I've picked up a new hobby: fact-checking Instagram stories that careless friends send my way. The AI slop, the missing citations, the made-up sources and the willful misunderstandings, it's all there day after day. Sometimes it's a lie by omission, like removing the date from a seven-years-old article to make readers believe something terrible is happening. Sometimes it's a straight-up lie,…
The German job market in 2026 is, roughly speaking, hell. So in addition to the usual venues I've been sending my profile to HackerNews' "Who wants to be hired" thread. The rules of the thread are fairly simple: Please only post if you are personally looking for work. Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here. Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work…
More than a decade ago on my first trip to the US I bought a Kindle DX , an almost-A4-sized e-book reader that followed me through multiple countries, homes, and commutes. We were off to a rocky start when I slipped on the ice and fell breaking the screen in the process, but I got a free replacement that I've been using ever since 1 . I never used most of its functionalities - all I wanted was an…
After spending the holidays with my family I am once again reminded of the need for a computer with dedicated hardware for seniors. Whenever we talk about parents and tech we picture an old woman wearing a shawl trying to operate a computer that's turned off, and that's unfair: the problem is not that my mom doesn't understand how a mouse works (she does) but rather that her OS keeps moving things…
I wrote my last post in November 2024, which is a lot. Unlike other dry spells (seven months in 2017 and six months in 2019), this one was not because I forgot about the blog but because I have a severe writing block due to, you guessed it, AI. I receive lots of bot traffic every day — way more, I suspect, than actual human readers. That's usually not a problem because I think of this blog as a…
There is a recurring joke about how the longer you work as a programmer, the stronger the urge to quit the industry and go live in a farm. I'm not at that point yet but I do have a soft spot for making physical things with my own two hands that, no matter how crooked, I can hold proudly and say "I did this". It is no surprise then that I'm a fan of the Maker Movement , the idea of figuring out how…
If you are a professional software developer you probably heard at some point the cautionary tale of the Therac-25 , a radiation therapy machine that gave massive overdoses of radiation to at least six patients in the 80s and killed at least three . There are several layers of problems explaining how all of this came to be, but today I'd like to focus on a specific thread. The (in)famous race…
Some weeks ago HN user wonger_ posted this list of words to Hacker News. This is a list of the words you can spell using only an upside-down calculator - the word "boobies" (5318008) is perhaps the most well-known, but it's far from the only one. This comment by user chriscbr went a step further and annotated all words according to their Part-of-Speech while this one by user jprete raised the bar:…
I got my 3D printing license last year, courtesy of the Stadtbibliothek Köln offering free printing to any card-carrying member who sits through their two-hours course "please don't burn down your fingers, the printer, or the library". The printer has been vital for replacing items that are too important to live without but too cheap to sell as spare parts, which brings me to today's topic: shoes.…
In my last post I mentioned a small webapp that I had built in an hour. This app was okay for what it was, but using it revealed that it needed a bit more love before it could be useful. And that's fine! After all, that was the whole point of making a quick mockup: to put it into the hand of users and see what their usage reveals about what's working and what isn't. I have now written an updated…
I recently had to solve a problem that I already faced before: I need an app to keep track of my daily expenses, it has to run on my phone (so I can enter expenses on the run before I forget), and pretty much nothing else. Last time I scratched this itch I built an Android app that did exactly that, and it worked fine for what I wanted. But time has passed, I have forgotten almost everything I…
As a software developer I constantly have to fight the urge to say "this is nonsense" whenever something new comes up. Or, to be more precise, as a software developer who would like to still find a job 10 years from now . I may still prefer virtual machines over clouds, but I also realize that keeping up to date with bad ideas is part of my job. I've given around turns around the Sun by now to see…
Today I'll take you on a small trip down the rabbit hole of verifying whether something reported on the media is actually true. Let's start with this article from NPR about customers suing food companies for misleading companies. Let's take a look at this bit: "Red Bull announced it would pay more than $13 million to settle a lawsuit brought by buyers who said the energy drink didn't — as the…
Oh boy, where do I even start with this...? Someone posted yesterday to Hacker News their new project : Meoweler , a cat-themed travel website that's almost entirely auto-generated. I have written here before about the realistic dangers of AI, predicting that we would see "garbage in any medium that offers even the slightest of rewards, financial or not". And boy was I right... Here's a short,…
Looks like I wrote this article and forgot to publish it for a whole month. I hope the extra length will make up for it. Now that the 61st annual meeting of the ACL is over, and based on my experience as a member of the Virtual Infrastructure Committee, I would like to share some thoughts on what my ideal virtual conference infrastructure would look like. A conference, for our purposes, is an…
I am currently considering whether to run a 10k and decided to take a look at the available training plans. This being the internet I found a whole lot of reasonably good training calendars but, this being the internet, they are all detailing the distances in freedom units miles. Seeing as I now spent an unreasonably long time translating one of those calendars, I have decided to put it here…
As someone who's constantly fidgeting, I tend to play some Solitaire during online meetings. Note that I didn't say "boring online meetings" because, let's be honest, the meeting can be the most interesting thing ever and yet I still need something to keep my hands busy. In Linux I use Aisleriot , and I'm really happy with it. The only (frankly, very minor) point I have to object is that I don't…
I am constantly having issues with HDMI and I never really know what the actual issue is. A non exhaustive list of possible causes would include a broken cable, a screen that's on the wrong port, an unsupported resolution and/or refresh rate, a PC that's not sending a signal, a PC that's using a different port from the one where I plugged the cable, and a monitor that's asleep and didn't notice…
I am in the middle of updating my LinkedIn profile and I decided to have an AI write it for me. I fed my CV to LLaMa and prompted it to generate the following blurb (which I tweaked slightly to remove hallucinations): Me: Hey, LLaMa, why should I hire this candidate? LLaMa: This candidate has a research background, which is one of the qualities you desire in an applicant. He was able to publish…
I have just finished playing Return to Monkey Island (RtMI). This is the culmination of a 30+ years journey, and it is only fair that I dedicate a couple lines to it. In short: of all the Monkey Islands I played, I just had to pay for the worst one 1 . I should have read the Wikipedia page and be done with it. Also note that Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation made a lot of the same points I'm about to…
As I mentioned before I have a Spotify premium account that I regularly pay for with gift cards. Spotify does not like that: if they could get ahold of my credit card number they could not only stop worrying that I won't pay them anymore but also they could track me better across the web - people change their e-mail all the time, but their credit card and cell phone numbers tend to last much…
I heard about Reddit for the first time around August 2010, when Digg redesigned its website for various reasons (none of them related to improving the user experience) and lost most of its users (many of whom were already annoyed ). The "Digg Exodus" is how I moved to Reddit, and I've used since then as my main source of news. And yet, the shadow of a bad redesign hangs over Reddit. Even though…
I have found myself often enough trying to classify a text that I decided to be lazy and write a solution that I could always rely on. The following script is an example on how to pre-train a HuggingFace transformer for text classification. This example uses only two classes, identifying whether the sentiment of a text is positive or negative, but nothing stops you from adding more classes as long…
Now that everyone is talking about Large Language Models (LLMs) in general and ChatGPT in particular I thought I would share a couple thoughts I've been having about this technology that I haven't seen anywhere else. But first, let's talk about chess. Chess is a discipline notorious for coming out on top when the robots came to take its lunch. Once it became clear that even the humblest of PCs can…
In my previous entry about home automation I mentioned that I was ready to start plugging things into other things and connecting everything to a central computer running OpenHab. This is the story about how everything went wrong. Networking Things starting going badly from the get go when I discovered that whatever "vectoring" is it has rendered my DSL router obsolete. Only two (available) modems…
My brother got his iPhone stolen at gunpoint. This is the story of how he lost control of his iCloud account first (along with years of priceless memories, including my nephew's first steps) and how this couldn't have happened without Apple's incompetent support. But before that, a plea for help: if you know of anyone who can help us get the account back (or rather, the priceless photos locked…
About 8 years ago I was searching for a new messenger bag - the one I had was good but too small, its only one big pocket was inconvenient, and the zipper was starting to fail. And since I was planning on bringing this bag with me everywhere, I needed a bag that could survive being dragged on a classroom floor, exposure to sun and rain, and fit under an airplane seat. Anything requiring "gentle…
Does this situation sound familiar to you? You are a data scientist, you developed an ML model in Python (using PyTorch, TensorFlow, or something like that), and you'd like your users to interact with it, You would like to make either an API or a web interface to your model, Your model is big enough (and therefore slow) that you would prefer not to load it from scratch every time a user wants to…
I always wanted a smart home. I don't have a particular use for it, I just think it's cool that I can yell at my living room and it will obey me. And since next month I'll be moving to an empty flat, it is truly now or never. This is the first post detailing what I hope will be a painless experience and what I know will be a long list of frustrations. Today I will detail my general plan, and in…
Here's a movie idea no one asked for: A group of teenagers have a dream of competing in the Paralympic Games, but their dream is in danger when their beloved coach gets terribly sick. And things don't look promising with their substitute coach either. Sent there as punishment for his failures in the army, he is very strict, belittles them constantly, and has no sense of humor. The coach's name?…
In what must be one of the weirdest flexes ever, I can proudly say that I keep my own email server. And like everyone who keeps their own e-mail server can attest, GMail is always annoyingly difficult to work with. The last version of this problem is that GMail stopped receiving my email because I didn't have a PTR record, an error that's annoyingly difficult to debug for two reasons: because the…
As I mentioned a long time ago I am using Pelican for publishing my blog. I recently did an upgrade which broke the syntax highlighting, and I thought I should take a short time to explain how to fix it because I couldn't find a solution anywhere. The problem: it used to be the case that you could write your code like this and it would do what you'd expect: ``` :::python print('Hello world') ```…
Remember this post where I complained that the music industry won't take my money? Well, it's that time of year again. As you may remember from following me on Mastodon , I bought an Alexa, set it up in Spanish, and almost went insane due to how bad it was. So I did what every normal person would do in this case and I gifted to my mom. This Alexa slept in an Argentinean drawer for a long time,…
I originally envisioned this post as a two-part brain dump, but then I realized that the type of people interested in libraries are also the type of people who aren't bothered by long text. So this post will be longer than usual. Now that we are almost a quarter into the 21st century it is perhaps time to have the talk: what do we do with our public libraries? I'd like to start by pointing out…
If you told me I was going to die in the next 24hs, asked me to guess what from, and it was a working day of the week, "MS-Teams-induced aneurysm" would definitely be in my top 5 guesses. I know what you are thinking: "he's exaggerating - no software can be that bad". This reveals one of two possible scenarios: either you don't use Teams in your daily work, or you do use it but you only pretend to…
Two years and 44 days after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I caught it. I haven't felt this sick since at least January 2013 (probably longer), and I therefore spent an entire week lying on my couch. Which is ironic considering that, as I lay there "looking half dead" (not my words), Germany was scraping almost all protective measures . What happens when you get sick right as the country…
So you want to use my PC? Sure, no problem, it's right there. But real quick, before you start, there's a couple small tips that you should keep in mind. If you turn it on and nothing happens, that means the KVM switch is listening on the wrong input. Just press the black button behind the screen to switch it back. Can't find it? Maybe it fell down - it has a short cable and sometimes the other…
An article titled Don't talk to Corp Dev has recently showed up in my feed and the HN discussion around it reminded me of this anecdote. To clarify: this story is based on something that happened in real life, as told to me by someone who witnessed it first-hand. Time has blurred some of the details and I have changed others. So feel free to dismiss the details, but please keep the main point in…
Last time I talked about Rust I mentioned that I wanted to like the language but I couldn't find a good reason for using it. Luckily for me, the last Advent of Code gave me the perfect reason for doubling down on Rust, and here's my updated report. In case you never heard of it, Advent of Code is an online competition that takes place every year in December. It is structured as an Advent calendar…
Let's say you are a band and you want to keep scalpers from buying all of your tickets and reselling them at ridiculous prices. By now we know what works: you sell tickets with assigned names on them, and check at the door that the name on the person's ID (or, alternatively, credit card) matches the name on the ticket. You can also offer a "+1 option" for bringing someone along, but they must be…
I recently found myself in a situation I haven't experienced in a long time: I got an error message that no one on the internet has had before. Neither DuckDuckGo , Google , nor Bing could find a single hit about the problem, much less a solution. The root cause (spoilers!) ended up being rather boring: I tried to use some features of the Azure cloud platform that are apparently blocked by the IT…
Here's a list of short thoughts that are too long for a tweet toot but too short for a post. On old computer hardware I spent the last month of my life fixing the computers of my family. That meant installing Roblox on a tablet with 1Gb of RAM, fixing antivirus on Windows 7, dealing with Alexa in Spanish, and trying to find cheap ink for printers with DRM. Fun fact: HP uses DRM to forbid you from…
Here's a thought that has been rattling around in my head for the last 10 years or so. My first word processor was WordStar , but I never got to use it fully. After all, what use does a 10 year old have for a word processor in 1994? I then moved on to MicroCom's PC-Flow for several reasons. First and foremost, it was already installed on my PC. Either that or I pirated it early enough not to make…
I have been too busy to blog the last month and a half, so I thought I'd take a bit of time to talk about my new project, unsignedch.ar . Ever since I started taking care of this server I have been worried about the projects I host here - the more scripting languages I install, the higher the chances that someone will find a vulnerability and use my server for mining cryptocurrencies. Therefore, I…
Last time I talked about GMail I mentioned that my account was blocked for sending about 100 e-mails despite following Google's best practices for doing so. On July 23 I got my access back, and I though I would update you all on how that happened since. Note: This article is rather long because there's plenty of e-mail content. If you don't care about the details, you can jump to the end for a…
Here's a "trick" that has saved me a lot of time and that plenty people have never learned. As those with graphics experience probably know, when you draw something in a computer screen you need to give the x and y Cartesian coordinates where your object will be drawn. This makes drawing squares easy but, on the other hand, makes circular layouts difficult. This is where polar coordinates come to…
In my previous post on hierarchical loss for multi-label classification I gave an implementation of a specific algorithm for calculating the loss between two trees. I then added a quick edit mentioning that "this algorithm doesn't work too well in practice", and today I want to delve into why. Imagine you want to predict the cities where someone lived based on some data. The hierarchy of locations…
So, this is a thing that happened: I was invited to give a talk to the Social event organized by LatinX in AI during the NAACL 2021 conference. I talked about best practices for publishing your code on the internet for everyone to see, starting from how to collaborate with your future self (aka "please write comments"), with scientists, with nice APIs who will do the web design for you, and…
Here's one of those problems that sounds complicated but, when you take a deep dive into it, turns out to be just as complicated as it sounds. Suppose you build a classifier that takes a book and returns its classification according to the Dewey Decimal System . This classifier would take a book such as " The return of Sherlock Holmes " and classify it as, say, "Fiction". Of course, life is rarely…
I recently confirmed that high quality audio makes you sound smarter , which is exactly what I always wanted: a way to look smart without having to actually work for it. This discovery led me to an internet rabbit hole on how to look and sound good online, with this guide being the end result. If you are trapped inside online-meeting purgatory like me, hopefully this guide will give you a small…