Smerity (n):

We should likely warn time travelers as we present them the wonder that is the modern mobile phone not to get their hopes up. They're still likely to lose text documents.

A well working `robots.txt` parser is the first step in any web crawling enterprise, small or large, and yet it’s surprisingly difficult to get a battle tested implementation. Texting Robots is a Rust library written combining units tests from multiple other robots.txt parsers and stress tested against all of Common Crawl's robots.txt files.

The city of Rome was a colossal undertaking. At peak the city of ancient Rome had an estimated one million people. We'll use this grand stage as a thought experiment about the requirements for modern society and how they're provided.

A key ingredient in creative tooling for a productive community? The inability to achieve perfection.

Generating an image of chaos (the bifurcation diagram) in Rust with parallel computation, PGM image export, and zero dependencies

Inspired by A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website (Hacker News), I thought it worth revisiting my history with web crawlers. This will take place from a few specific stories. For multiple stories the names of the companies have been removed.

Half a century ago the indexes in books were manually written. A quarter of a century ago search engines began to automate this index. Today language models burn through that sequence of abstract symbols.

"The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it."

TikTok avoids the cold start problem by having creators have a set of known challenges that they build upon and focusing on an interest graph rather than follower graph

The most free I'd ever felt writing was when the result was intended to be small, free, and a fun exploration of my own thinking. It's time for that to make a return.

"If for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years."

S-1 filings are a key resource in understanding both private and public companies.

"It took me like a decade, ten years, before any real understanding of my principles solidified."

How do you divine your way to the key differentiators for Instagram: limited format, instant upload, filters, and distribution?

"The person who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck"

SIMD isn't easy but it is endlessly fascinating. There's an odd sense of joy gained from peering high level to low through the lens of the compiler and raw assembly.

Luis von Ahn was a pioneer in the space of crowdsourcing, building ideas into companies that helped shape the digital world.

Adam recounts lessons learned from creating and selling half a million in digital products over two years.

Strict rules can prevent ambiguities and errors from ever occurring in both natural language and programming.

How do you, as a solo entrepreneur, build your own skillset and business such that you have a sustainable and long term future?

Kay explores the link between traditional engineering and software engineering as well as questioning whether all the existing complexity is necessary.

Xerox PARC was the home for invention - five years, 25 researchers, and $12 million per year - for the PC, GUI, WYSIWYG, ..., and Internet. How does simplicity and vision help you achieve that?

"This is field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years—this is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries."

Kay rewrites his own quote "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" to "the best way to predict the future is to empower the children who will invent it"