2281
Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu
The website of Ike Saunders
2282
Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the…
2283
The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral. Except if we look…
2284
Overcoming the friendship recession
My thoughts on the friendship recession and what I'm doing to maintain friendships.
2285
Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need
An attempted improvement that only makes things worse. It is time we start naming this phenomenon in software engineering.
2286
Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history
First we reinvented statistics. Then finance. Now we're reinventing program management and calling it agentic orchestration.
2287
Just a little AI resistance, as a treat
At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to Professor Kate Devlin who was talking a little about the AI Resist List. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI. Here's an example. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites. One…
2288
Building on ATProto
If you prefer to receive all of my writing in your inbox, you can subscribe here. I strive to publish weekly, on Tuesday mornings.
2289
Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits
I have seen a lot of public discussion around supply-chain attacks on the Python ecosystem, prompt injection risks when using coding agents,...
2290
Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles
Exploring cyberspace with a thumbstick.
2291
When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python
Some internet standards only support ASCII characters, but the world uses much more than the Latin alphabet. Thus, a mapping from Unicode to ASCII for use in domain names is required. NamePrep was...
2292
Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
First foray into the Zig programming language
2293
Bespoke: A programming language for people who say please
Modern programming languages are full of violence, vulgar abbreviations, and naked imperatives. Bespoke is a statically typed alternative in which exceptions are regrettable circumstances, mutexes ...
2294
LLMs as the new high level language
[UPDATE 2026-06-09]: a few months on, I have more misgivings than certainties about this.
2295
Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally
2296
The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services
A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future of software, books, music, and movies, in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse, while the human-made variant moves into a luxury segment of its own.
2297
How to engineer an AI harness for game development
Exploring practical ways to make your game more legible to AI agents and how to make agentic iteration faster.
2298
Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
Solid core + capability-based sandboxes + LLMs = Users with superpowers
2299
A Tour of Oodi
A library reaching for the future
2300
Understanding Traceroute
I never understood how traceroute discovers each hop. Turns out it's a clever TTL trick, and about 80 lines of Rust.
2301
The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
Don't update positively on your extremist beliefs whenever you hear a bad argument against them
2302
When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
From Situational Awareness’s Blow-up to Materials Science to the HuggingFace Hack
2303
I hate compilers
You'd think that given the same bytes of input you'd get the same bytes of output. lol. lmao. No, you don't. It's complicated.
2304
Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)
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2305
2306
747s and coding agents
Comparing a career flying the 747 and a career coding with AI assistance.
2307
What would a serious AI product look like?
Every “AI” tool is missing critical features that you would need if you wanted to do real work with them. What would those look like, if they existed?
2308
Bayesian statistics for confused data scientists
A gentle introduction to Bayesian statistics for data scientists who, like me, are confused by it.
2309
Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1
Floréal Technologies: Open software, French touch, International reach.
2310
Move Slow and Fix Things (2024)
Growing up as a kid in rural Bavaria, I always …