The public has known for years that governments around the world use software developed by an Israeli cyber-arms company to spy on journalists, opposition politicians, and activists. Investigative journalists published a series of bombshell reports in July…

Or: What happens when Newton’s laws are violated (Note in case you see ads here: This post is also available at my newer blog.) Recently, I read a book called Newton and the Counterfeiter, su…

Here, below, is the press release I sent out today to explain what I did and why.

Irish accountant and inventor (1883-1922)

FoundationDB is a very impressive database. Its paper won the best industry paper award in SIGMOD’21. In this post, I will explain, in detail, how FDB works and discuss a few very interesting design choices they made. It’s a dense paper packed with neat ideas.…

Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era

Splunk is taking the next step in our journey to realize our vision for the future of security and observability by joining forces with Cisco.

Early last week, Google released a new stable update for Chrome. The update included a single security fix that was reported by Apple's Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) team. The issue, CVE-2023-4863, was a heap buffer overflow in the WebP image…

In this deeply informative video, Jeremy Howard, co-founder of fast.ai and creator of the ULMFiT approach on which all modern language models (LMs) are based, takes you on a comprehensive journey through the fascinating landscape of LMs. Starting with the…

We did an analysis of the Google antitrust trial. Last week, over half of the trial was held behind closed doors because the judge, Amit Mehta, is deferring to Google on the need for secrecy.

Cambridge University Press is publishing a textbook I have co-edited with five colleagues, Shaken Baby Syndrome, Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy, by Findley et al. With contributions by 32 authors, this book provides a thorough analysis…

Electronics and microcontroller projects

The everything computer. Optimised.

I spent a recent flight finding out what I could do with a connection to the flight’s wifi, but without access to the internet.
I was on my way home from Strange Loop, a direct flight from St. Louis to Oakland. It’s a long enough flight that I planned to…

Since starting PostHog in 2020, we’ve learned a bunch about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to marketing to engineers . Paid ads is a…