Someone got their hands on a missile guidance computer for a 70's Titan nuclear missile and took it apart [http://www.righto.com/2020/03/inside-titan-missile-guidance-computer.html]. It's incredible how you could do sophisticated things with such primitive computing technology.

Butler Lampson [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Lampson] worked on several ground breaking computing projects at Xerox's PARC laboratories – the laser printer, Ethernet, and WYSIWYG editors among other things. At PARC he wrote a paper: Hints for Computer System Design [https:

I wrote about Zip compression yesterday [https://apoorvupreti.com/zip-files/]. This interactive essay [https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/] uses the compressablity (using Lempel-Ziv compression [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ77_and_LZ78], which is also used in Zip compression) of a song'

Zip files used to be ubiquitous when I started playing with computers in the early 2000's. These days the .zip file format is still around, but Zip compression is more commonly found in other places – Android's .apk, and Microsoft Word&

A nuanced look [https://blog.cloudflare.com/when-bloom-filters-dont-bloom/] at bloom filters – they are not always as effective as you would think.

This [https://danluu.com/monorepo/] blog post is a good introduction to the advantages of monorepos.

When I was still new to programming I would always be excited about rewriting things from scratch. I'd scrap all the work I'd done on a half-complete project, starting again just so the code could be refactored to be slightly

Someone [http://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html] hacked Google Maps' traffic density detection by filling a cart with ~100 phones running Google Maps, and walking down streets with it. The maps system  assumes the high density of slow-moving phones is due to a

Special chips for ML applications are gaining popularity these days. Google has an interesting article [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-at-googles-first-tensor-processing-unit-tpu] on their ASIC, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). It seems like the primary things these chips do well is matrix

This [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo] video is a great, although basic, introduction to how the machine learning algorithms that power most of the new tech platforms work. No technical knowledge required.

Joel Spolsky, the founder of Stack Overflow, has a series of strategy letters than blew me away with their level of insight and clarity. There are six of them, and I think you should read them all: * Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon [https: