news
Development/Programming Leftovers
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Consensus Labs LLC ☛ Generating vector embeddings for semantic search locally - The Consensus
In applications today we represent "things" as rows in a table. A row for each book in a Goodreads dataset. A row for each product in an Amazon dataset. And for the last few decades we’ve been working on ways to turn the textual (as well as associated graphics, audio, etc.) into meaningful vectors of rational (decimal) numbers.
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Justin Duke ☛ Notes on "Harness Engineering"
I try to keep an open but keen mind when reading these posts, both trying to find things that don't make much sense when you think about them for more than a couple seconds and what things are clearly in the internal zeitgeist for these companies but haven't quite filtered themselves out into mainland. And so I read Harness Engineering with this spirit in mind. Some notes: [...]
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C++ Stories ☛ Understanding std::shared_mutex from C++17
In this article, we’ll start with a basic example using std::mutex, look at its limitations, and then introduce std::shared_mutex, a reader-writer mutex added in C++17. Even in 2026, with many new concurrency features available, std::shared_mutex is still a valuable and practical tool.
Let’s jump in.
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[Old] Aaron Brethorst ☛ What Volunteer Open Source Taught Me About Remote Teams
The challenge isn’t the technology. The challenge is that my team is almost entirely volunteers, scattered across time zones from Seattle to Europe to Asia. Nobody is getting paid. Nobody has guaranteed availability. Any volunteer could disappear tomorrow because their day job got busy or they just lost interest. This is not how you’d staff a project if you had the choice.
But you work with what you have, and over the past year I’ve learned some things about making distributed volunteer teams productive that I think apply to remote work more broadly.
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Python
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Justin Duke ☛ Outgrowing Django admin
Let's set aside the visual design of the admin for a second, because arguing about visual design is not compelling prose. To me, the core issue with Django's admin interface, once you get more mature, is the fact that it's a very simple request-response lifecycle. Django pulls all the data, state, and information you might need and throws it up to a massive behemoth view for you to digest and interact with. It is by definition atomic: you are looking at a specific model, and the only way to bring in other models to the detail view is by futzing around with inlines and formsets.
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Daniel Lemire ☛ How bad can Python stop-the-world pauses get?
The common Python implementation has both types: reference counting and generational garbage collection. The generational garbage collection component can trigger pauses. A lot of servers are written in Python. It means that your service might just become unavailable for a time. We often call them ‘stop the world’ pauses. How long can this pause get?
To test this out, I wrote a Python function to create a classical linked list: [...]
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