Chris’ Corner: Design Do’s and Don’ts
I admit I’m a sucker for “do this; don’t do that” (can’t you read the sign) blog posts when it comes to design. Screw nuance, gimme answers. Anthony Hobday has a pretty good one in Visual design rules you can safely follow every time. Makes sense to me; ship it.
Read moreResearch roadmap update, May 2025
An update to the research that the User Experience team is running over the next quarter.
Read moreTrinomial Coefficients and Kings
The term trinomial coefficient is used a couple different ways. The most natural use of the term is a generalization of bionomial coefficients to three variables, i.e. numbers of the form where i + j + k = n. These numbers are the coefficients of yj zk in the expansion of (x + y
Read moreSalesforce wants to do for agentic AI what they did for SaaS
Christophe Coenraets, SVP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, tells Eira and Ben about building the new Salesforce Developer Edition, which includes access to the company’s agentic AI platform, Agentforce. Christophe explains how they solicited and incorporated feedback from the developer community in building the developer edition, what types of AI
Read moreRiff on an integration bee integral
I saw an integral posted online that came from this year’s MIT Integration Bee. My thoughts on seeing this were, in order: It looks like a beta function. The answer is a small number. You can evaluate the integral using the substitution u = 1 − x2025. I imagine most
Read moreThe Basics of Node.js Streams
Explore the fundamentals of Node.js streams for efficient I/O operations. Learn how readable, writable, and transform streams work with practical examples of data handling, piping, and backpressure management in this comprehensive guide. Continue reading The Basics of Node.js Streams on SitePoint.
Read moreWhether AI is a bubble or revolution, how does software survive?
Money is pouring into the AI industry. Will software survive the disruption it causes?
Read moreAnother little chess puzzle
Here’s another little chess puzzle by Martin Gardner, taken from the same paper as earlier. The task is to place two rooks, two bishops, and two knights on a 4 by 4 chessboard so that no piece attacks any other. As before, there are two basic solutions, here and here,
Read moreMultiplying by quaternions on the left and right
The map that takes a quaternion x to the quaternion qx is linear, so it can be represented as multiplication by a matrix. The same is true of the map that takes x to xq, but the two matrices are not the same because quaternion multiplication does not commute. Let q = a + bi
Read moreEmbeddings, Projections, and Inverses
I just revised a post from a week ago about rotations. The revision makes explicit the process of embedding a 3D vector into the quaternions, then pulling it back out. The 3D vector is embedded in the quaternions by making it the vector part of a quaternion with zero real
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