3121
Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
Confessions of a naive hamster: why the smartest people in the room keep missing that intelligence is often not the main bottleneck in the real world
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,713 posts.
3122
Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat
My thesis on the AI-first society and the future of software
3123
Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
3124
An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review
I’ve always wanted an ARM server in my homelab. But earlier, I either had to use an underpowered ARM system, or use Asahi which not only requires expensive Mac hardware but also slowed down in the past few years.
3125
The silent death of good code
I’ve been passionate about writing “Good Code™” since before I started my career, beginning way back when I was still a kid in middle school.
3126
Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
A beloved hometown impersonator had no idea what he was signing up for with this photoshoot.
3127
Life is too short for a slow terminal
I do all my work in the terminal, so it has to be quick. How my zsh starts in 30 milliseconds without a framework, and how to measure where your own shell spends its time.
3128
Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
LedgerStore became a case study for DynamoDB, and system design publications keep praising it to this day. But the design was abandoned 3 years after it went live.
3129
Cyberdecks, going analog, and convivial technology
People are moving away from corporate controlled tech, and making their own. How the designs of cyberdecks are being driven by women. And how medieval guilds, Luddites, and the Arts and Crafts movement are all connected to our current moment.
3130
Composition shouldn't be this hard
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.
3131
I tested 10 model/harness combinations on the same Three.js task
I've been testing a simple prompt with different model and harness combinations to work out which one produces best results. I do this in /goal mode.
3132
Soatok's Informal Guide to Threat Models
After a long day of exhausting conversations about Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography, random jackasses trying to play gotcha with endpoint attacks against end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, and me…
3133
Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight (2025)
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
3134
Stroustrup's Rule (2024)
Beginners need explicit syntax, experts want terse syntax.
3135
Engineering for Bounded Cognition
The mind that builds software is far smaller than the software it builds, and almost everything good in engineering is a way of living with that gap.
3136
Pandas Exercises for Data Analysis (Interactive)
101 interactive pandas exercises with solutions. Edit and run every code block directly in your browser — no installation needed.
3137
The simple elegance of the integrated timing belt loopback fastener
I’ve recently been working on a mechatronics project that involves constructing an X-Y cartesian motion system. I opted to use stepper motors to drive each axis, and timing belts and pulleys for translating the rotational torque of the steppers into linear motion. The timing belts need to be anchored to the component…
3138
Better Gaussian Splatting in Julia
use WASD + Mouse or tap on the screen to walk around :) Amulet of St. Michael in Kyiv, Ukraine (reconstructed with GaussianSplatting.jl, ~6M Gaussians)
3139
Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga
After the ACE BASIC posts of the last months, this one is about a different project I have been working on for the last half year: CL-Amiga , or Clamiga for short. It is a Common Lisp implementation built for the Amiga family -- classic AmigaOS 3 on 68k and MorphOS as a fully native PPC build, AROS and AmigaOS 4 maybe…
3140
3141
Bipartite Matching Is in NC
Since I’m a good mood today—at a beautiful science camp with my kids, high in the mountains near Big Bear Lake in California—I thought I’d blog about something positive. Las…
3142
Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087...
3143
UBI as a productivity dividend
Why Universal Basic Income (UBI) Is the Only Way to Share AI and Productivity Gains With Everyone
3144
I switched to Brave
I've been using Brave for a couple months now after using Firefox for around 25 years. I think Brave will be a permanent change.
3145
Were software engineers blue-collar workers all along?
There’s a common idea among economists that you can broadly split employees into two categories. “White-collar” workers are typically people who work in offices doing service-based, knowledge-based, managerial, or administrative...
3146
Why AI Sucks at Front End
How can it generate 3D worlds, videos, images and entire web pages, but still suck at front-end?
3147
Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026125 points118 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
At long last, Relic Entertainment has announced that Age of Empires 4 is coming. Strategy gamers rejoice! I am excited – I played the first one back in ’98 (I may be dating myself here)…
3148
The Car That Watches You Back: The Advertising Infrastructure of Modern Cars
How the connected car became an advertising surface. From Stellantis startup pop-ups to GSTV pumps to Gulp Radio aisles, and the consent infrastructure the automobile never developed.
3149
Excessive nil pointer checks in Go
Let’s talk about nil pointer checks in Go. You want to prevent panics in production, but that doesn’t start with a deferred recover. It starts with defensive programming. Check your inputs, check your bounds, and check pointers for nil before dereferencing them. I’ve started to see more nil checks in Go code. In the…
3150
Book prizes don't work how you think
all the beans that's fit to spill