Announcing: The UPSide project

A week ago I argued that UPSes suck and need to be disrupted. The response to that post was astonishing. Apparently I tapped into a deep vein of private discontents – people who had been frustrated and pissed off with UPS gear for years or decades but never quite realized it wasn’t only their problem.… Continue reading Announcing: The UPSide project

“The Lost Art of C Structure Packing” now covers Go and Rust

I have issued a new version, 1.19, of The Lost Art of C Structure Packing. The document now covers Go and Rust as well as C, reflecting their increasing prominence as systems-programming languages competing with C and being deployed in contexts where structure-size optimizations can be of some importance. TL;DR: C alignment and packing rules… Continue reading “The Lost Art of C Structure Packing” now covers Go and Rust

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Categorized as Software

The Roche motel

One of the staples of SF art is images of alien worlds with satellites or planetary twins hanging low and huge in the daylight sky. This blog post brings he trope home by simulating what the Earth’s Moon would look like if it orbited the Earth at the distance of the International Space Station. The… Continue reading The Roche motel

Rethinking housecat ethology

There’s a common folk model of how housecats relate to humans that says their relationships with us recruit instincts originally for maternal bonding – that is, your cat relates to you as though you’re its mother or (sometimes) its kitten that needs protecting. I don’t think this account is entirely wrong; it is a fact… Continue reading Rethinking housecat ethology

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Categorized as Science