Why does AI write like… that (NYT, gift link). Sam Kriss delves into the quiet hum of AI writing. AI’s work is not compelling prose: it’s phantom text, ghostly scribblings, a spectre woven into our communal tapestry.  ❄                ❄                ❄                ❄                ❄ Emily Bache has written a set of Test Desiderata, building on some earlier writing from Kent Beck. She lists the characteri...

Remember recently when I wrote that we all had our own first programming book ? Even if that first wasn’t our “first”, we all remember the first one that resonated. For me it was the Llama Book, aka Learning Perl that made me fall in love with Larry Wall’s language, and programming more broadly. Flight Simulator 98 was that “first” for me when it came to 3D gaming. We were still a few years away from the release of Train Simulator which would consume my life, so my formative e...

Whatever it is, let me start it with gratitude. Gratitude is fertile ground. Put in the seeds of your dreams and desires. Keep the ground watered and pull the weeds. Soon the seeds will grow. (Conversely, worry is fertile ground for all your fears. Stay worried and you will harvest an abundance of fears.) Gratitude has nothing to do with what you have, how good or easy you’ve got it, whether you get what you want or don’t. Gratitude is not concerned with such petty measurements of valu...

Probably not a popular thing to say today. The zeitgeisty thing to say is that we should all log off and live terrible cottagecore solarpunk lives raising chickens and being mindful. I wish people were more online and more public. I have rarely wished the opposite. Consider this post addressed to you, the reader. Your Writing I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you...

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...

Are Two Heads Better Than One? You're playing a game with your lying friends Alice and Bob. Bob flips a coin and shows it to Alice. Alice tells you what she saw - but she lies 20% of the time. Then you take your best guess on whether the coin is heads or tails. Your best strategy is to trust whatever Alice says. You're right 80% of the time. Now Bob joins in. He makes up his mind independent of Alice, and he _also_ lies 20% of the time. You were right 80% of the time by trusting Alice. How m...

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 ....

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...

We’ve spent a lot of time examining the problem of construction productivity in the US — the fact that, across a variety of different metrics, construction never seems to get any more efficient (in terms of how much output you get for a given amount of input), or any cheaper. A paper I wrote about by Goolsbee and Syverson , for instance, titled “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector,” looked at a variety of different productivity metrics and found that...

I've started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I've been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past two years, almost all of them written by LLMs. This article presents a collection of useful patterns I've discovered along the way. First, some examples to show the kind of thing I'm talking about: svg-render renders SVG code to downloadable JPEGs ...

Watching Mathematicians at Work (AI generated) The Smithsonian Natural History Museum has a FossiLab  where visitors can peek through windows watching scientists prepare fossils for conservation. Maybe we should have a similar exhibit at math museums or universities. How else can we learn what mathematicians do?  In 2025, artificial intelligence has achieved gold medal status at the International Mathematical Olympiad but so far has only contributed modestly in finding new theorems. Of co...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 347  | Dec 10, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

For a while, I have had an idea for Artemis – the calm web reader I maintain – to have a page that shows your feed and feed settings on the same page. I am interested in this idea because there is presently a distance between the settings to customise your reader and the reader itself. You need to click back-and-forth to see the impact of a change in settings to your feed. As a user, I would prefer to be able to immediately preview the impact of changing my feed and reader interface, befor...

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...

Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This was a huge benefit for IBM PC applications such as AutoCAD, spreadsheets, and flight simulators. The 8087 was so effective that today's computers still use a floating-point system based on the 8087. 1 The 8087 was an extremely complex chip for its time, containing somewhere betwee...

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...

I review a lot of PRs these days. As the job of a PR author becomes easier with AI, the job of a PR reviewer gets harder. 1 AI can “assist” with code review, but I’m less optimistic about AI code review than AI code generation. Sure, Claude/Codex can be quite helpful as a first pass, but code review still requires a large amount of human taste. 2 I care about the high level abstractions my team uses in our codebase, and about how the pieces fit together. I care that our codebase ca...

Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help with that.” But users have long played a cat-and-mouse game to try to trick language models into providing forbidden information. These “jailbreaks” have run from the mundane — in the early years, one could simply tell a model to ignore its safety instructions — to elaborate multi-prompt roleplay scenarios. Source Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help wit...

Following my posts on determinism and durable function trees , this installment advances this blog post series “The Theory of Durable Execution”. Durable execution engines (DEEs) talk about “workflows”, “activities”, “virtual objects”, “handlers”, and “functions”, but they’re often describing the same underlying execution patterns. This post proposes a model that extends the generic durable function into three forms: stateless functions, sessions , and actors ....

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 ...

There's an old compiler-building tutorial that has become part of the field's lore: the Let's Build a Compiler series by Jack Crenshaw (published between 1988 and 1995). I ran into it in 2003 and was very impressed, but it's now 2025 and this tutorial is still being mentioned quite often in Hacker News threads . Why is that? Why does a tutorial from 35 years ago, built in Pascal and emitting Motorola 68000 assembly - technologies that are virtually unknown for the new generation of progra...

In 2023 Robb Knight started the defaults trend, covering what people used as their default apps for specific purposes. I did a 2023 version, and while I mentioned planning to do a late 2024 version in my 2024 year end wrap up post, I never wound up getting to it. I’ve got a 2025 edition of my default apps below, with changes in bold. PC Tablet Phone Mail Client Proton Web N/A Proton App Mail Server ^ ^ ^ Notes Joplin Joplin Joplin Tasks N/A N/A Tasks (org. In 2023 Robb Knight started the defa...

Do Not Optimize Away Dec 9, 2025 Compilers are sneaky beasts. If you time code like this: var total: u32 = 0 ; for ( 0 ..N) | i | total += i; print( "total={}" , .{total}); You will discover that LLVM is as smart as a little kid named Gauss, and replaces the summation with an equivalent formula N ( N + 1 ) 2 . What’s more, if you write something more complicated like total += i + 2*i*i - i*i*i , you’ll see that LLVM figures out...