Gwern — Computer Science↗

After putting up with slow glitchy WiFi Internet for years, I investigate improvements.

Some years ago my family was in Pittsburgh, where we were visiting my sister for Easter. At the time she was a student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Compilation of links demonstrating that it is common to find order-of-magnitude speedups in software, especially when designed carefully for (extraordinarily powerful) contemporary computer hardware...

Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.

Programming folklore notes that one way to get better lossless compression efficiency is by the precompression trick of rearranging files inside the archive to group ‘similar’ files together and...

A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.

Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.

The primary purpose of Utext is to generate the coolest output, so the main challenge is just achieving any of the suggestions above.

Discussion of whether there is a general ‘unsorting’ list operation to avoid redundancy, repetition, or lack of novelty. Probably not, there are too many things you might want to maximize or minimize.

Speculation on why 3-move games like Rock-Paper-Scissors are so common in games & decisions: aside from allowing ties, is this design information-theoretically optimal in game difficulty vs...

Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format which provides a single, self-contained, HTML file which still can be efficiently lazy-loaded by a web browser.