A brief detour this week as I look into an alternate Collatz implementation. The first part of the series can be found here. The Collatz Conjecture Wikipedia page has an alternate formulation titled “as an abstract machine that computes in base two”. I have a computer. It’s a non-abstract machine that comptes in base two. Seemed like it could be fun. Making the Abstract Concrete The idea is pretty clever:...
I happened across a video about the Collatz Conjecture a couple months back and it seemed like a good way to continue learning Rust. The Conjecture is straightforward to implement, and optimizing it has led to some interesting places. I’m no mathmetician, nor do I think I can solve the conjecture, but it was a good bit of fun to explore. What is the Collatz Conjecture? The Collatz Conjecture is an unsolved problem in mathematics centered on a deceptively simple algorithm known as 3x+1....
When I started at Parse.ly, Python was our language of choice. It was fast to write and easy to read. It fit our brains well and it’s juuuust performant enough for a realtime analytics system. The choice was explicit: prioritize developer time and happiness over machine time and cost. ChatGPT and Github Copilot are upending that calculus. Over the next few years, developer unfriendly languages will become more appealing because LLMs will paper over the unpleasantness of actually writing code in them....
I’ve been using a Mac mini for personal projects lately, but I prefer developing on Linux. It’s closer to production, and I happen to know Linux internals better than MacOS internals. With some quality time on eBay, I recently built an Unraid homelab/media serverwith 24 cores, 32g of memory, and 20tb usable storage (i.e. not including parity disks). It seemed a perfect opportunity to set up a new devbox. I knew I wanted some sort of remotely accessible containerized environment....