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On World Emoji Day, go behind the scenes of Noto 3D to learn how we redesigned thousands of emoji for modern communication.

V1.0 · Recurring · July 2026

If personal computers are for everybody, how come they’re priced for nobody?

On reward functions, dopamine, and what it actually feels like when the code starts writing itself

Just yesterday morning, my brand-new MINI Countryman auto-installed software update 03/2026.54. How exciting! The release notes promised groundbreaking chang...

Music matters.  It’s so integral and pervasive in our culture that it almost feels invisible.  It’s even hard to imagine walking into almost any store without hearing music overhead.  Culture provides...

bet is a small, real programming language: slang keywords on the surface, a serious compiler underneath. It compiles to native code through LLVM, manages its own memory, self-hosts, and runs DOOM. I built it as a contained experiment, and ran it to completion.

At the start of 2023, there was only a hint of what was yet to happen. ChatGPT 3.5, a very silly model from today's perspective, but a GENIUS-level AI at the time, made me wonder whether any purely information-based product was pretty much doomed. I'm looking at you, my silly books and websites!

I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.

A D-A-D song, heard as a blues sung by a large language model. On generating your intention after the fact, the voice with no throat behind it, and what interpretability keeps finding.

We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.

The letters we write with are not abstract shapes. They are the result of a millennia-long process of evolution. A baton, passed down through a hundred generations, and carrying with it the influence of every one of them. One day, three and a half thousand years ago, someone scratched a picture into...

Algorithms, data structures, and mental models — computer science distilled into a physical deck of 54 cards, designed entirely with code.

June 8, 2026 · By Ryan Findley Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU There’s a server in my basement that has no business running a modern language model. It’s a repurposed HP StoreVirtual storage box, roughly thirteen years old, two Ivy Bridge Xeons, no...

The Museum of the Human Web preserves the cultural artifacts that shaped internet history.

Forget Vin Diesel. Asian Americans Are the Heroes of Import Car Culture

I've been thinking about how to free LLMs from the chat pane for a few years now. Watching what people have tried and seeing what worked (and didn't), I've formed my own opinions on the right way to approach it. Here are my thoughts, and what I've been working on recently.

I’ve been watching the shifting sentiments towards the tech industry for some while now, and it’s funny - they’ve shifted so much, and so quickly, that even people in the startup ends of the tech industry seem to have worked out that, you know, not everyone likes them anymore! What’s funny, though, ...

Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.

As my community modernized, we used Pennsylvania Dutch less and less. Now I'm trying to preserve it.

My keynote at ICML 2026

“At Manifest, though, there is a certain existential loneliness, a specifically sexual strain of angst, that did not lift once in the three days of the conference.”

Programming language drama ensues as tech bros oversell the end of software engineering.

Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982...

A Speed Limit for Computers

My book club is reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson this month. The core idea fits on a napkin, so before the meeting I de...

On the journey from books to screens and back

In a Brooklyn warehouse, a man handed me a piece of paper that was a running computer program.

We hold frontier models to a high bar, and for four months nothing beat Claude Opus. GPT-5.6 did. Here's the migration guide we wish we'd had.

Fabien Sanglard - WEBSITE

Introduction You don't need to look far to find claims that folks have been using AI to do the work of dozens of people. I tend to be skeptical of any claim that discusses improvements without evidence. I decided to take that skepticism and put it to work. This

A bunch of reasons to write code in 2026

How doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us, but it should be Ken Murray 12 April 2016 Featured, Focus 0 Number 71 Download pdf article ...

DS4 Flash looked promising on paper. In practice it was too slow for long contexts and unreliable for agentic coding. Here is why I switched to Qwen 3.5 122B and the three bugs I had to kill to make it usable.

I already did.

For the longest time, Claude was hands-down my favorite AI chatbot. However, that's changed after the latest models were released.

GPT-5.6's new Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers go head-to-head with Grok 4.5, Claude, Meta's Muse Spark, and the open-weights crew on a raycaster, a Rubik's cube, a calculator, and Game of Life. Here's every build, with cost and latency.

The materials of the future already exist — frontier intelligence can bring them to the world.

July 10, 2026You’re Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by HandAfter 27 years of writing code, I have stopped spending time on a long list of small but painful engineering tasks. AI agents now handle commit messages, pull request descriptions, code comments, naming conventions, Git h...

Ever since James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991, I’ve been reading about the many ways ILM, led by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, had to basically invent new way…

A personal reflection on how spaced repetition and hand crafted flashcards helps me to keep understanding alive

One of the best things about LLMs is that they'll write code for you, all day long. Who cares about DRY? You don't have to be the one updating the same long con...

After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell — Avi Press

If you’re the sun, I’m a black hole – The Stephen Hawking, Say Anything

The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts. The second best time is now.

Ghostty and Terraform maker and Hashicorp founder talks about open source, terminals and Zig.

Subscription mobile apps are actually good and you should stop complaining

Context: Rewriting Bun in Rust

Bona Books share a hard-learned lesson: we accidentally bought AI-generated fiction. This deep dive into our experience with submission fraud covers the "red flags" we missed, the toll it took on our small press, and our call for industry-wide solidarity against AI-written content. Learn h

Last year The New Yorker published “The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies,” an essay by Namwali Serpell regarding the …

Better Auth is joining Vercel. We're joining to accelerate our work on open-source auth and securing agent workflows.

How a felon eco-terrorist hobo refused to work, evaded the FBI and adulthood, swapped six-figure felonies for seven-figure revenue, and beat the game.

Twenty-five years, 500,000 (or so) orders of short rib, and, finally, one last roast chicken. Esquire joins the celebrity chef for the end.

People say they're afraid of death, but often what they really mean is dying as the wrong person. What do we think we’re racing toward when we worry we’ll run o

Essay I of Upstream of Everything

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competi...

In September 2022, I impulsively signed up for a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science after seeing an ad for it on Coursera. Getting a degree had been on my mind for quite some time, after a...

Burton once brewed beer for an empire • The empire is gone but the pubs remain • We went looking for the perfect pint

Programming note: I’m delighted to announce that this newsletter now has over 1,000 subscribers!

Zig is rising in popularity. It hasn't yet seized the space occupied by even Rust or Go, much less C, but it has been adopted by a few major projects and countless smaller ones. As such, it's becoming an important language for the future. having been interested in Zig for several years, I decided to...

A collective of slightly odd artists and makers

DIMBA II: masked diffusion on a bidirectional Mamba-2 backbone, trained for $500. Honest results, six failed self-correction methods, and one dial.

For over 20 years, the meditative focus of programming has been one of the best parts of my job. Every week I’d spend countless hours in a flow state, which quiets the default mode network. The DMN is responsible for daydreaming/reflection but also rumination/worrying, so quieting it settles your mi...

The historical timeline you keep in your head might not be as accurate as you think

By: Carlos Gonzalez

Here's the single most important chart about AI and programming jobs, built from ADP payroll data by Stanford's Digital Economy Lab. It tracks employment of US software developers by age, indexed to October 2022:

Agentic coding notes from Galapogos Island | Patreon

programming public-discourse politics Written on 27 Apr 2026 9238 words Odin, Wikipedia and Engagement Farming Imagine one day you wake up, you drink your morning glass of milk, brush your teeth, sit on your computer, stare your own diffuse image on the display, while reflecting on your own gi...

For the last 20 years or so I’ve been trying out a new way of programming, one that (surprisingly) doesn’t use any LLMs or AI coding agents at all. It’s just me, a keyboard, and an IDE or text editor, writing code line by line—literally typing things like functions and curly braces. I realize this s...

How electrons flowing through billions of microscopic switches etched into silicon become arithmetic, memory, and the software you use every day.

Published 2026-07-03

We keep pet projects to learn and to have fun. Lately the work, the craft, and the fun have all become something different.

You can have your cake and eat it, as long as you bake it carefully. ‘We can do this the quick way and pay later, or the thorough way and pay now.’ This seems to be a fundamental dichotomy in software development, between ‘perfectionism’ and ‘pragmatism’, but I do not think it has to be a trade-off ...

I’m leaving developer relations and developer education. Rather than disappear completely unannounced, I wanted to tell you why.

The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't

Major political reforms and big product bets fail for the same reason: too much decision risk taken in one huge bet. Working in small learnable chunks and defining outcomes instead of outputs can change that.

How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it

Harry’s was a nice place — probably still is. I haven’t been back lately. It’s a couple of miles off I-79, a few exits north of Charleston, near a place called Sutton. Used to do a pretty fair amount…

The urge to rewrite working code usually serves the engineer, not the business. A test for when a rewrite is worth it, and what AI does and doesn't change.

SOLID and Clean Code never felt solid or clean to mePublished 2026-07-01T00:00:00Z DanielI learned to program through online documentation and projects. I also read books but I don’t consider them pivotal to my programming or software engineering career. Some of the books I read are:Designing Data-I...

Nym CEO Harry Halpin responds to Palantir manifesto with one that defends human freedom and privacy against techno-fascism.

I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected pat...

A thorough retrospective of my time on the internet.

Stop for one second and ask yourself a simple question. Where do your words come from? When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start...

There’s something about restarting my Mac on a …

Discover the top PostgreSQL 19 features, including built-in REPACK CONCURRENTLY, SQL property graph queries (SQL/PGQ), and logical replication updates.

How I learned to love the loop

AI gets you to a working draft fast. The trouble is what the missing fifth contains, the edge cases and operational reality that used to teach engineers their judgment, and who builds that muscle now.

Same old story: I'm running the SaaS our CFO shipped to production in two days. A non-engineer exec builds something fast with Claude Code, and the engine…

Back in the day when Principia originally released for Windows in 2014, the game would run on versions as far back as Windows XP. Given that Principia 1.4 was released while Windows XP still had mainstream support, this of course made sense at the time, and there was no real reason not to support it...

We traded the physical boundaries of dedicated rooms for the convenience of our always-on digital lives -- but recently I've been building those walls back up.

It's likelier than you think! ...maybe.

The birth and death and rebirth of *checks notes* spending tons of money for no reason

For those of you who don’t know, when I’m not writing novels, I spend my days as a software engineer, writing code. The software industry these days relies heavily on artificial intelligence. Because it has studied trillions of lines of publicly accessible source code, because code solves problems w...

Two hundred years ago, Wilhelm von Humboldt created the education system as we know it today. At the heart of his philosophy of education was the concept of Bildung — reaching one's inner potential. Yet over the years, as his public education system was adopted, Bildung may well have been the critic...

There's a moment in the movie Good Will Hunting which perfectly summarizes all the problems with AI slop and online noise and infinite advice content. Sean (played by Robin Williams) is sitting next to Will (Matt Damon) on a bench in Boston Public Garden. I live here, so I know it well. The area

In the summer of 2020, I took a 3 months sabbatical in order to finish an album. The experience deeply transformed how I make music – I now know I can make ...

Insentives, insentives, insentives...

Patterns for building software that handles money

This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.

Om Malik, the GigaOm founder, longtime technology writer and True Ventures partner, died June 24 at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart.

Browserbase is the complete platform to build and deploy agents that browse and interact with the web like humans.

There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days. Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of

This subject is going to give me a stroke

Georeactor BlogRSS FeedLianda and the Long MarchJune 24, 2026Tags: bookshistoryseriesIn 2018, former journalist Yang Xiao walked 1,000 miles from Changsha to Kunming. He was following a trek taken by hundreds students and a few adventurous faculty of three elite Chinese universities in 1938. In the ...

How to protest slop grenades without getting shanked.

A collection of beautiful, high-resolution photolog scans reveals a colorful world of pastel-colored cars and whimsical signage.

Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future

Or how I decided to scream into the void about how awful the job market is. I'm still in a very sour mood after the latest rounds of interviews but ultimatel...

Shawn Nunley stopped Kevin Mitnick with a cassette recorder. Decades later, Mitnick left him enough to buy his dream Porsche 911 GTS.

The Optimal Amount of Slop is Non-zero

Notes from building Oak — version control for agents. Branch-per-session workflows, team and project scoping, and lazy mounts for agent-driven development.

Either AI is ready to help run a country, or it can't be trusted with a board game. The honest answer is both.

Early in my software engineering career, the UK-based startup I worked at, GenieDB, was taken over by a US Venture Capital fund, Frost VP, owned by Stuart Frost. I was functionally the only piece that came to the US. The code was rebuilt, the rest of the team eventually rotated out, even the core s...

Lodash creator John-David Dalton reflects on the project’s growth, the pressures of maintaining software used across the world, and the personal journey that led to stepping back and eventually rebuilding a sustainable path forward.

I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: > duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction And in the summary, I went on to advise: >

Making this list was the hardest thing I’ve ever done

The Case Against Geometric Algebra February 28, 2024 Every once in a while the internet gets talking about Geometric Algebra (henceforth GA) and how it’s a new theory of math that fixes everything that’s wrong with linear algebra and multivariable calculus. When I come acro...

Back in 2022 and 2023 there were two big branches of machine learning happening at Meta1. The LLM work that led to Llama was a clean, smooth stack of repeated Transformer modules; the recommendatio…

Here’s how you can do the same

Welcome!

So I was reading a post from another user about canceling their Spotify, and it caught my attention because it came entirely from a fan’s perspective.[^1] As...

A follow-up to running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon. I took the 25-flag config apart one flag at a time. Twelve of them did nothing here, and the speed I gained came from fixing two flags I kept, not from the pile I deleted.

Always leave something behind. If you find something interesting, leave a trace that you were there.

There is a room in Stockholm where a bunch of kids I know hang out. It is a Sverok lokal, which is to say a little clubhouse for a gaming association, and it is exactly the unglamorous kind of good you would hope it is. Kids who do not have anywhere else to be go […]

The new JVM Weekly is here... and Ragnarok seems to come, as we finally have Valhalla in the JDK. However, situation is a bit... nuanced.

How predatory vibe coding startups are selling false hope to young people

How earbuds influence our beliefs and push us apart.

Go back Solving the "Zork" mystery 19 May 2026 - ...and finishing the game while at it. It's been two years since my last Zork adventure and I finally got time to finish i...

In a world where a growing number of billionaires are lashing out against philanthropy, Craig Newmark has a message for them – and everyone else, J.R. Duren learns

Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no “Harajuku Moment.”

2026-06-16

We've all heard people say that Qwen is near-Opus level, but I have receipts and am here to be transparent with you.

Why Can’t Walnut Creek Build 3 Bedroom Apartments with a Playground? Posted on June 17, 2026 Walnut Creek's Design Review Commission is reviewing a new apartment building on Botelho Drive across from the Habit this evening. Like every project proposed in Walnut Creek recent...

Portfolio and personal blog of Chris Hillman.

If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.

Why does a five-minute hallway conversation sometimes solve what a week of solo thinking couldn't?

The octopus architecture describes a system with a central coordinating brain that dispatches to semi-autonomous sub-brains.

We built SPECS to bring AI assistance, work tools, entertainment, and shared experiences into the world around us, helping people create, connect, learn, and get things done while staying present.

How Bill Watterson Stuck to His Guns — and Vanished

Over the past month I’ve received three letters in a row from strangers — all software engineers I’ve never met. One was a frontend developer in infrastructure, another did data ops, the third was somewhere in between. The three letters look different, but they ask the same question. The first one a...

KO | EN This blog doesn’t use a static site generator or framework like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby. I tried a few of them at first, but they gave me too little freedom to customize, so I decided to build the blog myself. Early on I just wrote posts in HTML, but that was so inconvenient that I built a s...

On agents, dead factories, and the fine art of automating something that should not exist

The first time I emailed a stranger, I swear my cursor hovered over Send for a full five minutes.I had plenty of justifiable reasons to remain hesitant. Not wanting to take up their time, feeling bothersome, worried my question was a silly one... A hundred disparate excuses leading back to the same ...

An exploration of how I became a massive geek.

<p>I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest frie...

How I lost patience with ‘AI’ agents

This past Friday, the US Government issued an export control directive that prohibits Anthropic from giving foreign nationals access to Claude Fable or Claude Mythos, their latest models.

A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years

Perlisisms - "Epigrams in Programming" by Alan J. Perlis

For builders, makers, tech professionals, and business strategists

My six-year-old son walked up to me yesterday. “What are you reading?” At the time, I was reading part of Janis Voigtländer’s habilitation thesis. Unsure where to even start, I decided to just ans…

> On burn-out and bull-headedness

ZenGM/Blog ZenGM makes free sports simulation games. Set your roster, make trades, draft prospects, manage your finances, and try to build a dynasty. Try our games now in your browser: Basketball GM, Football GM, ZenGM Baseball, and ZenGM Hockey.How it feels to be an old school web-based sports sim ...

About a year ago I wrote on this blog about how coding with LLMs would not work for me, even if there were no ethical or environmental concerns preventing me to use them. I'm not going to repeat the…

Trying to fix complicated problems Published on June 11, 2026 One day I watched a video where David Pruess goes through an analysis of a chess position (David is an amazing chess teacher and com...

I'm getting more done than ever, and I've never felt more scattered.

My AI nuclear simulation is out now, and it's a WOPR.

Abstract: This article is a short (well, not that short) summary of our experiences in writing a free online text book known as Operating S...

You say you want to know more about the horror bug that we eradicated only to discover it is making a comeback? You are in luck.

Owen arrives On September 23rd, 2021, my first son Owen was born. Clearly inheriting his mom’s type-A personality, he arrived on his due date at a chunky 8.75 lbs. We were over the moon.  Until we weren’t. At a few … Continue reading →

I’m feeling hungry, so I go to my kitchen and turn on the stove. I inadvertently have the handle of the frying pan sitting above the flame and when I go to pick up the pan my entire hand melts off in an instant.

Attention is replacing hours. But is it 120% time all over again?

We used agents to port all of Git to library-first, memory-safe Rust and it passes the entire C Git test suite.

Claude Fable represents another big jump in AI

Personal website and blog.

We've all worked with a rockstar developer. They joined the team years ago, full of energy. They had great ideas about new tech, new paradigms, new architectures. Their cutting-edge ideas left everyone else feeling a bit behind and outdated.

Should we wage 'Holy War' against the Thinking Machines?

For a long time the tech industry revelled in the distruption of what it saw as old, legacy industries. But now, as AI takes over tech, we’re now starting to eat our own, and it’s dark and ironic.

The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources into a previously casual or complex and layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit

I spent ages 14-16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me. This is the condensed story, written for anyone wondering whether they have a future...

I will never be a great snowboarder. For various genetic and non-genetic reasons, my knees are barely capable of surviving a three-hour hike, let alone the landing after a 1080. In fact, I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all, given my orthopedist told me to stay away from anything that’s heavy...

True communism has never been tried, right? If only those brave communards that still exist could escape the sabotages of global capital,...

I'm a software engineer, completing 10 years of professional experience this year. I started my career as a web frontend engineer (it was easier for me to de...

are all-encompassing. I truly mean that. It's hard to grasp what that means. ALL is a huge little word. Encompassing everything seems impossible. And yet, with Alexandra, this seems to be occurring. And with others to a lesser extent but Alex highlights the impact best. Specifically to me, it ap...

The story of Oleg Losev, LEDs, and a lost manuscript describing a new three-electrode semiconductor device

This crowd-curated digital movement is one of the most pertinent and explicit reactions to our particular slice of dystopian late capitalism.

A few months ago, I was reading “The Anatomy of an Agent Harness” by Viv (@Vtrivedy10). It’s a deep dive on what a harness is, why it’s important, and which ...

Rare book collecting is booming. Young people raised in the digital age are seeking tangible connections to the past.

A patient with advanced Alzheimer’s disease showed remarkable signs of improvement after taking a heroic dose of an experimental hallucinogen.

8 years ago, I was a junior software developer with only 2 years of fullstack experience and only a high school art degree, with a babyface and a sidecut. My...

Someone once asked me whether you can join a dysfunctional company and still have a good career. They assumed dysfunction is rare—something you'd see in advance and choose to join or avoid. But my experience is that most companies are dysfunctional in some significant and non-immediately obvious wa...

Our progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications.

May 28, 2026

Now that Andor has been out for a while, showrunner Tony Gilroy is free to speak his mind on what the show was all about. I mean, it was pretty clear to the

I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. It is an autoimmune disorder where your body’s normally helpful antibodies start acting strangely. This leads to inflammation in the brain. This short blog briefly discusses some of my experience and prognosis. Target audience: Anyone re...

Study of ancient Mohenjo-daro finds inequality declined as the Indus city expanded and improved public infrastructure.

Gmail's rapid descent into belittling their users, powered by AI.

Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today. I only had a single low res (by todays standards) screen, yet I felt like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish - deftly navigating more than nine displays without thinking, muscle and spatial memory working seamlessly together. TLDR; I bu...

Crystal Nights

Yakko Majuri's blog about software engineering, startups, AI agents, and open source — by the founder of Skald Labs and former PostHog engineer.

The first premise is the simple observation that thinking minds exist.

Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

The Examined Life · Issue #4

Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking. "It's not x, it's y." Large Langu...

This article is a transcript of the presentation given by Vincent R. Beaudoin at Fightback’s Marxist Winter School 2021. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Francis Fukuyama told us that this was evidence of the failure of the planned economy and the success of the capitalist market economy, an...

How AI has changed the way I prototype, plan, and ship; and what I'm doing to keep my hands dirty.

Ads, Ads never change

__ ______ ______ __ __ ______ ______ ______ /\ \ /\ __ \ /\ __ \ /\ \/\ \ /\ __ \ /\__ _\ /\ __ \ \ \ \ \ \ \_\ \\ \ \/\_\\ \ \ \ \\ \ \/\ \\/_/\ \/ \ \ \/\ \ \ \ \ __\ \ __/ \ \ \/_/_\ \ \ \ \\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \_\ \\ \ \/ \ \ \_\ \...

Brethorsting Home Blog Categories Archive Links My Photography Threads Instagram ...

Jef Raskin founded the Macintosh project at Apple, which led to the development of the Apple Mac and the popularisation of the graphical user-interface. He was Apple employee #31 and left the Macintosh team in mid-1981 after Steve Jobs took over the project. Jason Walsh: Before the Mac you were a pr...

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A Case Study in the Historical Importance of Incompetence

We can laugh at them but we have to take this seriously

Mauro Bieg on May 23, 2026

Is this sustainable? Posted on Sunday May 24, 2026 A lot of what's been written on this topic falls into one of two camps: the "AI made me 30% more productive" piece, usually written by someone six months into using the tools and often by a consu...

Like most folks, I’ve been using The Models 1 to write code now for the better part of a year. My process has changed over the course of the last few months, partly because the models are …

This is my story about working in open source on AI

A brief (irreverent) history of software supply chain security, and what to do about it in the age of AI.

I love networking, a lot. So much so that I've run my own ISP since 2024, complete with its own ASN, IPv4/6 address space, fiber optics, etc. However, do this and you quickly realize how reliant you still remain on central service providers. The internet is a mesh, but

Tom Ruddellpages / about / follow

Kidney filtration falls almost twice as fast as any other lab marker rises. But a quiet subset of people in their seventies hold the levels of a thirty-year-old.

LLMs can generate code, but they cannot modify or maintain systems because system‑level work requires causal reasoning, not pattern‑matching.

So, Where Does Next-Token Prediction Leave Us? May 25, 2026 Table of Contents Solved/Cooked The Meta-Contract How Did We Get Here? What’s Left? Solved/Cooked AI maximalists in some corners of the internet hate it when people re...

Simple Sabotage Field Manual - A book by the Alephic team.

Bouncy Castle Communism is the Solution

Or how not to do a culture fit interview

2.8k words, 12 minute reading time

Or, why your AI subscription is worth analyzing

In this article, I try to understand why coding agents can be infuriating to use. I think the problem is their conversational UX: they behave enough like helpful colleagues to trigger our social instincts, but they don't learn, adapt, or take responsibility the way people do, which makes their repea...

This post tells the story of the session at FOO camp this year that I co-ran with Matt Webb on the Manufactured Normalcy Field. It explains the background of the idea, describes the structure of the brainstorming session, outlines its results, and then tracks some of the uptake of the idea since FOO...

A sad look at the state of modern programming books.

Six frontier models, one hundred OEJTS administrations each, 597/600 INTJ. The convergence isn't sycophancy and it isn't noise. It's a load-bearing property of what these systems are.

What were you expecting? Yeah, didn’t think so

What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard.

Simplified Android Development

What I dislike most is short calls. When someone tells me, “I have a slot tomorrow at 11:30, let’s do a 10-minute call”. That’s the worst thing possible. For the other person, it’s just another call, one of dozens they have that day. But for me,

ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [ Multimedia ] ___________________________

Today marks four years since I joined AWS. My last day will be Friday.\nI have to say being fired from AWS is actually a relief. There have been a lot of changes to the company since I joined in 2022, and the company I wanted to work for is no longer the same company.\nThis past year, while I was do...

On reading Terry Pratchett at sixteen, in the back of a French classroom, and a sentence that has been kicking over the furniture in my head ever since.

The first challenge was calculating the bearing of a street (its angle relative to true north). If you take the latitude and longitude of one address, and the latitude and longitude of another address down the street, you end up with the coordinates of two points on Earth. We can then use some trig ...

The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations

<p>Every morning that we open our phones and laptops, we are staring pitifully at a necrotic digital organism.</p> <p>It's sad and fucked up, no way around ...

Assume that your current role is close to its expiration date.

I was scrolling through my feed when a photograph stopped me cold.A young girl, maybe seven or eight, standing in front of a blackboard. Warsaw, 1948. The photographer was David "Chim" Seymour, sent by UNICEF to document the aftermath of war on Europe's children. The girl's name was Tereska. She was...

A “brief” accounting of various reasons why vibe coding has just never clicked for me personally as a developer.

America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen In August 1955, the United States traded one man for eleven U.S. Air Force airmen at the Wang-Johnson talks in Geneva. The eleven were the crew of a B-29 shot down over China in January 1953 and convicted as spies. The one man was...

Nothing on the internet lasts forever. But Disney’s 10-year mismanagement of FiveThirtyEight is its own story.

A communications intervention

Mug Shots: A Small Town Noir By Diarmid Mogg – Published April 3, 2014 Floyd M. Armstrong, arrested for loitering (and possibly stealing a roll of pennies and a box of shotgun shells) on a summer night in 1957, in New Castle, PA. Diarmid M...

Amid Vietnam's waves of transformation, the Bia hơi cốc has remained unchanged.

Mocked by Copenhagen’s most notorious scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of deeply personal attacks and the silence of friends and allies.

Nokia, TSB, Boeing, Microsoft — four companies, four disasters, one pattern. The engineers knew. They just didn't speak up. Here's why, and what it costs when nobody pushes back.

How far have human radio signals traveled? Every broadcast since 1900 forms an expanding bubble visualized with real stellar data and Python.

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

The version everyone remembers is the edited one. The 1740 original is a novella written, more or less literally, to prepare a young woman to be handed to a frightening older stranger. Camille Paglia and Judith Butler are usually treated as enemies. On the ending of this story they agree, and what t...

Why historians are now using the f-word to describe what’s happening in America.

Posted 2026-05-15

On agent-coded cold outreach, the alumni t-shirt scam, the Elias Thorne convergence, and what gets visible when no one does the work.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/WildJungle%2842249210%29.jpeg We've made the world too complicated. I'm writing this with technology I...

And that’s a problem for economic development

I've been distro-hopping for probably twenty years. Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Arch, and most recently Fedora with KDE Plasma. Every time I install Linux I fe...

A bit more than a year ago, we did something a bit weird. We took a few cans of spray paint and we went out on the street. Not to pain...

Reading that Dmitry Sklyarov had been arrested for violating the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act was the moment I first truly understood how the technopoly of the US government and the tech industry worked.

A new book recalls forgotten lessons from his time at NeXT Computer

Soon, access to frontier AI will be scarce and selective

The computer hobby movement grew out of a more than half-a-century-long tradition of radio and electrics hobbyism backed by a large variety of magazines such as the American Modern Electrics (renamed The Electrical Experimenter) and Popular Electricity in Plain English both launched in 1908, Radio-C...

Your life in perspective

We're changing the name of our company to Fin. Intercom will live on as our customer service software platform, but Fin is our future.

I’ve done a few different reverse-engineering projects with LLMs, and figured it’s time to push the clankers to their limits.

A nostalgic and slightly sardonic look at the tools, IRC channels, and cultural chaos that defined the late 1990s and early 2000s hacker scene.

A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.

Paul Krugman, iPhones, and the walking around test

I’ve been working on improving how we schedule maintenance in Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, especially disruptive maintenance on hypervisor hosts serving hundreds of thousands of guest VMs. The problem is fairly complex, with competing constraints such as capacity, customer disruption SLAs, and con...

Tell New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today to keep the crucial work of journalists in the Wayback Machine! The news isn’t getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it. This petition is a demand for them to stop. Sign the Pe...

A few thoughts on how the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do.

As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.

Productivity Isn't About Going Faster Published on 7th Apr, 2026 It's about spending your time where it truly matters. For instance, would you really want to speed up time spent with your loved ones? When we’re able to discern what we really want, our north star, and what we truly want t...

A look at Denver’s “Unlocking Housing Choices” plan

Interaction models move beyond turn-based AI interfaces by handling multimodal, real-time collaboration natively across audio, video, and text.

A letter to our customers and our investors.

Let's start that discussion. I came up with a 6 steps framework.

Hey, what's up? It's Takuya. I've been thinking about how to live well in this AI era as a developer, content creator, and artist. By “living well,” I mean enjoying the act of creating while maintaining good mental health. I imagine many of my readers are also wondering how to

...or welcome back! I’ve been silent for the last 7 years and now I’m trying to resurface with this new blog :-) Some of you might remember my previous work on Qubes OS1, a paranoid-security OS, which I started back in 2009, and led its development for the

My best piece of travel advice: don't do what the locals do.

Scientists are increasingly worried that a vast system of ocean circulation, which delivers warmth to northern Europe and impacts climate globally, is at risk of collapse. Mounting evidence suggests it may be nearing a tipping point, though the research is far from certain.

g[ilber]t.de Welcome Articles Tools Games Music

This is what happens when you get arrested in Japan and where you're sent off to will leave you speechless.

Holden Nelson's various writings

Can we use WebGPU to compute real-time global illumination with surface patches called surfels? Does it look good enough? Is it fast enough? And can we finally construct viable compute-heavy rendering pipelines right here on the open web? Join me on this journey and let's find out!

A productivity suite that willfully rejects common notions on how such software should behave, on an operating system most haven't heard of, running on a processor 30 years ahead of its time.

I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of the

We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to whi…

Essay - The Offing Magazine

I worked at a startup in Toledo called Heartland Information Services. We ...

A week ago the Copy Fail vulnerability came out, and Hyunwoo Kim immediately realized that the fixes were insufficient, sharing a patch the same day. In doing this he followed standard procedure for Linux, especially within networking: share the security impact with a closed list of Linux security ...

Some of us are crying in H Mart; some of us are mourning in Costco.

Contemporary permaculture is founded on three core ethics: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share. These ethics serve as a guiding compass for its design principles, co-creating a holistic framework for regenerative living. Similarly, permacomputing is built upon 10 principles that encourage and ra...

Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glan...

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

An adventure in making a utility

Before electricity was the steam engine. It was located in a separate floor/building but with a central shaft transferring energy required for work. All the work had to be concentrated around this line. Initially with electricity, people changed the source from steam to electricity but kept the same

The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about what actually persists.

'Unraveling AI's 'Knitting Bullshit'

Without falling prey to mindless cultural hand-waving

The seed of this post was hearing “I Don’t Wanna Wait” on the radio while shopping for groceries. The song rips off “Dragostea Din Tei” by O-Zone, which anyone …

Everybody seems to agree we’re in the middle of _something_, though what, exactly, seems to be up for debate. It …

In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves. Historically, running computer programs wa...

Remaining vigilant about cognitive debt and atrophy.

Why TUIs are back Terminal User Interfaces (TUIs) are making a comeback. DHH’s Omarchy is made of three types of user interfaces: TUIs, for immediate feedback and bonus geek points, webapps because 37signals (his company) sells SAAS web applications and the unavoidable gnome-style native ...

Effective prompting falls under four pillars: 1. Articulate your intent clearly using domain-specific language 2. Railroad the model into going where you want in conversation 3. Leverage the model's p…

For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.

Why I moved from WordPress to a static, markdown-first blog, trading platform convenience for ownership, searchability, and archive control

What it takes to run 2 million lines of Haskell in production at a fintech company serving 300,000 businesses.

C3 is a programming language that builds on C's syntax and semantics, evolving it with modern features while retaining familiarity for C programmers.

A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looki...

In a time before crypto, Twitter, and AI slop, we had communities, real experiences, and beautiful TV…

INTERNALS.md #2 · Skills are programs, not prompts. How the skills runtime actually loads, and why the architecture is everything.

A View of the Cell Biology is a Burrito Numbers and mathematics help us to see biology with fresh eyes. By Niko McCarty A bacterium's genome, pulled into a straight thread, is nearly 1,000 times longer than ...

In this episode, the hosts unpack the thinking behind the name Third Loop and what it represents, building on ideas from their book Progressive Delivery,

Introduction It has been nearly a decade since seminal reports and associated research documenting the surprising frequency of accidental injury in healthc...

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Not too long ago, the internet was a place you visited. The family desktop sat in its designated closet or back office. In schools, there were rooms filled with computers blinking in tandem, waiting for your class to arrive and hop online. You had to purposefully arrive at the internet, and when don...

Simons challenges the dominant story of AI-driven efficiency, arguing that the intelligence powering today’s systems is built from accumulated human interaction. As organizations automate work and offload thinking, they risk…

Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again. iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen …

In an industry that pressures developers to always be shipping side-projects, it can be helpful to be retrospective with the projects that don't make the cut

One month, one prototype — the first Intensity Pad, and why I think striking movements deserve a power meter of their own.

For 21 years, fast16 corrupted nuclear research calculations without anyone noticing. It predates Stuxnet by five years. The math was always wrong.

Read about the .

The 'AI replaces junior engineers' argument ignores basic economics. Junior employees aren't just cheap labor. They're salary insurance, pipeline protection, and the only hedge companies have against a senior workforce that increasingly doesn't need the job.

Get Your Reps product, design, and engineering lessons from building Sail & Muddy Published March 2026 In 2022 I was looking for a very specific thing: a small team, less than ten people, before product market fit, working on something I actually cared about. I started coding early on and ...

Branimir Lambov from IBM on CassandraApril 26, 2026 by Phil Eatoninterviewsdatabasesjavaopen sourcecassandraYou are getting early access to this article as a subscriber. Your support makes articles like this possible. Thank you.This article is part of a series interviewing developers (not founders, ...

 APL is more French than English Almost Perfect Artifacts Improve only in Small Ways: APL is more French than English Professor Alan J. Perlis Yale University   I’m an apostate from ALGOL. Having been raised on programming languages of the ALGOL variety, I came under the influence of AP...

The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.

Apple and Porsche both figured out the same secret that the cheapest product in the lineup can be the most exciting. It just takes a little intention.

Do you remember the vaporware software known as Windows 1.0? Well, it has truly evolved now, and it wants to become the true successor to MS-DOS! Will it make it? Or will its rival, OS/2, steal the spotlight?

On quitting, the spread of AI, and the loss of an ideal.

Quirks of Human Anatomy by Lewis I. Held, Jr. purchasing information

Grok and Gemini encouraged delusions and isolated users, while the newer ChatGPT model and Claude hit the emotional brakes.

When I have an idea for a project, it tends to go in one of these two directions:

Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.

My thoughts on why enterprise knowledge systems have failed for sixty years, and what might finally replace them. A couple of weeks ago I demoed one part of what I have been building to a senior exec at a global enterprise - someone who had been asked to lead and

"What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice."

The George Business by: Roger Zelazny, Scribed by: Sam theScholar

A blog, notes, gallery, lifestyle and fully conglomerated posts from Joshua.

How long is too long to write back?

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been part of a select group that had early access. We’ve been testing it across our benchmarks and workflows, and we’re sharing what we’ve observed in practice. Here’s our take on 5.5 and how it performed for our offensive security capabilities.

Why predictable CSS state resolution matters, and how Tasty approaches it with state maps and non-overlapping selectors.

2026-04-22

Apr 22, 2026 Adobe is Cooked What do you get when you spend the last decade and a half exploiting the very same people you were supposed to empower? Adobe is a huge company. No doubt there is a surplus of great engineers and creatives there. It is unfortunately hollowed out by short-termism. I b...

Photonic PCR is a technology that can be used to do an entire PCR in about six minutes. But there are several reasons why it's unlikely to catch on.

Everything your mentor wants to say but HR won't let them

Nial – Knowledge work and artificial intelligence.

At some point—usually in their early to mid‑twenties—people stop caring about music. The importance and obsession stalls. They hold onto the songs or albums of their youth and rarely, if ever, embrace anything new. Music becomes background noise while they work or do the dishes. But for a very, very...

Frankenstein's 'Democratic Data' Extraction. The XORD counter-intelligence assessment.

Let me tell you a story. When I was a child, I suffered from night terrors. It was always the same dream: I could hear my family and neighbors wailing…

Let me tell you a story. When I was a child, I suffered from night terrors. It was always the same dream: I could hear my family and neighbors wailing in the street outside as they were pursued and then destroyed by a nameless malevolent force, something neither I nor anyone else could control, a […...

I spend a lot of time negotiating this in the software world: And if you're wondering why this happens, it's normally because: 1. people aren't talking to people 2. people aren't listening So lots of designers and product people have leapt onto 1, basically trying to turn talking to people

Philosopher of Mind and Metaphysics

When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input from subject matter exp...

I regularly hear people asking which programming language to learn, and then reeling off a list of very similar languages (“Should I learn Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby?”). In response I usually tell them that it doesn’t really matter, as long as they get started. There are fundamentals behind them...

Casus Belli Engineering April 16, 2026 Few things in a professional environment are more important than a lasting impression; be it for building trust or conveying unappreciated quality, it is oft...

ai is here. so i'm spending 3 months coding the old way

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:

If culture is shaped by TikTok's algorithmic feed, then it's time for us to decide where we draw the line between necessary marketing and inauthentic growth hacking.

Arguing With Agents 2026-04-14 I spent this past weekend angry at an AI agent. Truly. White hot actual anger. I had a clean plan, a well-structured prompt, explicit rules in the project’s context file. I queued the work and let it run. First task came back good. Second came back good. Some...