Compsci

These exercises assume a CS graduate-level background and familiarity with the tools mentioned; they are for mentors to adapt for their students. I have either created or been subjected to all of them over the years, and I have mentored students through them on many occasions. The general theme here is that most of the systems and stacks that are taken for granted often don’t work very well, and often don’t seem to have a very bright future. This is even the case for famous codebases relied on by billions of people. There are no absolutes and no immediate fixes, but it is food for thought if we can demonstrate immense waste of human effort amid poor quality computing systems, even when impressive modern computer science is applied. ...

Random humans and computers Humans are terrible at randomness. If you ask people to write down a list of random numbers the result can usually be shown to not be random at all. Stage magicians and marketing experts exploit our inability to assess how random an event is. But computers, surely they should be random? It sure feels like it when your printer jams. But no, computers are often worse than humans at being random, and that’s a problem. Randomness is exceedingly important to making computers and networks work. ...