own development. I think there are a number of potential ways to do this and I'd be interested in your thoughts. Let's go with some bad ideas first. …

A new applied research lab for open source sustainability, launching today

The early star of the dot-com boom wasn’t Amazon or Ebay, it was Netscape, a company who produced a web browser of the same name. It went boom high and it went boom fast as it rose. And when it

The post Netscape: The IPO that went boom on its way up and down appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over new cards with questions that you have to answer as fast as possible: Is this adjustment to the database schema right? Do these bits of data look p...

Moving things around if possible.

The post Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 4 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Why don't we believe LLMs are people?

Release: datasette-auth-tokens 0.4a13

Upgraded for compatibility with `sqlite-utils 4.

Tags: datasette

Release: datasette-auth-tokens 0.4a13

Upgraded for compatibility with `sqlite-utils 4.

Tags: datasette

Release: datasette 1.0a38 This release fixes a SQL injection security issue that affects Datasette instances that serve a mixture of public and private tables in the same database, with access configured using the Datasette permissions system. Site administrators wh...

Release: datasette 0.65.3

Back-ported the SQL Injection security fix from 1.0a38.

Tags: datasette

When we lost Glen Hansard last week, his work still fresh and lively, it was a reminder that the world has changed more than we think it has.

SigV4 looks simple: sign a request, check the signature. Then you implement canonicalization, clock skew, and a cache that isn't allowed to hold your key. Tigris is a drop-in replacement for AWS S3 (or GCS, anything S3API compatible). As such, we need...

Simon Willison on Technical Blogging I was interviewed by Cynthia Dunlop for her "Write that blog!" series back in January, but I just realized I never linked to the interview from my own blog! It includes my answers to the following questions: Why did you start blogging – ...

Down but still in the mix

Release: datasette 1.0a38 This release fixes a SQL injection security issue that affects Datasette instances that serve a mixture of public and private tables in the same database, with access configured using the Datasette permissions system. Site administrators wh...

Release: datasette 0.65.3

Back-ported the SQL Injection security fix from 1.0a38.

Tags: datasette