The Tcl scripting language grew out of my work on design tools for integrated circuits at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1980’s. My students and I had written several interactive tools for IC design, such as Magic and Crystal. Each tool needed to have a command language (in those days people tended to invoke tools by typing commands; graphical user interfaces weren’t yet in widespread use). However, our primary interest was in the tools, not their command languages. Thus we didn’t invest much effort in the command languages and the languages ended up being weak and quirky. Furthermore, the language for one tool couldn’t be carried over to the next, so each tool ended up with a different bad command language. After a while this became rather embarrassing.
Why Is Inflammation a Dangerous Necessity?
The immune system protects us from a full spectrum of pathogens, but without balance, it can end up hurting us over time, too. The immunologist Shruti Naik explains how our defenses can turn on us.
A Plastic Bag’s 2,000-Mile Journey Shows the Messy Truth About Recycling
When the British supermarket chain Tesco Plc first started collecting plastic bags and wrappers from customers to be recycled in March 2021, Caroline Ragueneau was thrilled. She was working as a retail assistant at a Tesco store in southwest England when the first white deposit boxes appeared, promising to turn what’s typically discarded back into something useful. Plastic is a notorious source of pollution: unsightly on land, deadly to marine wildlife. Ragueneau, 56, an enthusiastic environmentalist, proudly told friends about the initiative.
Digging Up the Rich Viking History of Britain
A massive 1,100-year-old graveyard leads to a surprising new view of the Nordic legacy in Britain
Cat Jarman led me through a dense tangle of forest called Heath Wood. We were in Derbyshire, close to the very heart of England. There was no path, and the forest floor was overgrown with bracken and bush. It was easy to lose your footing and even easier to lose your way. Jarman, a fit, cheery woman in her late 30s, plunged jauntily on as I tried to keep up. “See all these lumps and bumps?” she asked as we broke into a small clearing. She pointed to an array of 59 small, rounded hillocks, many two or so feet high and four or five feet in diameter. Humans, not nature, had clearly put these things here, and they gave off a spooky, supernatural energy.
The Cult of Posits
Computers are incapable of representing arbitrary real numbers exactly. This is due to two intractable facts of real numbers:
Uncountably Infinite Domain: There are an infinite number of real numbers.
Uncountably Infinite Precision: Some real numbers require infinite precision.
Since computers use a finite number of bits, computer architects must settle on capturing a finite number of real numbers at a finite level of precision. This is done by fixing a mapping between bit patterns and real numbers called a representation. A representation makes a tradeoff between the quantity of representable numbers and the level of precision.
How Elden Ring Succeeds by Ignoring 20 Years of Open-World Design
Elden Ring is the current hot topic and for today’s piece, I wanted to talk about how From Software made an excellent open-world game, by ignoring the conventional trends of the genre.
If you’re one of the few people who missed the news, Elden Ring, the latest game by From Software is now out. My massive review for it should be out after this piece, but spoiler alert: the game has gotten high praise all around. In an interesting turn, there are developers throwing shade at the game and saying that it did well because of “bad UX” or “horrible controls.” For today’s post, we’re going to dissect why Elden Ring is resonating with so many people, and it did that by ignoring every convention of open-world design over the last 20 years.
Appwrite: Secure Open-Source Backend Server for Web, Mobile & Flutter Developers
Appwrite is an end-to-end backend server for Web, Mobile, Native, or Backend apps packaged as a set of Docker microservices. Appwrite abstracts the complexity and repetitiveness required to build a modern backend API from scratch and allows you to build secure apps faster.
Monitorian: Desktop tool to adjust the brightness of multiple monitors
Monitorian is a desktop tool to adjust the brightness of multiple monitors with ease. The user can change the brightness of monitors, including external ones, either individually or in unison. For the system with an ambient light sensor, the adjusted brightness can be shown along with configured one. In addition, the user can change the adjustable range of brightness and contrast for each monitor seamlessly.
NVIDIA Introduces Grace CPU Superchip
144 High-Performance Cores and 1 Terabyte/Second Memory; Doubles Performance and Energy-Efficiency of Server Chips
NVIDIA announced its first Arm® Neoverse™-based discrete data center CPU designed for AI infrastructure and high performance computing, providing the highest performance and twice the memory bandwidth and energy-efficiency compared to today’s leading server chips.
The NVIDIA Grace™ CPU Superchip comprises two CPU chips connected, coherently, over NVLink®-C2C, a new high-speed, low-latency, chip-to-chip interconnect.
The Grace CPU Superchip complements NVIDIA’s first CPU-GPU integrated module, the Grace Hopper Superchip, announced last year, which is designed to serve giant-scale HPC and AI applications in conjunction with an NVIDIA Hopper™ architecture-based GPU. Both superchips share the same underlying CPU architecture, as well as the NVLink-C2C interconnect.
Adafruit: Verified Accounts Secured with 2FA for Some High-Demand Products
Due to bots buying out certain high-demand items, such as the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, we are now requiring a verified account with two-factor authentication, 2FA, enabled for purchase. We are working to ensure as many of you makers and engineers out there have a chance to order these items at market prices without having to compete with bots.
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