Free Software, Education, and Programming

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 07, 2025

• Marco F ☛ Moving (my Data) to Europe | marco's µ.blog

  [...] To sum it up, I find it very unfortunate that it had to come to this and hope that despite the lack of integration, the various apps and services will still work as reliably as they have. Time will tell for sure.

• Openwashing

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Mark Kapo-berg says Meta’s latest Llama models put open-source Hey Hi (AI) in the driving seat

    Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled the latest additions to its Llama family of large language artificial intelligence models on Saturday, claiming that they’re among the most powerful ever released to the public.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • CedarDB ☛ Fast Compilation or Fast Execution: Just Have Both!

    That’s where just-in-time compilation comes to the rescue. It’s an even older idea than B-Trees and has had its revival both in our field and generally for programming languages. The core idea is to let code generate code just before you need it. For a database, this means only generating code only after receiving the SQL query from the user. We’ll first take a step back to code generation (without the focus on just-in-time) and then explain hands-on how to write your own C code-generator.

• Education

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Rossfest

    For those unfamiliar with Prof. Anderson's work, he is of course the author of "Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems", a seminal textbook that provides comprehensive insights into designing secure systems. This work has become a cornerstone in the education of security professionals worldwide. I knew Ross as one of his many proofreaders of the third edition.

    Security Engineering was one of the core textbooks for our students on their MSc in Cybersecurity Engineering. It is so readable that some students feasted on all of the more than 1000 pages, which took quite some time. It is truly a bible of cybersecurity as it contains everything in one place and how it all connects.

  • Allen Downey ☛ Announcing Think Stats 3e

    The third edition of Think Stats is on its way to the printer! You can preorder now from Bookshop.org and Amazon (those are affiliate links), or if you can’t wait to get a paper copy, you can read the free, online version here.

• Programming/Development

  • Golang

    • Daniel Lemire ☛ Faster shuffling in Go with batching

      Random integer generation is a fundamental operation in programming, often used in tasks like shuffling arrays. Go’s standard library provides convenient tools like rand.Shuffle for such purposes. You may be able to beat the standard library by a generous margin. Let us see why. Go’s rand.Shuffle implements the Fisher-Yates (or Knuth) shuffle algorithm, a standard method for generating a uniform random permutation. In Go, you may call it like so: [...]

    • University of Toronto ☛ My pessimism about changes to error handling in Go (but they'll happen)

      First, I think that changes to Go's error handling are inevitably coming sooner or later. Error handling is something the community keeps being unhappy about (even though some people are fine with the current situation), and we know that some people in the core team have written up ideas (via, also). This issue is on the radar, and because it's such a popular issue, I think that change is inevitable.