5671
Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash
The backlash against data centers is difficult to understand if your salary depends on your not understanding it.
5672
Cursor is now a part of SpaceX
Cursor has officially been acquired by SpaceX.
5673
5674
Reflections on software engineering in the age of AI
For those of you who don’t know, when I’m not writing novels, I spend my days as a software engineer, writing code. The software industry these days relies heavily on artificial intelligence. Because it has studied trillions of lines of publicly accessible source code, because code solves problems with testable right…
5675
Can Claude Fly a Plane?
I asked Claude to look up the X-Plane 12 API and try to fly a Cessna from Hainan to somewhere nearby. It kept a pilot's log. Everything below is Claude's own notes from during the flight. I occasionally had to remind it to keep the pilot log running, and had to tell it when it crashed as xplane would quickly restart…
5676
Our framework for reporting model misalignment
OpenAI shares a framework for tracking, investigating, and disclosing model misalignment, alongside six reports of unexpected or concerning model behavior.
5677
Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding
Explore how a decade of open source experiments in psychovisual modeling and compression led to JPEG XL, the future of image coding.
5678
There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
Metaphors like "a sinking ship" are often used to describe codebases, but are misleading. A _business_ will sink long before code quality reaches a hypothetical floor. Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset, so metaphors that imply an end provide a false sense of security.
5679
The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27
I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book . The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS…
5680
TextEdit vs. Pages
Allison Sheridan is right when she says TextEdit can usually do the job. But I'm sticking with Pages anyway.
5681
SIMD programming in pure Rust
I've recently tasted AMD Zen 5 CPUs (AWS' m8a instances) and... Whooaaa. Even before talking about GPUs and NPUs, the next 5 years of CPUs will be very exciting! For
5682
Game Boy Advance Audio Interpolation
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
5683
Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation
My fourth month of unemployment. I'm fresh off an interview with a senior technical role advertised with a decent compensation range whose upper end would let me make median rent, and whose lower range would not. At the end of an excellent interview, I am informed that said compensation
5684
The Power of a Free Popsicle (2018)
A new book shows the value of memorable defining moments on customer and employee experiences.
5685
Sysadmining Like It's 2009
2026 legacy lab summer camp plan
5686
Hands-On Introduction to Unikernels
Learn what a unikernel is and how it compares to a Linux container. Build and run your first unikernel inside a playground box.
5687
Felix and I
He is young – twenty four – sitting at the black computer table by the wall of his living room. I’m looking at him side-on. He’s silhouetted by the huge window with a gorgeous view of the neighbourhood church. Green trees outside. The sun is shining brightly. It’s summer. Probably “The Hot Summer”, when our friends G…
5688
Lil Finder Guy
Who is it? What is it? Is it friend or foe? Has it arrived in peace, or is it plotting to corrupt our SSDs and fray our USB-C cables?
5689
Hologram v0.7.0: Milestone release for Elixir-to-JavaScript porting initiative
Hologram v0.7.0: 49 contributors ported 150 Erlang functions, pushing runtime coverage from 34% to 96%. Plus enhancements, bug fixes, and infrastructure work.
5690
Against vibes: When is a generative model useful
Let's suppose I wanted to answer a question: is the tool X useful for the task Y. If I were scientific about this, I would analyze the properties of tool X and develop a model, and the task Y and the requirements for it and develop a model, and I would us...
5691
The real cost of random I/O
How good is the random_page_cost default, and should you lower it on modern flash storage?
5692
MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Wo...
5693
March, 19-21: God is a comedian
A stiff drink is recommended
5694
Space Shuttle Endeavour's 20-story vertical display
The California Science Center has begun the complex process of moving components into place for space shuttle Endeavour’s awe-inspiring vertical display.
5695
Rubin Observatory's first LSST Camera release: 500k galaxies in the COSMOS field
A new image from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a spectacularly deep view into a famous region of sky known as the COSMOS field. Located in the constellation Sextans, COSMOS is one of the most observed patches of the Universe — and Rubin’s new image adds a powerful new view of this well-known cosmic landmark.
5696
ToothPaste
AES-256 Cross Platform Device Control.
5697
A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits (2021)
Transformer language models are an emerging technology that is gaining increasingly broad real-world use, for example in systems like GPT-3 , LaMDA , Codex , Meena , Gopher , and similar models. However, as these models scale, their open-endedness and high capacity creates an increasing scope for unexpected and…
5698
The mountain that weighed the Earth
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
5699
We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust
And lived to tell the tale.
5700
Formal Methods and the Future of Programming
I’ve been telling people for the last 25 years that Jane Street as an organization was just not interested in formal methods.