FeedCity

Here’s a comment I read in the code I was working on. Walk the entire collection to locate flagged clusters. Skip it altogether when the cached, dirty-tracked flag count says there are none (the usual case): nothing needs marking, so the walk is pure waste. When...

Logic for Programmers has now been out for a month! To celebrate, I'm releasing the entire second chapter, "A Crash Course in Logic", for free on my blog. Read it here!

They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes

— Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress

Tags: ai, game-design

"This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get."

Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October: Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixe...

325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible with sustained effort.

— Andrew Digby, providing the best news of the year

Tags: kakapo

As part of my grant from NLnet to improve my Fediverse bot project, I'm spending time making sure I understand all the fundamentals of ActivityPub. The problem with Internet standards is they're scattered all over the place. Abandoned forums, half-maintained wikis, mailing lists with obscure rules, and monolithic blocks of text. Sometimes you just want one book which collates all the info and…

On September 1, 1982, the Commodore 64 launched. Its name referred to the amount of memory it had on board: 64 kilobytes. And it was the first computer with 64K of memory to sell for under $600. When the Commodore

The post Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

.gitmodules is a manifest and the gitlink is a lockfile entry.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Journal of Negative Results

All dressed up with nowhere to go.

The post AWE does not require PAE, though PAE makes it much more useful appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Introducing wrapture New from Graham Dumpleton (of wrapt, mod_wsgi, and New Relic's Python agent fame), who describes Wrapture as taking the monkeypatching ideas from wrapt and extending them to apply to testing and tracing at the same time. Wrapture (full documentation here...

One of the hardest problems in distributed systems is conflict resolution, or the same basic problem as merge conflicts in Git. Git merge conflicts happen when your branch differs from upstream in a way that Git can’t easily work its way around so it ...

I just found out Brian Beckman and I got a patent on work we did for GSI Technology [1]. Nearly all the work I do is under an NDA, so I don’t often get a chance to talk about my projects. This work is public now that it’s in a patent; I suppose it has […]

The post Patented application of linear algebra first appeared on John D. Cook.

The OpenAI/Hugging Face attack, clearly explained

When “plain English” isn’t a good thing.

A simple technique for keeping up with a codebase that coding agents are changing faster than you can read: ask the agent to quiz you on it.

A short note explaining the difference between synchronous cancelation, asynchronous cancelation, and graceful shutdown. I am not too attached to these specific three terms, but I want to call your attention to the three things behind them, which are important not to confuse with each other.

The whole point about Shakespeare is that you can set the play on an intergalactic space station or an American high school and keep virtually the rest unchanged. What happens when you transpose Dream from a proscenium arch to a living wood? As the sun sets over the trees, what sprites will come out to entertain us? Ruined Theatre brings a brilliant cast of seasoned West End performers to strut…

On August 31, 1994, software publisher Adobe bought Aldus for $446 million. Both companies were known for graphics products. Aldus’ most popular product was Pagemaker, a page layout program. Adobe’s most popular products were illustrator and Photoshop. The three products

The post Adobe’s August 1994 acquisition of Aldus appeared first on The Silicon Underground.