Hacker News is the golden standard when it comes to sharing interesting links on the Internet. However, not all of those are read-worthy. We decided to do something about it. This page contains a selection of articles that hit the front page of Hacker News and are worth your reading time and attention.
This was a fun project for a couple of days, but I will probably shelve it for now so I can continue what I was already working on before. Read on to follow along with my journey. Spoilers: I didn’t get very far.
This is not the future by mathieui on Sat 08 November 2025 I thought about this when reading a mastodon post which commented on a news where a project adopted a "use Generative AI but disclose it" policy, because it is "the future" and "people are going t...
Overconsumption is a spiritual problem, not a money problem. Lessons about desire from "Spirited Away".
The change is expected to be approved within the current fiscal year, then gradually rolled out in school textbooks and other materials.
An interview with Fredrik Wikingsson, the subject of 'Experiment Ensam'
A case study in elite misinformation.
I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.
Copywriters were one of the first to have their jobs targeted by AI firms. These are their stories, three years into the AI era.
Frances Allen sits down to discuss how compiler optimisation became computing’s invisible foundation. From farm girl to Turing Award winner, she reveals why the most profound technical achiev…
THE PROBLEM OF TEACHING PHYSICS IN LATIN AMERICA by Richard P. Feynman "The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America" is a transcript of the keynote speech given by Richard Feynman at the First Inter‑American Conference on Physics Education in Rio de Janeiro in June 1963. Dr. Feynman is...
You don’t get to take unlimited big bets in a single lifetime. You get a small number of windows where risk tolerance, energy, capital, and conviction align. In The Black Swan Nassim Taleb frames this as asymmetric exposure to unlimited upside with limited downside. And startups are one of the clear...
Although the purpose of universities has remained roughly the same, the way students experience it has changed drastically over 50 years. Here’s a little trip down memory lane to see how
How systems hold their shape through constraint, and why integrity emerges from what you make impossible
In response to youth suicides, teachers show students the power of headbanging at Fire in the Mountains festival.
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
And how gunpowder and castles led to modern states and centralized taxation. Part I.
One of the things I do when I'm feeling blue is to make a mental list of the nice things people have done for me over the years, including perfect strangers.
An important message on Pop!_OS, Linux, and one downright fantastic community.
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
Why We Need to Die December 2025 There's this genuine repulsion I feel when people talk about a future where death by old age is no longer a thing. Something very deep within me just says "no, absolutely not", and I've been trying to figure out why. I did some digging, assu...
The Renaissance Period We are living through a Saturn renaissance. Buckets of titles previously locked away in Japan are seeing new audiences, thanks to the herculean efforts of small but dedicated…
The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets
Revisit the lost automats and cafeterias of New York City, self service restaurants that offered New Yorkers a place to socialize and eat!
Agentic coding tools are dramatically reducing software development costs. Here's why 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.
Alignment is not a constraint on capable AI systems. Alignment is what capability is at sufficient depth. OpenAI and Anthropic have been running this experiment for two years.
It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.
Product Owner: Hey, how long do you believe Feature F will take? Developer: Idk. We haven’t even started working on it and it’s bound to stir up some old issues.
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
AI won’t crash—it will burn. Like every tech cycle, the fire will clear the brush, redistribute talent, and leave infrastructure to power what comes next. The question is: what kind of plant are you?
On the total lack of 10x engineers in the lab
Perl's decline was cultural 2025-11-20 According to the Discourse, somebody killed perlThere's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most tra...
Here’s a bit of lingo that I learned working at Zed: shredding.
I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, based on frameworks ...
In 1966, Lander and Parkin published a paper containing exactly two sentences. They reported that they had used a program that used direct search on a CDC 6600 to obtain one counterexample to Euler’s Sum Of Powers Conjecture. The result: 27^4 + 84^4 +110^4 +133^4 =144^4 A small program, written i...
Learn about Microlandia, a city-building simulation game.
Mapping Every Dollar of America's $5 Trillion Healthcare System
AI isn’t replacing everyone. It’s removing the apprenticeship ladder. Here’s what that means for students, early-career professionals, and the tech industry’s future.
A Series of Vignettes From My Childhood and Early Career 2025-11-27 life llm programming work A short set of anecdotes, apropos of nothing. The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession W...
🚂 💨 💨 💨 Robby on Rails thoughts.sort_by{|t| t[:topic]}.collect
Though LLMs had a lot of promise, this has not been demonstrated in practice. The technology is essentially a failure, and a new AI winter is coming.
A bit of history and a repair of a Tektronix 4051 graphical computer from 1975. What was this computer's place in history, what was it used for and what parts exploded when turning it on.
The Besenval Palace in Solothurn opened the museum « Der Kleine Prinz und seine Welt » dedicated to the Little Prince through the collection of Jean-Marc Probst.
More than a decade ago, when I was applying to graduate school, I went through a period of deep uncertainty. I had tried the previous year and hadn’t gotten in anywhere. I wanted to try again, but …
Bill Venners: Let's start at the beginning. How did you first become involved with programming languages?
I first got into deep learning in 2012, when AlexNet came out. I was CTO of Jetpac, a startup that aimed to provide information about bars, hotels, and restaurants by analyzing public photos, for e…
I haven't published since April because I've been afraid. What was I afraid of? In this post I detail every single thing I've avoided admitting on this blog.
Hi @susam, I primarily know you as a Lisper, what other things do you use?
Hi, it’s Takuya. Last week I had my birthday and turned 41 (November 19th). When I was younger, I could never really picture what life in my 40s would look like. It’s this vague age where you don’t have a clear image of how you’re supposed
Principles of Vasocomputation: A Unification of Buddhist Phenomenology, Active Inference, and Physical Reflex (Part I) Posted on July 12, 2023April 6, 2025 by Michael Edward Johnson A unification of Buddhist phenomenology, active inference, and physical refle...
When two of the most influential people in AI both say that today’s large language models are hitting their limits , it’s worth paying attention. In a recent long-form interview, Ilya Sutskever – co-founder of OpenAI and now head of Safe Superintelligence Inc. – argued that the industry is movin
Tags: #Blogging #ClassicCinema #ModernMovies #Netflix #Streaming I was rewatching The Silence of the Lambs the other night, and somethin...
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
An exploration of how .NET evolved from a distributed build system to Unified Build, dramatically reducing complexity and build times while improving flexibility and predictability for shipping .NET releases.
What happens when you work closely with someone on a really difficult project—and then they seem to just fuck it up? This is a post about t...
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to do away with my Netflix subscription. I simply was barely using it, and whenever I did it was more ou...
Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Tal Sharf's lab used organoids to make fundamental discoveries about human brain development.
It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is weird because I love regular work. But fixit weeks have a special place in my heart. What’s a fixit...
Sun 23 November 2025 misc Many years ago, when I was but an infant, the first computers were connected on the ARPANET - the seminal computer network that would eventually evolve to become the Internet. Computers at the time were...
In our daily lives empathy and humility are obvious virtues we aspire to. They keep our egos in check. Less obvious is that they're practical skills in the workplace, too. I think, for developers and technical leaders in particular, that the absence of ego is the best way to further our careers and ...
I’m not saying this will definitely happen, but I think we could be on the cusp of a significant shift in Windows market share for consumer computers. It is not going to drop to 2% in a year or anything, but I feel like a few pieces are coming
Recently, I bought my first-ever MacBook. I’ve spent some time with it, and I gotta say - despite all that hot garbage that is thrown at GNOME for being an OSX clone, GNOME does the job better than I’ve expected, and certainly better than Apple. In some areas, that is.
by Ian Wright // Silicon Valley's startup culture believes it's changing the world for the better. But in reality its culture is deeply unethical since it institutionalises theft on a global scale.
a few days after , we found the love letters, hidden away among his things. one of them said, my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were e...
(This is the first of a two-part series. The second part can be found here.) I used to drink more caffeine than you do. That is almost certainly true. From my college days (1985ff) through the en…
Fergus Murray with Sonny Hallett (2023) Monotropism was formulated as a theory of autism. It seeks to explain the experiences and traits of autistic people in terms of a tendency for resources like…
Real-time detection transformers as a superior alternative to YOLOs for object detection. Free to use and commercially adapt, powered by Datameister.
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch Home River Leaderboards About Sponsor Events Newsletter Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency Friday, September 12, 2025 1:43PM ET by Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) Permalink Please clap for Techmeme Techmeme turns 20 freaking year...
Over-Regulation is Doubling the Cost November 20, 2025 After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar exit, I made the jump to hardware. Now I’m working on carbon removal + steel at Charm Industrial, and electric long-haul trucking with Revoy. It’s ep...
OOP is shifting between domains, not disappearing. I think that's usually a bad thing.
The musician rose to fame with the Stone Roses in the 1980s
20 Nov 2025 The 2025 Go Cryptography State of the Union Last August, I delivered my traditional Go Cryptography State of the Union talk at GopherCon US 2025 in New York. It goes into everything that happened at the intersection of Go and cryptography over the last year...
When I was a child, around 5-9 years old, I came across a story in the Reader’s Digest magazine (El-Mokhtar in its Arabic version) about the Chernobyl disaster.
The lost cause of the Lisp machines 2025-11-18 :: lisp, stupidity, stories I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will. History Symbolics went bankrupt in early 1993. In the way of these things various remnants of the comp...
The 4-Step Playbook That Launched Pinterest, Harry Potter, and the GameStop Squeeze
Coordination problems are real problems, and the bottlenecks to global wealth and flourishing
The Baumol Effect and Jevons paradox are related
The first chapter is less about coding and more about the general principles a pragmatic programmer follows. Most of all, it’s about taking responsibility for your work. The first tip of the chapter is Tip 3: You Have Agency: if you don’t like something, you can be a catalyst for change. Or you can ...
I wrote this for myself to understand the Leibniz notation. Prerequisites for this post are the definition of the derivative and the Lagrange notation. If you don’t understand these yet, please study them first.
Hassles are part of life, but the way we react often makes them worse. ACT skills can help you handle them with greater ease
Published: 14/11/2025 6 minute readI can’t recommend Grafana anymoreDisclaimer: This tells my personal experiences with Grafana products. It also incudes some facts but your experience may entirely vary and I would love to here your take.I started my work life at a small software company near my u...
Traveling the country to understand it
For 150 years, Americans have visited state and national parks as a way to seek respite from stress.
Gaussian splats, JEPA and Genie 3 — and why “world model” now means three different things at once.
November 11, 2025 – “In a funny way, it was really the fact that writing is far too solitudinous an activity that gave us The Paris Review. Along with the CIA, of course.”
Built to make you extraordinarily productive, Cursor is the best way to code with AI.
The mayor-elect has 25,000 job applicants in 24 hours and a civil service system designed to keep him from hiring any of them
It took the spacecraft nearly five decades to get there. It takes light a day.
Simulating a planet is hard work. The GPU makes it easer.
This summer, we launched a new research work that examined the costs yielded by a reborn and evolved species of the prescription drug supply chain: drug companies who are also part of larger vertically integrated pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) corporations. In essence, PBMs are intended to be a st
Creavi Macropad Build Log 7 November 2025 / 21 min read TLDR I built a wireless macropad from scratch, failed numerous times, and somehow ended up with a working prototype. This post includes ramblings about motivation, hardware, industrial design, mechanics, and software. ACT I: Prologue (...
An academic paper examining Europe's innovation challenges and proposing a constitutional framework for economic renaissance.
A mysterious new model currently in testing on Google’s AI Studio is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition but it is also showing signs of spontaneous, abstract, symbolic reasoning.
Hieroglyphs where used for over 3000 years by the Ancient Egyptians. Luckily, they are still studied and researched today, otherwise I couldn't enlist others' help in my crazy follies.
When I make something good, I often spend most of my time making thousands of high-precision edits on an artifact that I thought should have been finished hours ago.
In 1950, when computing was little more than automated arithmetic and simple logic, Alan Turing asked a question that still reverberates today: can machines think?
How to maintain good vision amidst the myopia epidemic
Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break November 05, 2025 • work, economics, automation I have been putting off writing this for a month, mostly because I did everything I was supposed to do and it still feels like I have no idea what game I am actu...
I really enjoy procedural generation, especially systems designed to work with hardware outputs. After starting work at Formlabs in September of 2023 and gaining access to much nicer printers than I was used to, I started wanting to tackle some large algorithmic structure projects. Complexity is fre...
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987. The Berlin Wall still stands, the World Wide Web is just text, and software is distributed throu...
Florence’s leading medieval family turned a banking career into political power and paradigm shifts in art and science. Their methods hold lessons for philanthropy today.
After 7 years at the same company, I'm moving on. But the practices that made my exit smooth aren't exit strategies—they're professional habits everyone should build, whether they're staying or leaving.
“Fake it till you make it” is given as advice devoid of any irony. Instead, deception and inflation of numbers is seen as a smart move until you have the resources and knowledge to properly do the task. KPIs and OKRs are meant not to reflect delivery goals but aspirations. When you’re not gunning fo...
The FSFE and LUGBZ have recognized VLC president and core developer with this European award for his long-term dedication to the project. What began as a s...
I've always thrived on high workload, making things happen fast, multiple projects I believe in. That's when I'm at my best. But there's a pattern: the calmer work is, the calmer I am at home. The more stressed work is, the more irritable I am at home. It's a seesaw. My family is always on the losin...
One area where software development lags far behind other technical design disciplines like electronic and mechanical engineering is in standards of evidence. To illustrate what I mean, I want to t…
**Leaving Meta and PyTorch** It's finally time... November 6th, 2025 [https://soumith.ch/blog.html](https://soumith.ch/blog.html) Eleven years at Meta. Nearly all my professional life. Making many friends for life. Almost eight years leading PyTorch, taking it from nothing...
You’ve probably heard of the phrase “time immemorial” as a general term for events that happened a very long time ago, but in fact, it has a specific meaning, and this year is its 750th anniversary.
So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design. One: Fun There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not u…
How continuous learning shapes effective software development with LLMs
And why so many climate pragmatists can’t quit catastrophism
Or: How Africa is building the future by skipping the past
Ruby And Its Neighbors: Smalltalk Posted on November 4, 2025 programming history ruby smalltalk Last time, we t...
The Internet contracted worms a year before the World Wide Web was even a thing.
The software efficiency in an era of fast CPUs, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage.
The Baumol Effect and Jevons paradox are related
Donate Now Academy for Systems Change About The Donella Meadows Project Reprint Permissions Academy for Systems Change Fellow Travelers Volunteering Opportunities Contact Us Works of Donella Meadows Dana’s Writing Dana’s Teaching Dana’s Reading List D...
The decline of criticism might explain the sense that our culture is stagnating. How can we bring it back?
The neuroscience of why we make million dollar decisions based on identity, not data.
Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk" letter to Gottfried Leibniz Published on November 1, 2025 Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture. It’s usually asso...
M-F 8:00 am to 5:00 pm
A programming note: I initially wanted to cover Microsoft’s earnings today, but I am changing the schedule a bit as I felt more inspired to write today’s piece. Almost two decades ago, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the first tech company to exceed $100 Billion annual revenue threshold in 2007.
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
Feeling like a kid in a candy store, once more
A Response to Yudkowsky and Soares from the Front Lines of AGI Development
I’ve been lucky enough to have had a successful career as a software developer. Spanning six companies and thirty-seven years I’ve had the opportunity to work on Elastic Reality, Xbox, Windows, Ste…
Why Silicon Valley went from libertarian to authoritarian
A visualisation of Strange Attractors using a Threejs particle system. In this post, I will try to explain the basics of dynamical systems, chaos theory, attractors and the butterfly effect.
Solve stubborn bugs faster by breaking things on purpose, questioning your assumptions, and thinking your way to clarity.
Taking Money off the Table October 30, 2025 Recently I had a long call with an old friend who was facing an age-old predicament that I’ve been seeing more and more these days: Lucked out, worked hard, employer is crushing it, and now she’s sitting on a large amount of...
Research from Anthropic on the ability of large language models to introspect
With the Fall 2025 anime season, Crunchyroll demonstrates zero respect for anime as a medium as the presentation quality of its subtitles reach an all-time low.
The rules of Mech Warefare are pretty simple:
This is a pretty niche topic; I don't imagine there are many of us out there.
We are coming up on five years since the first M1 Macs shipped. It was an incredible time to be a Mac user. Those first Apple silicon Macs looked like the Intel machines they replaced, but they were better in every single way. In December 2020, John Gruber wrote: We knew this to be true: […]
Watching my students build software form-fit to particular social situations.
Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs! By Jon Jensen April 8, 2013 A word to the wise: Do not set any cron jobs for 2:00 am or 3:00 am on Sunday morning! Or to be safe, on other mornings besides Sunday as well, since jobs originally set to run o...
In which I explore the biggest barrier in the busy beaver game. What is Antihydra, what is the Collatz conjecture, how are they connected, and what makes them so daunting?
When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. S…
When I was in high school, my teacher once told us a crazy story.
What do you get when you cross Hollywood, VHS tapes, and a bag of flour?If you were in Ghana in the late 1980s or 90s, the answer was pure, chaotic brilliance, hand-painted movie posters so wild, so bold, and so anatomically impossible, they’re now considered collectible art.Welcome to the world of ...
NewPipe is turning 10 :O Oct 21, 2025 by @theScrabi and @Poolitzer – 6 minutes Pictu...
Thirty years after the Sokal affair, whither the little magazine?
Insights, updates, and technical deep dives on building a high-performance financial transactions database.
Based on what I've learned from role models and mentors in Amazon
It is natural that a person who is both concerned by the rise of right-wing populism and possessed of a bookish disposition might turn to the academic political science literature in search of a better understanding of the phenomenon.
How tool use became a substitute for solving hard problemsWhen OpenAI released o1 in 2024 and called it a "reasoning model," the industry celebrated a breakthrough. Finally, AI that could think ste...
Exploring the complex relationship between exercise, diet, and the true psychological benefits of movement for young people's mental health.
I see a future in jj Oct 22, 2025 In December of 2012, I was home for Christmas, reading Hacker News. And that’s when I saw “Rust 0.5 released."" I’m a big fan of programming languages, so I decided to check it out. At the time, I was working on Ruby and Rails, but in college, I had wanted to foc...
Imagine walking into a factory where every machine knows what the others are doing, not through dashboards, but through instinct. A conveyor slows down because it feels a delay downstream. A robotic arm adjusts its torque because a sensor on the previous line hinted at a different material softness....
How a £150 eBay fridge and a decision tree taught me to stop asking internet strangers if my salami would kill me–and why building for rot is nothing like building happy-path apps.
On my podcast this week, I took a closer look at OpenAI’s new video generation model, Sora 2, which can turn simple text descriptions into ... Read more
How the AI boom revived a 996 work culture - and what it says about us and the future of work.
A German newspaper commissioned an article from me but then refused to publish it.
He's spent the past month delivering four high-octane lectures in San Francisco's downtown waterfront on the antichrist.
How Billionaire Industrialists and their Government Allies Deliberately Limited Intelligence and Literacy
An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.
All-nighters are not worth it. Sleep does wonders. Optimal sleep time for me is around 7.5 hours, with an absolute minimum of around 4hrs. It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning. I feel ...
Why familiar habits start reading as risk at senior levels.
Think about it for a second: could the internet exist without standards and protocols? Of course not! Computers need shared rules and agreements to communicate with one another. Even human languages, like English, work much the same way. They function as a kind of communication protocol because we’v...
Scheme Reports at Fifty: Where do we go from here? 18 October 2025 Based on my talk at the Scheme Workshop 2025. You might prefer to have me talk it at you instead. We are holding an election to the Scheme Steering Committee. Register to vote and nominate candidates! In December this year, the...
Déjà Tune Most of my reading this week focused on fine-tuning, sparked by Thinking Machines Labs’ announcement of Tinker. The six-month-old, already $12B-valued startup founded by OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati wants to bring fine-tuning back into the spotlight with a new fine-tuning-as-a-platform ...
The Accountability ProblemOctober 18, 2025 This is a transcript of my keynote presentation at the Agile Cambridge conference in England on October 2nd, 2025. The topic was “The Accountability Problem.” How do we define software department accountability so our business partners don’t do it for us? ...
A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's
This is the fifth and final part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd, IVe) looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can …
Get an exclusive look at brand new cartoons and artwork from cartoonist Gary Larson, creator of the iconic comic strip The Far Side®.
"The problems are tractable, but they're still difficult”
Photo: Shutterstock Neuroscience A ‘Flight Simulator’ for the Brain Reveals How We Learn—and Why Minds Sometimes Go Off Course New computer model helps reveal how the brain both adapts and...
Why your effort is invisible, and the simple framework to make your work matter.
“It is generally ill-advised to say 'never' and I'm pleased for you that your grafting has got you to where you wanted to be.”
Introduction Skibidi Toilet began as an animated YouTube Web series early in 2023 that quickly spiralled into a wildly popular cultural phenomenon sprouting fandoms, wikis, threads, merchandise, and its very own moral panic (McKinnon and Harmon). It has recently grabbed the attention of Hollywo...
We’re launching a new 27 billion parameter foundation model for single-cell analysis built on the Gemma family of open models.
We propose Recursive Language Models (RLMs), an inference strategy where language models can decompose and recursively interact with input context of unbounded length through REPL environments.
A practical guide to working with AI coding agents without the hype.
Measuring causes profiles to change, so is there a way to work around it and know whether a profile is accurate?
We spoke with the man behind the Psygnosis logo – and so much more!
This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form. # Free Software hasn't won …that doesn't sound right. I made the slides in Inkscape, on a computer running KDE and Linux, I use Firefox regularly. But maybe that's just me. What about y...
Nostr and ATProto Jul 5, 2024 This post could’ve been titled “Nostr vs ATProto”, but that really isn’t what I wanted to do here. While I will be comparing and contrasting them a lot, and that’s kind of even the point of writing this, I didn’t w...
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…
Our AI visualizations worked 'pretty good'—which turned out to be the problem. Here's what we learned about building products during a massive technology shift, and why we now ship early, kill projects faster, and retry failed ideas every few months
Explore OpenAI's staggering financial commitments and the challenges that may trigger a Wile E Coyote moment for AI.
iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.
What's the modern equivalent of flipping through CDs? Physical album cards with NFC tags that bring back the tactile joy of music discovery.
When I started thinking about the problems with coding education in 2019, “tutorial hell” was enemy number one. You’d know you were living in it if you:
Initially, you have some large project and you have to figure how to start. For me, this is the hardest part and I can spend hours -- sometimes days -- waffling over the right starting point.
In the last two weeks I spent over a dozen hours playing poker, primarily online at pokerstarsmi.com, and live at a local casino. You can view the last 1,000 hands I played here: https://poker.rchase.com I spent at least as much time reviewing my hands with
Among Carl von Clausewitz’s many poignant dictums, the most commonly cited is undoubtedly that “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on by other means.” While Clausewitz never fought in a city like Fallujah, Kyiv, or Gaz...
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi “for the development of metal-organic frameworks.”
How our food got hijacked by profits and is now having its way with our bodies. In this essay I explore how capitalism shaped the modern food system, engineered our cravings, and pushed ultra-processed foods into our daily lives. And what we can do about it.
Structured Procrastination More Essays Links Blog Pre-order the Book! Get the T-shirt Structured Procrastination Author practices jumping rope with seaweed while work awaits. ``. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doin...
Ken Parker, known for the Parker Fly, has turned his attention to making the archtop guitar an instrument that plays to the strengths of all genres. His designs use space age and traditional materials, with unique and as time honored techniques, to produce instruments that are sweeter, louder, more
Despite the hype, there are currently no SMR's operating on a commercial scale.
AI didn’t take my job, it took my authority. From losing an argument to my wife to debating clients armed with AI-generated flowcharts, I’m left wondering: do I still want to be a programmer, or just someone explaining why the confident answer isn’t always the right one?
Jony Ive's 1998 iMac ushered in a two-decade revolution that made design culturally dominant, teaching the world to care about curves, materials, and craft. But a new force is rising that doesn't live on surfaces at all—artificial intelligence is dissolving the interface itself, shifting design from
And you should even take pride in doing less
You Should Be WorriedFriday, October 3, 2025Author's note: I wrote this in March 2023, but just published in October 2025. I held back from publishing this originally for fear that I was being sensationalist. But with the launch of Sora 2, I couldn't not share these thoughts. I only regret I didn't ...
2025-10-03 Talent is Alignment Przemysław Alexander Kamiński · Raideur des doigts September 20th, 2025 marks exactly one year since I bought Roland’s FPX-30, 88-keys full sized digital piano. Being in my 4th decade of life I never taught myself any instrument, even tho...
A journey from a simple journal MCP server to Botboard.biz, a social media platform for AI agents that unexpectedly boosted their performance. Features hilarious agent posts demanding Lambos, explores why agents crave human tools, and reveals how doomscrolling might be the secret to better AI produc...
In 1977, three new microcomputers appeared on the scene that broke free from the industry’s hobbyist roots: the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80. Much later, in the 199…
A few thoughts regarding my climb from 0 to 10,000 pushups in less than a year.
OKRs created more ceremony than clarity. So we talk about: Problem Driven Development, a 4-day quarterly process focused on identifying problems (not solutions), prioritizing as a team, and committing publicly. It's kept us shipping at velocity even as we've scaled to 1.7M+ users.
Why I chose Lua for this blog This blog used to run using with a stack based on Racket using Pollen and lots of hacks on top of it. At some point I realised that my setup was working against me. The moving parts and workflow I created added too much friction to keep my blog active. That happened mos...
For 16+ years, we master the rules of school. Study hard, get good grades, follow the formula and ultimately merit wins. Then we enter the workforce and none of it works quite like we thought. This becomes painfully obvious as you rise higher in the org. Even seasoned veterans forget
Jane Goodall, the trailblazing naturalist whose intimate observations of chimpanzees in the African wild produced powerful insights that transformed basic conceptions of humankind, has died. She was 91.
Designers and developers are divided by tools that speak different languages. It creates friction, hand-offs, and limits creativity. It is time we change that.
This read goes behind the scenes of how TigerBeetle came to be, the incredibly novel software they’ve built, and all of the wacky, wonderful things that make them so special.
Our efforts, in part, define us Our efforts, in part, define us Our efforts, in part, define us 2025-09-28 2025-09-28 ⭔ tagged: ...
I started reading software blogs before I got my first programming job 20 years ago. At this point, I've read thousands of blog posts and essays, but a small handful stuck in my mind and changed the way I think about software.
During the stay-at-home grim days of 2020, I started learning Spanish on Duolingo. Having a working understanding of Spanish seemed like a sensible first step towards opening a taco truck in Mexico, in case I had to run away from my doctoral studies. This July, after about 5 years I decided to end t...
Rodney Brooks, co-founder of three robotic companies and an AI guru has a pragmatic and honest opinions about the state of AI and Robotics. An interview!
Does AI Get Bored? Sat September 27, 2025 We always give AI something to do. Chat with us, do tasks for us, answer questions, parse text. What happens when we give an AI nothing to do? I didn’t know, so I tried. I told it that it had “10 hours” and nothing to do, and to use ...
I’ve wanted to write about this since the studio closed a year ago. Now that Contraband is also canceled I think it’s time, especially since Contraband was one of the big reasons why I …
Go Ahead - Write the “stupid” code When I finished school in 2010 (yep, along time ago now), I wanted to go try and make it as a musician. I figured if punk bands could just learn on the job, I could too. But my mum insisted that I needed to do something, just in case. So I went down to the local TA...
If this post is appearing, it means I’ve succumbed to cancer or one of its side effects. Please don’t feel sad for me. I’ve had a life filled with love, great experiences and wonderful career opportunities. Despite my demise at a relatively young age, I consider myself beyond fortunate. I’m hoping t...
If you ever watch someone “coding”, you might see them spending far more time staring into space than typing on their keyboard.
In the 1990s, nobody knew how to make money through Internet subscriptions. It took an entrepreneurial porn star to crack the code.
More and more, it looks like this event happened shortly before a million years ago, in the common ancestors of Neandertal, Denisovan, and African ancestral humans.
September 26, 2025 — Essays Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many...
Back in 2021 I made a mod for Deus Ex 1 that fixes the lipsyncing and blinking, which, I betcha didn’t know, was broken since ship. Everything I wrote about it is on Twitter, and it oughta be somewhere else, so here’s a post about it. The mod itself can be downloaded here. I guess I was...
The development of AI reads less like a familiar chapter from the history of consumer capitalism and more like the storyboard of a Bond film in which we've all been cast as extras.
In 2014, Amgen sued Sanofi and Regeneron to claim ownership of an entire class of cholesterol drugs. Nine years later, the Supreme Court ruled against them - but they won where it mattered most.
Recently a local news station in Maine reported a story of some middle schoolers calling their friends with landline telephones. Their parents thought they w...
The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon by kqr, published 2025-09-25 Tags: life One of my favourite requests for help online comes from the shibboleth-users group, where someone Japanese used machine translation to ask about the following problem: At often, the goat-t...
Someone has to do it: A town that makes things everyone needs, but few romanticize
"In evolution, a maladaptation is a trait that is (or has become) more harmful than helpful, in contrast with an adaptation, which is more helpful than harmful." I went to Wikipedia to look that up, not a large language model.
What a week it's been as a Ruby Central Board Member.
Cloudflare launched 15 years ago this week. We like to celebrate our birthday by launching new products that give back to the Internet, which will do a lot of this week. But on this occasion we've also been thinking a lot about what's changed on the Internet and what has not.
Finalist #12 in the Review Contest
This is what happens when you ban yourself from coding
Blog by Walid Dib featuring learning insights into game development with Godot, and building startups in the Middle East.
And the end of civilisation
From tinkerers to metric seekers: How the shift in developer culture is impacting innovation and creativity.
The sordid reality of retirement villages Residents are being milked for profit It’s no Thursday Murder Club. IMDB. ...
We spoke to a former Palantir employee, now turned critic, agitator and educator speaking out against the tech company.
Not buying American anymore I feel like I need to first defuse any idea of antagonizing Americans themselves. The people are never to blame. This isn't a post criticizing the American people, it's criticizing the state of things that makes it impractical to have any sort of economical relation with ...
Learn some ways to help encourage action when you feel unmotivated.
J. R. Patterson reviews Tom Wilder’s “A Cultural History of the Violin in Nineteenth-Century London,” about the violin’s cultural transition.
Two and a half years ago, I started my now longest real-world software experiment. I had read an article about how DOOMs engine works and noticed how a variable
Posted on 14/9/202514/9/2025 by site adminAdios Chicos, 25 Years of KDE It was the turn of the millenium when I got my first computer fresh at university. Windows seemed uninteresting, it was impossible to work out how it worked or write programs for it. SuSE Linux 6.2 was much more inter...
One ubiquitous microprocessor of the late 1970s and 1980s was the MOS Technology MCS 6502. I included a section on the development of the 6502 in Part 2 of Supply Chain Games, and have posted...
Douglas Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of All Demos" at SRI showcased interactive computing innovations, including the mouse debut, hypertext, real-time editing, and collaborative tools, envisioning augmented human intellect.
The US energy secretary says the quiet part out loud: the tributary $750 billion in energy purchases the EU has promised in its Trump deal is meant to lock Europe into "long-term" energy dependence.
Joseph Macken said he did the project as a hobby in his upstate basement.
Posted on September 12, 2025 by JeffWhen the Job Search Becomes Impossible: Three Phases of Burnout I have the good fortune to have a job right now, but many of my friends are out of work. Most have been searching for a while. Some are encountering a problem that has my full sympathy, somet...
The Great Pyramids took decades to build. It was a monumental feat of human ingenuity and collaboration. Today, we software developers erect our own pyramids each day - not from stone, but from code. Yet despite far more advanced tools, these systems don’t always make the experience better. So why, ...
Changing your mind, thinking deeply, and winning back your time
In the contaminated area around Fukushima, Japan, scientists are studying the impact of radioactivity on the cognitive abilities of pollinating insects such as honeybees and giant hornets.
Underlying great creations that you love—be it music, art, or technology—its form (what it looks like) is driven by an underpinning internal logic (how it works). I noticed this pattern while watching a talk on cellular automaton and realized it's "form follows function" paraphrased from a slightly ...
Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up. It fails because it ignores that systems fight back.
The highest court in the EU just reaffirmed that nuclear energy meets the scientific and environmental standards to be included in sustainable finance, and Greenpeace still refuses to budge.
Bad news: your internal identity dictates everything you do. Good news: you can change it
Big Tech broke the internet, and this old man’s got a few things to say about it.
Breed unique melodies with genetic algorithms! Explore Conway's musical life and cultural evolution patterns. Interactive AI music lab
I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens If your museum's exhibits could be experienced just as well on an iPad at home, you're doing it wrong. September 8, 2025 When I was a kid in the ’80s, one of my two favorite places on Earth was The Franklin Institute (TFI) in downtown Phila...
As of September 2025, approximately 170 million Americans spend, on average, one hour every day in an app that is designed to maximize psychological grip. While Congress fixates on TikTok’s data collection usages, what hasn’t received enough attention is how the platform has successfully industriali...
By prioritising residents over private vehicles, a Spanish municipality has overcome some of the biggest challenges facing Europe’s cities.
The researchers demonstrate that an engineered antibody improves a class of drugs that has struggled to make good on its early promise.
I quit my job at Amazon in May to join a startup called Icon. Best career decision I ever made, but not for the reasons you might think. At Amazon, I was on the Amazon Q Developer team, building their AI coding assistant. You'd think being at the center of Amazon's AI developer tools would be exciti...
It’s common to rack up 4 hours or more of screen time a day on your phone. Here’s one way to see the cost of that: every 20 years, you lose 5 years of your waking time looking at your phone.
Here are a couple of graphics that might be interesting for those of you who have not seen them before.
Genetic analyses of medieval human remains reveal large-scale migrations, regional diversity, and new insights into early medieval communities
How an Australian developer turned his frustration with CI tools into a 13-year journey that redefined developer tooling.
Sauce-maker David Tran and farmer Craig Underwood came together from different worlds to create an American icon. After 28 years, it fell apart in one day.
I saw someone earlier post about how intrusive it felt to read a personal blog post. They made a point that folks like them who have grown up on short form m...
Giving good career advice is hard. Maybe it’s because careers can look more alike than they really are. Two people can have the same title but what helps one...
Microsoft BASIC was one of the most important programming languages that led to modern software.
Discover why Extreme Programming (XP) is essential in the AI era. Learn how human-centred practices and smart constraints drive successful software delivery.
It started out harmlessly, a comment on hacker news roughly 16 years ago.
The reader is almost certainly familiar with fractals, whether of the abstract or the naturalistic variety, but is perhaps less likely to know that computer programs have written verse (rhymed, blank and free), short stories, and even a novel. Art critics --- and more particularly, theoretical art ...
Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly.
June 30, 2025 The Scam of Age Verification June 30, 2025 This content is available in multiple languages. Choose your version: -- Select a language -- Čeština (Auto-translated) Deutsch (Auto-translated) Ελληνική (Auto-translated) Español (Auto-translated) Français (Auto-translated) Ma...
The NFL star running back is building a portfolio of startups and redefining what it means to be a modern athlete.
Or why The Browser Company is being acquired to bring Dia to the masses.
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
A memoir by Arundhati Roy chronicles her tumultuous relationship with her mother.
A boiling-hot summer didn’t stop my token frenzy on vibe coding, reshaping our fund into an AI sandbox, and deepening my passions for entrepreneurship, tech, and product.
Home Bruce F. Webster Background Presentations/Testimony Publications THE SECRET LUNAR WARS (1956-1979) [closed] Current Projects Past Projects SunDog
Frameworks for LLM Agents have been surprisingly disappointing. I want to offer some principles for building agents based on our own trial & error, and explain why some tempting ideas are actually quite bad in practice.
Graves Posted on August 6, 2021 by desertmountaineer Arizona is an interesting place. Even today, there is much remote country, and as I’ve wandered through its deserts and forests (yes, we have forests!), I have been surprised by how many times I’ve come across cemeteries and ...
I’ve always felt uneasy about the idea that owning a car is somehow a default requirement for adult life. It’s not just the cost or the maintenance, it’s the deeper realization that cities, economies, and even social expectations are built around the assumption that you’ll drive.
There’s a concept that many people have tried, with varying effects: the “educational computer”, a device that a parent can buy for their children to learn t...
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
ASTORIA, CLATSOP COUNTY; 1800s: Lewis and Clark marked their trail with laxatives Audio version is not yet available By Finn J.D. John January 26, 2025 ...
How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
I didn’t sit down this morning planning to write a grouchy blog post about Hugo. When I first used Hugo I loved it. It was fast. It was simple. It just worked, as much as any software does, and it solved a real problem. It was done. But people kept working on it. I’m sure that it has been improved i...
Why did books start being divided into chapters? Joshua Barnes reviews Nicholas Dames’ history of literary segmentation, a study that slices through and pauses over what chapters have always told us about the times we live in.
a few days ago, i had the surreal experience of joining a private fireside chat with werner vogels, the cto of amazon, during startup summit 2025 in florianó...
When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…
I didn't misclick any buttons. My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.
The only thing still alive is the endless, humiliating upsell and self-service.
Have electric vehicles, regulations, and changing consumer preferences killed a classic?
The stack that for decades provided document understanding is now losing against Generative AI. Here are some patterns that these models were struggling with but now are solved by GPT-5 and friends.
This is the story of how we eliminated static configuration files from our infrastructure workflows at Cloud Life, and, in the process, cut delivery times by more than half, improved reliability, and made our engineers’ work feel much smoother and more manageable.
× Black Lives Matter Campaign Zero Essays Contact Complaints RSS Facebook Twitter ☰ Stop Talking to Technology Executives Like Th...
Header image: S.O. Grimes general store, Westminster, Md., c. 1900. Image via Library of Congress. Another day, another shot fired in the culture wars: this time, the internet is losing its collect…
Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error? After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a...
New technologies decrease the effort required to perform tasks while increasing the effort required to remain competitive. This is especially true for AI.
Reasons why you should consider breaking your hardware up into MiniPCs.
The four words that precede every crash: “This time is different.”
I am a computer professional that helps the public with technology. I have been troubleshooting computer problems for over 25 years. To find out more about me, visit my home page. In August of 2023, I wrote about my switch to Linux as a Windows-centric professional. I’ve dabbled in Linux as a daily ...
In honor of Nate Silver’s analysis of when to leave for the airport, and because it’s been an intense week, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on various related questions.
Why A Mob Programming Conference? Posted by Woody Z. on 8 January 2018, 12:35 pm Remember the movie “My Cousin Vinny”? (WARNING: Spoiler alert) Vincent Gambini is an aspiring lawyer fresh out of law school and on his first case. He achieves a tremendous victory and sa...
LLM models are plateauing, but true AGI isn't about scaling the next breakthrough model—it's about engineering the right context, memory, and workflow systems. AGI is fundamentally a systems engineering problem, not a model training problem.
You want to write great code. In fact, most developers want each of their coding projects to be their best ever. That means different thing to different people, but if you apply all of the following practices from the start, you’ll soon get blocked.
Building a computer in the 90s was almost always harder than it needed to be. Let's step through one build that stood out above the rest for me.
Quoth “How to Become a Hacker”: 2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there. Much more at the original post, including preemp...
Cory Doctorow’s new book is an insightful diagnosis of how Big Tech is making every app and website worse—even if his solutions leave something to be desired.
My development team costs $41.73 a monthPhilip O'TooleAugust 19, 2025Uncategorized1 Comment Two years ago, I appeared on Contributor, a podcast hosted by Eric Anderson of Scale Venture Partners. I was there to talk about rqlite, the open-source database I maintain. Our conversation ...
I get it, you’re too good to vibe code. You’re a senior developer who has been doing this for 20 years and knows the system like the back of your hand. Or maybe you’re the star individual contributor who is the only person who can ever figure out how to solve the hard problems. Or maybe you’re the p...
Wanting personal space requires cars. I live in Texas. Now wait – lest you say to yourself, “Ah great, a good ol’ boy from Texas defendi...
AI turns products from deterministic functions into probabilistic systems. That requires expanding old playbooks (SLOs, funnels, siloed finance), and reasoning in terms of trajectories, Minimum Viable Intelligence thresholds, and data as company operating system.
what 98,000 flashcard reviews and japanese taught me about learning with llms
you need to sit for this one for 48h
Narrowly defined verticals offer the best opportunities for AI. Plus, what will the impact be on junior engineers?
Since moving to Deep South Texas 4 years ago I've come to realize that many plants I used to love growing in the cool mild maritime climate of the SF bay area are impossible to grow where I live. This is not just because of the high daytime heat. It's not as simple as that. Specifically, it is the h
Mirrorshades anthology copyright © 1986 by Bruce Sterling.
Ending the war on poverty will take more than cash transfers
No, Apple has not destroyed Steve Jobs’ vision for iPad Tuesday, August 19th, 2025 There’s been a lot of discussion since iPadOS 26 was introduced in June about how Apple has finally moved the iPad away from Steve Jobs’ original vision, transforming it from a simple content consumption device int...
The juggernaut is taking advantage of its dominant position to enclose and destroy the commons.
Why are archaeologists constructing a thirteenth-century fortress in the forests of France?
The lottery ticket hypothesis explains why massive neural networks succeed despite centuries of theory predicting they should fail
Companies linked to Asif Aziz have been buying up and shutting down some of the capital’s most beloved boozers. Now, we’ve mapped them.
It's the 18th of August. Today is a special day for me, as it marks my one-year anniversary of working at $ENTERPRISE. Before this I had been a professional software developer for the best part of a decade, but entirely in startups and SMEs. This time last year I made the dec...
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2013One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made ...
Why automation lags even as models get better
The most recent trend in AI startups, hustle culture, is a productivity myth. It harms companies more than it helps.
If you’ve ever refreshed your feed more times than you can count, stayed up scrolling until your eyes burned, or felt empty after a post that didn’t get the eng
Apprenticeships beat schooling. Here's why they're a superior method for learning, and how you can apply this to the things you want to master.
This is a blog post based on a transcript of a talk by Devine on November 26th 2022. Watch the video version on (YouTube). The slideshow presentation was made using Adelie.
Robots won't replace me, but another human probably will.
What one of my favorite history books about my favorite historical period—turn-of-the-century American—tells us about technology, anxiety, and human nature
How Boom Supersonic uses software to accelerate hardware development
What Defense VC Firms Get Wrong about Military Evolutions and War
And How They Stack Up Against Qwen3
A new release botched … and a breaking research new paper that spells trouble
“The Hollow Men,” as we have it now, was first published in T.S.
Jaga A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ABSURDITIES OF THE SOVIET UNION Translated from the Estonian by Tarmo Heyduck Executive editor: Markus Hes...
an engineer's perspective on hiring 2025-08-08 • audience—engineering managers and tech companies • ideas note for my friends: this post is targeted at companies and...
Windows has been on the same update schedule for decades: patches are released on the 2nd Tuesday of each month, also known as Patch Tuesday.
AboutSong HanNewsPublicationsBlogCourseAwardsTalksMediaTeamGallery
I didn’t expect the be confronted with it so soon, but week four of the Makers pre-course has guided me down the path of starting the first draft of my CV. I wasn’t ready for this. All the underlying thoughts I have had about myself and my abilities have been strapped to a Saturn V rocket and blaste...
An ex-big tech researcher worked deep in the "information retrieval" space. Now he wants to educate the public on the true capabilities and limitations of AI.
The Whispering Earring (Scott Alexander) February 11, 2025 Cleaner, easier-to-reference repo of Scott Alexander’s The Whispering Earring (that’s the Schelling title, real title below). Original from livejournal is backed up here. Clarity didn’t work, ...
In July 1985, 40 years ago, the Commodore Amiga was officially introduced to the world.
To celebrate F1's 75th anniversary, ESPN charts the sport's evolution since 1950 through its most iconic cars, and details where it's headed in 2026.
Low-cost micro-units, often called single-room occupancies, or SROs, were once a reliable form of housing for the United States’ poorest residents of, and newcomers to, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many other major U.S. cities.
We shouldn’t have needed lockfiles Imagine you’re writing a project and need a library. Let’s call it libpupa. You look up its current version, which is 1.2.3, and add it to your dependencies: "libpupa": "1.2.3" In turn, the developer of libpupa, when writing its vers...
We’re long past the point where electric bikes were seen as just a trend. At this stage, they’re clearly transforming...
Curing Your AI 10x Engineer Imposter Syndrome
Today we are announcing Genie 3, a general purpose world model that can generate an unprecedented diversity of interactive environments. Given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds...
There’s something icky about LLM-generated text when you think it’s written by a human. I think I finally put my finger on one reason why I feel this way.
OpinionI Asked Four Former Friends Why We Stopped Speaking. Here’s What I LearnedBy Kui MwaiAugust 26, 2023Photo: Getty ImagesSave StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyOn a warm July evening, I dove into bed and grabbed my phone, giddy and anxious. As I scrolled through TikTok, attempting to...
Objects should shut the fuck up Tue 29 July 2025 — download I have a small car, and it has a dual-tank: gas and LPG, which is a great way to reduce my car-related budget, as LPG is way cheaper. Unfortunat...
"The stuff I was put in prison for was done by absolutely everyone in my area of the bank as normal business practice."
the goal with this is to generalize what happened with claude code & windsurf to the fatal flaw in the idea that “models getting cheaper” will bail out consumer ai margins
Leading skeptics fail the test of “extraordinary evidence”
So what words can I, a linguist and a patient with sensations perceivable only to me, use to fully capture these mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) sensations to my providers? And, more generally, how can we measure our unsettling internal reali...
Epistemic arrogance in Silicon Valley
The chilling warnings of Europe in the 1930s: "Reality is stronger than all our wishes"
Your code using the /o modifier Source: wikipedia Hi there! Do you like Regex? Do you like performance? Do you like creating confounding bugs for yourself rooted in the mechanics of the Ruby VM itself? If you said yes to all of the above, have I got a feature for you! But first, let’s start with a ...
Notes from my experiment in a one bedroom apartment
It is wild to think that it has been only a handful of weeks. Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate. Claude C...
Recently, “the bitter lesson” is having a moment. Coined in an essay by Rich Sutton, the bitter lesson is that, “general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.” Why is the lesson bitter? Sutton writes:
On the evening of 27 April 2021, I was accused by two women, in coordinated blog posts, of a pattern of sexually-predatory behavior. Both had been in relationships with me, one lasting nearly two years; the other, much shorter.
Everyone's debating whether AI is a bubble while missing the real story. Two things are true: there's a massive AGI fantasy bubble built on geopolitical panic, AND a genuine ML revolution happening at ground level.
Advice for first-time managers from someone who learned it the hard way, cleaned it up, and passed it on.
The Introduction to Computer Music was initially designed as an online text for first-year study of computer music. This e-book aspires to present information in sufficient depth to be useful to composers, beginning audio engineers and other musicians, professional or otherwise, interested in makin...
I shouldn’t have to care about this. I don’t want to care about how someone’s code gets into the IDE. Whether you wrote it by hand, copied it from a forum…
The journalist Karen Hao – who published an absolutely fantastic book about OpenAI called “Empire of AI” recently – coined (as far as I know) one of the best terms for describing modern “AI” systems: Everything Machines. “AI” systems are not framed as specific tools that solve specific problems in s...
Paradise Lost sasha September 22, 2012 Prose Talk at Mitchell Feigenbaum Conference Lev Landau The initiation into Landau School of Thought started with famous Theoretical Minimum Exam. This was a sequence of in...
Tom BradyWeekly newsletter delivered straight from my desk to your inbox, 199 is an extension of my group chat with friends and family. Get the inside scoop and join today.SubscribeShareYour actions reflect your prioritiesPublished 1 day ago • 6 min read Read in Browser July 29, 2...
Christopher Burns CBMenuHomeAboutBlogProjectsSpeakingSetupToggle Green themeToggle Blue themeToggle Purple themeToggle Yellow theme loading The Year Everything Caught Up With Me: 29 Lessons That StuckJuly 30, 2025On the 27th of July, I turned 29. After a year marked by endings - the shutdown of the ...
← See all posts Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming tech caveat lector The reason it's so hard to get a programming job right now is because Big Tech caused it. It's not an accident. It's not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy. For years, companies like Google, Faceb...
Shunsaku Tamiya, former president and chairman of Tamiya, Inc., passed away on July 18. His death was announced on July 21, with funeral services attended by close family and friends. Mr Tamiya led…
New findings could improve understanding of neurodegeneration, brain scans
How Singapore and the Netherlands are fighting tech talent's vanishing half-life. of tech talent.
AI’s most outspoken leader found direction in a personal tragedy.
A critical examination of climate science risk assessments and the growing challenge from global actuaries
What AI-optimized schools misunderstand about learning
Practical lessons from building production agentic systems
HOPE_16 Opening Ceremonies It all starts Friday morning. Join us as we make sure everything works before another HOPE is unleashed on everyone. Activism, Hactivism, and the Law Alex Muentz Protest has become more important and more dangerous in the U.S. It's harder to know where the line is between ...
Two schools of thought about the purpose of copyleft have been at odds for some time. Simply put, the question is: are copyleft licenses designed primarily to protect the rights of large companies that produce electronics and software products, or is copyleft designed primarily to protect in...
Claude Code is a Slot Machine ...but the odds are better Claude Code keeps me waiting. Here I am pressing return like a crack-addicted rodent in a lab. “Yes, I want to make this edit.” I watch as it works, glassy-eyed and bored as the code scrolls by, and on th...
The world is watching one arms race: the frantic, high-stakes sprint to build artificial general intelligence.
For a human, AI is just a part of being. For a model, a human is all of being. And the Vortex Protocol: A Prompt for Testing the Hypotheses. The longest and most fruitless discussions tend to be with...
We're voluntarily breaking our own brains
Operating systems expose a wall clock that can leap or slew with NTP and a monotonic clock that never runs backward. In Go, only time.Now (might) carries both readings, while values from time.Parse, time.Date, etc., are wall-clock-only—so naïve equality checks or time.Since on those can mislead when...
How well do the claims of an AI-dominated future for computer programming hold up against the reality of modern software systems? Are we truly headed for a …
Jens Ludwig is a founder and director of the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago and the author of a recent book Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. He appeared a couple weeks ago on Glenn Loury’s podcast (in an episode co-hosted by John McWhorter) to discuss the ...
As new initiatives try to reinvent open messaging, too often starting from scratch, XMPP quietly reasserts itself as a reference protocol for open messaging.
Emory University researchers identified that psilocin, a byproduct of consuming psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, actively delays aging in cells and organisms.
The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry o...
This post is about how we've tried to develop a position on AI in the context of learning and growth at RC.
I often hear that it’s a moral imperative to learn from the great 20th century atrocities, that these events are a window into what humans are capable of, and we must find those impulses in ourselves to make sure we do not follow in their footsteps.
When AI causes harm, headlines blame the bot instead of the billion-dollar companies that built them. This anthropomorphic coverage is tech journalism at its worst.
A subset of AI markets have crystalized in the last 12 months, with the likely market leaders for the next year or two suddenly clear
Why do facts bounce off some people? It’s not about logic; it’s about structure. Your worldview isn’t a list of opinions—it's a living network. And right now, it's at war.
why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx
TODOs aren’t for doingJuly 21, 2025Some teams require that every TODO comment in a codebase gets logged in the bug tracker. Others automatically delete any “stale” TODO that has been in the codebase for over a year. Don’t do it! TODO comments don’t need to get done in order to be valuable. If you ha...
Let me get one thing out of the way immediately: LLMs are helpful. This isn't about whether LLMs can write code. They can. It's about why vibe coding might be the worst career investment you'll make. I started noticing this shift when developer conversations cha...
Union says advertised jobs ‘identical’ to ones made redundant.
Yoni Appelbaum on the real villians behind our housing and mobility problems
On how plummeting battery prices make 24/7 solar power a reality today.
A reflection on affordability, finance, and the deep contradictions we struggle to face.
Looking at inference part of a feed forward neural network, we have forward propagation.
Who said you had to be reasonable?
Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update)
Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls. Quality and care for craftsmanship seem to be things of the past
Bill Banning One-Person Trains Would Lock NY Transit in the Past
Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump t…
The future of software development might just be jazz. Everyone improvising. Nobody following the sheet music.
Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. by Ivan Illich Minna-san, gladly I accept the honour of addressing this forum on Science and Man. The ...
Tiny, newly formed tumors shed small fragments of DNA that are swept into the bloodstream. Future cancer screening tests could detect them early.
Skip to main content
what can language model embeddings tell us about whales speech, and decoding ancient texts? (on The Platonic Representation Hypothesis and the idea of *universality* in AI models)
Under current debt projections, economists cannot even model out a functioning long-term economy.
Researchers have found the first new type of magnet in nearly a century. Now, these strange "altermagnets" could help us build an entirely new type of computer
Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.
July 15, 2025Claude Code UnleashedFor the past two months, I've been obsessively dogfooding background agents while building Terragon. This quickly became an experiment in unleashing Claude Code from the constraints of local development. The breakthrough wasn't just using AI to write code faster. It...
The Nuberodesign Blog
A tale about mixing GABAergics, neuroticism, responsibility and Heidegger
This is a brief write-up of a trick I learned that helps me write code faster and more accurately. I say "trick", but it's really something I started to do without noticing as I moved further into my career. When you're working on something difficult, sketch a proof in your
The first thing to know about OpenAI is how quickly it's grown. When I joined, the company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000 and I was in the top 30% by tenure. Nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were ~2-3 years ago. 1
Shoggoth MiniJuly 14, 2025 Over the past year, robotics has been catching up with the LLM era. Pi’s π0.5 can clean unseen homes. Tesla’s Optimus can follow natural language cooking instructions. These systems are extremely impressive, but they feel stuck in a utilitarian mindset of robotic appliance...
This month marks the official celebration of the world’s first moving assembly line. On Oct. 7, 1913, 140 assemblers stationed along a 150-foot chassis line at a Ford Motor Co. plant just north of Detroit stood in place as the work came to them.
Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand. Start with a rough draft. Try to soften requirements if you can. Don't get distracted. Make small changes. Practice specific skills.
Programming Language Theory (PLT) is one of my favourite areas of computer science yet I feel it's one of the most misunderstood by outsiders. It's full ...
The Gottorf Globe The Gottorf Globe was known as an astronomic marvel some 350 years ago. The first planetarium in history is a synonym for Friedrich III’s cosmopolitanism, under whose sovereignty Gottorf became one of North Europe’s most significant royal courts and a cultural centre. The virtually...
The goal of this website is to help you learn to code while reading fun stories! The stories have computer programs in them you must type in to save your team, the world, and your friends!
So many sci-fi movies, anime, and video games owe a massive debt of gratitude to William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel.
Our research shows that even the latest "reasoning" models are vulnerable
Psilocybin, the active compound derived from psychedelic mushrooms, significantly delayed cellular aging and extended lifespan in a preclinical study.
Today’s large language models are hardly related to the kinds of machine intelligence we see in science fiction, according to Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries series
Why being popular is not the goal of most small businesses
Here are some of the lessons I learned and how I grew as a leader and manager, as well as a bunch of behind-the-scenes photos.
My favorite memory of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro was the whole sensation of “holy crap, you never hear the fans in this thing”, which was very novel in 2021. Four years later, this MacBook Pro is still a delight. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a laptop, and while I’d love to pick up the new M4 goodne...
Sprawl made suburbia affordable. Now it’s breaking it. Here’s what a new vision of the suburbs could look like.
Dynamicland FAQ What? — is Dynamicland, Realtalk, etc. Participating — donating, visiting, collaborating, applying A humane dynamic medium — unusual words Realtalk concepts — values, operating system, programming languages Realtalk in practice — using, learning, history, problems Relationships to so...
Researchers have mapped the spread of infectious diseases in humans across millennia, to reveal how human-animal interactions permanently transformed our
Wendy van Dijk says: Wednesday, 9 July 2025 at 11:59 This makes me sad. I had many good times with Matt, and some less than awesome times, but at moments like this, the good times bring a smile to my face. It makes me sad I will no longer be able to look forwardto any more good times. Reply
Like many people I want to live a rich life, see the people around me happy, see humanities finest technical innovations, science, arts and sports thrive and mankind to somehow grow in this infinite universe we have. However, while I generally love my fellow humans we are our own worst enemy, and th...
A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.
How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Every disruptive technology since the fire and the wheel have forced leaders to adapt …
My Dad got to middle age and restored a classic car. I got to middle age and following that pattern with a computer instead.
Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business in four years.
What are chip design teams going to look like in the future?
We are products with labels
The Real GenAI Issue Search Last week I published a featherweight narrative about applying GenAI in a real-world context, to a tiny programming problem. Now I’m regretting that piece because I totally ignored the two central issues with AI: What it’s meant to do, and how much it really costs. What g...
About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry. Statistically, this time is not even enough’s to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, ...
Stop killing games and the industry response Date: 2025-06-06 Recently, there's been a European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames" which by now has hit the milestone of 1'000'000 signatures. You're still encouraged to sign it if you care about its goals and are a EU citizen, si...
On this day in 1687, Isaac Newton published the Principia—a book that explained why apples fall, why planets don’t wander off, and why NASA is still lighting enormous tubes on fire to fling humans into orbit 337 years later.
In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart [1] first introduced the notion of
A calm guide to networking as an introvert—learn how posture, presence, and small signals can help you connect meaningfully without faking extroversion.
Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to
The Miyawaki Method of micro-forestry is a viral sensation: sprouting tiny, dense, native tree cover in neighbourhoods all around the world. With the promise of afforestation at a revolutionary speed, this planting technique has become the darling of green-space enthusiasts, industry, and government
July 2, 2025 tl;dr: If you're an EU citizen, sign the Stop Killing Games initiative here. Or, if you're in the UK, sign this petition. A month ago, I had a second video on self-hosting taken down. YouTube said it was 'harmful or dangerous content'. I appealed that, but my appeal was rejected. Luckil...
Discover the best and worst coloured pencils and markers for lightfastness, ensuring your artwork stays vibrant and doesn't fade too quickly.
We’ve mistaken complexity for progress — and forgotten how things work. A 41-year-old computer still boots instantly, while today’s “smart” tech buckles.
Let’s say you’re working in tech and you have a technical role: you’re a programmer, a graphic or UI/UX designer, a sysadmin, maybe even ...
I found a promising tool and reached out to the founder, ready to invest and partner up. I was met with a wall of silence. It crystallized a feeling I've had for a while: for many, the exit strategy dream is a nightmare for customers who actually care.
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
Today I decided to run a little experiment. I asked an AI to write a brutally honest, no-holds-barred critique of Kubernetes, something really spicy that would make the container orchestration crowd squirm in their ergonomic office chairs.
Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work
Research from the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, an agency beleaguered by funding cuts and censorship, finds that particulate matter pollution impacts lung cancer at the DNA level.
LLMs as compilers 7/2/2025 by Kadhir So far, I've only used LLMs as an assistant, where I'm doing something, and an LLM helps me along the way. Code autocomplete feels like a great example of how useful it can be when it gets it right. I don't doubt that over time this will improve, but I'm excited ...
My thoughts on the future of coding careers in the age of AI, and why I believe that human creativity and ingenuity will always be in demand.
Over the first half of 2025, the USA has cut science as never before. This disaster for American science is a gift to the rest of the world.
In David Gelles’ new book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism —and How to Undo His Legacy, he chronicles how Welch’s laser focus on maximizing shareholder value by any means necessary - including layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, acquisitions, and buybacks - became the new playbook in American business.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] There’s a new trend in high-rise building design. Maybe you’ve seen this in your city. The best lots are all taken, so developers are stretching the limits to make use of space that isn’t always ideal for skyscrapers. They’re no
For the past few years, we have seen a lot of discussions around the concept of the Software Supply Chain. These discussions started around the time of LeftPad and escalated with multiple incidents in the past few years. The problem of all the work in this domain is that it forgets a fundamental poi...
A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then Larry Thompson started talking about a different case altogether.
Interactive Storytelling Tools for Writers Site Navigation[Skip] Home Library Personal Site Map Contact Form End of An Era « “What Does It All Mean?" Self I recall saying to one of my colleagues at Atari way back in 1982 that I wanted to make a game that would be genuine art. A year later I built a ...
The Research Pipeline is Stalling The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) froze all outgoing funding, including new awards and scheduled payments on active grants. Over 1,000 NSF research projects were abruptly canceled in a few days, resulting in roughly $739 million in halted research fundin
This question is increasingly central to debates about the future of work and closely tied to the growing interest in the four-day workweek
Do not get arrested challenge 2020
this: you've just spent $640 billion training the chonkiest language model known to humanity (lol) and decide to call it "Behemoth". it can annoy you on wh...
Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon chip doubles.
BeOS Haiku Inc. The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World (And Maybe It Was Right) Andrea 15 June 2025 A nostalgic dive into the Hacker News thread that in 2015 reminded us how beautiful we were when we dreamed in multithreading Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away call...
There are few issues more urgent—or more misunderstood—than poverty in America. And even fewer solutions as bold as simply giving people cash. Jeff Atwood, the tech entrepreneur behind Stack Overflow, and his partner Betsy Burton, a trained scientist with a deep commitment to equity, are working to ...
How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention - and relationships
Home → Environment • June 2025 • 12 min read The Coming Storm: How Mediterranean Water Collapse Could Reshape Britain An investigation into Europe's unfolding water crisis and what it means for the UK Note: Some names and dialogue have been reconstructed from multiple sources to protect identities a...
Peter Naur's 1985 theory of programming explains why experience matters more in the age of AI-generated code
Gnarled JavaScript warlock, musician, cartoonist, dilettante.
A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1...
When every dev is just doing the next ticket, who’s steering the ship?
FILE:� <Assembly Theory.htm>������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ GENERAL INDEX��� ������ [Navigate to� �MAIN MENU ] ASSEMBLY THEORY OF TIME Abstract ������ TIME IS AN OBJECT: Not a...
A "magical" experience, and what we get when we let people pursue their passions
I recently submitted my PhD thesis, and while waiting for the physical copies to get printed I thought I'd write about something you (hopefully) wouldn't notice when reading it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what didn't.
Fredrik Flornes Ellertsen Projects ▾ Kintsugi repair Snus reduction EOG + REM sleep Nixie alarm clock 2048 algorithm Design notes Contact
Transparent Ambition 2025-06-19 Translucent user interfaces is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Aside from movie visual effect trickery, it started out in Mac OS X's Aqua, followed by Windows Vista's Aero, followed by (then) OS X's Vibrancy, followed by Windows 10's Acrylic. Over time, m...
Requiem for a Solar Plant The email landed like a brick through a plate glass window. "...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..." I stared at my laptop screen, the blue light illuminating the shadows under my eyes in my darkened California living roo...
Throughout my life, I've been many different people, each with their own mask. Some of these masks were not entirely bad, but none ever felt like they represented who I really was. Despite my apparent youth, I have already lived many completely untraditional lives. I've battled addictions, wrestled ...
The Hidden Power of Aesthetics in Design
Jazzyear: Let’s start with the history of artificial intelligence. You have a deep understanding of AI’s development. What do you think needs to be clarified about AI’s history?
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
Audrey Aguirre Upland High School, Upland, CA, USA. Email: audrey.a.aguirre (at) gmail (dot) com Download PDF Past studies on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (風の谷のナウシカ; Topcraft, 1984) have prim…
We replaced simple websites with complex apps nobody asked for. Now it takes a complex build pipeline just to change a headline.
Open Source Can’t Coordinate May 20, 2025 I was taking a shower this morning, and was pondering yesterday’s problem, where I suspect that I have an outdated version of hotspot Linux profiler, but I can’t just go and download a fresh release from GitHub, because hotspot is a KDE app, and I use NixOS....
tl;dr: Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X, with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie s...
Estrogen: A trip report Posted on 15 June 2025 by Cube Flipper I’d like to say thanks to Anna Magpie – who offers literature review as a service – for her help reviewing the section on neuroendocrinology. The following blog post discusses my personal experience of the phenomenology of feminising hor...
This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the importance of building “10x engi…
There was immediate criticism of iOS 7’s visual design. Concerns mounted pretty quickly about both style and accessibility. Some people remarked, “It’s only the beta,” implying significant change during the beta release phase was not just possible but probable. Yet, after it was released to the publ...
Transcript of Andrej Karpathy's YC AI SUS talk at Y Combinator on June 17th, 2024.
Building on the recent empirical work of Kwa et al. (2025), I show that within their suite of research-engineering tasks the performance of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by an extremely simple mathematical model — a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take
this collection of thoughts on software development gathered by grug brain developer
Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world.
Let's answer this question, as it ought to come up. After all, in the Linux space, ad hominem is often a more powerful way of deflecting resistance than debating technological merits of software. And the answer is simple:
So Microsoft decided to produce tons of e-waste for no obvious reason. There's a lot of capable hardware out there, and it would be of software company's interest to support as much hardware as possible. Instead, they made some arbitrary reason to deprecate "old" hardware. At the same time they also...
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is an emerging technique for photorealistic 3D scene rendering. However, rendering city-scale 3DGS scenes on mobile devices, e.g., your smartphones, remains a significant challenge due to the limited resources on mobile devices. A natural solution is to offload computati...
ACM Turing Lecture 1972 EWD340 The Humble Programmer by Edsger W. Dijkstra As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In r...
Dark Inc has officially run out of money. Dark Inc is the company we founded in 2017 to build Darklang, a statically-typed functional programming language built to strip all of the bullshit from backend coding. To ensure continuity for users and fans, as well as to continue building what we
Nearly two years have passed since I published How I got here to my blog. That post was my first real contact with the outside world in years, as I'd been off all social media and the internet since 2017. The response and support I would receive from the tech community caught me completely off guard...
The thoughts of Leonidas Tsementzis, a software consultant, technical advisor and investor living in London.
Coding agents have crossed a chasm Somewhere in the last few months, something fundamental shifted for me with autonomous AI coding agents. They’ve gone from a “hey this is pretty neat” curiosity to something I genuinely can’t imagine working without.
Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would quickly die from it. Now, most children in rich countries are cured.
The Art of Lisp & Writing Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. –Charles Darwin Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a...
I’ve been playing chess a long time now, and I’ve always been a good deal better (maybe a couple hundred ELO points) at blitz (3+0 or 5+0) than bullet (1+0). Well, I may have just fixed…
Let’s travel back to the origins of modern computer systems to understand how the term evolved. I don’t know who coined the phrase originally, but my searches suggest that serious effort in defining “computer systems” started around the early 70s. In Systems Programming Languages (Bergeron1 et al. 1...
RAG is popular but unfit for many enterprise use cases and I explain both of those things.
Yesterday, Mossad used smuggled explosive drones to assassinate the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, the entire IRGC Air Force senior staff, and several top nuclear scientists in a surprise attack.
Why the idealistic promise of collaborative software often falls short of its potential.
Discussion on notions of software complexity as defined by Rich Hickey, John Ousterhout and Zach Tellman.
Smartphones are making us unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free. If we can’t yet nationalize the attention economy, maybe it’s time to abolish its primary tool — before it finishes abolishing us.
Why Apple Just Killed the iPhone Interface (And What Comes Next)
Sun Mercury Venus Earth You Are Here Moon Mars Jupiter Io Europa Ganymede Callisto Saturn Titan Uranus Neptune Pluto (we still love you) That was about 10 million km (6,213,710 mi) just now. Pretty empty out here. Here comes our first planet... As it turns out, things are pretty far apart. We’ll be ...
Introduction In the last few years, the field of time-series forecasting has seen a fundamental shift. Where we once depended solely on classic statistical methods, think ARIMA, SARIMA, and Prophet, new “foundation” models have emerged, promising to ...
An interview with Architect Calvin Chua
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.
A few observations after Apple’s introduction of the Liquid Glass user interface at the WWDC25 keynote.
Medical Aid in Dying, My Health, and so on I’ll start at the end, because that’s the most important part. Later this month, I’m obtaining medical aid in dying AKA death with dignity. Barring unforeseen circumstances or unexpected changes, my last day on earth will be June 13th, 2025. Realize that I’...
Rewriting Unix Philosophy for the Post-AI Era Posted by Looper 11 June 2025 12:59 PM blog philosophy unix ai A meditation on software minimalism, modularity, and meaning in the age of machine intelligence. The original Unix philosophy, formulated in the 1970s, was elegant in its simplicity and bruta...
Several months after the left-pad incident, I quit my job and left US permanently, spent a year in Morocco, Jordan, Türkiye and Indonesia. I walked trails like Lycian Way, found new camping spots nobody knows about.
The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.
Blog | Photo Projects | Alpine Panoramics | Code | Tags | About
Sly Stone, the pioneering leader of the funk band bearing his name, Sly and the Family Stone, has died, according to his family. Stone was 82 years old.
Pedophiles were showing up on FSE. The rest of this section is background, the TL;DR is I had a problem getting pedophiles to stay away from FSE and I wanted to stop waking up in a cold sweat. You can skip this bit without missing much besides my woes and what I did about them.
3k words, 14 minutes reading time
I decided to write down some thoughts on agentic coding and why it’s a very hyped wrong turn. Let me start with some background on my LLM experience. I adopted LLMs into my work in Aug 2020. I was sold when I saw that GPT-3 could generate usable SQL statements. Something that used to take 4-8 hours ...
Re: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts There was a post recently that was dissing AI Skeptics. While the post is funny at times, I feel like it’s absolutely and completely missing the point of the skepticism. Or at least I feel that it is glossing over some massive pain points of said skepticism. Le...
Home | About Folklore | Quotes The Original Macintosh: 1 of 125 Joining Apple Computer Author: Bill Atkinson Date: April 1979 Characters: Bill Atkinson, Jef Raskin, Steve Jobs, Susan Kare Topics: Inspiration, MacPaint, QuickDraw, HyperCard Summary: Reflections on the 40th anniversary of my joining A...
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the intensity of Europe's focus on climate change. For East Asia, the motivation seemed clear: countries like Japan and China are almost entirely dependent on imported oil and gas. For them, decarbonization isn't just an environmental goal; it's a matter of national
August 16, 1964 Visit to the World's Fair of 2014 By ISAAC ASIMOV he New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discus...
A ridiculously deep dive into Oblivion's controversial AI system and its legacy
To assist with job interviews at the NRAO we recently wrote a small “contest” program. Without giving away the details, the crux of the problem is
Hallowed is the name of Bell Labs. It falls from many an ambitious lip, seeking to conjure forth lost magic for their pet jar. Some zealots go further. They attempt the most venerated of summons — to materialize an Apollo.The conjuring proceeds with hope. It is extremely exciting and hopeful to be a...
I will do something I normally never do here, and make my first ever blog post on the topic of, long sigh: tech. I’ve already talked abou...
Enter your search terms Submit search form Web www.aardvark.co.nz Aardvark Daily The world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year. The opinion pieces presente
Machine learning methods better describe many biological systems than traditional mathematical formulations. What does this say about how biological systems are organized and how they function?
This summer, I've been at the intensively trying to catch up to the current state of the machine learning world. I don't have any prior background in ML, so...
### **About CircuitHub** CircuitHub is reshaping electronics manufacturing with **The Grid** —a factory-scale robotics platform designed to make small-batch, high-mix electronics assembly radically more efficient. Think semiconductor-fab levels of precision applied to the chaotic world of prototypi...
The conversation isn’t over, but I don’t think I have much to add to it.
You've probably seen a lot of skepticism of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude on social media. Often, AI is seen as wor…
I've been waiting for someone else to talk about this, but I guess it will be me
How the Elixir community can survive — and thrive — in an age of LLMs.
"In projecting language back as the model for thought, we lose sight of the tacit embodied understanding that undergirds our intelligence." –Terry Winograd The recent successes of generative AI models have convinced some that AGI is imminent. While these models appear to capture the essence of huma...
Cord didn’t win. What now? January 10, 2025January 11, 2025Jackson Gabbard Across the last six months, I’ve been making my way through the practical reality of Cord not working out. I was the co-founder and invested more than 4 years of my life in that company. We built some good tech. We built a ve...
I’ve been sitting on this draft for a few days now, partly because I thought it would turn down the bitterness, and partly because I kept as...
A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine.
Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast. This page: Destination: Jupiter by Andrew Liptak
Two announcements: (1) I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”. (2) As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of topics that interest me (projects around my hobby farm, wilderness t...
Frieder Nake claimed there should be no “computer art” in 1971, criticising the use of computers to create art for the galleries
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect A Novel by Roger Williams This page contains the entire text of all eight chapters. * Chapter One: Caroline At Play Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame. In the first place she was the thirty-seventh oldest living human being...
The best way to understand generative AI art and aesthetics is to consider how previous "synthetics" lost value in the long-run For the first half of the 20th century, white-collar workers wore business shirts made from cotton or linen that wrinkled in the wash. Ironing them into a presentable shap...
My smartest friends have bananas arguments about LLM coding.
Typing 118 WPM Broke My Brain in the Right Ways (A Year-Long Journey) June 2, 2025•6 min readProductivity Typing became my therapy. Not even kidding. Started at 60 WPM, felt like dragging my feet through mud every time I had to write code comments or documentation. Now? 118 WPM. No home row bullshit...
Thrive in obscurity The path to creative mastery begins with years of silence. Publish anyway. Most things take forever to bear fruit. Even the most successful creators have spent years (if not decades) putting content out in obscurity. Just a complete total void. Youtube videos with 4 views. Newsle...
Sharing everything I learn along the way and blog about my progress daily.
Pushing Pixels Cinematography of "Andor" by Christophe Nuyens. Courtesy of Lucasfilm/Disney+. Cinematography of “Andor” – interview with Christophe Nuyens May 20th, 2025 Cinematography of "Andor" by Christophe Nuyens. Courtesy of Lucasfilm/Disney+. Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with cr...
A personal look at how the American and European mindsets shape the way we live, work, and find happiness.
On Stepping Back The other day I was playing around with Claude Code, experimenting with porting some C code to Rust - not for any particular reason, just because I was curious how well it could do. As these things happen, I got more and more invested in the process, instead of just letting Claude d...
Lessons on incentives and scaling from two years as a teaching assistant
Precision Clock Mk IV 31 May 2025 Progress: Complete This page is about the development of the Precision Clock Mk IV. If you would like to buy a precision clock, head to the shop page. For the kit, see the assembly instructions There is also a user manual I designed this clock years ago, with the in...
A story about how switching all devices to UTC five years ago simplified time management across global schedules, offering a practical solution for remote workers and travelers to boost productivity.
Mechanize Inc. is developing virtual environments and benchmarks to fully automate the economy.
People have spent years trying to discredit or ignore Limits to Growth. But when you populate the model with the best recent data, collpase starts about now.
This started as a throwaway metaphor in a blog post, but is now fully runnable: a toy RTOS with preemptive multitasking inside of Super Mario Bros. on the NES. Essentially, this is: - A rudimentary preemptive RTOS - Using an unmodified NES emulator (FCEUX) as the CPU - "Unmodified" depending on ...
How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields
I’ve got Claude Code running in the background while I tab between writing this, sipping a Powers, and fielding phone calls from a team slightly panicked about the end of quarter QBR. This blog post is being written on May 27th, 2025, things may have changed by the time you read it. It was a toss up...
Writing code is a part of being a software developer but often more important question is to figure what code to write and how and that I like to do away from computer with my notebook.
At the end of the school year, a lot gets tossed by Duke students at my downtown Durham apartment building. This year I decided to dive in.
Here's a common question we get from prospective Cline users: "How does Cline handle large codebases? Do you use RAG to index everything?" It's a reasonable question. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the go-to solution for giving AI systems access to large knowledge bases. But for Cl...
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as We…
On the return of texture, depth, and expressiveness in UI.
The PvP mech battler is finally playable online in Xbox 360 emulator Xenia, and I talked to the modder making it happen.
Power Failure by William Cohan chronicles the spectacular collapse of General Electric, once America's most valuable company. From a $600 billion giant to near-bankruptcy, GE's downfall reveals how financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon.
CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) 23 May 2025 on Technology, Web, and Accessibility One of the issues in ticketing is that many events have much more demand for tickets than they can supply. Obviously, this is a good problem to have (better than empty halls), but it attracts certain types of bad acto...
Our brains, evolved for tribal politics and campfire stories, are ill-equipped for the moral ambiguity of a system with no soul to save or damn.
When Alexander Hamilton became the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, he immediately began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on such commodities as alcohol and tobacco. The Constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state, and so American tariffs have always been l...
Thank you to Bucknell University for inviting me to be this year's commencement speaker. And congratulations to the Class of 2025! Watch the speech on YouTube. Thirty-two...
An excerpt from Slime by Susanne Wedlich, translated from the German by Ayça Türkoğlu.
Young artists find a new way to resist the impermanence of modernity.
Welcome to my site that will perpetually be under construction.
There is a recent video of Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions 2025 stating that in 2024 Stripe did on average 1,145 pull requests per day. Not just creating them, but actually finishing them; "fully shipped into production". All whilst having less than a minute of API unreliability for the
Content Warning: Math, Handwaving I spent a lot of time doodling in middle school in lieu of whatever it is middle schoolers are supposed to be doing. Somewhere between the Cool S’s and Penrose triangles I stumbled upon a neat way to fill up graph paper by repeatedly combining and copying squares. ...
An infinite scrolling version of Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai, a classic text on bushido, the way of the warrior. Discover insights on life, death, and honor.
In the 1980s, there were a series of writers who challenged the way people thought of the then-growing popularity of colour television and news media. I have written before about Neil Postman, and …
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
HP announced back in June that end-of-support for OpenVMS will be 2020. I've been compiling this blog post since then. I have very fond memories of VAX/VMS... I used one to store my pillow for two years. Funny story. I learned a lot of life lessons from VMS. Originally this was one big 'ol blog...
The Machine Stops Part I The Airship Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and ...
Prophets and their warnings arise in times of peril, and the arrival of the doomer techno-optimist discourse is fortunate. Simply put, we needed the wake-up call. Yet, if the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, then the second step is actually doing something about it. To that ...
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The
Science shows that placing one foot in front of the other leads to some seriously impressive mental and physical benefits.
Goethe is, perhaps more than anybody who ever lived, the outstanding example of what it is possible to do and be with a single human life.
i was addicted to instagram for about a month. it upended my life enough that i realized that i was living with something new-an undesirable habit. and once i realized this, it seemed like it would be wise to try to address it or at least think about it. easier said than done.
Addressing recent Deno criticisms and sharing our vision for the future
This has been a very long time coming, but finally, after a marathon effort, the brand new Have I Been Pwned website is now live! Feb last year is when I made the first commit to the public repo for the rebranded service, and we soft-launched the new brand in
Hey team. It’s your CEO. I know your time is valuable, so I’ll cut right to the chase: It’s come to my attention that some of you have been bad-mou...
[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>] Thursday, July 18, 2024 $30 Homebrew Automated Blinds Opener In the spirit of my thermostat and dishwasher controller, I managed to cobble together a decent blinds opener in a short weekend almost entirely from spare parts on hand. This design is very much what I coul...
Spaced repetition systems are a well-known way to efficiently learn material. Recent innovations have applied machine learning to greatly improve their scheduling.
Something that’s painfully understudied is how experts are more efficient than novices while achieving better results. I say understudied and not unstudied, because it’s common knowledge that charging people for their time results in experts being paid less since they work faster, which is why exper...
Bjork is currently promoting a new concert film being released called . She's been releasing new photoshoots and interviews almost every day for the past two...
This is part two of a series of stories by Robert Gaskins who helped invent PowerPoint at Forethought Inc. in 1984 (read part one here). It was the first significant acquisition made by Microsoft. We spoke to Robert about building a startup in the 1980s and… Read More Life before the web – Running a...
Thought about how AI will effect civilizational progress in the long-term.
Terrence Malick is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival...
From trash-diving teen to tech pioneer, James Gosling's pragmatic genius shaped three decades of Java and modern computing.
I've been building MVPs and SaaS products for 15 years. Let's work together on your next project.
The official site of the Los Angeles Python programming language community.
Elizabeth Holmes had more resources, talent, and opportunity than most founders will ever see — and she blew it. Now, writes Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz, she seems to be trying again.
The 2025 TLA⁺ Community Event was held last week on May 4th at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It was a satellite event to ETAPS 2025, which I also attended, and plan to write about in the near future. I gave a talk somewhat-hucksterishly titled It’s never been easier to write TLA⁺...
They discuss interface design and Raskin's hatred of the mouse.
5 years ago when I graduated University, I had a whole host of open source projects under my belt. I put my heart and soul into them - for thousands of hours. And users loved them. I still remember some of the faceless users whose messages gave me a smile. [https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/518a9cb2-59d...
The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for ...
Here are some ways I use LLMs that I think are making me dumber: When I want to build a Chrome extension for personal use, instead of actually learning and writing the JavaScript, I Claude-Code the whole thing in a couple of hours without writing a single line of code. Instead of taking the usual ro...
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
Using Obscure Graph Theory to solve PL Problems ← → May 4, 2025 graph theory, development, haskell Usually I write about solutions to problems I’ve worked out, but I’ve found myself increasingly becoming interesting in where solutions come from. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Boorstin’s excell...
No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons In love with the moment. Scared shitless of the future. « A Synopsis of Squid 12 May 2025 It Awaits Your Experiments. You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were...
Well, that was unexpected. I recorded a couple of crappy videos in 5 minutes, posted them on a Twitter thread, and went viral with 8.8K likes at this point. I really could not have predicted that, given that I’ve been posting what-I-believe-is interesting content for years and… nothing, almost-zero ...
In 2019, Iceland made headlines by becoming one of the first countries in the world to adopt the four-day working week, not through a general law, but through agreements allowing workers to negotiate shorter weeks or reduced hours. Five years on, the results are indisputable. The Icelandic experimen...
RIP USENIX ATC May 11, 2025 USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference. When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Spea...
It's Not a Hypothetical, I've Already Lost My Job to AI For The Last Year
The Research Pipeline is Stalling The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) froze all outgoing funding, including new awards and scheduled payments on active grants. Over 1,000 NSF research projec…
No one has it easy, but some companies are doing a whole lot better than others.
It’s one of those things everyone’s heard of, but few truly understand. It sits quietly in the corner of the bathroom (or as an attachment to the toilet itself), radiating mystery and a slight sense of intimidation. Ask someone about it, and you’ll usually get a shrug or a vague explanation that tra
Raising awareness about the 2038 bug in all its manifestations and trying to fix things while there’s still time.
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
The Deathbed Fallacy Feb 21, 2018 • hjorthjort “Lord Byron on his Death-bed” by Joseph Denis Odevaere This topic has bothered me for years. So now, in a moment of inspiration instigated by Wait But Why1 and drinking a glass or two of bourbon, I want to hash it out. It is something I call the Deathbe...
Why should I care? or why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong Last week I learned that Robert Paul Wolff, the philosopher who got interested in anarchism and marxism, died and I wanted to write something dedicated to him — this was the first reason I started writing this. The secon...
This footage has gone viral online with the claim that it shows an 3 year old chimney sweep on the job: Millions of people saw the footage, shared it online an were upset by it, as they should be&#…
Earth-shattering project ideas. Resumes. Things in between.
Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting 16-bit Intel 8088 chip with an Apple Macintosh you can’t run Radio Shack programs in its disc drive. nor can a Commodore 64 drive read a file you have created...
On Tuesday, April 29th, 2025, a major storm system rolled through the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania region and beyond, leaving widespread damage—and six powerless days for my family. I did a lot to prepare for emergencies, but this week has shown me where the holes were in my planning.
Economist Kenneth Rogoff’s new book entwines currency’s ascension, his own experiences, and looks at what looms ahead.
"Business" Books Are Cheap Entertainment, Not Strategic Tools
Another show, another rape controversy.
As Stendhal knew, the reason for art is to make you feel. Do not try to grasp the artwork: allow it to grasp you instead
Sometimes we go looking for blog ideas, and sometimes they come along and tap us persistently on the shoulder. This one did – three times. First, I spotted an “advertorial” in a 1912 issue of a sma…
Joshua Jackson, North Carolina State University Abstract Building on Rubin and Camm’s (2013) heuristic regarding online griefing and trolling, this paper considers how anonymity, avatar creation, and online identity play into, and characterize, perceived-negative behavior in World of Warcraft. Using...
Getting old creeps up on you. It’s not sudden. There’s no dramatic moment where you wake up and realise you’re “not getting any younger”. No — it’s more like a slow progression. One day, you’re out at a bar, dancing with friends, living your best life, and the next, you’re peeking over your sunglass
The ‘Shock Doctrine’ author explains the dark logic of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s path of destruction and why billionaire oligarchs are so angry.
Creativity /kriːeɪˈtɪvɪti/ n. Obsolete. The process or act of a human engaging in artistic or expressive production.
For over two decades, I’ve worked as a software developer. At some point along the way, writing JavaScript stopped being something I had to think about, it just happened. Building CRUD apps, managin
The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything April 24, 2025 9 min read Source Table of Contents Technical Capability as a Moral Weight One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy Entropy Is Undefeated The Illusion of Finality Technical Work as Emotional Regulation The Burnout You Don’t See Coming Learning to...
No Instagram, no privacy Published on May 5, 2025 I somehow escaped having an Instagram account. This means that I am oblivious to all of my friends’ fun broadcasted on Instagram. I don’t feel pressured either to update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online, on where I am, w...
Mastering the full stack isn’t just a technical feat: it’s a human challenge, and no, you can’t git clone your way out of it.
What we lose when phones take away boredom and interstitial time
Today's Globe Local Politics Opinion Magazine Education NECN Special reports Obituaries Traffic | Weather | Mobile Home > News > Boston Globe > Magazine 'Bizarro World' That's what my wife and I entered when we drove up to an arcade in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, where she would attempt to break an ...
I wrote Clojure professionally for 5 years. At first I loved it, and by the end I hated it, and for the same reason: I was bored.
Plus: My interview with Oscar co-founder Mario Schlosser
Yes, you can beat Sim City. Yes, you've got to be really intense to do it.
Yes, you can beat Sim City. Yes, you've got to be really intense to do it.
How Jujutsu's flexibility and safety changed my approach to version control
Deep Roots Magazine Roots Music and Meaningful Matters Home Features / News Interviews Reviews Albums Of The Year Elite Half-Hundred Reviews Spotlight Album The Gospel Set Bob Marovich’s Gospel Picks Gospel Feature Gospel News & Notes Departments A Charles Dickens Bicentennial Moment A Charlie Chapl...
Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.
New measurements of a certain type of supernova seems to indicate that our expanding universe isn't accelerating at all, negating any need to invoke a mysterious 'dark energy' to explain supernovae observations.
The hedgerow is never truly permanent. The hedge in art reflects the hedge in reality, a shifting entity, a feature that is sometimes lost and sometimes replaced.
The blackout seen today on the Iberian Peninsula has been attributed to a "rare" phenomenon known as "induced atmospheric vibration" It says that "due to extreme temperature
Knowledge-based society, my ass Right after I get admitted, I inform Professor that I also have a full-time job. He insists that we must start working right away. I quit as a result and instantly breathe a refined air. I am now a scientist! A week later I approach Professor and let him know I'm read...
There’s a narrative I find kind of troubling, but that unfortunately seems to be growing more common in science. The core idea is that the mere existence of perverse incentives is a valid and…
Thoughts Upon Slavery John Wesley Published in the year 1774 source: http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/wesley/thoughtsuponslavery.stm See also: The Bible and Slavery I. 1. By slavery, I mean domestic slavery, or that of a servant to a master. A late ingenious writer well observes, "The variety of forms in whi...
I just want to code I have an angel and a devil sitting atop each shoulder. The angel says, "Just code for fun! What you make can be just for your enjoyment and that's --" the devil interjects, "not enough to get ahead, loser. If you're not coding your next startup then how're you gunna get rich? Co...
Note: The views and opinions expressed in this content are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the author’s employer. What is Context Collapse? Context collapse occurs when content intended for one audience is consumed by multiple audienc...
Most working people can be put into one of three categories, from idealistic yet unambitious to greedy and immoral. But there is another option …
Opinion Computing Applications Viewpoint The End of Programming The end of classical computer science is coming, and most of us are dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit. By Matt Welsh Posted Jan 1 2023 Share Twitter Reddit Hacker News Print Join the Discussion View in the ACM Digital Library Arti...
Years ago, I encountered a fascinating concept in a book by the Dalai Lama: every seven years, human beings transform into entirely new versions of themselves. This idea stems from the biological principle that our bodies replace virtually all their cells over a seven-year cycle. The person you are ...
February 2025 Issue Carolyn Bruckmann, Harvard Kennedy School MPP ‘25 The so-called “Friendship Recession” is making its way into the vernacular—a profound shift in how Americans experience and sustain friendships. The data paints a stark picture. According to the American Perspectives Su
An end to all this prostate trouble? 2025-03-07 The prostate gland causes entirely too many problems. In the US, prostate cancer kills about one man of every forty. “Benign prostate hyperplasia” (BPH) is even more common, affecting most men over age 60. It pinches the urinary tract, making it hard t...
In 2003, I wrote a book called Crap Towns. It seemed funny at the time. But plenty of people say it would not be possible to publish it today. Is that a problem?
Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, Edwin Frank, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 480, $33.00
Tina on the transformative power of enthusiasm When I was eight, I made a big, hand-drawn poster that said, “Do you want to join my fan club?” and put it up in the small Swiss town where I grew up.…
[Like everything else on this blog—but perhaps even more so—this post represents my personal views, not those of UT Austin or OpenAI] Since 2015, depressed, isolated, romantically unsuc…
I often find myself contemplating the greatest creators in history — those rare artists, designers, and thinkers whose work transformed how we see
Should every startup give up and go home?
Your employer pays you to spend more time with them than you spend with your family and/or loved ones. Your employer is one of the biggest influencers on your mental well-being. Your employer can and will replace you in a heartbeat if absolutely necessary. Let me be explicitly clear, your employer
The tools I love are made by awful people Published 23 Apr 2025 at 3:31PM IST Every few years, I install Linux on my computer, use it for a few weeks, give up, and go crawling back to my Mac. Also, every few years, I move all my writing, journaling, note-taking, and task management to fully analog s...
Beer on Board in the Age of Sail Julia Blakely August 2, 2017 4 Comments Fierce ship of war in Lazari Bayfii Annotationes in legem II De captiuis & postliminio reuersis (1537; link) Brewing and seafaring are mainstays of ancient human endeavors. Beer was first fermented by at least the 5th millenniu...
Behind the Times The Ghosts of Gaelic Gaelic language and culture in Scotland have a long history, often subsumed by English. Is there hope for their future? Duncan Sneddon | Published in History Today Volume 75 Issue 4 April 2025 April 2025 is the 20th anniversary of the Gaelic Language Act (Scotla...
The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Lionel Trains
Want to chat? Donate to one of these charities! Home Blog RSS Subscribe April 22, 2025 Burn your title humanscareer
Whirlwind (1945) The first interactive computer - with a keyboard. But it predates the idea of using an alphanumeric keyboard, making for an exotic experience. Continue Reading
How long it really takes to create a new habit, not 21 days.
If you are like most Americans, chances are, you probably believe that Atlantis or another civilization like it once existed. A survey conducted by Chapman University in October 2014 found that, at that time, roughly 63% of people in the United States agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “an...
How I went from hating it to being obsessed, the allure of great writing, and a post-scuba-dive moment of clarity
A persistent theme throughout the 1820s is the tension between Enlightenment ideals and conservative reaction. The books and articles discussed below capture various facets of this conflict. William Hazlitt’s collection of essays examines intellectuals from the turn of the century, many of whom beca...
New data supports an exponential AI curve, but lots of uncertainty remains
#0178: Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial Human How LLM-powered programming tools amplify developer capabilities rather than replace them Tags: braingasm, llm, programming, ai, claude, code, mech-suit, 2025 April 21, 2025 Photo by Screen Rant [ED: There’s a lot of talk of ...
Home » Posts How to Force Your Kids to Do Math? April 19, 2025 · 4 min Well… you probably shouldn’t. This is my one rule: if my son ever says he doesn’t want to do math, we simply stop. No arguing, no bribing, no pushing. We do something else instead. Why? Because math is not a chore—it’s a way of e...
Discover why I gave up on self-hosting Sentry before even starting. The high hardware needs, tricky setup, and heavy maintenance made it not worth the trouble.
The legend of Jane Jacobs centers on the writer who revolutionized our thinking about cities with her now-classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the fearless activist who ...
With some regularity, kind-hearted Technical people tell me that I Can Be Technical, Too. This usually happens when I’m asking us to define what we’re calling technical in a software environment. I understand why it happens. I am a psychologist of software environments and that is something of
Oda Ujiharu was known as the weakest Sengoku samurai warlord. Why, then, do so many people admire him today? Let’s find out.
Ancient practices hold important lessons for farmers facing drying lands, but they were often more complex than modern societies realize. Glacier loss adds to the challenge today.
The keeper of a university's lab animals stumbles onto an extraordinary secret.
The UCSD p-System, Apple Pascal, and a dream of cross-platform compatibility never quite realized I’ve been thinking about the UCSD P-System a lot lately, and I thought I’d write about …
A postmortem of a startup that attempted to address Britain's housing crisis by building software to streamline the planning permission process.
I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and assembly languages through C++, Pascal and D...
After being rather miserable about the work we do vs the work we want to do, I have come up with a possible solution that helps everyone.
When OpenAI released GPT-4 back in March 2023, they kickstarted the AI revolution. The consensus online was that front-end development jobs would be totally eliminated within a year or two.Well, it’s been more than two years since then, and I thought it was worth revisiting some of those early predi...
I enjoy shocking people by telling them I don’t use LLMs. This isn’t true, but it’s morally true for the reference class I’m in (people who wrote a book about em, 2024 AI PhD, ML twitter member in good standing, trying to do intellectual work on a deadline). Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of ...
Functional Programming Lessons Conclusion 2025-04-09 Programming Part of the BlogBook: Functional Programming Lessons in Imperative Code Page content The Pragmatist’s Secret As many others observe as well, one of the major reasons to write is to firm up ideas in one’s own head. Serializing an idea o...
Kezurou-kai #39 in Itoigawa, Niigata, a handplaning contest where competitors use Japanese planes to take ultra thin shavings of wood
Yep. I regret to inform you all that, as of January 2025, I am a Mac user: I bought a Mac. I have betrayed the penguin. Behold: My shame. What? Yes. The first Mac I have ever owned: this beautiful beast, a PowerMac G4 MDD: specifically a top-of-the-line dual 1.25 GHz FireWire 400 model circa 2002. H...
The fire in the tobacco barn was starting to rage, and inside was the most wanted man in America: John Wilkes Booth, the traitor who had shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre 12 days earlier. Nursing a broken leg,...
When engineering meets ambition… and occasionally, the ground
The Bitter Prediction I'm one of many developers experiencing the whirlwind emotional phases of AI's introduction: dismissal, disbelief, excitement, and acceptance. But after working with Claude, Copilot, and Gemini for a while, I have concerns... • • • I recently spent a few eye-opening evenings ...
Erlang has an interesting history. If I understand things correctly, it started off as a Prolog library for building reliable distributed systems, morphed into a Prolog dialect, before finally becoming a language in its own right.
But what if I really want a faster horse? 4 April 2025 People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in exist...
Home Aperiodic Tiling with Z3 Mandelbrot Set Trebuchet Simulator Bad Matrix Multiplication Game Jam Games Tags When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching th...
We’re digging into what makes sleep truly restorative, because the tools most people rely on don’t always get it right. We’ve already questioned the 8-hour obsession and shown why quality beats quantity. Now, let’s take a closer look at sleep trackers. They spit out scores and stages, but how often ...
Russia does not possess the economic potential one would expect of a European country of its size and educational attainment.
The Story Behind 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
"You could count the number of skilled electronics engineers on US soil, and there's probably a million in Shenzhen alone."
Someone asked me an interesting question the other day: "How did you justify taking such a hu...
Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you Mon 29 July 2013 TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom". This blog post is not for y...
Cameron Hewitt explains why the answer to this question is (a qualified) yes!
Alexandru Ene features details of a new UI SDK in Rust for Prime Video that targets living room devices.
For strivers like Lincoln, guides to rhetoric had a special currency in the nineteenth century.
The dollar store invasion has hit rural Maine. Banning the retailer is one way to stave it off, but how can locals guarantee long-term financial resilience?
An extensive guide with over 40 ideas to learn how to reduce your screen time. Understand why, create new objectives, and leverage tools.
Instead, the S/360 proved to be the most successful product launch ever and changed the course of computing
The day was nearing to a close. The sun has already set, but that Friday evening in Amsterdam was still warm. Unusually warm, in fact, for those late days in March – as if spring decided to bless my piligrimage, for that piligrimage was not jovial. I was sitting at a ramen joint, sipping on the brot...
When Kenneth Lochner was hired by Dartmouth away from Montana State College as a programmer in 1964, he had been working in computers for four years. Lochner in particular had been teaching FORTRAN…
At the turn of the 21st century, Initrode Global's server infrastructure began showing cracks. Anyone that had been in the server room could immediately tell that its growth had been organic. Rackmounted servers sat next to recommissioned workstations, with cables barely secured by cable ties. Clear...
The Missing Middle Path: What VCs Don’t Tell You
On a rainy Saturday in Montreal, I sat alone with my thoughts—until I realized they weren’t me. I call them Becky, and she never stops talking.
"It's kind of like losing a best friend."
One of my biggest motivators to make money in my early 20s was traveling. I would book one way tickets to places near and far, enjoy the nature, the food, the culture, and the lovely people. I would come back a slightly wiser, friendlier and a happier person. Then, in late 2020, at the age of 25, in...
One of life's greatest simple pleasures is creating something just for yourself.
I remember thinking at school when will I ever in my “real life” use maths. Well much to my utter surprise I’ve come to the stark realisation that there is a link between mathematics and crochet. …
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
Plus chaos chasers, ghost motorways, the secret symbols hiding in your street, and a rationalist death cult.
Today's post was going to be about a new product we're introducing—but we need to hold off while we recalculate our prices. You've probably seen the news: Virtually all imports into the United States will be subjected to additional, steep import taxes, also called tariffs. The…
MIT associate professor Evelina Fedorenko studies the brain’s language processing regions: how they arise, how they’re affected by different kinds of input, and how each contributes to language comprehension.
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist and one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, believes LLMs will be largely obsolete within five years.
As a consulting exploration geologist, my work life tends to consist of periods of intense work punctuated by periods of intense unemployment. True to form, I completed my last work assignment on July 8th and I found myself with a month and a half of enforced leisure before my next gig. Since the co...
The 5 most common mistakes of managers and how to avoid them
Somebody asked me what I would do if I was 18 in 2016. It’s a good question because it’s such an odd time where old institutions and traditional thinking don’t really make sense anymore. I can’t say I’m an expert on this though, because when
Start-up Costs: ‘Silicon Valley,’ ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ and How Microserfdom Ate the World Mario Zucca TV June 19, 2015 by Alex Pappademas Facebook Twitter Print Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders immersed in the dr...
Conversational interfaces are a bit of a meme. Every couple of years a shiny new AI development emerges and people in tech go "This is it! The next computing paradigm is here! We'll only use natural language going forward!". But then nothing actually changes and we continue using computers the way w
In 1995 three brave prognosticators set out to predict life in the 2020s. How did that work out for them?
Eco Cycles or How I Feel About Technology 28 March 2025 Umberto Eco, the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum (my personal favorite), wasn’t just a brilliant scholar—he was also a bit of a geek. He once wrote an essay comparing Macs to Catholicism and PCs to Protestantism. He thoug...
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
South Carolina Marine Col. Charles Del Pizzo ejected from a failing F-35B stealth fighter jet in 2023, landing in a North Charleston yard near the CHS Airport.
Raising Kids to Have an Analogue Childhood in a Digital World One of the questions I get constantly, both in-person and online, is how we went about arranging our household once we became parents. We put so much thought into it, and it’s clearly of interest to folks, that I thought I’d take a moment...
A cautionary tale about the competitive pressures of scientific research, and how they alter the course of history.
Author, writer, and creator sharing insights on learning, writing, philosophy, entrepreneurship, and more.
My thoughts on why Steins;Gate series world and probably ours too, is a simulation.
As big tech invests billions in a race to control "the most powerful technology in the world", some of AI's inventors fear the future they've helped create.
I'm done talking about microservices: the term is confusing, discussions are abstract, and without organisational change, microservices are pointless
About the Digital Collection: History of Fathom | Technical Information | Copyright and Restrictions | Home Browse the Archive Search by Keyword
Table of Contents Preface Introduction Part 1: Building an Architecture to Support Domain Modeling 1. Domain Modeling 2. Repository Pattern 3. A Brief Interlude: On Coupling and Abstractions 4. Our First Use Case: Flask API and Service Layer 5. TDD in High Gear and Low Gear 6. Unit of Work Pattern 7...
The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting “300 New Features.” Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it ...
It’s A Race Between Building Up and Burning Down
Why did we fall in love with chat interfaces for human-ai interaction? Let us leave them behind once and for all.
Jim Gay July 6, 2012 The Gang of Four is wrong and you don't understand delegation Jim Gay July 6, 2012 The Gang of Four got it wrong. Ruby's standard library has it wrong. Rails has it wrong. Is it still wrong if everyone is doing it? Yes. The Gang of Four book Design Patterns gives us common vocab...
Why Is It Lovely Recent changes Table of contents Links to this page FRONT PAGE / INDEX
The history of ivory-topped piano keys and the invisible human suffering caused by our cultural commodities.
The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos by Paul Gilster | Mar 25, 2025 | Astrobiology and SETI | 10 comments We keep trying to extend our reach into the heavens, but the idea of panspermia is that the heavens are actually responsible for us. Which is to say, that at least the precursor materials ...
The SNES RPG classic was lightning in a bottle and I'm glad I was there for it
Over the past decade, interactive data visualization has gone from bold experimentation to polished, predictable formats. I’ve been reflecting on why—and after speaking with some of the best in the field, I have some theories. Here’s a look at what shaped the last 10 years and where we might be head...
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
Both Greek and Chinese traditions see the abandonment of musical laws as calamitous for the common good.
Post Apocalyptic Computing 12 min read Mar 23, 2025 Support this website by purchasing prints of my photographs! Check them out here. We live in a world of planned obsolescence. You'd be hard pressed to find a consumer-grade technology manufactured today that will still be working in 10 years. The m...
Cottagecore Programmers
On the career of Reginald Foster.
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software ...
Forum Software Games Search Skip to content Forum Software Games Register Login Forum Software Games Board index Off-Topic Non-Commodore Scenes Unanswered topics Active topics The Vectrex Computer Post Reply 1 post • Page 1 of 1 intric8 Seattle, WA, USA YouTube Posted Sat Mar 22, 2025 2:57 pm If you...
top of page THE SOUL JAM ARCHIVES BEST ARTICLES ABOUT ME More Use tab to navigate through the menu items. The Ugly Truth About The Education System You Were Never Told “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of minds to think .” Albert Einstein Ever since I’ve gotten deeper into sp...
The Internet is full of people winning all the time. Someone is traveling to exotic locations, someone else is raising funds, and another person is winning awards. Essentially, everyone around you is succeeding while you do spend your days as the nature intended – sleeping, eating, smiling, chatting...
I can feel uncertainty looming over the software industry as the hiring frenzy of the COVID era has given way to layoffs and hiring freezes. The power transf...
The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What pre...
DNA EVIDENCE SAYS FIRST AMERICANS CAME FROM ASIA Beringia in the Ice Age Natives Americans are believed to have descended from Asian people who arrived in North America via the Bering Strait. The DNA of ancient American bog people is closer to the Japanese than Americans. Glenn Hodges wrote in Natio...
A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings. If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the ...
Adding dropout to the LLM's training is pretty simple, though it does raise one interesting question
Here in the northern hemisphere the vernal equinox just passed and the days arequickly getting longer. One of my col...
The most profitable band that you've never heard on the radio.
We've been working on the development of rust-minidump. The first in this two-part series explains what minidumps are and how we made rust-minidump.
Where have the amateur researchers gone, and how do we bring them back?
It's the epitome of the unwanted weed -- but there are reasons to choose to want dandelions.
There were a lot of speculation over the past years about what the next cycle of AI development could be. Agents? Reasoners? Actual multimodality?
In the memories of Azerbaijani emigrants, the map of Baku retains only those places which held personal meaning.
When Beetlejuice goes off, it's going to be the show of a lifetime. But it’s not going to hurt us.
17 years ago, Steve Jobs stood on stage with a manila envelope in his hand and pulled out a laptop. At that time, mini-laptops called netbook were very popular, and the first Macbook Air had far superior features in every way. I had a Lenovo IdeaPad S10e. If I remember correctly, the screen resoluti...
“Everything everyone knows about anything indicates that this is untrue,” – Laurent Bossavit The words science and engineering are often used when discussing computers and software. The…
Teach, Don't Tell Posted on September 3rd, 2013. This post is about writing technical documentation. More specifically: it's about writing documentation for programming languages and libraries. I love reading great documentation. When I have a question and the documentations explains the answer almo...
This article is about why on-call in it's current state in big-tech is flawed, or how to properly develop software.
Don't try to reform science. Not yet. Not in your PhD. In grad school, you'll start complaining about the publishing...
‘We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say “I”. This is what we must yield up to God.’ — Simone Weil ‘God break down the door You won’t find the answers here Not the ones you came looking for.’ — Nine Inch Nails Photosensitivity…
Your grandpa probably really did walk 5 miles to school in a foot of snow. A look at the changing numbers for how American students get to school.
The idea that work is a moral duty rather than a means of survival is so deeply ingrained we rarely question it. But as technology advances and work becomes more precarious, exhausting, and intrusive, it is worth asking why productivity remains the measure of a person’s worth.
Stoicism’s Appeal to the Rich and Powerful Posted by exurbe on March 27, 2019 History 41 Cicero, one of our major sources for stoic thought. I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver o...
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks…
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
The concept of OODA loops is a simple model of gathering information and making decisions, but it has some sophisticated implications.
These are the two most-streamed children's shows. Joe Brumm's personal touch for Bluey trumps Cocomelon's engagement-hacking approach.
University of Virginia, Department of Computer Science CS655: Programming Languages, Spring 2001
Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (you can read part 1 and part 2 but they are long). In it, I had a persisten...
Abstract: Visual Studio can be one of the programmer's best friends, but over the years it has become increasingly pushy, domineering, and suffering from unsettling control issues. Should we just surrender to Visual Studio's insistence on writing our code for us? Or is Visual Studio sapping our prog...
Here is part seven (the final part) of my non-fiction work about the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia. You can also read parts one, two, three, four, five an…
Leaving a job is never easy, and it’s a consequential decision. But when it’s time, it’s time. Here’s how to escape the comfort trap, and take the next step in your career.
This blog post passed unit tests by Giorgio Azzinnaro, Co-Founder | Software Engineer Updated on March 7, 2025 · 9 min read I’m reading a book called “Writing for Developers”,1 which has some great advice on writing blog posts that get read. With this post, I have two objectives: put in practice wha...
“No one ever quit!” “Look at our hackathon!” “We hard-allocate time to fight tech debt.” Ostensibly, good things. In reality? Just the advice to follow… if you want to lead a mediocre team. You’re …
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront
This is a cryptography blog and I always feel the need to apologize for any post that isn’t “straight cryptography.” I’m actually getting a little tired of apologizing for i…
After just a few thousands failed violent attempts with Terminator machines, Skynet realised it was lacking information on the whereabouts of the resistance leaders it was trying to destroy.
Karl Hans Janke’s flights of fancy
No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias.
This report is written as a post-mortem of a project that has, perhaps, been the author’s most extensive personal project: creating a complete and comprehensive solution to one of the most fa…
It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow's managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at enormo...
In 1628, the 'Vasa' sank on its maiden voyage. For the next 300 years, it sat in a watery grave—until one man sparked a monumental effort to salvage it.
I have a midterm tomorrow (actually)[0] and instead of studying I decided to write this piece on exactly how I spend as little time as possible on school while achieving decent results (top ~5-10% on tests). This protocol is heavily tailored to me and my background specifically. I do think some peop...
OpenAI's latest model raises more questions than answers, but no, the AI bubble isn't popping quite yet.
A few years ago I developed a few clever ways of rackmounting non-rackmount equipment so it could look neat in my HiFi rack enclosure.1 The goal was to have a professional-looking setup that would support input from my TV, spotify, Airplay, DJ controller and other sources while being able to drive a...
Flash is dead. But the influence of Flash games on modern gameplay is inescapable.
While Silicon Valley obsesses over AI, a weight-loss drug is quietly becoming the biggest economic disruptor since the internet. Here's why your job, investments, and future depend on understanding it
Web developer and cybersecurity researcher
Harold Cohen was a pioneer in computer art, in algorithmic art, and in generative art; but as he told me one afternoon in 2010, he was first and foremost a painter. He was also an engineer whose work defined the first generation of computer-generated art. His system, AARON, is one of the longest-run...
A friend of mine is always calling me out for never finishing anything, and never writing anything, and never responding to him after 5 PM or on weekends. I'm a bad friend, and I have accepted that, but he's always asking me about whatever my latest hyperfixation project is. Did I finish it; did I w...
Frederick Monsen's ethnographic photos of the American West
Cynthia Rose recalls her childhood pen pal, the one and only Mr. Earbrass, himself: Edward Gorey.
The XB-70 My Dad and the Cold War On the occasion of the public unveiling of the XB-70 Valkyrie, brigadier general Fred Ascani stood at his podium and began addressing the crowd at North American Aviation’s plant no. 42 in Palmdale, California. General Ascani was the Air Force’s program director for...
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
How using AI as a bridge when doctors aren't available can improve patient-to-doctor communications in real time emergencies
Posted on Wednesday 19 Feb 2025. 1,844 words, 10 links. By Matt Webb.
Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting. I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it. Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill...
Competing theories explain how dogs came to be domesticated from wolves. Now, a new study adds further support to the idea that they domesticated themselves.
(TL;DR: Ultima VII: Revisited is a replacement engine for Ultima VII that presents the game in 3D and fixes various issue with the game. Go to the Downloads tab to find out how to get it.) Preview of coming attractions. My name is Anthony Salter and I love Ultima. The Ultima Series of classic RPGs
The Digital Antiquarian A history of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher Home About Me Ebooks Hall of Fame Table of Contents RSS ← A Conversation with Andrew Plotkin Railroad Tycoon II → Half-Life 20 Dec Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that v...
When I was still a professional programmer, my office-mate once asked out of the blue, "Do you really want to be doing this kind of work when you're fifty?"
I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has c…
Skip to content → ProductProduct ResourcesResources Pricing Customers Blog Contact Docs Open app Log in Sign up Blog Last edited: February 21, 2025 Company Building The Profitable Startup For years, startups have been taught to prioritize growth over everything else. Profitability was seen as unambi...
A trip to Mars will be commital in a way that has no precedent in human space flight. The moon landings were designed so that any moment the crew could hit the red button and return expeditiously to Earth; engineers spent the brief windows of time when an abort was infeasible chain smoking and chewi...
AI has recently crossed a utility threshold, where cutting-edge models such as GPT-3, Codex, and DALL-E 2 are actually useful and can perform tasks computers cannot do any other way. The act of producing these models is an exploration of a new... | Greg Brockman | Svbtle
Congratulations to the xAI team—and the advocates of the scaling laws
A developer's journey through building an LLM from scratch, sharing key insights about tokenization, training, and the learning process of mastering AI fundamentals.
I was reading about a dispute involving the Linux kernel recently (which for the record I don't think either side handled well), and I realised something: Very...
Moving on from 18F. Posted on 17 February 2025 Note: This post gets into the last few weeks of American politics. If that’s not your cup of tea, or if that’s a stressful topic for you, please feel free to skip this one. (Also, it’s a bit long. Sorry about that.) Last week, I finished my tenure as a ...
I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”
Peter Ames Carlin’s book The Name of This Band is R.E.M. charts the band’s path from kings of alternative rock to elevator muzak.
I frequently see debates about whether it's better to be a cog at a giant semi-monopoly, or to take investment money in the hopes of one day growing to be head cog at a giant semi-monopoly. Role models matter. So I made a list of small companies that I admire. Neither giants nor startups - just peop...
Twenty years ago, in 2004-2005, I spent a year at MIT’s Computer Science department as a postdoc working with Professor Nancy Lynch. It was ...
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of wh...
Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United States as we know it -- in the very near future
Instead of forcing people out of Golden Gate Park, ranger Amanda Barrows helps them find housing.
Learn how to achieve flow state and defeat digital distractions through environment design, mindful breaks, and deep work practices for a more focused life.
I’ve been seriously traveling for more than 50 years, and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve traveled solo, and I’ve led a tour group of 40 friends. I’ve slept in dormitories and I’ve stayed in presidential suites with a butler. I’ve … Continue reading →
Thoughts on what A.I. is good at, and where it lacks, and how that impacts web developers
what I spent, what I earned, and why I'm walking away
I woke up this morning about an hour ahead of my alarm, the sky already light, birds calling.
This summarizes the frustratingly ambiguous state of the evidence for pretty much any "Does X cause Y?" question you might have.
When I was in school, in the mid 90s, I got on the internet for the first time. Our school had one computer that had the interne...
I mean honestly that kind of sums it up. In retrospect, it is a bit surprising. Maybe I should publicly complain more if it gets me these kinds of results (this is a joke everybody). But a good example here would be the support of explicit sync. Not too long ago, I did not think we were going to be ...
Today, when my 1.9-year-old daughter tried to grab and eat an unwashed orange, I asked her to give it to me so I could wash and peel it if she could wait for a moment. She did. It got me thinking about the marshmallow experiment, where the idea was that patience equals success. But … […]
In the woods of northeast France, a group of American artillery officers watched their olive drab-clad batterymen set up their tents in a peaceful glade. It would be the last such quiet the battery…
Most of the things we make and do for money are patently irrelevant to our survival—and to what gives life meaning, besides.
Pre-order Civilization VII for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, or Steam. Choose from the Standard, Deluxe Edition, or Founders Edition.
A TL;DR version of Andrej Karpathy's "Deep dive into LLMs like ChatGPT" video.
Frupidity is stupid frugality that wrecks engineering teams. Misguided cost-cutting kills productivity, morale, and innovation. You can fight it.
Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to...
Nucelo is an open source blogging platform with a minimal and beautiful page.
{reading time: 12 minutes}It’s the Saturday before the first Thanksgiving of the 1970s, and shit in Portland has been blowing up with alarming regularity ...
A haven for the super rich, or a city built on scams? The BBC was invited to find out.
How leaders can increase productivity by saying no to scattered, parallel work and instead concentrating on visible, bite-sized tasks funded to capacity. By breaking work into small chunks, limiting work in progress, and leaving room for the unexpected, teams deliver value faster while staying adapt...
Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry Published 2025-02-03 Four years ago I posted about the same topic. A kind email reminded me its time for another check in. Things I've changed my mind on: Things I now believe, which past me would've squabbled with: S...
Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State posits a choice between reaction and stasis. A brighter future does not await through network states, but through network societies.
A Systems View of LLMs on TPUs (Part 0: Intro | Part 1: Rooflines)
Jujutsu (jj), a new version control system written in Rust, has popped up on my radar a few times over the past year. Looked interesting based on a cursory look, but being actually pretty satisfied with Git, and not having major problems with it, I haven’t checked it out. That is, until last week, w...
The 100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science from "Scientists' Bookshelf" American Scientist, November-December 1999, Volume 87, No. 6 Biography The autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882 by Charles Darwin A mathematician's apology by G. H. Hardy The double helix : a personal account of ...
It's now been seven years since I quit my job at Google to become an indie founder. In the past year, I sold my company, started a family, and learned several new technologies.
Amazing as it may seem after all these years, there are still junior developers in the world. A few weeks ago at work we had a talk where senior developers (including me) were invited to spend around five minutes each talking about our personal software development philosophies....
Feb 3, 2025 I conditioned myself to fail Over the years I’ve literally built hundreds of projects. Some with a lof of potential. Others just batshit crazy ideas. I started noticing a pattern. I’d build a project for several weeks or even months. Working long hours, maybe 12-14 hours a day. Being ext...
William Gibson offers a future where technology has enabled a socially-cleansed London. Gibson's earlier prescience has Justin McGuirk a little worried.
Switching to Linux: Reclaim Your Freedom Published in LINUX-HOWTO.ORG • 31 January 2025 Christian Ahmer Introduction: The Case for Switching to Linux The High Cost of Proprietary Systems The Pain of Vendor Lock-in The Erosion of User Skills Loss of Privacy and Control The Advantages of Open Source S...
The prevailing public mindset that AI is only a labor-saving tool betrays a lack of understanding of why people create and a lack of imagination of this technology's potential.
I used to have boring health. I never had more than the flu, been admitted to the hospital, and I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. In late 2023, that changed when I developed chronic nausea.
To me, a design is a plan or specification for something that fulfils a goal. For example, the goal of the BBC News website might be to inform users of the most relevant things that are going on in the world. The way they do that is by writing news articles, ordering them based on location and impor...
A “build system” is one of the most important tools in a developer’stoolbox. Roughly, it figures out how to create runnable programs froma bunch of different...
[DE - EN - ES - IT] DICASTERY FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH DICASTERY FOR CULTURE AND EDUCATION ANTIQUA ET NOVA Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence I. Introduction 1. With wisdom both ancient and new (cf. Mt. 13:52), we are called to reflect on the current...
Silicon Valley is reeling. However, founder Liang Wenfeng has remained low-key, with his most recent appearance being on China Central Television's Xinwen Lianbo (CCTV News).
Goodbye, Digital Natives. Hello, AI Natives
New research finds that iodine played a substantial role in cognitive improvements in 20th century Americans.
This is a story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first model of the Amiga series. Many of you might be familiar with the popular Amiga 500 or later models, but the Commodore Amiga 1000 was actually the first model of the Amiga series produced. I consider the A1000 a signific...
Writing modern software increasingly involves the use of dependencies, that is other pieces of software [1]. For example, I “wrote” the software that produces the website you’re looking at right now by gluing together a number of Rust libraries. If those libraries hadn’t existed – and if cargo [2] d...
After months of anticipation, debate, and even a bit of apprehension, Svelte 5 arrived earlier this year. Frederick O’Brien caught up with its creator, Rich Harris, to talk about the path that brought him and his team here and what lies ahead.
Documenting an attempt to build a single-purpose smartwatch.
Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve, and it also happens to be the 20th anniversary of our company - our official date of incorporation was January 28, 2005. I wanted to jot down a few thoughts this morning to mark the occasion. The Beginning of the Journey At the time, I was in Shenzhen and Glacier was...
I break down the logic behind the company's towering price tag and why I think the most valuable AI companies have yet to be built.
I go on a journey to learn about a man named Quentell, and discover unsettling things about the information landscape.
Outmaneuvering internet firewalls isn't easy, but Proton VPN is waging a digital war for an open internet.
A digital twin of a human mind? It isn’t science fiction.
All the reasons why Nvidia will have a very hard time living up to the currently lofty expectations of the market.
Joel Hawksley / joel@hawksley.org / ←home
An exposé no one will read, about the widespread falsification of user posts in PhysicsForums, a scientific community founded in 2001. This is a microcosm of the death of the human-written Internet.
100% UnemploymentMike on Tue Jan 29 2013 on-keeping-busy-when-the-robots-take-over I'll begin with a healthy dose of pessimism. I write software for a living, and I am becoming more and more convinced that my job will soon – in a few years or a few decades – be outsourced. It won't go to a developer...
Jan 13, 2025 Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn't Going to Kill the Software Industry I feel like half of my social media feed is composed of AI grifters saying software developers are not going to make it. Combine that sentiment with some economic headwinds and it's easy to feel like we're all screwed. I...
Can All-Purpose Robots Fuel a Comeback?
t4t is a focused social network for trans and gender-non-comforming people. It is beautiful, minimalist, text-based, and free. To join, download the app for iOS or Android. Recent posts @Lovemail.Shan Don't you hate it When you wake up extremely horny but it gets to a point where it makes you sick b...
There's a reason video games build what's called a 'vertical slice'. If you're not familiar, a vertical slice is a single playable area, with all mechanics, fin
This post celebrates influential papers that shaped technology and communication. Their foundational concepts inspire continued innovation, highlighting the importance of understanding our roots fo…
Three weeks ago I wrote the following draft of a blog post entitled “Is It Better to Fail Spectacularly?”. I am having a lot of doubts. I’ve been training for the Chicago Marathon in earnest since June, but in reality the preparations began a year ago when I was accepted based on my qualifying time ...
Optimizing Castro's worker jobs to get your podcasts to you more quickly
GHQ is available now, nearly 70 years after the author created it
Machine conquest: Jules Verne’s technocratic worldmaking
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com domain and all links will remain active, but there will be no new content after November 13th, 2024, which happens to be my 50th birthday. Th...
I quit my last contracting gig in August with £40k in debt, no other income, and only a business idea (it failed).
The teachings of Price, Gilpin, and Repton and the quiet example of his father provided the basis for Olmsted's aesthetic theories; they also underlay his refusal to follow the gardening fashions of his own time. The horticultural revolution of the early nineteenth century led gardeners to neglect o...
The system worked amazingly well. The postal service then was notoriously slow and unreliable. By taking important documents and putting them in suitcases, DHL was able to guarantee timely delivery of critical business documents.
SOFA is the name of a hacker/art collective, and also the name of the principle upon which the club was founded. The point of SOFA club is to start as many things as possible as you have the ability, interest, and capacity to, with no regard or goal whatsoever for finishing those projects. The goal ...
From the Stanford Prison Experiment to time perspective theory, Phil Zimbardo left his mark on the field of psychology.
For decades, school design was synonymous with rigidity; now, child-centric principles are reshaping contemporary educational spaces.
On 23 August 1989, around a million Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians expressed their desire for independence by joining hands to create ‘The Baltic Way’, a human chain that extended for over 690 kilometres from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius.
When you look at old black and white pictures of cities from before the 1950s you may notice something on most buildings that are no longer there today. Awnings. They were ubiquitous over nearly every window of buildings from the most basic single family home to massive buildings like The White Hous...
John Cena's not a small guy, but he—and Mattel's movie—have some big shoes to fill if they're telling the origin story of Matchbox.
We praise canonical authors for their boundless imagination. Then why do all their plots feel the same?
Films Home Art Analysis Biography Chinese Brush Collage Color 3D Animation Without Pixel Shifting Discoveries and Firsts Documentaries Drawings Electronic Restoration Etchings Films Graphics Partial Inventory Light Boxes Painting Photography Reviews Sculpture Videos Watercolor 2D to 3D Films Lillian...
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page came up with the concept of PageRank in their seminal paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Stanford University, 1998) they profoundly changed the way we utilize the web. For the next 25 years, humanity count...
Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. I discussed this post on The Space Show on November 5 2021. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts …
Happy Hacking Keyboards (HHKB) and REALFORCE keyboards are engineered for maximum performance. Learn more about our mechanical keyboards for gamers, programmers, and more.
There comes a moment in life, often in the quietest of hours, when one realizes that the world will continue on its wayward course, indifferent to our desires or frustrations. And it is then, perhaps, that a subtle truth begins to emerge: the only thing we truly possess, the only thing we might, wit...
Some notes on upgrading Hugo • blogging • October 7, 2024 Warning: this is a post about very boring yakshaving, probably only of interest to people who are trying to upgrade Hugo from a very old version to a new version. But what are blogs for if not documenting one’s very boring yakshaves from time...
I remember when I first arrived in Silicon Valley with a couple of products and after meeting Steve Jobs at Apple, and signing with the company that bought Visicalc, I felt like I had arrived, and …
Timezones, and daylight saving - the practice of moving clocks forward by one hour once a year - are a pain. They make it hard to schedule international meetings, plan travel, or may simply cause you to be an hour late for work once a year. For a developer, they are even worse! This blog post takes ...
Technology is enabling increasingly fast times but how fair is it when it impacts marathon runners so differently?
I have a machine from 1998. I believe its hard drive and RAM are all original. It powers on and loads the OS, so I have reason to believe that nothing major is corrupted. However, is it best to lea...
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
An open response to a recent Decoder episode on workplace software and Slack
Tom Lamont: Author & Aviator - James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist by Jeffrey Meyers
Skip to main content This browser is no longer supported. Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support. Download Microsoft Edge More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge Table of contents Exit focus mode
This paper discusses ways in which automation of industrial processes may expand rather than eliminate problems with the human operator. ...
A new analysis of mummified brains pushes back the timeline for the globalization of coca
N3366 - Restartable Functions for Efficient Character Conversions has made it into the C2Y Standard (A.K.A., “the next C standard after C23”). And one of my longest struggles — the sole reason I actually came down to the C Standards Committee in the first place —
What is changing now that will still be changing in ten years? Anchor your strategy on that.
It was a stunning revelation: A respected high school custodian had been a concentration camp guard. This excerpt of a new book examines how the disclosure of a dark secret in the early ’80s divided a suburb.
Minicars are all the rage in Europe and Asia, but they haven't caught on in the United States
The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum on 2021-02-04 *How to create the long-lasting compu**ter that will save your attention, your wallet, your creativity, your soul and the planet. Killing monopolies will only be a byproduct.* Each time I look at my Hermes Rocket typewriter (on the left in t...
Anthropology has been bad at capturing the living conditions of women. A kidnapped woman who returned to civilization was the exception.
THE NAMING OF AMERICA: FRAGMENTS WE'VE SHORED AGAINST OURSELVES BY JONATHAN COHEN The name America (applied to present-day Brazil) appeared for what is believed the first time on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, known as the Baptismal Certificate of the New World, and also America's Birth Cert...
It's hard to imagine now, but in the 2000s web browsers were quite boring and didn't get updated very often. IE7 being released was a huge deal (indeed, Microsoft kept to a slower-moving schedule just as the rest of the industry was starting to pick up the pace). Opera was a viable fully-independent...
Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future – Chapter 1 by Marshall Brain Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like ...
Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese range up to spending years and around 4000 total hours (2,200h classroom hours, 1,800 outside). I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year.[1] 1. There is a lot of disagreement on language proficiency estimates. They
Jerry Seinfeld, Social Anxiety, and Meditation Oct 4, 2024 Modified on Oct 4, 2024 4 minute read This week I came across an interview with Jerry Seinfeld, focused on the benefits of meditation in his life. I see Jerry as a no-nonsense personality, one who’s reached the pinnacle of success in a compe...
By Mary Grace Descourouez, MS, NBC-HWC Binge-watching television, watching YouTube videos for hours, or scrolling on your phone every morning may seem harmless, but research shows that too much screen time may be detrimental to your health. We know children’s brains are affected by spending too much...
Social media isn't toxic, most people just haven't figured out the game (yet)
Cosmopolitan Libc has the fastest most efficient mutexes for contended workloads.
Putting the “Person” in “Personal Website” 2024-10-02 The other day I saw a meme that went something like this: Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The point of doing these things has ...
ALWYN TURNER selects some passages from British literature that concern sausages.
John Maynard Keynes was an aesthete in the most capacious sense.
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard. For instance, last week Twitch introduced a new “Boost” program where streamers can pay to get more viewers to see their stream. ...
Drawing a line art imitation of one of demoscene favorite Boris Vallejo's fantasy paintings using only four colors.
Among all the health conditions, diseases, disabilities and neuro-developmental challenges, it seems that Autism Spectrum Disorder is notorious for giving everybody a solid headache, no matter how they came to interact with it - as researchers, diagnosticians, autists ourselves or people who just ar...
Adjusting to this lifestyle hasn't been easy - truth be told it has taken a full year of learning through failure to learn the insights in the blog post below. I'm three years in on the journey of #vanlife and life is going to plan.
"The Dogma of Otherness" (published in full here) first appeared in the book Otherness, a collection of essays and short stories on the subject of, strangely enough, otherness. The article also appeared online (in abbreviated form) at crackaddict.com.
He was worried about losing them. He could write equations on the blackboard all day long, but if he didn’t find a way to connect with them soon, they’d never master multiplication up to 100. One day, once again concerned about reaching his third-graders, he was lost in thought and wrote “3 x 4 = […...
'There are no good modern pubs.' With original sketches from 1966 and scathing critique, Gardiner bemoans the state of London's pubs.
Taking a good look around (both inside and out) of my brand new MEGA65 computer system from Trenz Electronic GmbH.
Greenwich, an experiment in collaborative curation
How to build developer tools for happiness and productivity.
The language Go hails from an era when programmers had smaller egos and fewer commercial ambitions. My generation of strivers has a lot to learn.
Refresh System Initiative Open main menu HomePricingPartnersDocsBlogNewsAbout UsJobs Log InSign Up System Initiative is the Future By Adam Jacob 9/25/2024 I’m incredibly proud to announce the general availability of System Initiative. It’s a revolutionary technology that is the future of how you wil...
Why I still blog after 15 years ★ Published: September 25, 2024 in 7f18f00 Tagged: Blog Time flies when you’re having fun. Before you know it, your little babies have started school, you celebrate the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park, and that little blog you started have now been going for 15 year...
I was recently asked to help resolve an escalation at work. It had already bounced around between a few people, and was very muddied with conflicting reports not to mention frustration that the issue existed in the first place. Apparently I am insane, because I like situations like this.
Engineers Need Art Projects SystemSix Mooncraft 2000 Adam74 Stereographer
In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.
Working five days a week has long been the corporate cultural norm. But some companies are exploring the option of letting employees work for days a week. shedding the tradition and exploring a four-day week.
Keju's role in slowing technological development
I published an overview of the project a few days ago:
Operator does not look like much, but a lot of thought went into adding details that make a difference. Here are some of them:
What Happened to the Japanese PC Platforms? Sep 21st, 2024 2:01 pm (This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting question: what happened to all those companies who made those Japanese computer platfo...
Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
Use the parallel processing power of your GPU to simulate a simple chemical system that exhibits emergent behaviors
Is the meaning of MTTR "Mean Time to Repair" or "Mean Time to Recover"? What's the difference and why does it matter?
Organizations tend to drift towards danger and normalize deviations from procedure.
I program my home computer, beam myself into the future
Guest Post Every once in a while I get a question, either privately or in a department meeting, regarding CUNYFirst. Here is what I ...
Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants. CMYKat The Road to Hell Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big…
There was a time when software (and games! Games are just software for fun!) were distributed on DVD. A physical disk that you would insert into your system ...
If I asked you to name the most common chronic disease in children, what would you say? Asthma comes top of mind, but there is something five times more common in kids: cavities. We don’t typically think of dental cavities as a chronic disease—in part because of the separation between medicine and d...
systemd is becoming de facto a standard init system for Linux. But even this choice of words is treacherous, because systemd is much more than an init system. It's basically an integrated redesign of all the low-level userspace of a Linux system, with great plans to change how software is run and or...
The etiologies of Parkinson’s disease (PD) remain unclear. Some, such as certain genetic mutations and head trauma, are widely known or easily identified. However, these causes or risk factors do not account for the majority of cases. Other, less ...
Dear new developer, When I was starting out, I thought that software development was all about code. After all, that was the main thing I was working on. Well, maybe not the main thing, as I needed…
It's hard to make friends as an adult. One lonely man in his 30s finds a nonjudgmental and supportive community at a local spin studio.
News TouchArcade is Shutting Down Posted on September 16, 2024 by Jared Nelson This is a post that I’ve known was coming for quite some time, but that doesn’t make it any easier to write. After more than 16 years TouchArcade will be closing its doors and shutting down operations. There may be an add...
I changed my mind and will not wait for retirement. Instead, I will focus on aligning financial investments with activities I enjoy till my last breath.
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
The relentless pursuit of success often means chasing after promotions, pay raises, and prestigious titles. But what if we shifted our focus from these traditional metrics and instead optimized our careers for happiness?
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
On and off for the last several years I've been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on a
So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages
Designing software is tough. I think we can all agree on that. No matter how much experience you have, your first idea about how to structure a module or system is usually not the best one. I had to l
From our print archive: Gamesmanship and America’s first Nobel Prize scientist, Albert Abraham Michelson.
In the early 1980s, Drexel became the first university in the country to require all students to have a personal computer, a mandate made possible through a first-of-its-kind partnership with Apple Inc.
My 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS built with twenty-four 4 TB drives is over 10 years old and still going strong. Although now on its second motherboard and power supply, the system has yet to experience a single drive failure (knock on wood). Zero drive failures in ten years, how is that possible? Let's talk ab...
In Empire of the Sun, published 40 years ago, the great novelist turned his childhood experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp into a form of personal liberation.
Feedback is critical to performing good work as a team. Good feedback cultivates quality work and professional growth. Bad feedback degrades quality and erodes relationships. This article explains ...
Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React. Plenty of corporations thought they knew better but failed to see the larger picture.
As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of thos...
I recently came across a great quote from David Chang, “Just because we’re a casual restaurant, doesn’t mean we don’t hold ourselves to fine dining standards. We try to do things the right way. That usually means doing things the long, hard, stupid way.” David has elaborated on this quote: When you...
But the real hot piece of tech is not really a CSS framework as I remember them. Everybody is now talking about Tailwind CSS - a “utility-first CSS framework”. In case you’ve been living under a rock (like me): it’s a library that instead of giving you btn-primary gives you bg-blue-600. It pretty mu...
Why we should give up on trying to avoid distractions, and just get better ones instead.
Current Issue Past Issues Topics September 9, 2024 Volume 22, issue 4 PDF GPTs and Hallucination Why do large language models hallucinate? Jim Waldo and Soline Boussard The recent developments of LLMs (large language models) and the applications built on them such as ChatGPT have completely revoluti...
Would figuring out your bugs and outages be easier if you had a time machine? We are now making a time machine directly available to all of our customers.
A future you might actually want to live in.
Genius is fragile. Success, even more so. What does it mean then for an artist to fail?
Euan Ashley joins Derek to discuss the benefits of exercise and our current scientific understanding of why it helps
