Or: the perils of blindly using AI to save some money. IMPORTANT NOTE: while I'm pointing out some specific companies in this post, it's not meant to discredit them; instead, I hope to trigger a bit of reflection on how AI should (and should not) be
There's this post by Ahrefs , a SEO company from Singapore, which is getting quite a lot of shares recently. While nobody ever said that the cloud was cheap, it's a terrible comparison. Basically, the article enumerates what they have bought (a number of Dell servers + network
Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why?
Why you should care about ransomware attacks even for irrelevant internet-connected systems, and how to use duplicity with AWS S3 to create ransomware-resistant backups.
I think the behaviour of many people towards log4j developers and towards the project is simply ridiculous. I understand the memes; it's the internet, after all. But I can read posts and tweets by many IT professionals - developers, managers, security engineers - that treat the log4j project
Today I'll discuss about an interesting concept: consistent hashing. It's a widely employed technique to properly perform sharding in distributed storage systems. I'm not aiming at a rigorous explanation (please don't use the raw snippets I provide in production code!), but I
I don't have strong opinions on Facebook - I'm not even a user anymore - but I think that the "like/dislike" mania is going a bit too far. I've read yesterday that an engineer was fired from Facebook for having a
How to start with machine learning? Some serious, yet practical, suggestions.
How badly I wanted something like that? The problem: Python for scripting Beside programming and data science, I find Python to be a very useful glue language; I think it's great for shell replacement when bash/zsh scripts get too complex, but there's one caveat: as
This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not need to understand how to use the language or its packaging ecosystem. Delivery and distribution is a relevant part of
As some of my followers already know, I'm enrolled in the great Master's program at Georgia Tech, the OMSCS. As a part of my studies, I'm doing some research to investigate the expectations gap between the higher education and the industry sectors; why does
Every day now and then, I get an scp command wrong. Scp is designed after commands like rcp and works totally fine for local-to-local file copy. While this can (or could) be useful in some contexts, It's not what I like to do these days; very often, if
Ollivander
UPDATE: this article was written at a time when remote work wasn't so widespread. After having worked remotely myself, I don't think that the office is so critical anymore, even though I believe it's still useful to have a nice office somewhere where you
Ollivander
Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one tool doing one thing well, I sometimes find it slightly boring to put all the tools together, sometimes
Mostly Unixish
Sure, git is great. Sure it is possible to use multiple commit identities in git - just set local per-repo variables. If it weren't for the fact that chances of forgetting about it is about 99.9%. Problem context When installing git, it is required to configure a
Ollivander
This is something I get asked quite a lot, so I wanted to write a piece about it. This is an extract from the manpage from GNU grep: NAME grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern SYNOPSIS grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...] grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN]... [-f FILE]
Ollivander
The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way,
Ollivander
There seems to be a common belief about computer science: people either get it, or don't get it. A recent paper by the University of Toronto, Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal, dispels such myth. The paper even suggests some explanations for this myth: teaching failure.
Ollivander
Really. Stop (ab)using just strings and integers! Yes, they're the building blocks of whatever you do. But if you abuse them, you're not taking full advantage of your Object Oriented programming language. Let me explain with some concrete example. For the sake of conciseness, I&
Ollivander
The Process, today, is king. There're a lot of people focusing just on process, and a lot of them hold it as The True Solution to all the world's problems. Then, there're those who don't believe in process. They say, we mostly
Mostly Unixish
Are you unsure whether your mass storage works properly? Do you suspect it's faulty somewhere? Verify it with a nifty tool, included in most Linux distros and in macOS if you install the ext2fs tools: sudo badblocks -swv -t random -b 4096 -c 2048 <DEVICE> It
Mostly Unixish
As much as I like Docker, one thing it doesn't do well: cleanup whatever is left on my hard drive after running it for a while. There're generally two kinds of Docker Waste: * Exited containers. Unless you used run --rm when running a new container from
Ollivander
This seems a simple enough question: How can I discover the type of any given Python object? Suppose Python 2.7 (Python 3 is a different beast on this topic), and try implementing such function: def discover_type_of_object(obj): """ Args: obj: Any python object Returns:
Ollivander
Some years ago, a git workflow model called git-flow took the software development world by storm. I'd always thought that the workflow was far too complex and I couldn't figure out what purpose it served. Now, after having used it for some months, I can just