USS George HW Bush under construction at Newport News shipyard. Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at the ship failure that caused the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, the boring part of Bell Labs, a more efficient way of making antimatter, underground nuclear reactors, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Francis Sco...

All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in general, research mathematicians don’t need to think about it when they’re solving their problems. They can take it for granted that sets behave the way they’d expect, and carry on with their work. Descriptive set theorists are an exception. Source All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract...

TigerBeetle Blog Nov 22, 2025 Continuing the tradition , I’ve been also blogging somewhat regularly on TigerBeetle’s blog, so you might want to check those articles out or even subscribe (my favorite RSS reader is RSSSSR ): https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/ https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/atom.xml Today’s post is a video version of Notes on Paxos ! TigerBeetle Blog Nov 22, 2025 Continuing the tradition , I’ve been also blogging somewhat regularly on T...

Air Lab is the Flipper Zero of air quality monitors This air quality monitor costs $250. It's called the Air Lab , and I've been using it to measure the air in my car, home, studio, and a few events over the past few months. And in using it over the course of a road trip I learned to not run recirculate in my car quite as often—more on that later. Networked Artifacts built in some personality: Jeff Geerling November 21, 2025 Air Lab is the Flipper Zero of ai...

Ever tried to hammer a nail in with a potato? Nor me, but that’s what I’ve felt like I’ve been attempting to do when trying to really understand agents, as well as to come up with an example agent to build. As I wrote about previously , citing Simon Willison, an LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal . Unlike building ETL/ELT pipelines, these were some new concepts that I was struggling to fit to an even semi-plausible real world example. That’s because I wa...

Carmichael Numbers are the bane of probabilistic primality algorithms. You have to go through extra steps just to handle these relatively rare numbers. But did you know that the Miller-Rabin algorithm not only determines the compositeness of Carmichael numbers but can actually find non-trivial factors? Apparently none of the AI models I tried did either. Feel free, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, to train on this blog post. Let's start with Fermat's little theorem, not as big as his "last" one but...

Orbital Index is taking next week off for American Thanksgiving. Happy turkey / turducken / tofurky day, everyone! 🦃 ...

Important # indieweb lesson in # modular website setup this morning: Keep your DNS provider separate from your CDN separate from your webhost, so you can swap out any one of them as necessary, whether for economic or as it were today, reliability reasons. And make sure those services themselves don’t depend on each other. This is of course regarding the # Cloudflare # outage: * https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/8gmgl950y3h7 * https://theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/18/cloud...

I want to be upfront that this blog post is for me to write down some thoughts that I have on the idea of rewriting the Python Launcher for Unix from Rust to pure Python. This blog post is not meant to explicitly be educational or enlightening for others, but I figured if I was going to write this down I might as well just toss it online in case someone happens to find it interesting. Anyway, with that caveat out of the way... I started working on the Python Launcher for Unix in May 2018 . At...

I've been working on adding support for comments over the last few months. On a static site, that's hard, but it's finally done. A few months ago Maurice Renck and I were having a conversation on the Fedi (I think) and he mentioned that he would prefer to leave a comment than send me an email. Since then I’ve also seen a few other people talk about how they like to see a comments section on blogs. So while I’ve been pissing about with Jekyll recently, I decided to build a commenting s...

Hot on the heels of Tuesday's Gemini 3 Pro release, today it's Nano Banana Pro , also known as Gemini 3 Pro Image . I've had a few days of preview access and this is an astonishingly capable image generation model. As is often the case, the most useful low-level details can be found in the API documentation : Designed to tackle the most challenging workflows through advanced reasoning, it excels at complex, multi-turn creation and modification tasks. High-resolution output : B...

Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has made listening to customers a top priority, saying at Intel Vision earlier this year: "Please be brutally honest with us. This is what I expect of you this week, and I believe harsh feedback is most valuable." I'd been in regular meetings with Intel for several years before I joined, and I had been giving them technical direction on various projects, including at times some brutal feedback. When I finally interviewed for a role at Intel I was told something ...

I’ve been on the road in Europe for the last couple of weeks, and while I was there Thoughtworks released volume 33 of our Technology Radar . Again it’s dominated by the AI wave, with lots of blips capturing our explorations of how to use LLMs and similar technology. “Agents” are the big thing these days but we’re also seeing growing movements in infrastructure orchestration, coding workflows - and the inevitable antipatterns. Many thanks to my colleagues for putting this together aga...

When did computer scientists start to talk about “simulation” between programs? As of a couple of months ago, the earliest paper I had seen on this topic was Robin Milner’s widely cited IJCAI 1971 paper, “An algebraic definition of simulation between programs” . (That’s the official publisher’s version, but this tech report version seems to have more readable typesetting.) 1 Recently, though, I came across this historical overview of bisimulation by Davide Sangiorgi, publish...

<iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-PKGWQMKL" height="0" width="0"></iframe> This document curates the most common questions Shreya and I received while teaching 700+ engineers & PMs AI Evals. Warning: These are sharp opinions about what works in most cases. They are not universal truths. Use your judgment. 👉 Want to learn more about AI Evals? Check out our AI Evals course . It’s a live cohort with hands on exercises and office hours. Here is ...

Modern CPUs, operating systems, and software in general do lots of smart and hard-to-track optimizations, leading to warmup behavior, cache effects, profile pollution and other unexpected interactions. For us engineers and scientists, whether in industry or academia, this unfortunately means that we may not fully understand the system on top of which we are trying to measure the performance impact of, for instance, an optimization, a new feature, a data structure, or even a bug fix. Many of u...

The more I work with large language models through provider-exposed APIs, the more I feel like we have built ourselves into quite an unfortunate API surface area. It might not actually be the right abstraction for what’s happening under the hood. The way I like to think about this problem now is that it’s actually a distributed state synchronization problem. At its core, a large language model takes text, tokenizes it into numbers, and feeds those tokens through a stack of matrix multipl...

After yesterday’s experiments with rework I was going to spend a post or two building some charts, but apparently people find a task-centric simulation less natural than a worker-centric one, so instead I’m going to do some rearchitecting. Parameters Let’s start by going back to a pool of developers doing tasks one at a time without rework. As before, we’ll define some default parameters, including a random number seed to ensure reproducibility: PARAMS = { "max_task_dur...

A dusting of snow blankets hills in the distance, left over from the snowfall two evenings ago. There are thin light clouds above the hills through which the sky peeks. On the horizon, separating the snowy white hills from the light grey clouds, there is a hint of a pale red, cast from the sun setting at the opposite end of the sky. The sun is setting , I think to myself. Knowing that it will soon be the evening, I stand by the window and gaze out the window so I can see as much of the hills as ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alexandra Wolfe, whose blog can be found at wrywriter.ca . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Luigi Mozzillo and the other 124 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?...

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (November 19, 2025) — Shield AI and Destinus today announced a strategic partnership to integrate Hivemind, Shield AI’s mission autonomy software, across Destinus’ aerial platforms. Together, the companies are creating the first scalable, cross-platform autonomy architecture jointly developed by next-generation defense leaders in Europe and the United States. By combining Shield AI’s battle-proven autonomy with Destinus’ industrial-scale European manufacturing, t...

I’m writing this post from the cute hotel breakfast room in Hanoi. It’s been bucketing down since we got here, but that hasn’t stopped us having some of the best food I’ve ever had in the world. I wasn’t sure whether I’d be live-blogging this trip like our recent Japan trip , but I’ve decided to take a digital break. I’m still making notes on what we’re doing, so I can do a recount when we get back. I’ll see you in early December. Thanks for reading. By Ruben Scha...

I've recently been downsizing my Magic: The Gathering collection to cards that I really want to keep. I think a "collectible card game" is a good way to indulge a lot of my worse packratting tendencies, and living in a small New York apartment is not really all that great of a situation for being a hoarder. But it's a good impetus for me to ask which of these cards I actually want to continue to own. When you sell Magic cards to an online store they want them sorted in a particular way (or, so...