A mental random number generator
George Marsaglia was a big name in random number generation. I’ve referred to his work multiple times here, most recently in this article from March on randomly generating points on a sphere. He is best remembered for his DIEHARD battery of tests for RNG quality. See, for example, this post.
Read moreNew symbols in Unicode 17
Unicode 17.0 was released yesterday. According to the announcement This version adds 4,803 new characters, including four new scripts, eight new emoji characters, as well as many other characters and symbols, bringing the total of encoded characters to 159,801. My primary interest in Unicode is for symbols. Here are some
Read moreMandelbrot and Fat Tails
The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers c such that iterations of f(z) = z² + c remain bounded. But how do you know an iteration will remain bounded? You know when it becomes unbounded—if |z| > 2 then the point isn’t coming back—but how do you know whether an iteration
Read more408: Proxied Third-Party JavaScript
Chris and Stephen hop on the podcast to discuss the concept of a proxy. Possibly the most “gray hat” thing that CodePen does. We use a third-party analytics tool called Fullres. We could just put a link to the <script> necessary to make that work directly to fullres.com, but being
Read moreBech32 encoding
Bech32 is an algorithm for encoding binary data, specifically Bitcoin addresses, in a human-friendly way using a 32-character alphabet. The Bech32 alphabet includes lowercase letters and digits, removing the digit 1, and the letters b, i, and o. The Bech32 alphabet design is similar to that for other coding schemes
Read moreWe built stackoverflow.ai with the community and for the community
Ryan is joined by our very own Ash Zade, Product Manager, and Alex Warren, Staff Software Engineer, to discuss our newly released stackoverflow.ai, how it’s enhancing user experience by combining human-validated answers with AI, and our future plans for deeper personalization and community integration.
Read moreInferring sample size from confidence interval
The previous post reported that a study found a 95% confidence interval for the the area of the Mandelbrot set to be 1.506484 ± 0.000004. What was the sample size that was used to come to that conclusion? A 95% confidence interval for a proportion is given by and so
Read moreMandelbrot area and escape times
The two latest posts have been about the Mandelbrot set, the set of complex numbers c such that iterations of f(z) = z² + c remain bounded. It’s easy to see that the sequence of iterates will go off to infinity if at any step |z| > 2. For each c, we can look at
Read moreChris’ Corner: Simple, Accessible Multi-Select UI
There’s a nice article by Enzo Manuel Mangano called Checkbox Interactions – The beauty of Layout Animations. In the end, you get some nicely animated checkboxes, essentially: I like it. It’s a modern-looking multiple-choice with very clear UX. Enzo’s tutorial is all React Native-ified. I think Enzo is a React
Read moreStop Duct-Taping AI Agents Together: Meet SmythOS
Discover SmythOS, the open-source operating system for AI agents. Move from fragile prototypes to production-ready multi-agent systems with proper orchestration, observability, and security. Continue reading Stop Duct-Taping AI Agents Together: Meet SmythOS on SitePoint.
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