Stack Overflow is almost dead
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,841 posts.
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
How a simple loop enables powerful AI assistants
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⁺ tooling! which I…
Introducing our first Frontier Models!
OR: the ideas your mother warned you about
it’s too hard
In 2011, Larry Page became CEO of Google and tried to fix meetings. But his new policies were no match for Google Calendar pedants.
Hello! I've recently been working on the pathfinding for NPCs in my game, which is something I've been looking forward to for a while now since it's a nice chunky problem to solve. I thought I'd write...
Research programming language for concurrent ownership
Landmark court decision against “TCF” consent pop ups on 80% of the internet
This article provides a hands-on guide to integrating Rust and Java through the Java Native Interface (JNI).
Since early 2022, Motion was on CockroachDB. Cockroach has many qualities going for it: effortless horizontal scaling, especially when…
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
Simple tools for smart, attractive people like you
New AI agent evolves algorithms for math and practical applications in computing by combining the creativity of large language models with automated evaluators
“It’s not that hard to build a fully functioning, code-editing agent.” Thorsten Ball
CI is chaotic, bursty, spiky, and short-lived. That chaos is a nightmare unless you’re built for it. Blacksmith’s serverless CI cloud thrives on unpredictability: more customers = more noise = smoother utilization = lower costs for everyone. Multitenancy isn’t just efficient — it’s profitable. And yes, the margins are…
It's not you. HDR confuses tons of people. In this post, we finally explain what HDR actually means, the problem it presents, and three ways to solve it.
E-COM was a $40 million US Postal Service project to deliver email on paper. Why it failed, and why spammers were its only real customers.
This post will examine the cryptography behind passkeys, the guarantees they do or do not give, and interesting cryptographic things you can do with them, such as generating cryptographic keys and storing certificates.
Databricks agrees to acquire Neon, a serverless Postgres database company, to bring speed and flexibility to production workloads.
In March of 2023 we announced that we were starting work on a safer high performance AV1 decoder called rav1d, written in Rust. We partnered with Immunant to do the engineering work. By September of 2024 rav1d was basically complete and we learned a lot during the process. Today rav1d works well—it passes all the same…
Wise has stolen more than $60,000 AUD from us, and refuses to let us access it. We’ve had a Wise account for around 5 years (since they were called TransferWise). It’s been a really useful …
Discover why Nextcloud file uploads for Android app are not working properly, and how Google’s app store rules are hurting Nextcloud users.
Every so often I come across a paper, blog post, or (occasionally) video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it—it was that impactful.