Sans Big Tech Part 6: Encrypting emails at rest

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I explained why I start building a personal cloud as part of a long journey towards digital independence from Big Tech. In Part 3, I grappled with the big security risks that come with this choice: When you go for your own cloud, security becomes your…

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Peripheral vision and non Euclidean Geometry

I came across a recent paper by Google researchers on Introducing a New Foveation Pipeline for Virtual/Mixed Reality In the human visual system, the fovea centralis allows us to see at high-fidelity in the center of our vision, allowing our brain to pay less attention to things in our peripheral vision. Foveated rendering takes advantage…

The menace of link rot

I have been writing a blog on financial markets for nearly a dozen years now, and it is distressing to find that when I look up one of my older posts on that blog, many of the links in that post no longer work. This phenomenon is known as link rot. Recently, there was a…

Predicting human behaviour is legal, predicting machines is not?

I read this Wired story about some hackers being sent to jail for “hacking” slot machines in US casinos. “Hacking” is probably the wrong word to use for this: they made money by predicting what the slot machine would do by observing it carefully, and using their knowledge of the insecure random number generator used…

Formatting Numbers

Formatting numbers (especially tables of numbers) is one of the most frustrating programming tasks. Different programming languages and environments have taken different approaches to this problem, but the result is still unsatisfying. In this post, I will argue that half a century of advances in computing have delivered too little progress in this simple task.…