3391
Why LLMs Can't Write Q/Kdb+: Writing Code Right-to-Left
In my previous post I showed how LLMs struggle with coding in q/kdb+; having immediate feedback loops using the q-MCP server does help a…
3392
Attention is a luxury good
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to. Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability …
3393
GPT-5o-mini hallucinates medical residency applicant grades
Since the opening of the residency recruitment season, we’ve heard your feedback on the Cortex Core Clerkship Transcript Normalization feature. As a physician-founded organization born out of our lived experience as applicants and program leaders, we understand the many emotions tied to the start of the season. We…
3394
A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine
How the Darwin-Gödel Machine rewrites its own code to improve, and whether we can trust it
3395
An open-source maintainer's guide to saying “no”
Stewardship in the age of cheap code
3396
Rails on SQLite: new ways to cause outages
This post was originally given as a talk for Friendly.rb and Kaigi on Rails. The slides are also available. Between Litestack and the Rails 8 trifecta of Solid Cable, Solid Cache, and Solid Queue, it’s easier than ever to spin up a Rails app that doesn’t need a database service, or a redis service, or a file storage…
3397
Adding Mastodon Comments to Your Blog
I hate ads. I also hate tracking and bloat. But I didn't actually hate the latter quite enough to get rid of Disqus for comments. It was a free, good service, and you could turn off ads for the users (which I did).
3398
How do interruptions impact different software engineering activities
Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.
3399
Faster substring search with SIMD in Zig
I've been learning a lot about low level programming languages lately, and for a long time there has been one thing that has interested me: SIMD (or 'single ins…
3400
My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)
TeX and related systems are often associated with their default fonts, Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern (CM) typefaces. While these fonts are excellent, they have become so ubiquitous in the scientific community that many LaTeX users have sought alternative fonts for their documents. As a result, a plethora of font…
3401
Why are smokestacks so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] “The big black stacks of the Illium Works of the Federal Apparatus Corporation spewed acid fumes and soot over the hundreds of men and women who were lined up before the red-brick employment office.” That’s the first line of one
3402
ClojureScript 1.12.42
We’re happy to announce a new release of ClojureScript. If you’re an existing user of ClojureScript please read over the following release notes carefully.
3403
RIP Usenix ATC
USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference . When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I…
3404
Optimizing a 6502 image decoder, from 70 minutes to 1 minute
A little walkthrough on an image decoder algorithm's high-level optimization, in order to make more digestable for a 6502 processor.
3405
A Year of Telepathy
Over the past year, three people with paralysis have received Neuralink implants. This blog post explores how each person is using Telepathy in everyday life.
3406
3407
A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
3408
3409
3410
Slow social media
How can we design better platforms?
3411
Revisiting Knuth's “Premature Optimization” Paper
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste e…
3412
A Post Mortem on the Gino Case
Zoe Ziani, a psychology researcher who had the misfortune several years ago as a Ph.D. student be tasked with following up on some unrelicable published psychology research, tells the story of how her department pulled the chair out from under her:
3413
LLMs and coding agents are a security nightmare
Things are about to get wild
3414
Julia 1.12 highlights
Highlights of the Julia 1.12 release.
3415
It Awaits Your Experiments
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016 [1] —“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing…
3416
AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery
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3417
The hidden complexity of scaling WebSockets
WebSockets are at the very core of Compose. Learn how we scaled them to support 1000s of concurrent users.
3418
Particle Life simulation in browser using WebGPU
If you don't care about the explanation and want a direct link to the simulation, here you go .
3419
Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE
Notes on installing and netbooting Windows 11 over iSCSI
3420
Introduction to Ada: a project-based exploration with rosettas
Discover Ada through a fun, project-based tutorial! Learn the language’s clarity, safety, and modern features while building an SVG rosetta generator. A…