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There is no robot vacuum manufactured in the United States as far as I can tell. It seems crazy to me---these devices map out the interior of people's homes and businesses, often with cameras running and a wifi…

With LLMs and foreign troll farms and bot nets, it seems it would be valuable for Americans, or any country's citizens, to have conversations that more or less can be relied on to be carried out by their fellow…

One issue with solar and wind is their intermittency. But (my economics / engineering mind thinks) if we have a market for electricity where the price of electricity depends on current moment supply and demand rather…

If I could work on one problem right now it would be reinvigorating liberal democracy, both in my home in the United States, and around the world. I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, a software engineer, machine learning…

Is there any effort out there to mirror the code repositories on github.com?

Docker does kind of run in Windows and macOS in addition to its native Linux---by running inside Linux VMs. Is there a cross-platform container framework that's implemented using each platform's own native container…

It feels like a tricky dance: to know if we have product-market fit, we need to get users/customers, or learn why people don't _want_ to be our users/customers. But if we tell the market about an app that isn't ready…

I want to incorporate an algebra solver into a neural network. Crazy idea, I know. I'm trying to generate algebra problems that are actually solvable, and the best way I can think to do that would be to have a solver…

I can't help but notice the similarity between an OS instance and an organism. It has a boundary and defenses (firewall), various ways of interacting with its environment (network), it has resources and "organs" of its…

Many optimizations are dismissed as irrelevant and "premature". But, for enterprises with finite cash to throw at hardware, fewer optimizations are premature than is often assumed. Use less memory, use less CPU, and you…

I've been doing a lot of listening lately about the state of IP networking and where things are headed. John Day on Programming Throwdown has been provocative, and Geoff Huston on the IPv6 Buzz Podcast also. Though…

I've been working on a web app for the past two years and keep having the uneasy feeling that security-wise all I'm doing is adding a few "rooms" to the house of cards that is today's software and network security.…

I've been using this site since 2014 and something about the tenor of the occasional political posts lately feels very different to me. More Marxist dogma and crypto-Trumpist resentments, less insightful analysis. So…

I know there has been a ton of work on distributed / decentralized social networking protocols. Is there something out there that aims to replace the functionality of apps like Tinder, but in an open fashion?

I find myself wanting to know if I have this or that variant of a number of genes. Seems like getting a complete copy of my own genome could be useful. But I'd prefer not to have a third party have a copy of it. I don't…

My understanding is that OpenJDK 8 will no longer receive updates after January 2019. Most of my Java code targets Java 7 and some Java 8. What would be the consequences for me of jumping to the OpenJDK 11? How does it…

I just watched the somewhat concerning documentary "Take Back Your Power" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZTiT9ZSg3Q ) and was left with some questions. I'm very sympathetic to the privacy concerns people have…

As far as I can tell, the demise of Mozilla Persona has left a vacuum in terms of user-controlled identity solutions. Why did Persona fail? What else is happening in this area? What's coming up on the horizon?

Every login page is different---or at least used to be until sites started standardizing on Facebook/Google/whatever login. This seems like an obvious place for browsers to provide a standardized user experience, but…