Unexpected things that are people
panlegal expressions of personhood
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,191 posts.
panlegal expressions of personhood
(From someone who has spent far too much time thinking about the designs of programming languages)
ChatGPT and LLMs amplify both insight and illusion. They are not knowledge engines, but confidence engines shaping how we think and learn.
I ‘ve done such a thorough job of de-Googling that I forgot to show up for a meeting with someone, because I hadn’t checked my Google calendar in ages. (No, they were not amused.) In my defense, I proceeded to explain to them that having de-Googled, I was also in the process of de-Appling, which is a special bonus…
For the past five months I've been leading the efforts to rebuild Zed 's cloud infrastructure.
Recalls at major automakers cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It’s a huge issue. To mitigate it, our company created an analytics department solely focused on categorizing warranty claims into actionable problems.
A few weeks back I got a note on Bluesky, linking me to a website offering a free computer. The owner was in Cambridge, not far from me, and the computer was an HP 9000/300 Series - a Model 340, specifically.
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.
We're discussing a paper that demands attention...
We traditionally divide consoles into “generations”—the earliest devices like the Magnavox Odyssey are the first generation, the Atari 2600 is second, the NES third, the SNES and Genesi…
This is my Code BEAM Europe 2025 talk, converted to a blogpost.
The U.S. government is reportedly preparing to ban the sale of wireless routers and other networking gear from TP-Link Systems , a tech company that currently enjoys an estimated 50% market share among home users and small businesses. Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China…
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 free in 3d printing…
Bull markets make you feel smarter than you are. Bear markets make you feel dumber than you are.
Divide a company's income by its revenue, and you get the operating margin. For some volume of sales that comes into the business, it gives an idea of what percentage is left as cash in the end. Barring some accounting shenanigans regarding where the bottom line is....
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.
Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…
A Large US Study Finds Memory Decline Surge in Young People
OpenAI partially released a new model yesterday called GPT-5-Codex-Mini, which they describe as "a more compact and cost-efficient version of GPT-5-Codex". It’s currently only available via their Codex CLI tool …
A follow up to The Ofcom Files. Some notes on Ofcom’s strategy to date. As many of you know, I represent the U.S. website 4chan, pro bono, in its U.S. federal lawsuit against the UK…
Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his…
Mozilla forcing llm features and providing no gui for users to disable them
For the past week, domains associated with the massive Aisuru botnet have repeatedly usurped Amazon , Apple , Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. Cloudflare responded by redacting Aisuru domain names from their top websites list. The chief executive at…
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.
Overview Part 2 is now ready There is a common refrain on the internet that things have gotten worse and are continuing to get worse. There is a proliferation of horrible jumpy loading ads on every website, every search engine throws a crappy AI summary in front of your search result, every site/webapp seems to have…
Even for him, his latest whopper is something
Rene Schallner (@renerocksai): software engineer turned AI researcher and engineer, in Vienna.
I can’t think of any other language in my 45 years long career that surprised more than Zig . I can easily say that Zig is not only a new programming language, but it’s a totally new way to write programs, in my opinion. To say it’s merely a language to replace C or C++, it’s a huge understatement.