A blog about programming, technology and society.
I ve decided to implement my own markdown static site generator and moved this blog to GitHub pages. You can find the new blog at https://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/ There s also an RSS feed if you want to subscribe: https://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/feed.xml
In this post, I want to talk about a dynamic that I ve seen play itself over and over again in the software world. In fact, I would venture a guess that this kind of situation probably happens in the hardware world as well, but I ll speak about software systems since this is where my experience [ ]
I got up today, had my morning coffee, and was surprised to find that AI music is pretty much solved. Okay, there are still some audible artifacts, and you can argue that the song I linked to is not that original if it makes you feel better. Still, as someone who s dabbled with music and [ ]
Every once in a while, I see people mention dark patterns in UI design. Patterns that are actively trying to deceive users, either to maximize engagement, to click some ad, or to get them to perform an action they didn t want to perform. An obvious example would be some huge pop-up ad which can be [ ]
Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been casually working on UVM, a project to a minimalistic virtual machine that is portable and easy to target. As part of this project, I’ve also been working on a toy C compiler to make creating software for this VM easier. I first wrote about UVM on February [ ]
Years ago, when I was an undergraduate student at McGill, I took a software engineering class, and as part of that class, I heard the infamous story of the Therac-25 computer-controlled radiotherapy machine. Long story short: a software bug caused the machine to occasionally give radiation doses that were sometimes hundreds of times greater than [ ]
We don t always think of it this way, but on modern machines, memory and pointers are an abstraction. Today s machines have virtual memory, divided in blocks called pages , such that the addresses represented by pointers don t necessarily map to the same address in physical RAM. In fact, mmap even makes it possible to map files [ ]
Just over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about a topic that s very important to me, which is the problem of code rot, of software constantly breaking because of shifting foundations, and the toll it takes on programmers, and on society at large. We re no doubt collectively wasting billions of dollars and millions [ ]
One of the things that s been on my mind recently is the idea of building a virtual machine for code archival purposes. Something that s optimized for long-term stability and longevity, with the goal of helping prevent code rot. This is a fundamentally hard problem to solve, because the world changes, and so software changes with [ ]
Four years ago, I wrote a blog post titled Minimalism in Programming, in which I tried to formulate an argument as to why it s usually a good idea to try to minimize complexity in your programming projects. Today, I want to write about something I ve been thinking about for a long time, which is the [ ]