3991
How I feel about AI
It's complicated
3992
How employment is changing at Anthropic
How has AI restructured work and employment at Anthropic? As a company at the frontier of AI adoption, Anthropic could be a leading indicator of how AI will shift work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy.
3993
The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma…
3994
Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
Bear with me, because some of these "lies" are going to feel obvious, or like unimportant trivia. In all honesty, that's not that far from the truth. However, I hope you'll let me try to build a detailed and fun illustration showing how something as mundane as email can break our expectations in surprising ways.
3995
The lost art of XML
There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. "Oh, XML," they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. "We use…
3996
LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction
" A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures."
3997
The Vibe Tax
Pol had 12 hours, a blank repo, and a fresh weekly quota. By morning, only one of those remained.
3998
Are arrays functions?
A high-performance and high-level purely functional data-parallel array programming language that can execute on the GPU and CPU.
3999
The AI Industry Is Lying to You
Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not subscribe to my premium newsletter? It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5000 to 18,000 words, including
4000
11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey
A unique statue depicting a human sitting on the back of a leopard has been unearthed from the Neolithic site of Karahan Tepe near Şanlıurfa, southern Turkey. The figure is 70 cm (27.6 inches) high and was discovered in what archaeologists believe was its original location: on a stone platform along the wall of a…
4001
There is more to code review than (automatable) detection
The abstract for article “ The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection ” paints this picture for the reader…
4002
The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
FROMSOFT has a reputation for diverse and punishing npc encounters across the entire Soulsborne extended series, but the implementation of the AI decision making itself is perhaps unexpectedly low-tech. Since the majority of the code is implemented in Havok Script (A games-oriented Lua implementation from Havok) it’s…
4003
Petered
We’re looking in the wrong place for the imposters among us.
4004
I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on…
4005
The Isolation Trap: Erlang
Erlang's mailbox design is more disciplined than Go's channels: only the owning process can read from a mailbox, and sends are asynchronous. Yet the four failure modes of shared mutable state still show up, just in different shapes.
4006
Reports of Telnet's death have been greatly exaggerated
Terrace runs sensors attackers cannot tell from real targets. We see new attack sources first, record what they do, and ship the block rules while the attack is still running.
4007
Video Encoding and Decoding with Vulkan Compute Shaders in FFmpeg
In this blog we explore how FFmpeg uses Vulkan Compute to seamlessly accelerate encoding and decoding of even professional-grade video on consumer GPUs — unlocking GPU compute parallelism at scale, without specialized hardware. This approach complements Vulkan Video's fixed-function codec support, extending…
4008
Raspberry Pi Pico 2 at 873.5MHz with 3.05V Core Abuse
Adventures with dry ice and RP2350 - how fast can it go?
4009
We are building data breach machines and nobody cares
A few weeks ago, my longstanding friend and colleague Curt Cunning mentioned to me that he was slogging through Nietzsche, which bespeaks his incredible will to power through things that are unpleasant (one of the many things that makes him an exceptional engineer). In any case, it lead me to revisit some of his work…
4010
DuckDB 1.5.2 – SQL database that runs on laptop, server, in the browser
We are releasing DuckDB version 1.5.2, a patch release with bugfixes, performance improvements, and support for the DuckLake 1.0 lakehouse format.
4011
How to grow a cacao tree at home (2024)
Growing chocolate at home might sound like a wild idea, right? Chocolate originates from cacao trees, which demand a tropical climate, specific growing conditions, and several years to reach maturity in order to flower and fruit to produce cacao pods. However, our CocoTerra founder, Nate Saal, took on the challenge…
4012
A type-safe, realtime collaborative Graph Database in a CRDT
Open-source TypeScript property graph database from codemix.
4013
Improving C# Memory Safety
The `unsafe` keyword is being redesigned to mark caller-facing contracts rather than just syntax. Safety obligations between callers and callees become visible and reviewable. The model is motivated by the rise of AI-assisted code generation and arrives as a preview in .NET 11.
4014
Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software.
4015
A fortuitous decade as an indie software developer
Ten years and one day ago, on August 9, 2016, I abruptly quit my job. I mark this occasion as the beginning of my indie software developer career. Happy anniversary to me and to my customers!
4016
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025
Backblaze's 2025 Year-End Drive Stats Report provides an in-depth analysis of hard drive failure rates for Q4, the full year, and lifetime performance across its data center fleet.
4017
The death of the brick and mortar toy store
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why more and more local stores are going defunct. A …
4018
My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it
Senior engineers are best positioned to benefit from AI. We're good enough to avoid slop, and there's so much we can accomplish. I wouldn't go back.
4019
The three year myth
I got let go from my job - elimination of role, they're claiming - so I'm understandably a bit raw. So was my boss from what it looked like, though he still has a paycheck and benefits whereas I do not. Still, rawness is an excellent time to reflect on
4020
I don't recommend Tailwind CSS
Tailwind CSS is a very popular CSS framework among web developers. With no prior graphic design knowledge, it solves the standardization of spacing…