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The Secret Lives of Ernest Beaux

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Ernest Beaux is known for Chanel No5, the most famous perfume in the world. But the...
Ernest Beaux is known for Chanel No5, the most famous perfume in the world. But the man himself remains in the shadows, a name less well known than some of the other personalities in Chanel’s circle: Stravinsky, Diaghilev & Nijinsky of the Ballets Russes, and Winston Churchill, to name a few.Beaux was born in Moscow...
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WebAuthn and Passkeys

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Heya,WebAuthn, also known as passkeys, is a standard which makes authentication easier on the web. Common...
Heya,WebAuthn, also known as passkeys, is a standard which makes authentication easier on the web. Common other methods of authentication have their weaknesses:A username and password means that the user must remember the password. Humans, XKCD notwithstanding, are not great at creating secure passwords. When a pass...
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When Will the GenAI Bubble Burst?

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In early August, I wrote a piece called What if Generative AI turned out to be...
In early August, I wrote a piece called What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud, picked up in the Financial Times and elsewhere.I am not yet ready to claim victory. But as time goes on, I increasingly believe that call was correct. Some new facts have come to light, and the dud idea itself has become quite main...
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Male archetypes in fairy tales

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I’d planned, for this weekend, another post about the psychology and mythology of midlife, but something...
I’d planned, for this weekend, another post about the psychology and mythology of midlife, but something happened which hijacked my thought patterns. Just over a week ago I appeared at the Oxford Literary Festival; I gave a talk about Hagitude. Just one man sat, attentive, on the edge of the sea of women. After fort...
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The Color of Silence

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Sergi Marló | UnsplashSilence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.― Charlotte Brontë, VilletteOn August...
Sergi Marló | UnsplashSilence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.― Charlotte Brontë, VilletteOn August 29, 1952, the pianist David Tudor walked onstage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, NY, to premiere a new composition by the American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992). Tudor s...
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How can Robinhood afford 3% cash back on its new credit card?

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Hi Fintech Futurists — Today’s agenda below.FINTECH: Robinhood Unveils New Credit Card OfferingLONG TAKE: Launching our...
Hi Fintech Futurists — Today’s agenda below.FINTECH: Robinhood Unveils New Credit Card OfferingLONG TAKE: Launching our AI indexes, and reflecting on the Web3 AI mega-merger (link here)CURATED UPDATES: Paytech, Neobanks, Lending, Digital InvestingTo support this writing and access our full archive of newsletters, an...
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Banning open weight models would be a disaster

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In response to an Executive Order from President Biden, The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) has...
In response to an Executive Order from President Biden, The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) has asked the public for comments on “Open-Weight AI Models”—models like LLaMa, Stable Diffusion, and Mixtral—which are freely distributed to the public. They are considering blocking access these models in order to prevent...
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Good information still pollutes the epistemic ecosystem

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What do The Last Psychiatrist, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and the Breaking Bad showrunners have in common? We’ll...
What do The Last Psychiatrist, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and the Breaking Bad showrunners have in common? We’ll get to this, but first we have to talk about...I’m largely positive on Cal Newport's work. With the release of his latest book "Slow Productivity," I went back summarized his underlying message in my previous p...
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There were no ancient computers and it's fine

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Last August, in an article about the history of the calculator, I opened with the following...
Last August, in an article about the history of the calculator, I opened with the following quip:"I find it difficult to talk about the history of the computer. The actual record is dreadfully short: almost nothing of consequence happened before the year 1935. We keep looking for a better story, but we inevitably en...
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Not so fast, Mr. Fourier

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Anarchy in the US (The Revolution That Almost Happened)

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This is the first of a multi-part series. 1894: the Pullman strike! Ken Burns has never...
This is the first of a multi-part series. 1894: the Pullman strike! Ken Burns has never done one of his trademark documentaries on it, and there are no iconic photographs like those of Lincoln, Grant, Frederick Douglass, or Robert E. Lee like we have for the Civil War. PBS’s The American Experience series did do a d...
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Identity, authentication, and authorisation from the ground up

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This piece was originally posted on the koodos labs engineering blog — follow there for updates...
This piece was originally posted on the koodos labs engineering blog — follow there for updates on what we’re working on! 😆In an earlier post we learnt the basic concepts of identity, authentication, and authorisation — important terms that are easily confused by hackers and technologists.In this post we will dive d...
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XZ Backdoor: Times, damned times, and scams

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re: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4Written by Rhea K. and Simon HennigerThere has been a recent backdoor found in the...
re: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4Written by Rhea K. and Simon HennigerThere has been a recent backdoor found in the xz/liblzma tarball. In what is likely one of the largest breaches of trust in the free software ecosystem, this backdoor is likely to have been put in by Jia Tan, a long-time...
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Spacing the Cans

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What work is the “Happy Harvest” brand doing on this can of tomato paste from Aldi?...
What work is the “Happy Harvest” brand doing on this can of tomato paste from Aldi? It’s not competing with other brands of canned tomatoes, because Aldi pretty much sells only its own house brands. Despite this, Aldi doesn’t simply take a no-frills approach and uniformly brand all its products with “Aldi”; it inven...
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How Long Will x86 Endure?

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It’s 1979, and Intel has a problem. Its 16-bit 8086 microprocessor is losing out to its...
It’s 1979, and Intel has a problem. Its 16-bit 8086 microprocessor is losing out to its competitors. To quote from the Oral History:Dave House: … Motorola was selling the 68000 and Zilog was selling the Z8000, and we were commonly coming in third with the 8086 when it came to design win choices.Why is it losing?Dane...
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Are LLMs on the trajectory of word processors or digital advertising?

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In his newsletter this week, Steven Levy looks at the trajectory of ChatGPT and sees echoes...
In his newsletter this week, Steven Levy looks at the trajectory of ChatGPT and sees echoes of VisiCalc. VisiCalc was the “killer app” of personal computing, the forerunner to a transformative general purpose technology. And Levy has been a tech reporter for four decades. He’s one of the best in the business. He eve...
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Technologist vs. spy: the xz backdoor debate

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Well — we just witnessed one of the most daring infosec capers of my career.Here’s what...
Well — we just witnessed one of the most daring infosec capers of my career.Here’s what we know so far: some time ago, an unknown party evidently noticed that liblzma (aka xz) — a relatively obscure open-source compression library — was a dependency of OpenSSH, a security-critical remote administration tool used to ...
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Ray Marching: Menger Sponge Breakdown

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There are two very popular methods to render 3D scenes. Rasterization has historically been the most...
There are two very popular methods to render 3D scenes. Rasterization has historically been the most popular method used for real-time graphics (ex: video games). In short, rasterization is a technique that projects 3D models, composed of 3D triangles, onto a 2D plane. Another popular method of rendering is ray-trac...
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The First Cat War

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In 1916, a serious debate about cats was consuming the country’s attention. Conservationists blamed cats for...
In 1916, a serious debate about cats was consuming the country’s attention. Conservationists blamed cats for being the greatest threat to the country’s bird life, while cat-lovers accused bird-lovers of hysteria. The conflict was often reduced to zero-sum terms, with the naturalist John Burroughs declaring that “the...
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The Tailwind 4 alpha looks awesome

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Earlier this month, the Tailwind team announced that Tailwind’s 4.0 alpha is now open sourced. I...
Earlier this month, the Tailwind team announced that Tailwind’s 4.0 alpha is now open sourced. I love Tailwind and there’s a lot in the post that’s getting me excited 🤩.Here’s what I found interestingIt’s faster and smaller. Improvements here are always welcome. Tailwind is already fast and small, though 🤔. So I que...
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The window for great-grandmothers is closing

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A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother...
A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45.She had my aunt when she was reasonably young and my aunt in turn had her first child at a young age as well. She then went on to become a great-grandmother at 75, meani...
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Engineering Managers Should Not Exist

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The software engineering manager role should not exist. Source: I am one. Before that I have...
The software engineering manager role should not exist. Source: I am one. Before that I have over a decade of software development experience at companies small and large. Engineering managers generally take on some frankenstein role of product, project and technical management and are bad at all of them I’ve seen a...
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Radios, how do they work?

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Radio communications play a key role in modern electronics, but to a hobbyist, the underlying theory...
Radio communications play a key role in modern electronics, but to a hobbyist, the underlying theory is hard to parse. We get the general idea, of course: we know about frequencies and can probably explain the difference between amplitude modulation and frequency modulation. Yet, most of us find it difficult to arti...
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Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture

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… we say tongue-in-cheek that TPU v1 “launched a thousand chips.”In Google’s First Tensor Processing Unit...
… we say tongue-in-cheek that TPU v1 “launched a thousand chips.”In Google’s First Tensor Processing Unit - Origins, we saw why and how Google developed the first Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU v1) in just 15 months, starting in late 2013. Today’s post will look in more detail at the architecture that emerged from t...
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