A decade and change after “The Art of Unix Programming”, I’ve decided to do another book. Actually, I have more than just an intention and some notes; I’ve been working hard on it over the last five days it and have 41 Kwords of rough-cut manuscript ready.
Month: December 2018
Pessimism about parallelism
Massive concurrency and hardware parallelism are sexy topics in the 21st century. There are a couple of good reasons for this and one rather unfortunate one. Two good reasons are the combination of eye-catching uses of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in games and their unexpected secondary uses in deep-learning AI – these exploit massive hardware… Continue reading Pessimism about parallelism
The blues about the blues
Some kinds of music travel well – they propagate out of their native cultures very readily. American rock music and European classical music are obvious examples; they have huge followings and expert practitioners pretty much everywhere on earth that’s in contact with civilization. Some…don’t travel well at all. Attempts to imitate them by people who… Continue reading The blues about the blues
The curious case of the missing accents
I have long been a fan of Mark Twain. One of the characteristics of his writing is the use of “eye dialect” – spellings and punctuation intended to phoneticize the speech of his characters. Many years ago I noticed a curious thing about Twain’s eye dialect – that is, he rendered few or no speech… Continue reading The curious case of the missing accents