Mathematics is, at its core, an art. Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create and explore new worlds. They test, and then push past, the limits of their imagination. They engage with thousands of years of history, with concepts and tastes and fashions that are constantly in flux. This artistic pursuit of beauty, truth and meaning is what every Quanta math story is about… Source Mathematics is, at its core, an art. Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create ...

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. … Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. – Douglas R. Hofstadter ...

It continues to be a busy December, if not quite as busy as last year . Today's big news is Gemini 3 Flash , the latest in Google's "Flash" line of faster and less expensive models. Google are emphasizing the comparison between the new Flash and their previous generation's top model Gemini 2.5 Pro: Building on 3 Pro’s strong multimodal, coding and agentic features, 3 Flash offers powerful performance at less than a quarter the cost of 3 Pro, along with higher rate limits. The new 3 Fla...

mdBook is a tool for easily creating books out of Markdown files. It's very popular in the Rust ecosystem, where it's used (among other things) to publish the official Rust book . mdBook has a simple yet effective plugin mechanism that can be used to modify the book output in arbitrary ways, using any programming language or tool. This post describes the mechanism and how it aligns with the fundamental concepts of plugin infrastructures . mdBook preprocessors mdBook's architecture is ...

The best way to introduce this post might be to reflect on my post from January, where I begrudingly declared some new years resolutions , and see how good I was at keeping them: Read more on the site… The best way to introduce this post might be to reflect on my post from January, where I begrudingly declared some new years resolutions , and see how good I was at keeping them: Read more on the site… The best way to introduce this post might be to reflect on my post from January...

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 :) ...

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...

Bell Labs, as we’ve noted before , was for years America’s premier industrial research lab. Not only did Bell Labs invent much of the technology that powers the modern world — the transistor, the solar PV cell, the first communication satellite — but it made numerous scientific breakthroughs, accumulating more Nobel Prizes than any other industrial research lab. I’m generally skeptical of efforts to create a “modern Bell Labs,” as I think much of what made Bell Labs work was his...

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 ...

We just finished our last Homebrew Website Club Europe event of the year. We spent the time chatting about the last year on our websites – what we made, what we are proud of, what we learned – and looked ahead to what we may be interested in doing next year. One question came to mind during the event: what are you grateful for in the indie web this year? I am grateful for so many people making cool things and sharing them on their websites. I have been inspired countless times by blog post...

I’ve mentioned this a few times now, but when I started using Claude it was because Peter got me hooked on it. From the very beginning I became a religious user of what is colloquially called YOLO mode, which basically gives the agent all the permissions so I can just watch it do its stuff. One consequence of YOLO mode though is that it didn’t work well together with the plan mode that Claude Code had. In the beginning it didn’t inherit all the tool permissions, so in plan mode it ac...

The Fine Arts Building Last week, I partook of the second Fridays open house in the  The Fine Arts Building , ten floors of offices all related to the arts and creatives in some way. Art studios of all kinds, from fine art to photography, music instrument sales, repairs and instruction, an opera company and various music ensembles, puppetry, jewelry makers, authors, interior decorators, a store that sells music scores on paper and an independent books store, and much more.  On the evenings of ...

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...

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 ...

A mailbox for Christmas 2025-12-18 09:45 Christmas is often the time when geeks get bombarded with technical questions from their loved ones. Last year, I gave my opinion on Gmail accounts and was asked what alternative to use for email. I was a bit stumped for an answer: ProtonMail or Tuta? But they regularly encourage users to switch to their paid service and use their other services (VPN, drive, password vault, etc.). What's more, standard email clients are not compatible. That's what g...

This month’s dithered banner image is of a shopping centre rooftop Xmas installation in Ho Chi Minh City. The sun was absolutely beating down, but Clara and I enjoyed wandering around :). This replaced an image I used to use in 2015 of a cropped Xmas tree, but it was a bit hard to make out. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-18. This month’s dithered banner image is of a shopping centre rooftop Xmas installation in Ho Chi Minh City. The sun was absolutely beating down, but Clara...

1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio - RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2 . The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0 , an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. Jeff Geerling December 18, 2025 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio - RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 ...

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

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...

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...