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Can gzip be a language model?
A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,421 posts.
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Markdown in /src
In this essay, Carson Gross argues that Markdown is now an important source artifact for software systems built with LLMs, and that, following the principle of locality, it should live in /src, alongside the code it produces.
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AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
We cut PR wait time and running costs by rethinking CI as a system, from the infrastructure underneath it to how work gets scheduled and tests get parallelized.
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Why does mathmain need an encrypted loader?
A math solver leads to encrypted code in npm packages. Follow the loader, the trigger matrix that unlocks it, the remote access payload, and the full indicators.
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Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?
Here are my thoughts on the free online textbook Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? by Paul E. McKenney, author of the Linux kernel’s RCU synchronization mechanism. I read a lot of this textbook, got my fill, and probably won’t read more of it in the near future so wanted to write this…
216
Attention is all you have
The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments.Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks.A...
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Python Workers are now generally available
Python Workers allow developers to run Python web frameworks and AI orchestration libraries natively in the Cloudflare Workers runtime. You can seamlessly integrate with Cloudflare's ecosystem including D1, R2, and Workers AI without writing any JavaScript glue code.
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First Shader from Zero in Godot 4
Create your first shader in Godot. Implement texture sampling, shift shader UV coordinates, mask regions, and use noise to generate random shapes that make up a portal.
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Sublime Text Build 4213
Sublime Text now ships with Python 3.14 and Python 3.3. Python 3.3 is disabled by default and will be removed in a future version. If you're experiencing plugin compatibility issues you can re-enable 3.3 using the setting "disable_plugin_host_3.3": false .
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MCP was always a bad idea?
Why MCP was always a bad idea and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
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The senior engineer death spiral
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
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If AI coding is lowering your code quality, you're not managing quality right
One common take on the coding agents that I see goes something like this: “Sure, AI helps you output more code, but won’t the quality suffer?”
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What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust Intro I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I gravitate toward the functional side of Rust like clean functions, expressive types, that…
224
Saving another 100TB of RAM
Cloudflare's global network is immense but not limitless. As we look for small ways to trim our resource usage, we sometimes get lucky and we can cut significantly more. Here’s how we reduced one of our Pingora-based service's RAM usage with statistics.
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A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game
Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware or emulation…
226
I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
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Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
Bend just serves as a useful example of my general point regarding vibe-coding as it is recent, high-profile, and has aspects that make it easy to use as an example. I don’t know anything about the author’s history with designing languages or if they actually did consider the tradeoffs below and made what I think is a…
228
I hate you Microsoft
The rare moment when I need to open a powerpoint document is here. As usual, I have my institutional account logged into their “services”, because my university pays microslop something in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts with this large software provider.
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C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour
Let’s start with a question! Is this program well-defined? 1 2 3 4 int main() { while (true) ; } If you said yes, you’d be wrong — at least before C++26. A while (true); loop with no side effects used to be undefined behaviour. Compilers were free to assume it terminates, and some — Clang in particular — would…
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Towards Self-Driving Codebases
We're post-tokenmaxxing. What are we pre-? How do we get there?
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Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
My personal website, portfolio, and blog.
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DeepSeek-v4.1 Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression
A deep dive into the DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash technical report: CED, CSA2, HSI, Single-Pass mHC, Engram and FP4 KV Cache — how the KV cache was compressed to just 890 bytes per token.
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Why building a Rust LSP is hard
Rust LSP that doesn't eat memory for breakfast
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You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles
Git packfiles were designed for mmap and local disk, so pulling one object out of a bucket means guessing at a byte range. I wrote a new format instead.
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Small programming tricks
A lot of effective engineering comes from the accumulation of small nuggets of knowledge.
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Replacing Pull Requests with Delta
From the Zed Blog: Delta is now in public beta. Replacing pull requests is our first step toward replacing GitHub.
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When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader
A write-up of a full shader debugging session to find out why my Voronoi Diagram shader was stuttering in one specific machine.
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Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
In September 2026, NVIDIA announced it is leaning into native GPU programming in Rust. CUDA C++ and CUDA Python are mature, enterprise-grade toolchains, and NVIDIA will be growing and maturing CUDA…
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Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
Open answers to a reader's letter.
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My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
In 2014 I wrote http_build_url, a temporary PHP polyfill for AOL's CMS. Twelve years and nearly 20 million installs later, I'm deprecating it.