computers

Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language

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Attention, Spoiled Software Engineers: Take a Lesson from Google’s Programming Language

Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into … Read more

Intel Is Cutting More Than 15,000 Jobs Despite Getting Billions From the US Government

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Intel Is Cutting More Than 15,000 Jobs Despite Getting Billions From the US Government

In a move likely to raise a few taxpayer eyebrows, Intel said today that it will cut 15 percent of its workforce, or more than 15,000 jobs, as it struggles to rebound from disappointing results. In March, the US government said it would give Intel no less than $8.5 billion to help it rebuild its … Read more

Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

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Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

For someone just getting into this weird craft, BASIC felt positively thaumaturgic. It was spellcasting: You uttered words that brought iron and silicon to life, and made them do things. (As the software engineer Erin Spiceland puts it, coding is “telling rocks what to think.”) If you were, as I was, marinated in Tolkien and … Read more

Steve Jobs Knew the Moment the Future Had Arrived. It’s Calling Again

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Steve Jobs Knew the Moment the Future Had Arrived. It’s Calling Again

Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it … Read more

Hospitals Around the World Are Struggling in the Aftermath of the Great IT Meltdown

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Hospitals Around the World Are Struggling in the Aftermath of the Great IT Meltdown

“If one of those computers is affected, suddenly all of your sterilization procedures have to slow down or even stop, and then operations stop,” he says. With large healthcare systems employing thousands of personnel and looking after vast numbers of patients—last year Michigan Medicine had more than 2.7 million outpatient visits—modern healthcare has become reliant … Read more

The Eternal Truth of Markdown

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The Eternal Truth of Markdown

Markdown became a core part of how I wrote. The simplicity and flexibility meant I would live the dream of write once, run anywhere. It did lead to some ambiguity, though. Gruber would probably say this is by design. His emphasis throughout the Markdown documentation is on the syntax of Markdown, not—say—the resulting HTML. His … Read more

Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer

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Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer

At the same time, I understood almost immediately why Haskell was—and still is—considered a language more admired than used. Even one of its most basic concepts, that of the “monad,” has spawned a cottage industry of explainers, analogies, and videos. A notoriously unhelpful explanation, famous enough to be autocompleted by Google, goes: “A monad is … Read more

How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine

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How I Became a Python Programmer—and Fell Out of Love With the Machine

The difficulty with any new programming language is the sharp learning curve, all that drudgery and bashing your forehead into the keyboard. There was no Codecademy or Stack Overflow in those days. We bought books from the likes of O’Reilly and No Starch Press. I bought Learning Python and skimmed the first few chapters, but … Read more

To Build a Better AI Supercomputer, Let There Be Light

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To Build a Better AI Supercomputer, Let There Be Light

GlobalFoundries, a company that makes chips for others, including AMD and General Motors, previously announced a partnership with Lightmatter. Harris says his company is “working with the largest semiconductor companies in the world as well as the hyperscalers,” referring to the largest cloud companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. If Lightmatter or another company can … Read more

Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better

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Selective Forgetting Can Help AI Learn Better

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach won’t displace the huge models that undergird the biggest apps, it could reveal more about … Read more