Tag Archives: Tech

Adam Mastroianni has a thoughtful and interesting article on peer review. The idea of having outside “experts” evaluate a prospective paper before it’s published in a journal seems to be obviously the right thing and something that has been the … Continue reading →

I just came across an interesting article that appears to be from Francesco Nidito—although I’m not sure about the provenance—concerning the Plan 9 operating system. The gist of the post was that Plan 9 was a brilliant piece of software … Continue reading →

The IEEE Spectrum has a lovely article about the origins and early history of PostScript and how it jumpstarted desktop publishing and arguably digital printing. Most Irreal readers probably know the rudiments of the story. PostScript was developed at Adobe … Continue reading →

Fred Brooks was a computer scientist who, among other things, worked on the development of OS/360. He’s probably best known for his influential book The Mythical Man-Month, which has itself obtained a mythical status within our industry. The TL;DR of … Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about developers threatening a suit against Microsoft/GitHub/Copilot for copyright violations. The issue was that the AI assistant Copilot was “suggesting” code that was an exact copy of copyrighted code without attribution. That post … Continue reading →

Manu Cornet worked at Google for 14 years and recently moved to Twitter (he’s since been caught up in the great Twitter purge) and has an interesting discussion of the differences in the companies’ cultures as seen from a staff … Continue reading →

I’ve written several times about my use and affection for finite state automata in programming. It’s amazing how often it can reduce a complex problem to a triviality. The first stage in taking advantage of this method is to draw … Continue reading →