I read The Frugal Gamer’s post “ If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell? ” with great joy. Like The Frugal Gamer, I too am bundled up inside bracing the weather. I was hoping to go for a walk but the rain and wind has convinced me to stay inside and instead huddle around a warm beverage. Which brings me to my answer. If I were to open a shop, I think it would be a coffee shop. I have spent so much time in coffee shops and tea houses. When I was young, I used to go to cafe...

Gitanjali Venkatraman does wonderful illustrations of complex subjects (which is why I was so happy to work with her on our Expert Generalists article). She has now published the latest in her series of illustrated guides: tackling the complex topic of Mainframe Modernization In it she illustrates the history and value of mainframes, why modernization is so tricky, and how to tackle the problem by breaking it down into tractable pieces. I love the clarity of her explanations, and smile...

I wrote about JustHTML yesterday - Emil Stenström's project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last night, purely out of curiosity, I decided to try porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with the least amount of effort possible, using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2. It worked beyond my expectations. TL;DR I built simonw/justjshtml , a dependency-free HTML5 parsing library ...

With the growing trend of countries proposing laws to restrict access to the web based on users’ age, I feel compelled to say two things: A) No, age-gating social media is not going to kill what’s left of the internet. If you think “the internet” = “social media sites,” then that’s your fault, and you should be ashamed. But don't get it twisted: this doesn't mean that these laws aren't bad, because they are. B) How about, instead of preventing “the kids” from accessing soci...

I find this sort of thing fascinating. I looked for detailed info before my own surgery because I like to know what I’m getting into. If you’re grossed out by surgical/medical descriptions or photos, skip this one.  So I had this spot — like a pimple or small wart — appear under my right eye years ago. 2017, 2018? Sometime in there. It was very small, directly under/partially on the lash line near the inside corner of my right eye. Not really noticeable, didn’t hurt or itch or gro...

Linux 6.18 has released, and we have a bit to talk about for this holiday season progress report! More upstreaming madness Last time, we announced that the core SMC driver had finally been merged upstream after three long years. Following that success, we have started the process of merging the SMC’s subdevice drivers which integrate all of the SMC’s functionality into the various kernel subsystems. The hwmon driver has already been accepted for 6. Linux 6.18 has released, and we have a bit...

Taking apart a Boeing 747 to build the 747 house . Via Inhabitat . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Boom Supersonic’s gas turbine, the reliability of learning curves, a fake bridge collapse, using coal mines for geothermal energy, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Boom announces a gas turbine Supersonic jet ...

Throughout the years, I’ve been part of a few medium- to large-scale system migrations. As in, rewriting old logic in a new language or stack. The goal is usually better scalability, resilience, and maintainability, or more flexibility to adapt to changing requirements. Now, whether rewriting your system is the right move is its own debate. A common question that shows up during a migration is, “How do we make sure the new system behaves exactly like the old one, minus the icky parts?” A...

Whenever I start a new internal project or doc repository, I always include a section on the welcome page called A Moment of Calm . I was retiring one of these internal wikis recently, and wanted to preserve this section for posterity: This was taken in Yosemite in 2005 by Jay Bergesen . Lovely. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-17. Whenever I start a new internal project or doc repository, I always include a section on the welcome page called A Moment of Calm . I was retiring one o...

From Dwarkesh Patel : Unreasonably effective writing advice: “What are you trying to say here? Okay, just write that.” Writing effectively is notoriously hard. Even once you get past writers block and are actually writing words on the page, organizing those words coherently is challenging. One virtue I’ve come to value in writing is simplicity. That is, writing in a way that can be understood while minimizing the cognitive load on the reader. I find this virtue most useful i...

Last week we talked about the different ways we can decompose a simple predicate which is a conjunction of two simpler predicates. Given the query: SELECT * FROM ab WHERE a = 7 AND b = 100 We can: Not decompose the filter at all, and scan our base data applying the predicate a = 7 AND b = 100 , push down the a = 7 filter and translate the scan over the primary index into a scan on a secondary index, then apply the b = 100 filter on the results of that, o...

Programmers often want to randomly shuffle arrays. Evidently, we want to do so as efficiently as possible. Maybe surprisingly, I found that the performance of random shuffling was not limited by memory bandwidth or latency, but rather by computation. Specifically, it is the computation of the random indexes itself that is slow. Earlier in 2025 , I reported how you could more than double the speed of a random shuffle in Go using a new algorithm ( Brackett-Rozinsky and Lemire, 2025 ). However, I...

It’s that time of the year, and we’re proud to announce the NEW song of ice and fire calendar for 2027 with some amazing digital art provided by Tyler Jacobson.   Here’s a link to some of Tylers artwork: www.tylerjacobsonart.com And while Tylers art won’t be available till next year don’t forget that Tom Kidd’s Knight of the Seven kingdoms 2026 calendar is ready and waiting just in time for the holiday season. TOM KIDD’S WEBSITE LINK TO PURCHASE CALENAR 2026  All of Tom...

It’s been too long since I last shared my photos, so here’s a crow I saw a couple of months ago. I love watching the local birds. The sparrows in my neighbour’s hedge, the starlings that like to perch up high in their tree, the crows and the magpies playing on the roofs, the occasional blackbirds skittering around on the ground... they all bring me just so much joy. Olympus OM-20, Soligor 400mm f/6.3, Kodak Ultramax 400 Olympus OM-20, Soligor 400mm f/6.3, Kodak Ultramax 400...

About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why things are the way they are. In an effort to understand those reasons, I opened a GitHub issue which resulted in a short but productive discussion. I walked away discouraged, and then decided to, reasons be damned, attack this problem from three different angles. ...

Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces , to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I’ve learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent arti...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 348  | Dec 17, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

Well it’s that time of year already! Whilst munching on a mince pie , enjoy the final Interesting Links for 2025. It’s been a busy twelve months for me; this time last year I was signing off from my last company, which went on to be acquired —and last week I found out that my current company (Confluent) is to be acquired by IBM . Despite my reaction against any kind of cheese moving , I figure this is going to be an interesting development and a whole new experience for me :) ...

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 a 25% discount code for readers. 👈 Listen to the audio version of this FAQ If you prefer to listen ...

Since I’ve decided to use TOON instead of JSON, I’ve benchmarked the performance of serialization of 2 Go TOON libraries compared to JSON built-in serialization. Here are the results using current version of the libraries and go 1.25: % go run . goos: darwin goarch: arm64 pkg: bench_toon cpu: Apple M3 Pro BenchmarkJSONMarshalCompact-11 3488496 322.3 ns/op BenchmarkJSONMarshal-11 767379 1546 ns/op BenchmarkToonMarshal-11 669687 1...

Like last year’s overview of a happening 2024 in global lunar exploration , I present to you a comprehensive, curated, and contextualized linked rundown of lunar technology and science developments across 2025, organized by country or region. There is also a section on progressive cooperative & collaborative international efforts—because these are the gems we need more of—as well as a section discussing shortcomings in the same. Each linked article in the overview explains the importance ...

ONE The following headline confused me:                     Trump, 79, Deletes Weird AI Video Shilling Magic Beds  (see  here ).  Was Weird Al selling magic beds? Magic beds? ! How does that relate to President Trump? What’s going on? The problem is the font: a capital I (as in AI) can look like a lowercase l (as in Al). So the headline should really be: Trump, 79, Deletes Weird Artificial Intelligence Video Shilling Magic Beds. This case is particularly confusing because: a) We...

I’ve been moving all my MCPs to skills, including the remaining one I still used: the Sentry MCP 1 . Previously I had already moved entirely away from Playwright to a Playwright skill. In the last month or so there have been discussions about using dynamic tool loadouts to defer loading of tool definitions until later. Anthropic has also been toying around with the idea of wiring together MCP calls via code, something I have experimented with . I want to share my updated findings with...