Concept: Poison pill

One strategy is a poison pill: a special message on the queue that signals the consumer of that message to end its work. To shut down the squarer, since its input messages are merely integers, we would have to choose a magic poison integer (everyone knows the square of 0 is 0 right? no one will need to ask for the square of 0…) or use null (don’t use null). Instead, we might change the type of elements on the requests queue to an ADT…

Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue).

For many artificial intelligence researchers, it is an unexpected step toward machines that can understand the vagaries of human language — and perhaps even tackle other human skills.

https://rootsofprogress.org/immunization-from-inoculation-to-rna-vaccines

When you get your covid shot (probably in 2021), take a moment to think back on the 300 years of progress that got us to this point.

https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-python-black

This is an Emacs package to make it easy to reformat Python code using black, the uncompromising Python code formatter.

What are your favorite CLI apps?

I’m looking for CLI utilities that are definitely not part of the POSIX required or optional utilities, and more coloquiallly not considered to be standard BSD or *nix fare.

The Penderwicks

My daughters couldn’t stop lauging during storytime. They actually enjoy bedtime now. Birdsall is an excellent writer.

Just write the praser

This is a whirlwind tour of writing parsers by hand. Why would you want to do that, when tools like Yacc exist to do it for you?

I recently participated in 2020 Emacs User Survey. One of the questions asked is “When you were first learning Emacs, what did you find difficult to learn?” The obvious answer is keyboard shortcuts, e.g., instead of CTRL-S for save, it is CTRL-X CTRL-S. Instead, CTRL-S performs find, which is usually mapped to CTRL-F, and so on and so forth.

Why Emacs is hard for new users

There were other problems too. I didn’t put them all down in the survey. I’ll jot them down here as they come to mind.

I recently got a Logitec Razer Kiyo for my Zoom meetings. Currently, I need to use it on on Linux Laptop, and it works rather fine. I was skeptical that it would “just work” on Linux, but it did! There is also a software package named v4l-utils that allows you to configure the zoom (crop) level of your video, which is nice for cutting out undesirable background.

apt-get install v4l-utils

You can get a listing of attached cameras with

How to hire for your organization

A three-part series from 9/21/20 to 10/5/20 on how to hire for your organization.

The Tempral Workflow Framework

Let’s look at a use case. A customer signs up for an application with a trial period. After the period, if the customer has not cancelled, he should be charged once a month for the renewal. The customer has to be notified by email about the charges and should be able to cancel the subscription at any time.

This Feburary, I ordered a Dell XPS-13 Developer Edition. The Developer Edition is a line of Dell laptops that ships with certified Linux OS. It has been my programming powerhouse for the last eight months.

My first choice for a laptop was not Linux. Windows and macOS are simply more practical. Games and MS Office just works on Windows. Software support on macOS is generally good (except games), but it beats Windows with its underlying BSD architecture. There is better hardware support simply because more people use it. However, I ultimately ended up with a Dell and Linux and it worked out great.

The Ultimate Guide to GPT3 from Twilio

A step-by-step walk through of what it is like to the the GUI to GPT3 from OpenAI

A Columnist Makes Sense of Wall Stree Like None Other (See Footnote)

Mr. Levine wasn’t always a darling of business media and finance Twitter. (The best measure of his audience’s devotion may not be his 112,000 Twitter followers, but rather the 3,000 that follow @MattLevineBot, a fan account describing itself as a bot that mimics his writing style.) He began his post-collegiate career as a Latin teacher, then worked as a lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz before advancing to Goldman. Despite having made more money at white-shoe law and Wall Street firms than he does as a writer, Mr. Levine says he is happier now. He is doing exactly what he has long wanted to do. This is the story of his ascension. It begins with an escalator.

Software engineers find it natural to talk about abstractions. We have ideas such as Decorators, Model-View-Controller, and Message Queues. These abstractions allow software engineers to talk to each other using our own rich and succint language. Abstractions, however, is not unique to engineers. In my role as a parent and an American citizen, I am constantly confronted with new abstract ideas arising out of life.

The abstractions I am referring to are new words and ideas coming out of our shared culture. For example, words that do not exist twenty years ago: Me-Too and BLM as well as a redefinition of words like gender and socialism.