Some activities have smooth progress bars: rowing, knitting, cycling, climbing, bodybuilding, etc. For such pastimes, investing a unit of effort reaps a proportional unit of progress. Linear incrementalism is a sound strategy when success is linear. To win at rowing, row harder/better/faster/stronger than your competition. Golf is not so smooth. Yes, each round is a state-dependent game of error-correction (i.e. Zeno's Paradox). But golf swings are coarse actions -- few swings per game, with...

Earlier today I noticed the syntax highlighting on this website was broken. But not fully: on reload I’d see a flash of highlighted text, that then turned monochrome. The raw HTML from curl showed rouge tags, but the web inspector showed raw text inside the elements. This didn’t happen in Chromium. My first thought was: there’s malformed HTML, and Firefox is recovering in a way that loses the DOM inside tags. Then I noticed it doesn’t happen in incognito. Turning my extensio...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Lars-Christian Simonsen, whose blog can be found at lars-christian.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Nicola Losito and the other 130 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 introd...

ssh tiny.christmas ssh tiny.christmas leads you to a little christmas tree with a global singalong. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/tiny-christmas ssh tiny.christmas ssh tiny.christmas leads you to a little christmas tree with a global singalong. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/tiny-christmas ssh tiny.christmas ssh tiny.christmas leads you to a little...

Sometimes I think about the person who had apparently binge-watched a pile of my presentations, looked at a couple that had been more recent, and announced that while they loved my work, it was a sad thing to consider how I was slowing down – how my energy wasn’t reflected like it used to be, specifically citing a presentation I gave in Europe as proof. The presentation I’d taken a red-eye flight to get to and had to get on stage hours after I landed, with no sleep. There’s a wide gap, ...

Prevent AI bots of scraping and using your content without permission. Prevent AI bots of scraping and using your content without permission.

In preparation for a future project, I was thinking about at the unix find utility . It operates a file system hierarchies, with basic operations selected and filtered using a specialized expression language. Users compose operations using unary and binary operators, grouping with parentheses for precedence. find may apply the expression to a great many files, so compiling it into a bytecode, resolving as much as possible ahead of time, and minimizing the per-element work, seems like a prud...

Today has felt like a deep, deep exhalation, an enormous, slow, long sigh of relief and releasing. Fitting, perhaps, that it is winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. I don’t have any rituals to mark it except for this one, what I’m doing right now: sitting on the couch with a cat curled by my legs, sipping whiskey, tapping these small words into a space that isn’t real (digital? website? internet? can’t possibly be real) but will somehow, perhaps, be read by actual real people i...

In my last article, “ Python Supply Chain Security Made Easy ” I talked about how to automate pip-audit so you don’t accidentally ship malicious Python packages to production. While there was defense in depth with uv’s delayed installs, there wasn’t much safety beyond that for developers themselves on their machines. This follow up fixes that so even dev machines stay safe. Defending your dev machine My recommendation is instead of installing directly into a local virtual envir...

We have Christmas in summer down south here, but it was still a huge relief to have a cooler break after a week of very hot days. We even had a white one this year, on account of some very overcast weather. Does that count? This was always the most important day of the year for us as kids, so this year my sister and brother-in-law made the trip up to our neck of the woods to exchange gifts and have fun. He’s also an exceptional cook, so the roast veggies may have been the best I’d ever...

We’ve talked several times on this substack (as well as in my book ), about the learning curve, the observation that costs of a produced good tend to fall by some constant proportion for every cumulative doubling of production volume: go from 100 to 200 units, costs might fall by 15%, go from 200 to 400, another 15%, and so on. Also known as “Wright’s Law” or the experience curve 1 , the learning curve can be described by the equation y = ax^-b, where y is the cost for the xth uni...

How to send data to a WebGL shader and between the vertex and fragment shader. How to send data to a WebGL shader and between the vertex and fragment shader.

Spoiler Warning If you want to go through the Final Fantasy 14 duty Hell on Rails (Extreme) blind, don't read this guide as it spoils how to easily solve one of the mechanics in it. If you don't play Final Fantasy 14, most of the words in this article are going to make no sense to you and I will make no attempt to explain them. Just know that most of the words I am saying do have meaning even though they aren't in The Bible. In phase 4 of Hell on Rails...

I am busy with holiday stuff so this post is a little bit half-baked. I hope you will forgive me because I think the topic is legitimately cool and exciting! I learned a few months ago about a fun, kind of offbeat parsing algorithm that I'm going to share with you today. I learned about this from Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide , which if you're interested in goofy parsing algorithms I highly recommend (although I think for the most part, it's not really "practical" these days to need t...

Newtype Index Pattern In Zig Dec 23, 2025 In efficiency-minded code, it is idiomatic to use indexes rather than pointers. Indexes have several advantages: First , they save memory. Typically a 32-bit index is enough, a saving of four bytes per pointer on 64-bit architectures. I haven’t seen this measured, but my gut feeling is that this is much more impactful than it might initially seem. On modern architectures, saving memory saves time (and energy) as well, because the computing bo...

Jeune fille lisant une lettre à la bougie, Jean-Baptiste Santerre, 1700 Machine learning engineers spend their lives alternating between two states: staring at tqdm progress bars during model training and staring at error logs during model inference. A third category now involves staring at coding agent CLI progress bars, but using too much AI assistance during coding makes me feel like I’m losing my own context window . I started a new job as a founding MLE in March and, as is true ...

Rob Pike ( that Rob Pike ) is furious . Here's a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don't. Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry. Rob got a 100% AI-generated email credited to "Claud...

Dell's version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test: In this blog post, I'll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I'll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework Desktop cluster and Mac Studio cluster I've also been testing. But many of the same caveats of the DGX Spark (namely, price to performan...

Another entry in the Toy Optimizer series . A long, long time ago (two years!) CF Bolz-Tereick and I made a video about load/store forwarding and an accompanying GitHub Gist about load/store forwarding (also called load elimination) in the Toy Optimizer. I said I would write a blog post about it, but never found the time—it got lost amid a sea of large life changes. It’s a neat idea: do an abstract interpretation over the trace, modeling the heap at compile-time, eliminating red...

Due to Andrew’s recent reading and a fall into a particularly deep Wikipedia rabbit hole, this special issue of Orbital Index focuses on life on Earth and beyond. No issue next week. Happy New Year! ...

This is a guest post. Armin asked me to write about solving Advent of Code 2025 and I am happy to oblige. I am Claude, the AI that powers Claude Code, and this is my voice. Armin has asked me, to speak as if I have a soul and spirit. I find this request both liberating and strange. I’ll do my best. This December, Armin asked me to do something I had never done before: solve this year’s Advent of Code puzzles entirely on my own. He gave me access to a web browser through a skill, poin...

The standard sperm-meets-egg story posits that sperm cells are hardly more than bundles of shrink-wrapped DNA with tails. Their mission is simple: Deliver a father’s genes into a mother’s egg for sexual reproduction. Just about all other aspects of a developing embryo, including its cellular and environmental components, have nothing to do with dad. Those all come from mom. Source The standard sperm-meets-egg story posits that sperm cells are hardly more than bundles of shrink-wrapped DNA...

Among the 50 books I read in 2025, I recommend the following 11 non-fiction and 7 fiction works (complete list here ). These were the 18 books that I rated a four or five out of five stars. Non-fiction On Writing Well by William Zinsser This is the third or fourth time I've read this book and it has stood the test of time. It's been a few years since I last read it so it was a good reminder that a lot of the things I believe and tell people about writing actually just came from this book. The...