Curated river of news
Latest posts from blogs I follow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUForkn00mk We're All Building a Single Digital Assistant/images/blog/we-are-all-building-single-digital-assistant/header.webp/images/blog/we-are-all-building-single-digital-assistant/header.webp I want to talk about where I think all this personal AI stuff is going...
Slay the Spire 2 may yet prove this year's best deckbuilder, but The Killing Stone is more intriguing. It's also heckin' Elizabethan, if you opt for the "period" dialogue option. The setup, in present-day English: it's the 17th century, and ...
The number of screenshots of Claude conversations is going up in my life and it’s beginning to have an impact on my general mood. Most of the time it’s well-intended; coworkers working through a problem with a chatbot before bothering ...
CSS cascade layers are the ultimate tool to win the specificity wars. Used alongside the :where selector, specificity problems are a thing of the past. Or so I thought. Turns out cascade layers are leakier than a xenonite sieve. Cross-layer ...
When I finished my first playthrough of Atomfall for review last year, I felt like Rebellion’s pasty-littered survival game was just starting to properly get its hooks into me. I’ve dug plenty of short games over the years - Return ...
Zig v0.16 update adds “Juicy Main” which provides appropriate defaults for a general purpose memory allocator, an arena allocator, and the new io interface. IO as an interface unlocks async/await patterns in Zig. Async is not concurrency but it does ...
Earlier this year Nvidia announced DLSS 5, a new version of their DLSS technology: a layer of graphical magic that uses their GPUs to do improbable things to the resolution and framerate of your favourite PC games (unless your favourite ...
The best New York Times story this week didn’t appear in the paper. In fact it wasn’t an article at all, but a web site created by a freelance journalist named Ted Alcorn. Alcorn tapped into the paper’s public API ...
Supply Chain attacks are all the rage these days, with many high-profile attacks that were carried against the Python ecosystem (with litellm), JavaScript (with axios) and WordPress in the last
For the past several months I've been searching for the Missing Programming Language - a language with a good balance of types, performance, ecosystem, and agentic AI performance. I've landed on a spe...
Real time network diagnostics in your terminal.
Documenting how the head injury incurred on January 16, 2026 continues to affect me three months later.
Good and Bad Harness Engineering/images/blog/bitter-lesson-engineering/bitter-lesson-engineering-header.webp/images/blog/bitter-lesson-engineering/bitter-lesson-engineering-header.webp There are lots of ways to do Harness Engineering well and poorly, but the most important one comes down to whether...
In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and a conviction. Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and ...
Why, where, and how I created a new app to be my new home of fiction writing.
When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s ...
From an aside of a much longer essay from Tom Forth:
In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte marched 685,000 soldiers into Russia - the largest military force ever assembled in European history up to that point, and one of the largest military fuckups of all time.He had no coherent supply plan for ...
It's Time for Full Activation/images/blog/its-time-for-full-activation/header.webp/images/blog/its-time-for-full-activation/header.webp I've been experiencing a feeling lately that's massive and hard to pin down. But here goes. If you remember my piece on Constraints on Creativity/blog/our-constr...
My alma mater, St. John’s College, has just one intercollegiate sport: croquet It started in 1983, with an annual match against the U.S. Naval Academy. Two years later, I attended the third such contest during my freshman year. Someone took ...
I've decided to go on a content hiatus. This will be my last dispatch for a while. I don't know how long I'll be gone. Why? Because I've been posting to an anonymous audience on the Internet almost every day ...
I used the GitHub Copilot CLI to generate some scripts for me to control Elgato Lights with the Logitech MX Creative Console!
We are releasing DuckDB version v1.5.2, a patch release with bugfixes and performance improvements, and support for the DuckLake v1.0 lakehouse format.
We released the DuckLake v1.0 standard!
We recently went on a 9 day trip to Japan. It was awesome. Japan has been at the top of my bucket list since ~2020 but with Covid, getting married, and having a kid we just never found the right ...
Why we need collaborative AI engineering and a tour of Ace: the multiplayer coding workspace
Weaver, seen from the Front, Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design. Product design ...
I quipped on BlueSky: It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects. Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the people ...
AI Only Has to Beat 3/10/images/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10.webp/images/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10.webp I think there's a misconception about how AI will break and change things. The Mythos hype has convinced people that AI is about to be so advanced that it can overcome our great cyber...
Sundays are for remembering the glorious sunshine you enjoyed but half a week ago, while looking out at eleven degrees Celsius' worth of grey skies and drizzle. Did you know some people actually like rain? Imagine. The weather taste equivalent ...
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik - and the United States lost its collective mind. Newspapers ran headlines about Soviet nuclear weapons raining from orbit, and schools held duck-and-cover drills. Eisenhower's approval rating cratered and the smartest ...
I spoke at Deep Dish Swift in Chicago!
In this article I share my personal highlights of PyCon Lithuania 2026. Shout out to the organisers and volunteers This was my second time at PyCon Lithuania and, for the second time in a row, I leave with the impression ...
After months of pleading for the sun to show its face, I'm actually feeling quite warm now. Potentially, I'd go so far as to say I'm too toasty. I'm not saying I'm looking forward to winter. But I'm not not ...
Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no ...
Aperture Collapse/images/blog/aperture-collapse/header.webp/images/blog/aperture-collapse/header.webp I've been playing with this idea of Aperture Collapse. It's a problem I have that I suspect a lot of people have as well. It's where AI has magnified our capabilities so much as builders that we...
When you pip install a package with compiled code, the wheel you get is built for CPU features from 2009. Want newer optimizations like AVX2? Your installer has no way to ask for them. GPU support? You're on your own ...
This year I’ve been asked more than ever before what web development “stack” I use. I always respond: none. We shouldn’t have a go-to stack! Let me explain why. What stack? My understanding is that a “stack” is a choice ...
The document wars, e-mail hosting discourse, and the return of an old friend
A quick but important reminder that font-family declarations don’t inherit fallback stacks the way many developers assume.
Maybe it was the past few months of RAMnarök hacking away at my optimism, but my first thoughts upon handling the fifty-buck Epomaker HE68 Lite fixated on how it might not just be cheap in the good way. Surrounded by ...
I spent about a decade waking up at 6am and checking my follower count before I brushed my teeth. Refreshing analytics while the coffee brewed, reading Y Combinator essays, networking on Twitter and trying to reverse-engineer what made people break ...
I spoke in Seoul, South Korea to an incredibly bright group of participants!
A talk, a workshop, and a podcast at AIE Europe. Here's what I did.
Play this short quiz to test your Python knowledge! At PyCon Lithuania 2026 I did a lightning talk where I presented a “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Python quiz, themed around iterables. There's a whole performance during the lightning ...
Me, in 2025, on Mastodon: I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the ...
This article shares two skills you can add to your coding agents so they use uv workflows. I have fully adopted uv into my workflows and most of the time I want my coding agents to use uv workflows as ...
