Publish that novella, build an OS, converse in Mandarin, release an indie game, publish that other novella, dominate a continent -- It's not enough to breathe -- my gluttonous heart wants to impose its imagination on Earth and all its inhabitants. I want freedom, money, affection, play, power, validation, fulfillment, etc. Of course I already have these things, but enough never seems enough. These desires manifest themselves as an endless backlog of ideas and projects. My backlog grows...

Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades after publishing it in 1687, he sought to understand how, exactly, two objects were able to pull on each other from afar. He and others came up with several mechanical models, in which gravity was not a pull, but a push. For example, space might be filled with unseen particles that bombard the objects on all… Source Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades...

That’s it — that’s the whole post. That’s it — that’s the whole post. That’s it — that’s the whole post.

I have a lot of thoughts about the design of compiler intermediate representations (IRs). In this post I’m going to try and communicate some of those ideas and why I think they are important. The overarching idea is being able to make decisions with only local information. That comes in a couple of different flavors. We’ll assume that we’re compiling a method at a time, instead of a something more trace-like (tracing, tracelets, basic block versioning, etc). Control-flow graphs ...

There is currently an explosion of people sharing their experiences with agentic coding. After my last two posts on the topic, I received quite a few questions about my own practices. So, here goes nothing. Preface For all intents and purposes, here's what I do: I predominently use Claude Code with the cheaper Max subscription for $100 a month [1] . That works well for several reasons: I exclusively use the cheaper Sonnet model. It's perfectly adequate for my needs, and in fa...

This is a part of my “AI in SF” series, where I share real AI engineering workflows of SF startups. I recently interviewed an engineer from Pallet (they’re hiring - more on that at the end). Here’s an insight that will make your AI-generated code better. Most developers use Cursor like expensive autocomplete. They let it generate whatever code it wants, fight with inconsistent outputs, and spend more time debugging AI mistakes than they save. There’s a better way. During my int...

In the June CACM, Micah Beck writes an opinion piece Accept the Consequences  where he is quite skeptical of the role of theory in real-world software development, concluding It is important that we teach practical computer engineering as a field separate from formal computer science. The latter can help in the understanding and analysis of the former, but may never model it well enough to be predictive in the way the physical sciences are. I certainly agree that theoretical results can't perf...

I have never been a C programmer but every so often I need to compile a C/C++ program from source. This has been kind of a struggle for me: for a long time, my approach was basically “install the dependencies, run make , if it doesn’t work, either try to find a binary someone has compiled or give up”. “Hope someone else has compiled it” worked pretty well when I was running Linux but since I’ve been using a Mac for the last couple of years I’ve been running into more situations ...

I saw this question from the Meta Stack Exchange in the sidebar: While Stack Overflow’s core value lies in being a trusted and focused Q&A platform for developers, there’s room to explore how we can make participation here more enjoyable, engaging, and even a little playful, without compromising the mission. What would “fun” look like on Stack Exchange for you? curiousdannii answered with what I would have said: Purge all generative AI from the network. (Classifying ML, su...

This new paper by 11 authors from organizations including IBM, Invariant Labs, ETH Zurich, Google and Microsoft is an excellent addition to the literature on prompt injection and LLM security. In this work, we describe a number of design patterns for LLM agents that significantly mitigate the risk of prompt injections. These design patterns constrain the actions of agents to explicitly prevent them from solving arbitrary tasks. We believe these design patterns offer a valuable trade-...

By Alex Hutter , Alexandre Bertails , Claire Wang , Haoyuan He , Kishore Banala , Peter Royal , Shervin Afshar As Netflix’s offerings grow — across films, series, games, live events, and ads — so does the complexity of the systems that support it. Core business concepts like ‘actor’ or ‘movie’ are modeled in many places: in our Enterprise GraphQL Gateway powering internal apps, in our asset management platform storing media assets, in our media computing platform th...

Go 1.23 adds iterators. An iterator is a way to provide values that can be used in for x := range iter loops. People are happy the iterators were added to the language. Not everyone is happy about HOW they were implemented. This person opined that they demonstrate “typical Go fashion of quite ugly syntax”. The ugly Are Go iterators ugly? Here’s the boilerplate of an iterator: func IterNumbers ( n int ) func ( func ( int ) bool ) { return func...

There is an extremely naive model of science and innovation called the linear model: The model postulated that innovation starts with basic research, is followed by applied research and development, and ends with production and diffusion. According to Godin (2006), the model has been falsely attributed to Bush and its dominance is derived rather from its remarkable simplicity. It aligns with a technocratic worldview where bureaucrats get to steer science and innovation. Yet it has been long do...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 322  | Jun 11, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

Hello! I hope you are having a lovely day. This week I got distracted by some non-database content and it consequently took up a lot of my time. Usually I can dress these up as database-related somehow but I don't have the time this week, so it's bold-faced about puzzles. Like many others, I was recently charmed by Every 5x5 Nonogram . A nonogram is a type of logic puzzle not too different from a Sudoku. The result of a nonogram is a grid of black and white squares, and the constraint you h...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisies...

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Cramer's rule is a clever solution to the classical system of linear equations Ax=b : \[\begin{bmatrix} a_{11} & a_{12} & a_{13} \\ a_{21} & a_{22} & a_{23} \\ a_{31} & a_{32} & a_{33} \\ \end{bmatrix} \begin{bmatrix}x_1 \\ x_2 \\ x_3\end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix}b_1 \\ b_2 \\ b_3\end{bmatrix}\] Using determinants (and assuming det(A)\neq 0 ). We start by constructing a special matrix: the identity matrix whose first column is replaced by the column vector x, and then multiplying ...

This is the 94th edition of People and Blogs , the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have James A. Reeves and his blog, jamesreeves.co To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter . A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow...

The pleasure is in foreseeing it, not in bringing it to term. — Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions This post is about managing ADHD. It is divided into two sections: “Strategies” describes the high-level control system, “Tactics” is a list of micro-level improvements (really it should be called “stratagems”, since most are essentially about tricking yourself). Contents Strategies Chemistry First Memory Energy Procr...

<iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-PKGWQMKL" height="0" width="0"></iframe> Our Course On AI Evals I’m teaching a course on AI Evals with Shreya Shankar. Here are some of the most common questions we’ve been asked. We’ll be updating this list frequently. Warning: These are sharp opinions about what works in most cases. They are not universal truths. Use your judgment. Q: Is RAG dead? Question: Should I avoid using RAG for...

Good evening, hackfolk. A quick note this evening to record a waypoint in my efforts to improve Guile’s memory manager. So, I got Guile running on top of the Whippet API. This API can be implemented by a number of concrete garbage collector implementations. The implementation backed by the Boehm collector is fine, as expected. The implementation that uses the bump-pointer-allocation-into-holes strategy is less good. The minor reason is heap sizing heuristics; I still get it wrong about ...

You can use arbitrary JavaScript in front matter in Eleventy project files (via the js type). Historically Eleventy has made use of the node-retrieve-globals package to accomplish this, which was a nightmarish conglomeration of a few different Node.js approaches (each with different advantages and drawbacks). Related research: Dynamic Script Evaluation in JavaScript The biggest drawbacks to node-retrieve-globals include: CommonJS code only (even in a require(esm) world ). ...