When people think about autonomy in aviation, they often focus on what it can do — flying complex missions, reacting to dynamic environments, making intelligent decisions in real time. But the real challenge isn’t getting autonomy to work , rather it’s proving that it can be trusted.   For autonomous flight to scale across aircraft and mission sets, it must meet the same airworthiness expectations we apply to human pilots. This isn’t just paperwork; it’s the difference between a de...

The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this lubricating, liquidlike layer is what makes ice slippery. They disagree, though, about why the layer forms. Three main theories about the phenomenon have been debated over the past two centuries. Source The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that ...

If your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can. — Marcus Aurelius What we learn as children programs us in certain ways. These programs run subconsciously. They determine our default emotional responses to everything  and the meaning we derive from those responses and the behaviors we enact based on the meanings we derive. Some of these programs served me well in childhood but don’t work for helping me be the person I want to be as an adult. There are healthy...

Last week’s now-corrected headline & intro of a peak-peek at lunar samples had a peak typo (pun intended). I wish I could conveniently blame it on the very productive yet equally tiring Hong Kong trip to cover the international lunar sample science symposium coupled with the excitement of having seen fresh Moon samples. Or perhaps put it on Hong Kong itself because you can’t peek at its towering structures—they peak at you. But the reality is that it was just me being sloppy while rewr...

A vulnerability in a docker container caused my VPS to catch a bug A vulnerability in a docker container caused my VPS to catch a bug

Programming note : Bits about Money is supported by our readers . I generally forecast about one issue a month, and haven't kept that pace that this year. As a result, I'm working on about 3-4 for December. Much financial innovation is in the ultimate service of the real economy. Then, we have our friends in crypto, who occasionally do intellectually interesting things which do not have a locus in the real economy. One of those things is perpetual futures (hereafter, perps), which I find fasci...

For various reasons, I find myself working on a laptop with no external screen, mouse, or separate keyboard for a time. Of course, since I don’t normally use this setup, I obviously needed an entirely new Linux setup to celebrate the occasion and so that I could spend the requisite day of setup before going back to real work. This time I’m on a minimal kick and so started with Ubuntu Server with the minimize option to have basically nothing, and build up just the parts I want and need. For ...

I keep a Google Doc titled "Notes". I look at it every day. I feel guilty when I look at it. I feel guilty because Notes has my TODO list. Notes has a log of how slowly I do things, if I do them at all. I haven't had a job for one third of a year and I am not rich yet; and I don't deserve to be. I'm not doing much of anything at all. When the year ends, I will have been unemployed for 136 days. August Summary One Week of Unemployment Two Weeks of Unemployment In August, I read a lot of books. I ...

Elon Musk is not happy with the EU fining his X platform and is currently on a tweet rampage complaining about it. Among other things, he wants the whole EU to be abolished. He sadly is hardly the first wealthy American to share their opinions on European politics lately. I’m not a fan of this outside attention but I believe it’s noteworthy and something to pay attention to. In particular because the idea of destroying and ripping apart the EU is not just popular in the US; it’s popu...

1. It’s hard not to think about the direction the software engineering field is going in. I don’t think you, dear reader, need to be reminded of this, but just to set up some timeline tentpoles: In mid 2024 , Github Copilot was something of a pleasant convenience for coding. This was the “fancy autocomplete” era. A “nice to have”, which you could lean on, but where you still felt fully in-control of the process of writing code. In early February (2025) , I wrote about how...

In the past two months or so, I spent some time making tiny GLSL demos. I wrote an article about the first one, Red Alp . There, I went into details about the whole process, so I recommend to check it out first if you're not familiar with the field. We will look at 4 demos: Moonlight , Entrance 3 , Archipelago , and Cutie . But this time, for each demo, we're going to cover one or two things I learned from it. It won't be a deep dive into every aspect because it would be extremely redun...

There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton With respect, I think that handling interrupts is harder than either of these. Yesterday’s post explained how SimPy does this. Today, after several near misses, we’ll look at how to add it to our simulation. A Quick Recap Our Simulation class now includes a process that waits a random interval, chooses a random developer, and interrupts her by calling .interrupt : cla...

The playwright  Tom Stoppard passed away at the age of 88 on Nov. 29, 2025. ONE) He wrote many plays and some movies.  Below I highlight his works whose themes I think will be of interest to my readers (Or at least to me—your mileage may vary.) 1)  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) This is Hamlet told from the point of view of two minor characters who, in Shakespeare’s original, can best be described as plot furniture. The play begins with, R and G are flipping coins. R bets ...

The one constant that I have observed in my professional life is that people underestimate the need to move fast. Of course, doing good work takes time. I once spent six months writing a URL parser. But the fact that it took so long is not a feature, it is not a positive, it is a negative. If everything is slow-moving around you, it is likely not going to be good. To fully make use of your brain, you need to move as close as possible to the speed of your thought. If I give you two PhD stud...

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting here at my desk, working on client projects and sipping my coffee. While taking a break, I was clicking around the web, as one does, and found a post titled “ Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? ” by Ploum ( also featured on P&B ). I find this topic quite interesting, so I’m gonna take a moment to share my thoughts. I don’t have skin in the game, I’m not on any of these social media platforms, and I frankly do...

Rob Bowley summarizes a study from Carnegie Mellon looking on the impact of AI on a bunch of open-source software projects. Like any such study, we shouldn’t take its results as definitive, but there seems enough there to make it a handy data point. The key point is that the AI code probably reduced the quality of the code base - at least if static code analysis can be trusted to determine quality. And perhaps some worrying second-order effects This study shows more than 800 popular Gi...

One of the fundamental things that query planners have to do is decompose predicates . What do I mean by that, well, it's actually something that comes up quite often in everyday programming. Imagine we have a database and a relation with two columns, a and b , along with two indexes: one on a , and one on b . We can write some code to simulate this. First, we can create a dataset of a s and b s: let data : Vec = ( 0 .. 1000000 ) . map ( | _ | ( random_range ( 0 ....

I had a bit of a blogging and social media break when I went to Vietnam. The former I missed dearly, the latter I’m becoming accustomed to. It’s interesting; the urge to check it every second of the day has dissipated. In the most cliché way possible, I’m realising just how many mental CPU cycles it was taking up. I’m keeping up to date with RSS, and I have so many group chats across messaging platforms that I’m not left wanting for conversation. Not sure when I’ll be back. I do...

The DC-ROMA II is the fastest RISC-V laptop and is odd Inside this Framework 13 laptop is a special mainboard developed by DeepComputing in collaboration with Framework. It has an 8-core RISC-V processor, the ESWIN 7702X—not your typical AMD, Intel, or even Arm SoC. The full laptop version I tested costs $1119 and gets you about the performance of a Raspberry Pi. A Pi 4—the one that came out in 2019. Jeff Geerling December 8, 2025 The DC-ROMA II is the...

As is customary on my microblogging posts, let’s get us started with an original meme. Also, if you’d like to read my previous Microblogging Protocols compared posts, you can read v1 here and v2 here. It’s been a little over a year since I made my updated microblogging protocols comparison. Since then a few things have happened, and my previous could use some trimming. In the spirit of keeping things shorter (and keeping the comparison v3 post relevant longer), I figured I’d split the po...

World’s largest ring forging, via Chinese Academy of Sciences . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at 3D printed legos, exploding wire detonators, the David Taylor model basin, multi-point metal forming, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but I’m working on a more involved piece about internati...

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 ...

Mechanical Habits Dec 6, 2025 My schtick as a software engineer is establishing automated processes — mechanically enforced patterns of behavior. I have collected a Santa Claus bag of specific tricks I’ve learned from different people, and want to share them in turn. Caution: engineering processes can be tricky to apply in a useful way. A process is a logical cut — there’s some goal we actually want, and automation can be a shortcut to achieve it, but automation per se doesn...