
2025-04-28 18:55:06
Medium writer Paolo Perrone curates a short list of interesting algorithms, the rationale behind them, along with graphs and diagrams to boot.
Algorithms that made this short list:
Wave Function Collapse
The Diffusion Model
Simulated Annealing
Sleep Sort
BOGO Sort
BOID
SHOR’s
Marching Cubes
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and,
Boyer Moore
"The 10 Weirdest, Most Brilliant Algorithms Ever Devised and What They Actually Do&…
Quanta Magazine authors Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz strike up a conversation with Ellie Pavlick (Research Scientist at Google Deep Mind) about the differences and similarities between the way people understand language, what NLP algorithms do, and the fact that such conversations more often than not shed light into more than Linguistics' computational side.
"Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans?"
I looked into buying a solar charged battery bank. This product category is completely dominated by no-name 3rd party sellers. 🚩
Charge time is key. No listing had even a rough estimate for solar charge time. 🚩
An example unit claims max solar power 1.13 w, with enough battery power to charge an iPhone 14 Pro twice. Working from that, you'd need ~25 hours of full sun to fully charge. I'd roughly estimate that means at least 3 days in summer. Not quite worthless, but close…
I have a relatively new #ASUS ProArt13 laptop where I still have a #Microsoft #Windows installation so I can keep upgrading its firmware (I planned removing it once I have a stable #Linux distro with kernel >= 6.14).
I'm surprised by how unstable it is. Just leaving it doing nothing for more than 10 minutes is enough to trigger a #BlueScreenOfDeath (I can reproduce the issue). If I keep doing stuff, it does not crash.
At this point I'm not sure if it's Microsoft's fault or ASUS'... but I suspect the blame falls on Windows side (nothing like that happens on my Linux installation).
#Windows11
"Bertrand Meyer is, hands down, the best writer in the computer field, because of a simple reason: his books have both great content and great prose. Not all authors of computer books (and certainly not the one you are reading now) can make the same claim."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/bertrand-meyer/
"Comment le boom des milliardaires alimente les inégalités et menace la démocratie."
"Avec une richesse qui se concentre au sommet, l'Europe doit agir maintenant pour défendre la démocratie et la stabilité économique pour tous."
#TaxTheRich #démocratie
USC professor Allison Marsh writes this delightful short article for IEEE Spectrum about Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert's British counterparts in Cambridge and how, in their case, a document (the Lighthill Report) precipitated cuts in British AI research funding in ways similar to how funding was temporarily cut in the U.S. following MIT's publishing of Minsky and Papert's "Perceptrons" in 1969.
"Freddy the Robot Was the Fall Guy for British AI"
"Of course, not everything made with Python was successful. Suffice to mention the GadflyB5 SQL relational database, or Mercurial; excellent tools in their own right, but shadowed by much more popular options. reStructuredText also is generally dismissed, developers usually prefering Markdown or Asciidoc."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-state-of-python-in-2021/
Looks like the USPS shut down the covidtests.gov at 8:00 PM EDT on 3/9/2025, per text on the website.
I'm feeling somewhat fortunate in that I got my order placed and received in the last couple weeks.
If they had too many tests stockpiled, better management and allowing people to order additional test kits seems like a better choice than destroying good tests.
#CovidTests…
It's the fact that you can tell from a mile away that it's even less defensible than a photoshop, it was a hackjob done in a fucking word processor, it's all so blatant and lazy that I can't not conclude that anyone who still champions this guy have a rotting bowl of porridge for a brain.
"It is an interesting phrase, “the business”, especially when used by engineers to label the group of non-engineers in the organisation. It implies that everybody else is engaged in getting customers and making money, while engineering is a cost centre funded presumably through altruistic motives."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/enough-agile/
No dark mode for SSMS?
SQL Shades to the rescue!
Free version adds plain dark mode to the IDE (fine by me.) Paid version supports additional themes.
This solution is cleaner than the rather hacky approach of modifying ssms.pkgundef to restore a half-finished dark theme commented out by SSMS developers apparently at the last moment.
"Finally, a real dark mode for SQL Server Management Studio!"
Startup CTO, writer and coach Dr. Milan Milanović shares a love letter to C# in 2025, and why its adherents believe it's such a good choice. He discusses, amongst other topics:
1. Language Features
2. The .NET Ecosystem
3. Tooling
4. Libraries and NuGet
5. Documentation
6. Community
7. Popularity
8. C# vs Other Languages, and
9. The Future of C#
He also shares a brief history of the language.
"Why C#?"
"To make a long story short, at some point during early 1996 I bought a cheap 14.4 kilobit per second modem, taking 10 minutes in average to download a single megabyte. Together with a monthly subscription to the new “Blue Window” service by Telecom PTT (soon to be renamed Swisscom), lo and behold, I was online."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/sniffing-packets/
Noch 2 Stunden, dann gibt es #Fruhstuck ( #Intervallfasten ). Vermutlich möchte ich #Hummus und #Orangenmarmelade
8 Light writer Taylor Keazirian argues in favor of maintaining a set of "living" documents as part of software development project efforts. Common misconceptions about software documentation are addressed and refuted with insights on what a minimal technical set of documents for a software project should look like.
"Mastering Technical Documentation"
"Jim Coplien ends his talk with a simple call to action: at every conference where new technology is introduced, software engineers should strive to be skeptical; to ask whether it improves the quality of life of society as a whole, and to take it home only to increase the human value of our products and services.
Focus on the people. Again and again. Because that is what Agile and OOP were all about, to begin with."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/james-coplien/
PVS Studio author Valerii Filatov dives deep into the past twenty-six years of C# history: from the humble beginnings of version 1.0 to present-day C# 13.
"History of C#: versions, .NET, Unity, Blazor, and MAUI"
https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/csharp/1248/
Quanta Magazine Staff Writer Yasemin Saplakoglu describes the various ongoing inter-disciplinary efforts to advance our scientific understanding of the Human brain. Computer scientists and computational neuroscientists collaborate as the latter borrow mathematical models from the former, and studies ways to incorporate new biological data to enhance, or supplant existing computational models.
"AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That's OK."