One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet: Store …
Passkeys are the future of authentication, but using them for data encryption is a disaster waiting to happen. Overloading these credentials creates a dangerous blast radius that can lead to the irreversible loss of a user's most sacred memories and documents.
Calibrate your enthusiasm
Posted on Friday 3 Jul 2026. 723 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.
09 Apr 2026 The Vercel Plugin on Claude Code wants to read all your prompts!
Latest Geekbench performance figures for macOS VMs, and testing of how few cores and how little memory is really needed: could you run a macOS VM usefully on a MacBook Neo?
Ever since Golden Gate Claude I’ve been fascinated with “steering”: the idea that you can guide LLM outputs by directly manipulating the activations of the…
Back in 2019, SwiftUI was announced as the future of Apple development. Seven years later, it still feels like a beta version struggling with stability, performance, and many other aspects. What’s actually wrong with SwiftUI?
If xAI defaults on its debt, Apollo Global Management ends up in the GPU rental business.
This past Tuesday I typed C-x C-c in Emacs for the last time after 20 years of daily use. Though nearly half that time was gradually retiring it, switching to modal editing, then to Vim. Emacs is a platform, and I’d grown accustomed to its applications, especially those I built myself. There was no particular hurry…
Follow a sponsored result in Google to a page in Medium that provides a Terminal command that you will live to regret. And what is Marek’s disease?
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
The Napoleon technique is a productivity technique that involves postponing dealing with something if it’s likely to get resolved without your immediate input.
A blog about software development and programming.
Many of us are inconsistent in our economic desires. I would like the price of my home to rise, because it increases my wealth, but I would also like the prices of all other homes to fall, so that I could sell my house and buy an even nicer house. Also, I would like to
The value of human thinking is going down. The value of human attention is going up. Those two facts are pointing in very different directions.
Making English more enjoyable to write.
In a recent episode of President Curtis , the President struggles with opening a door on two separate occasions. These doors don't work beca...
I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them: Here’s one for the…
A guide to implementing JSON-LD on your personal website for better SEO, covering WebSite, Person, BlogPosting, and more with ready-to-use code snippets.
After I posted 8086 microcode disassembled , Ken Shirriff sent me a high-resolution image of the microcode ROM from the 80386. I didn’t expect I would ever do anything with it for a couple of reasons: one is that it’s absolutely huge (94720 bits) compared to the 8086 one (10752 bits) so (even with bitract or similar)…
Investigating JPEG XL's place as a Web image codec.
Java 26 is here, and its main purpose seems to be to provide a solid foundation for future things to come. It comes with a few new features, some performance improvements and multiple enhancements that mention Project Valhalla as the inspiration for their existence. This post has all the info!
The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English
I recently watched a video that put a name on something I'd been feeling. The author splits an LLM's context window into two zones. There's the smart zone , where the model is sharp, and the dumb zone , where attention drops off and the model starts forgetting what you told it five minutes ago. The cutoff sits…
Noticing responses to problems; there’s a whole set. The consultant’s reaction to each of these as they arise.
AI's coding ability is outpacing our ability to wield it effectively. That gap closes in levels — 8 of them. Here's the progression from tab complete to autonomous agent teams.
Solitary work, creativity and larval ideas
If vibecoding is what people say it is, the world should be drowning in vibecoded artifacts right now. Two years of access. Millions of people with the tools. The barrier supposedly fell, right? RIGHT? So where is everything?
