Hello. If you are reading this, then you must be interested in getting notified when I (Dmitry Mazin) post to cyberdemon.org, which is a blog about computing. Thanks for reading!
If you are new, you may be interested in these posts.
* In the Age of AI, Don't Let Your Skills Atrophy
* On OpenAI's Terrible Arguments Against Transparency
* Pink Lexical Slime: The Dark Side of Autocorrect
* In the Age of AI, Don't Let Your Skills Atrophy
* On OpenAI's Terrible Arguments Against Transparency
* Pink Lexical Slime: The Dark Side of Autocorrect
I am pleasantly surprised that I gained a number of subscribers over the past week. I just wanted to say hello to thank you for following.
If you are here for essays like Reddit is OpenAI’s moat, I suggest my essay about autocorrect called Pink Lexical Slime. It took a year to research and write. In that essay, I showed how autocorrect was changing English spelling. I extrapolated how predictive text could amplify bias and alter English style. Of course, predictive text turned into large language models, making the issues way bigger. I should write a big update to that essay at some point.
Please beware that by following me, you are exposing yourself to highly technical content about Linux and databases like What’s Writing to My Brand-new Disk?.
Again, thanks for following me.
By the way, feel free to say hi at dm@cyberdemon.org!
If you are here for essays like Reddit is OpenAI’s moat, I suggest my essay about autocorrect called Pink Lexical Slime. It took a year to research and write. In that essay, I showed how autocorrect was changing English spelling. I extrapolated how predictive text could amplify bias and alter English style. Of course, predictive text turned into large language models, making the issues way bigger. I should write a big update to that essay at some point.
Please beware that by following me, you are exposing yourself to highly technical content about Linux and databases like What’s Writing to My Brand-new Disk?.
Again, thanks for following me.
By the way, feel free to say hi at dm@cyberdemon.org!
Hey friends! I just finished a new article.
Have you ever heard “a disk is a bunch of bits”? In this article, I get down and dirty with the actual bits that live on my disk and in computer memory.
This exercise did a ton to demystify computers for me. Hopefully you also will think it’s cool.
https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/07/19/bunch-of-bits.html
By the way — please do share this article if you want (eg on HN)! I worked a lot on it and it’s rewarding when people read it.
Have you ever heard “a disk is a bunch of bits”? In this article, I get down and dirty with the actual bits that live on my disk and in computer memory.
This exercise did a ton to demystify computers for me. Hopefully you also will think it’s cool.
https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/07/19/bunch-of-bits.html
By the way — please do share this article if you want (eg on HN)! I worked a lot on it and it’s rewarding when people read it.
cyberdemon.org
A disk is a bunch of bits
We've heard that a disk is a "bunch of bits", so let's get dirty and personal with those bits.
My friends, brace yourself for another Linux article. This time, I answer why writing a measly 14 bytes to a file ("Hello, world!") results in 73 THOUSAND bytes getting written to disk.
https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/08/17/io-inflation.html
This article took me months to write, mostly because... well, it turns out that tracking down all those writes is a bit of a slog. No, no, the article is interesting! I promise! Go read it!
My father's praise for my past two articles was "this is good introductory stuff, you should send it to your little brother". Hopefully this one is just as good, I guess? 😆️
https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/08/17/io-inflation.html
This article took me months to write, mostly because... well, it turns out that tracking down all those writes is a bit of a slog. No, no, the article is interesting! I promise! Go read it!
My father's praise for my past two articles was "this is good introductory stuff, you should send it to your little brother". Hopefully this one is just as good, I guess? 😆️
cyberdemon.org
Why does writing 14 bytes to a file write 73 kilobytes to disk?
I investigate why writing 14 bytes to a file writes 73 kilobytes to disk. In other words, I explain the difference between file and disk IO, and explain IO i...
My friends, I am sorry to say that my father passed away on September 8th. He was a brilliant man, a sweet man. I have written a memorial to him. Please feel free to read it, and join me in celebrating his life. https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/09/18/papa-memorial.html
cyberdemon.org
Remembering my father Yevgeniy Mazin, 1964-2023
In memory of my father, Yevgeniy Mazin.
Dear followers! I'm back after a long absence. Do you find submodules confusing? I certainly have. So I finally sat down and understood how they work. https://www.cyberdemon.org/2024/03/20/submodules.html
cyberdemon.org
Demystifying git submodules
Demystifying git submodules by showing exactly how they work.
Hello good people – new blog post. LLMs make parallelizing scripts (even more) embarrassingly easy. https://www.cyberdemon.org/2025/02/28/llm-parallelism.html
cyberdemon.org
LLMs make embarrassingly parallelizable scripts even more embarrassingly parallelizable
You can speed up your one-off scripts with an LLM's help.