Distributed traces are essential for understanding the behaviour, performance, and reliability of microservices architecture. They can be used to surface meaningful observations about service dependencies, call graphs, and runtime dynamics, enabling software engineers and scientists to develop new tools for optimisation and fault diagnosis.

As more and more academic search tools start to increasingly leverage on the fruits of "AI" (actually transformer based models) and librarians start to encounter such tools whether it is from brand new products like Elicit.com, SciSpace, Scite.ai assistant etc or from existing vendors bundling in AI such as Scopus AI, Primo Research Assistant, Statista Research AI etc (see

Blogs come and go. Sometimes they move from one location to another. However, blogs have not been systematically archived, perhaps for work by efforts by OpenLaboraty.

The Mysterious World of Cephalopod Consciousness Cephalopods, which include octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish, have long fascinated scientists and ocean enthusiasts alike. Known for their incredible intelligence and problem-solving abilities, these marine creatures have increasingly become the subject of study when it comes to understanding consciousness in animals.

We recently finished my seven “discover columns” as I mentioned some weeks ago. Here are the remaining five columns.

Python has a ton of solutions to parallelize loops on several CPUs, and the choice became even richer with python 3.13 this year. I had written a post 4 years ago on multiprocessing, but it comes short of presenting the available possibilities. Here is an attempt to bring all of them finally in a single place.

Artificial intelligence has become the central nervous system of our era, quietly weaving itself into the fabric of our daily lives. A recent House report makes recommendations for our future.

`The Historical Context of California’s Battle with Invasive Species Over the course of a century, California has faced numerous environmental challenges, one of the most significant being the invasion of non-native species. These species threatened the natural habitat, disrupted ecosystems, and posed considerable risks to the native flora and fauna.

I tried to learn assembly, but didn’t find the energy. But I had a inspired times anyways.

On Friday the 13th of December 2024 our PhD student Linda Berube had her viva voce examination and was awarded a PhD with minor corrections in Human-Computer Interaction Design!

I had good intentions to give NaNoWriMo a try this year but didn’t get very far. Instead I gave OpenAI’s Creative Writing Coach GPT a try for a (very) short story I had in mind, inspired by my frustration trying to access closed-access research articles for a review article I’m preparing.