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  • December 22, 2022

    Missing Piece of the Fusion Puzzle : Novatron and the Return of Open Field Line Confinement

    It’s not trivial to make fusion work, but a real breakthrough is now in the making, and it’s happening at KTH.


  • November 7, 2022

    The Dirty Little Secret About Cyber Security : Not Too Complicated, Just Hard Work

    When the real truth starts seeping in, it feels like one of those detective stories where you realise in hindsight that the clues were there in plain view for anyone who cared to really look.


  • October 5, 2022

    Redundancy Reconsidered

    We somehow appreciate the inherent comedy in how engineers systematically over-provision, create fallbacks, fail-safes and redundancies at every possible corner.

    books

  • September 4, 2022

    Dear Apple, Here Are Three Things I’d Like You to Fix With Contacts

    Apple’s contact management app represents a glaring blind spot both in terms of functionality and user experience. That’s ironic given that the company’s marketing always revolves around connecting people.


  • August 20, 2022

    Mode Confusion

    Human factors engineering taught us the importance of building systems that minimise the risk for mode confusion. That’s highly pertinent when designing interaction with robots that are supposed to be perceived as social.


  • August 17, 2022

    Why We Keep Referencing The Past To Feel Good About the Future, or: A Brief History of Skeuomorphism

    Why did the disciples of Bauhaus love to hate Parisian metro stations? And is VR really virtual?

    books

  • June 9, 2022

    The Sim-To-Real Gap

    While watching babies and kittens learn by doing is cute, you don’t want to get in the way of a ten ton industrial robot figuring out the fundamentals. You also don’t want a soon-to-be autonomous car cruising your neighbourhood to pick up traffic rules.


  • June 2, 2022

    The Better Deep Learning Gets, the More Vulnerable It Is to Adversarial Attacks

    These are not your ordinary run of the mill cyber security threats. Adversarial attacks don’t rely on exploiting bugs.


  • May 30, 2022

    Now You See Me, Now You Don’t : Adversarial Patching Brings Serious Trust Issues to Machine Learning

    A brief seven years after Gibson’s far fetched futurism, the science fiction had become reality. Does that mean we’re screwed?


  • May 26, 2022

    Excellent Engineering Won’t Keep You From Solving the Wrong Problem

    Teams like this can follow the tenants of XP and agile to the letter, and still end up building the wrong product. Teams like this need tools on a whole different level. Entire problem spaces need to be explored, before discrete problems are picked out to be solved.


  • May 10, 2022

    The Trend Towards Open Core

    2018 was the watershed year for the open core model, where you build value around a code base that is guaranteed to remain open, and create revenue streams around consulting, hosted services and closed source add-ons.


  • May 4, 2022

    The Best of Both Worlds : How to Build a Company While Sticking to Open Source

    The professor’s privilege and means that researchers can do what they want with whatever they create. Which if you’re in software usually just means that you publish your code on GitHub under MIT or BSD license and move on to the next research project.


  • April 21, 2022

    Ise Ise Baby

    The approach is one of the most promising candidates among “non-Von Neumann” computer architectures. So one hundred years after the idea was first broached, is the time now ready for Coherent Ising Machines to make a dent in the universe? There are three signs that so might be the case.


  • April 28, 2021

    At the Crossroads of Intellectual Property and Software Engineering

    The ins- and outs of open hardware; the power and perils of building your products on top of FOSS-stacks; the dos and don’ts with design patenting, and so much more.


  • April 25, 2021

    Life in the Machine

    Close to the Machine : Technophilia and its discontents by Ellen Ullman chronicles the dawn of the Internet from the point of view of a freelance programmer. I loved it intensely.

    books

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