Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can be hard to fully accept that fluent writing can come from an unthinking machine. That’s because, to many of us, finding the right words is a crucial part of thought — not the outcome of some separate process. But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that behaves something like an LLM? Source Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can b...

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...

For all I know, John O'Nolan is a cool dude. He’s the founder of Ghost , a project that is also really cool. You know what’s also cool? RSS. And guess what, John just announced he’s working on a new RSS app (Reader? Tool? Service?) called Alcove and he blogged about it . All this is nice. All this is cool. The more people build tools and services for the open web, the better. Having said all that though, John: If you want to follow along with this questionable side project of und...

The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait. I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650 ! Jeff Geerling December 4, 2025 The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait. I ...

The Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), India’s most powerful rocket to date, mounted on its launchpad in Sriharikota. Image: ISRO 🚀 Before we begin, I’m very happy to welcome globally published space writer & author Gurbir Singh  as a sponsor of both my  Moon Monday  and  Indian Space Progress  newsletters for the third year! Not sponsored: Among his several books, India’s Forgotten Rocket Pioneer is the most relevant to this edition of Indian Space Progress. I also encourage you ...

Having solved yesterday’s bug , we can get back to looking at the effect of re-work on throughput. As a reminder, our workflow looks like this: +----------------+ +-----------+ +------------+ +------------+ +---------+ | task generator | -> | dev queue | -> | developers | -> | test queue | -> | testers | +----------------+ +-----------+ +------------+ +------------+ +---------+ ^ | ...

When my wife saw me playing with my new encrypted radio, she asked what it was for. “Imagine,” I said, “if I could type a message on my phone and send it to you, and the message would appear on your phone. Instantly!” She wasn’t impressed. “It also works if phone lines are down due to a power outage… or societal collapse.” Still nothing. “If we’re not within radio range of each other, we can route ou...

I’ve had my VORON Trident for 2 years and I’ve run it for 2600 hours. Overall I’m happy with the printer but I’ve been itching to make some more mods to it. Having finally finished the VORON 0 ( with mods ) I now have a backup printer I can use to rescue myself when I screw up. As the printer was starting to crap out with a leadscrew starting to grind down again , the chamber thermistor stopped working, and PLA clogging up the Rapido hotend again it was time for a bit of a rebui...

This was news I wasn’t expecting over my Friday morning coffee. Legendary computer memory manufacturer Crucial is exiting the consumer electronics business. Parent company Micron issued this press release . “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Su...

“We see something that works, and then we understand it.” (Thomas Dullien) It is a deeper insight than it seems. Young people spend years in school learning the reverse: understanding happens before progress. That is the linear theory of innovation. So Isaac Newton comes up with his three laws of mechanics, and we get a clockmaking boom. Of course, that’s not what happened: we get the pendulum clock in 1656, then Hooke (1660) and Newton (1665–1666) get to think about forces, speed,...

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 ...

I didn't expect a parable about a fisherman to smack me in the face with such clarity, but here we are. While reading Grow slowly, stay small on Herman’s blog, I learned about The Fisherman and The Businessman , which goes like this: A businessman meets a fisherman who is selling fish at his stall one morning. The businessman enquires of the fisherman what he does after he finishes selling his fish for the day. The fisherman responds that he spends time with his friends and family...

Shield AI Expands into Space Domain through Partnership with Sedaro WASHINGTON (December 3, 2025) — Shield AI and Sedaro today announced a strategic partnership to advance autonomous operations in orbit. The collaboration establishes Shield AI’s Hivemind Pilot as Sedaro’s preferred autonomy software for on-orbit demonstrations, extending the company’s proven edge autonomy from air and sea into space. Under the agreement, Shield AI will use the Sedaro Platform as its primary enviro...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 346  | Dec 3, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

PyPi publishing party! Pyriodic project is packaged and published on Python's package page, PyPi PyPi publishing party! Pyriodic project is packaged and published on Python's package page, PyPi

Reddit is one of the longer-standing platforms on the internet, bringing together folk to discuss, rant, grumble, and troll others on all sorts of topics, from Kafka to data engineering to nerding out over really bright torches to grumbling about the state of the country —and a whole lot more. As a social network it’s a prime candidate for using graph analysis to examine how people interact—and in today’s post, hunt down some sneaky shills ;-) I’ve loaded data for se...

Well, another day, another distro, another fight with the uselessness that is the CapsLock key. My first two posts here and here work to varying degrees of success but either not well enough, or too damn complicated to set up. So here goes again - this should be short… Ubuntu has a keyd package, but it didn’t work for me. Instead, I installed from source, made up a small config file, and started the daemon as instructed. Well, another day, another distro, another fight with the uselessness ...

In part 1 we covered how durable function trees work mechanically and the importance of function suspension. Now let's zoom out and consider where they fit in broader system architecture, and ask what durable execution actually provides us. Function Trees and Responsibility Boundaries Durable function trees are great, but they aren’t the only kid in town. In fact, they’re like the new kid on the block, trying to prove themselves against other more established kids. Earlier this year I wrot...

With the recent spate of high profile npm security incidents involving compromised deployment workflows, I decided that it would be prudent to do a full inventory of my npm security footprint (especially for 11ty ). Just in the last few months: November 2025 : Shai Halud v2 (PostHog) (and PostHog post-mortem ): Worm infected ×834 packages. Propagated via preinstall npm script. September 2025 Shai Halud ( @ctrl/tinycolor , CrowdStrike) : Worm infected ×526 packages. Propagated...

Inspired by Daniel Litt's X Post Started asking mathematicians whose career started before the internet if they think Google, email, etc. have sped up the pace of math research. Wide variety of opinions but the broad consensus seems to be “yes,” among those I’ve spoken to. — Daniel Litt (@littmath) October 30, 2025 and Bill's recent post  on finding papers on the web I would tell the story of the before times. In the 1980s if you wanted to read a paper, you either had to find it in...

Last Sunday, I ran the 2025 Seattle Marathon. This was my third marathon, and I got a PR! I’m splitting this race report into two broad sections: about the course, and about my experience/training/etc. The Course & Event Candidly, I’ve avoided running the Seattle Marathon in the past because I’d heard negative things about the course layout. Previous courses spent much more time around the arboretum and University District, and routed over the 520 bridge – which does sound fun in the...

EA’s planned “take private” by a triumvirate of investors consisting of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, private equity giant Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity is, in many ways, straightforward. At the time of the deal, EA’s stock was up 14.1% year-to-date and since January 1, 2021, it had grown only 17.2%, spending most of that four-and-a-half year period underwater. EA’s stock price doldrums reflected several challenges. For example, a series of unconsummated talks ...

Last week we talked about some of the reasons why we want data independence. This week I want to talk about some of the historical steps that brought us to where we are today, and why the relational model is a good fit for modelling data. The first real database is often thought to be IDS, the "integrated data store," which was designed by Charles Bachman. Bachman won the Turing award for his work on databases and his Turing award speech The Programmer as Navigator is a really important...