A recent book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature , is a “radical revisioning” of van Gogh’s work “in relation to industrial pollution and climate change” . 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → A recent book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature , is a “radical revisioning” of van Gogh’s work “in relation to industrial pollution and climate change” . 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → Van Gogh and the ...

Yesterday, my pocket computer told me to volunteer an extra 20 minutes on my commute. I ignored its advice; I spent an extra 45 minutes circumnavigating a horrific freeway closure. My wrist computer advises me to exercise, wash my hands, and avoid loud noises. No thanks -- call me old-fashioned, but I prefer heart disease, germs, and hearing-loss. The doctors/scientists said I should exercise more and drink less and sleep more and eat less (but sometimes more) and definitely floss more. My...

Greets greets! Today, an update on recent progress in Whippet , including sponsorship, a new collector, and a new feature. the lob, the pitch But first, a reminder of what the haps: Whippet is a garbage collector library. The target audience is language run-time authors, particularly “small” run-times: wasm2c , Guile , OCaml , and so on; to a first approximation, the kinds of projects that currently use the Boehm-Demers-Weiser collector . The pitch is that if you use Whippet, you get ...

CF Bolz-Tereick wrote some excellent posts in which they introduce a small IR and optimizer and extend it with allocation removal . We also did a live stream together in which we did some more heap optimizations . In this blog post, I’m going to write a small abtract interpreter for the Toy IR and then show how we can use it to do some simple optimizations. It assumes that you are familiar with the little IR, which I have reproduced unchanged in a GitHub Gist . Abstract interpretati...

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is currently grounded. This rocket, which is the workhorse of the global space industry, can’t fly. Here’s what happened on a recent Falcon 9 flight, why the FAA has grounded the rocket, and when SpaceX might be flying the Falcon 9 again. The problem during flight: A propellant leak On July 11, 2024, SpaceX was conducting a routine launch of its Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This mission was yet another flight to deploy 20 Starli...

Once upon a time, long ago, the world was encased in ice. That’s the tale told by sedimentary rock in the tropics, many geologists believe. Hundreds of millions of years ago, glaciers and sea ice covered the globe. The most extreme scenarios suggest a layer of ice several meters thick even at the equator. This event has been called “Snowball Earth,” and you’d think it would be a terrible time to... Source Once upon a time, long ago, the world was encased in ice. That’s the tale told...

Getting Started with Meshtastic After seeing the Meshtastic booth at Open Sauce, my Dad and I thought it would be fun to learn more about the low power radio tech by getting our own radios and experimenting. Then, we were contacted by Simon from Muzi Works , and he offered to send a few units of R1 and H1, his company's pre-built Meshtastic nodes. What's a node, and what is Meshtastic? Excellent question. What is Meshtastic? Simply put—and copied shamelessly from...

I've been thinking about online communities a lot lately, and had an idea about a new Masto instance, but maybe it wasn't such a good idea? I've been ruminating on what the perfect online community looks like for months . Does the perfect online community actually exist? What are we currently doing wrong? What do we do well? How can we fix them? Thinking back to the what I consider was the glory days of Fosstodon; it was when the instance was much smaller. I could peruse the local timeline ...

I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for community-led events in the front-end community, and I am forever grateful for that. However, I am heartbroken by the current state of the events. Many community-led events have recently been cancelled due to low ticket sales, which feeds a gigantic gap of events left by the pandemic. I remember we had to cancel the in-person London CSS and IndieWebCamp London at the very last minute back in 2020, and it was incredibly stressful to disappoint a...

China’s ambition to build a lunar navcom constellation Ling Xin reports on China’s ongoing studies to have a phased constellation of 30+ satellites which would provide high-precision navigation as well as high-bandwidth communications for most places on the Moon with up to quadruple coverage. Earlier studies focused on a navcom constellation that optimizes for the lunar south pole. The overall intent is to support China’s ambitious crewed lunar surface missions driving towards a ...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 279  | Jul 24, 2024 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

The short version of this post: The last-ever !!Con is coming up in a month from today! Please spread the word about !!Con and get your tickets here ! If you’re not familiar with !!Con, it’s a radically eclectic, radically inclusive, radically affordable (pay-what-you-want!) independent nonprofit computing conference. I co-founded !!Con with a group of friends back in 2014 ; my last post recounts some of our history. !!Con consists almost entirely of ten-minute lightning talks...

A Maclaurin series is a power series - a polynomial with carefully selected coefficients and an infinite number of terms - used to approximate arbitrary functions with some conditions (e.g. differentiability). The Maclaurin series does this for input values close to 0, and is a special case of the Taylor series which can be used to find a polynomial approximation around any value. Intuition Let's say we have a function and we want to approximate it with some other - polynomial - function...

A number of readers last week reached out to direct my attention to What if a SQL Statement Returned a Database which is a much more thorough and well-articulated explanation of the core idea—thank you! A Query Planning Guideline Say I want to construct a plan for the following query: SELECT a , sum ( b ) FROM ( SELECT a , a + 1 AS x , b FROM ab ) GROUP BY a , x Perhaps we have parsed this query into a syntax tree and resolved all the names an...

In 2022, I gave a talk at a virtual conference with an unforgettable name: HYTRADBOI, which stands for "Have You Tried Rubbing a Database On It?" Its goal was to discuss unconventional uses of database-like technology, and featured many excellent talks. My talk "How to Query (Almost) Everything" received copious praise . It describes the Trustfall query engine's architecture, and includes real-world examples of how my (now-former) employer relies on it to statically catch and prevent ...