My team at Google is the infrastructure team for Skia: Skia is an open source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms. It serves as the graphics engine for Google Chrome and Chrome OS, Android, Mozilla Firefox and Firefox OS, and many other products. Skia, being a graphics library, needs to be tested for both performance and correctness, and being cross-platform, it needs to be tested across a wide variety of platforms and under different configurations.

L-Systems are cool. The amount of complexity, and naturalness of the forms you can get from such a tiny amount of code is amazing. The code is intentionally compact as I was intending to submit something along these lines to a code golf competition, but then got distracted.

This article from Technology Review, How AI Can Keep Accelerating After Moore’s Law is a good follow-on from a previous article Moore’s Law Is Dead. Now What?. From the second article: Engineers have kept GPUs getting more powerful because they can be more specialized to the particular math they need to perform for graphics or machine learning, he says. In order to continue to squeeze more performance out of the same number of transistors and/or watts, we are going to need to get closer to the metal, and the metal is going to have to become more and more specialized, or at the very least, the metal has to stop looking like monolithic CPUs with a small number of cores.

The rural areas of North Carolina are emptying out. North Carolina County Population vs Count Population Growth Rate (2010 - 2014). Click on the graph to toggle between population density and county population. North Carolina is not immune to Rural Flight, nor is it a special victim, as the phenomenon is happening world wide. Countrysides around the world are emptying out. It's important to keep these broader patterns in mind, first so you don't go blaming random local events that look like correlation: Mary Hobbs has been living in Woodland for 50 years and said she has watched it slowly becoming a ghost town with no job opportunities for young people.

I am in the process of moving this blog over to Jekyll, while at the same time admitting that I’m never going to finish writing my own blogging software, and that I really should concentrate on the writing, and not the underlying software. This is also an admission that for a while there may be general brokenness such as broken links and some horribly formatted posts. Also, I will be turning on comments, which is a longer post in itself, but let’s just say that after years of watching abuse and generally uncivil behavior on all the social networks I’ve decided to revert to old technology from a simpler time, where I get to have absolute control over what appears next to my writing.

Why yes, the frogs in the pond across the road are rather loud. BTW, Google Science Journal is awesome.

The article Will Tech-Driven Deflation Export Japan’s Economic Woes to the World? reminded me of this video, "Evolution of the Desk": The origin for the above video is http://bestreviews.com/electronics#evolution-of-the-desk. Each time an object gets digitized that's one less object to manufacture, one less object to ship, one less object consuming raw materials. It's actually more surprising that this hasn't had an even larger impact on the U.S. economy. Update: A great slide deck from Hal Varian covers the same ground with a slightly different take, pointing out that much of this progress not only doesn't increase GDP, it actually reduces it, which is a problem of using GDP as a metric.

We just finished migrating all of our monitoring from InfluxDB to Prometheus and I thought I'd write up our reasons for the change. Please note that these are my own personal observations and relate to a specific project, these issue may not apply to you and you should evaluate each product for your own uses. Update: To clarify, the versions of InfluxDB and Prometheus that I am talking about are InfluxDB 1.

As we head into the fourth week of Pat McCrory's failure to conceeed in the NC gubernatorial race, it's important to look at McCrory's infantile behavior in a larger context. While it would be tempting to try to psychoanalyze his continued intransigence as yet another man-child temper tantrum, there are larger forces at work, of which McCrory is just one sad symptom. The root of the problem stems from the ever widening wealth gap and subsequent elite overproduction.

You might think that as the U.S. moves from an industrial and manufacturing based economy to a knowledge based economy that we surely have weathered similar tranistions. For example, as we moved from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing based one. While we did indeed weather the same changes, the vital difference is the timescale over which those changes took place. As you can see from this data on agricultural employment, we did experience a loss of 6 million agricultural jobs over a 50 year period from 1910 to 1960.

To get an idea of voter suppression in action let's overlap the The Racial Dot Map with Wake County's early voting locations.

Restart ESF Pauli % Low Entropy High Entropy Initial Conditions Entropy: Mean: Entities: Mean: Quanta Magazine published an interesting article in their Insights Puzzle column called Seeing Time Through a Liquid Crystal Display. Above is my version of the simulation, which operates on a basic level like the simulation presented in the article, but then adds in a few twists. At this point you should to read the arctile to understand the basic simulation.

Bitworking is now served over HTTPS thanks to Let's Encrypt, in particular to the rsc.io/letsencrypt Go library which made it trivial to implement. Next up, Webmention.

Building on The Republican race: Five degrees of climate denial, extended to the full seven stages: Stage 1: Denial Pre 2010 - The climate is not changing. Stage 2: Ignorance 2010 - The climate might be changing, or it might not, we just don't know. Stage 3: GAIA Bashing 2014 - Climate change is real, but it’s natural. Stage 4: We so tiny 2016 - Climate change is real, but humans aren't the primary cause.

What to do when it's late at night and your high schooler says his table wasn't able to complete their physics lab today because they were missing equipment, and the teacher said, maybe half jokingly, that they could complete the lab at home if they didn't finish it in class? That's right, you build experimental equipment in your garage. This is the Interial Balance we built from scratch using two hacksaw blades.

It's March 2016 and that means I've been building and maintaining httplib2 for over 10 years. As with most of my best software, httplib2 was initially a rage-based project, fed by my disgust on the state of HTTP client libraries in 2006. In the past 10 years it's gathered quite a following, with 0.9.2 current being downloaded from PyPI: 37297 downloads in the last day 210596 downloads in the last week 830573 downloads in the last month I'm done.

Update [June 2017]: Scratch that, after moving the blog over to Jekyll I moved over to using MathJax for LaTeX support. And I never did add Julia support, oh well. In the first of two enhancements to piccolo, LaTeX support has been added. Just put the LaTeX in a latex-pic element and it will be converted to a PNG, with the alt text set to the LaTeX code. <latex-pic>E = mc^2</latex-pic> Transforms into:

We do large displays for Halloween, usually involving converting the garage into a haunted house. They're major undertakings, with four or more actors, so we only do them every other year. I also try to roll a "build" into every Halloween. For example, 6 years ago I built this as part of the haunted house: And two years ago the same skeleton got taken out of the jail and laid out on a table, this time animated with pneumatics.

A sound effects board with the sounds of a dragon built using the Web Audio API. Because Halloween. Start Snoring Stop Snoring Sniff Roar Chains: [Source] Roar: [Source] Sniff: [Source] Snore: [Source] Code

Note: This post was updated in Jan 2017 to use the Custom Elements V1 spec. One of the questions that comes up regularly when talking about zero frameworks is how can you expect to stitch together an application without a framework? The short answer is "the same way you stitch together native elements," but I think it's interesting and instructional to look at those ways of stitching elements together individually.