For over 20 years, the meditative focus of programming has been one of the best parts of my job. Every week I’d spend countless hours in a flow state, which quiets the default mode network. The DMN is responsible for daydreaming/reflection but also rumination/worrying, so quieting it settles your mind. If I didn’t…
The Nasdaq wiped out roughly $2.5 trillion in market cap on Thursday, officially pushing the index into correction territory.
Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you're a scientist, journalist, or just someone who…
In a WWDC 2011 session, Dan Schimpf explained some of the goals of the refreshed design for Aqua in Mac OS X Lion were “meant to focus the user attention on the active window content”. This sentiment was echoed by John Siracusa in his review of Lion for Ars Technica: Apple says that its goal […]
a tale about a young transgender intern
Note: I’ve seen some online chatter about the possibility that the footage shared in this post could be AI generated (which is pretty depressing, but here we are I suppose). I just wanted to …
Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity…
FDR has always been one of my favorite presidents, second maybe to Lincoln. Both were men the establishment assumed were one of them until, to their horror, they governed like they weren't. Both could trash the opposition in one breath and take the moral high ground in the next.
An interactive data journalism piece exploring the rise of young-onset colorectal cancer, with population simulations, risk factors, and prevention information.
A blog about software craft and quality
Human DX optimizes for discoverability. Agent DX optimizes for predictability. What I learned building a CLI for agents first.
VE Commercial Vehicles’ My Eicher platform had a critical vulnerability that let you take over anyone’s account and gain control over their vehicle fleets.
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…
A Ligo research note on redundancy in natural protein fold space and what kind of data still carries signal.
A look at AI Chip Architectures. NVIDIA, AMD, TPUs, Trainium, Groq, Cerebras.
Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.
At WWDC 2025, Apple announced macOS 26 Tahoe. One of the new features in macOS Tahoe is a new disk image format: ASIF. Designed for use with virtual machines (its documentation lives under the Virtualization framework), ASIF takes a lot of inspiration from existing virtual disk formats. Practically, that means it’s…
In the last post, I got the game’s clouds to look passable. But after looking at it during playtesting, I still wasn’t satisfied with the way the overall picture of how sea, sky and clouds came together. With some small tweaks, things started to look a lot better.
Lately I've been spending time learning Scheme and using it to implement the concepts I'm learning in my physics classes as time permits. One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot. One of the biggest challenges has been the fact that Hoot is…
Yesterday I was looking at YC jobs to see if there were any interesting small startups hiring in my area (while I otherwise love my current fully-remote job,...
[This is a guest post by Álvaro Lozano-Robledo. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] TL;DR: Keep calm and carry on studying math. I wo…
I had a dream last night I went to work at Amazon. Joining the Bezos neofeudal empire. This post is directed at anyone with talent who works at a tech company ushering in this future.
Compared to their parents, Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids. The new American dad is more present and more exhausted—but also, more satisfied with life.
They are draining the economic potential of our cities. We need to make them financially unsustainable.
Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye: I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment. Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries…
Ok, the title is a tongue-in-cheek, but there's very little thought put into files in most languages. It always feels a bit out of place... except in C. In fact, what you get is usually a worse version of C.
Somehow a film made 56 years ago named Colossus The Forbin Project predicted the world of today
A blog about software craft and quality
[This is a guest post by the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] We would …
