Related posts

Founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project, original author of GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and long-time president of the Free Software Foundation.

• War is erasing history

  *Ukrainian cathedrals, Gaza’s archives, Iranian squares — modern war is systematically erasing human history [in places which are bombarded].* Israel's bombardment of Gaza has destroyed many centuries-old building…

  Related

Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

• Tangling Gets Smarter in knitr

  Note This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr triage sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint. Tangle is the old Literate Programming (e.g., WEB/Sweave) term for pulling th…

  Related

• spin() Improvements in knitr

  Note This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr triage sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint. The concept of spin() is like the reverse of purl(). Instead of pulling code…

  Related

• More Capable Cache in knitr

  Note This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr triage sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint. knitr’s chunk cache is one of those features that may have quietly save…

  Related

+ 1 more

• The knitr SQL Engine Grows Up

  Note This is one of a few posts on new features from a recent four-day knitr triage sprint; see that post for the full details of the sprint. knitr’s sql engine lets you write a SQL query in a code chunk, run it a…

  Related

• knitr — A general-purpose tool for dynamic report generation in R

  Related

• knitr-examples — A collection of knitr examples

  Related

• litedown — A lightweight version of R Markdown (without using Pandoc or knitr)

  Related

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?

  My comment on What blog posts influenced your thinking the most? — Lobste.rs. An early Joel Spolsky one for me was The Law of Leaky Abstractions. I read that near the start of my career and it's encouraged me to a…

  Related

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

• 20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Job

  I created my first AWS account at 10:31 PM on April 10th, 2006. I had seen the announcement of Amazon S3 and had been thinking vaguely about the problem of secure backups — even though I didn't start Tarsnap until…

  Related

• Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership

  Amazon's Leadership Principles are famous, not just within Amazon but also in the tech world at large. While they're frequently mocked — including by Amazonians — they're also generally sensible rules by whi…

  Related

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

• Hard Drugs, my new podcast with Jacob Trefethen, and the story of a drug that could end AIDS.

  How to speed up medical innovation, how to scale it up, and how to make sure lifesaving tools reach the people who need them the most.

  Related

• A year of funded FreeBSD

  I've been maintaining FreeBSD on the Amazon EC2 platform ever since I first got it booting in 2010, but in November 2023 I added to my responsibilities the role of FreeBSD release engineering lead — just in time t…

  Related

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

• It’s always an honor to partner with incredible Nigerian healthcare workers, midwives, researchers, innovators, and changemakers—like @NcpwdOfficial and Wheelchairs for Nigeria's Chief Ayuba Gufwanm, a polio survivor who has spent his life raising awareness, delivering mobility aids, and championing vaccines. People like him make me hopeful that, despite the odds and obstacles, we can #EndPolio for good. Thank you H.E. President @officialABAT for this recognition.
  Quoting@officialABATToday, I conferred the Nigerian National Honour of Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR) on Mr Bill Gates @BillGates in recognition of his decades-long commitment to improving lives through interventions in global health & polio eradication, education, digital innovation, and agricultural develop…

  Related

• My re:Invent asks

  As an AWS Hero I get free admission to the AWS re:Invent conference; while it's rare that I'm interested in many talks — in previous years I've attended "Advanced" talks which didn't say anything which wasn't alre…

  Related

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

• Diffusion Models for Video Generation

  Diffusion models have demonstrated strong results on image synthesis in past years. Now the research community has started working on a harder task—using it for video generation. The task itself is a superset of t…

  Related

• Generalist AI doesn't scale

  There has been a lot of talk about AI recently, and one particular point has received sigificant attention in the tech industry: The cost of training models. According to some insiders — and the market capitalizat…

  Related

• Many great things you missed this year

  This week: Birth seasonality, causes of death across the lifespan, progress against HIV/AIDS & cystic fibrosis, very rare infectious form of Alzheimer’s, improvements in cholesterol, and more.

  Related

• The Transformer Family Version 2.0

  Many new Transformer architecture improvements have been proposed since my last post on “The Transformer Family” about three years ago. Here I did a big refactoring and enrichment of that 2020 post — r…

  Related