With every passing night, I find myself thinking how the sun now sets a little bit earlier each day. Whereas the sun sets late in the peak of summer – at around ten o' clock at night – the autumn sun falls earlier. I notice change in the air as we move from summer to autumn. The heat is slowly receding as a refreshing autumn chill appears. Yesterday evening I had a short errand to run. I was excited to go outside and feel the chill that had been coming through the window -- to take in the fr...

WASHINGTON (August 19, 2025) — Airbus U.S. Space & Defense recently completed its first autonomous helicopter test flight utilizing Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy package. The test flight, which took place in Grand Prairie, Texas, marks a significant step in the development of the MQ-72C Lakota Connector, in support of the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) Aerial Logistics Connector (ALC) program. The H145 helicopter was utilized as the test vehicle for the flight to help perfect the mission technol...

The State of CSS Survey results recently came out and I was asked what I was my pick of the year in the CSS world and turns out I had an opinion. I told Sacha , My pick of the year is all the font clamp generators that people have been creating and sharing. What’s great about them is that they are all so different so it accommodates different learning styles. Especially, if reading documentation alone doesn’t help understanding how something works. For example, Modern fluid typ...

The most annoying thing about this stupid bloody sprain is no running for 6-8 weeks. I just starting to enjoy it again. FML. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️ Reply to this post by email ● Sign my guestbook The most annoying thing about this stupid bloody sprain is no running for 6-8 weeks. I just starting to enjoy it again. FML. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS i...

<iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-PKGWQMKL" height="0" width="0"></iframe> 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. 👉 If you want to learn more about AI Evals, check out our AI Evals course . Here is a 35% discount code for readers. 👈 Listen t...

You’ve got data in Apache Kafka . You want to get that data into Apache Iceberg . What’s the best way to do it? Perhaps invariably, the answer is: IT DEPENDS . But fear not: here is a guide to help you navigate your way to choosing the best solution for you 🫵. The Candidates I’m considering three technologies in this blog post: Apache Flink SQL (open source) Kafka Connect (open source) Confluent Tableflow ($) ...

Left inset: A test first stage structure of the upcoming Long March 10A rocket. See the technician humans standing beside for scale; Right inset: Static fire test of its seven YF-100K engines roaring in tandem. Images: CMSA / CCTV / CALT On August 15, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) and the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) conducted a 30-second static fire test for the upcoming Long March 10 series of crew-capable rockets using a high fidelity first stage structure....

If someone manages to create a content blocker for MacOS/iOS that prevents all the content that mentions either AI or vibe coding to reach my screen, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. I am so goddamn tired of reading about AI, GPT models, and people vibe-coding. I get it, it’s fun tech, but it’s exhausting. It’s the crypto/NFT craze on steroids. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook ...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 332  | Aug 20, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

I've heard this story from a few places. A father watches Back to the Future II with his kid. The 1989 movie view of 2015 looks entirely different when in fact not much has changed except for the fashion and the lack of mobile phones. This is supposed to be a parable about the lack of technological progress. I disagree. It's about a lack of imagination of the future because of those phones. Phones that are hidden from sight, and have become so ubiquitous we take them for granted. The phone in ...

Jellyfin on macOS for a quick self-hosted media library I forgot to bring my portable Pi media server running Jellyfin on a family trip, but had a small selection of my ripped movie and TV show library on my portable SSD. One dreaded part of choosing a movie or show to watch after a rainy afternoon and all other avenues of entertainment are exhausted is having the kids (especially the youngest, who can't read yet) choose a movie without the 'movie shelf' showing the movie pos...

A totally legit scientist uses Zener cards to tests for psionic ability. A kind of crazy in-game explanation for D&D psionics occurred to me. I haven’t seen it before so I figured I’d share it. The canonical explanation for psionics is that they’re from the Far Realms: weird Lovecraftian planes beyond mortal comprehension, where squidgy creatures use psionics to do squidgy things. I think this doesn’t tell the whole story. If you look at D&D psionics through the editions, you find a ...

Back in the days when I did live talks, one of my abilities was to finish on time, even if my talk time was cut at the last moment (perhaps due to the prior speaker running over). The key to my ability to do this was to use Expansion Joints - parts of the talk that I'd pre-planned so I could cover them quickly or slowly depending on how much time I had. The way I'd do this would be to plan for some topics to be optional. The talk would work if I skipped over them, but I could also...

I was reading the latest issue of the journal Science , and a paper mentioned the compound Cr 2 Gr 2 Te 6 . For a moment, I thought my knowledge of the periodic table was slipping, since I couldn't remember the element Gr. It turns out that Gr was supposed to be Ge , germanium, but that raises two issues. First, shouldn't the peer reviewers and proofreaders at a top journal catch this error? But more curiously, it appears that Cr 2 Gr 2 Te 6 is a mistake that has been copied around several ...

Solar still needs storage cheap enough to move energy between seasons. I have been working on a startup to do this for the last two years.  ... Read More Solar still needs storage cheap enough to move energy between seasons. I have been working on a startup to do this for the last two years.  ... Read More Solar still needs storage cheap enough to move energy between seasons. I have been working on a startup to do this for the last two years.  ... ... Read More Read More

F22 Raptor engine exhaust, via @sci_fi_infra. Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at efforts to stop solar and wind permitting, Ford’s new manufacturing process, Lake Powell’s water levels, Tesla’s used car prices, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Some housekeeping items this week: I’m going to try to keep t...

0.0 Context Setting Tuesday, 19 August 2025 in Portland, Oregon, where it’s nice and sunny but not too hot, the dog and I had a pleasant morning walk that was early but not too early, and the covers I’m listening to are pleasing. This one got away with me a bit. Fifth in a row, I think? Got to be careful here and not set myself up for thinking missing a day or two is a horrific failure on my part. Let’s just keep going, okay? Oh, remember Do Not Reply cards ? That's all. Just rem...

Our basement flooded this week, so I’ve been cleaning up the mess. In that process, I found a 22-year-old letter from my grandmother (who passed away Christmas 2023) to my mom that had a little Eleventy naming history that some folks might enjoy. I first talked about the significance and history of the Eleventy name back in a blog post from 2018 celebrating the project’s first birthday : I chose it because of a story my grandma Nonnie loved to tell about how I learned to count. Rather...

For a while now, my favourite piece of technical writing has been Darts, Dice, and Coins: Sampling from a Discrete Distribution by Keith Schwarz. In it, he answers this question: You are given an n-sided die where side i has probability p_i of being rolled. What is the most efficient data structure for simulating rolls of the die? He covers a bunch of fun sampling techniques in pursuit of building up to the alias method , an algorithm that lets you sample from a such a distribution in...

Stefano Marinelli, the illu(mos, strious, minating) proprieter of all that’s good in the BSD operating system community, has a new one for you to check out: Think of illumos.cafe as your local gathering place for everything related to illumos-based operating systems - SmartOS, OmniOS, Tribblix, OpenIndiana and friends. It’s more than a collection of services; it’s a warm, volunteer-run space for conversation, learning, and community. I still have a soft spot for Solaris. I used it ...

I wrote a while back about why code performs better than MCP ( Model Context Protocol ) for some tasks. In particular, I pointed out that if you have command line tools available, agentic coding tools seem very happy to use those. In the meantime, I learned a few more things that put some nuance to this. There are a handful of challenges with CLI-based tools that are rather hard to resolve and require further examination. In this blog post, I want to present the (not so novel) idea that an i...

Name: Giuseppe Location: Warsaw, Poland Occupation: Freelance Content Marketer by day, YT Content Creator at night Room size: 28 m² (300 ft²) Cost of setup: ~$11K Social media: Instagram , X , YouTube Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself Hey there! My name is Giuseppe, I’m from Italy but I live in Poland. I am a freelance Content Marketer by day, and YouTube Tech Creator at night. What I do on a daily basis is create content for my clients that drives sales to their business. I start...

After a year of rumors that GPT-5 was going to unveiled next week and the CEO of OpenAI hyping it up as "scary good" by tweeting pictures of the death star, OpenAI released their new model to the world with the worst keynote I've ever seen . Normally releases of big models like this are met with enthusiasm and excitement as OpenAI models tend to set the "ground floor expectation" for what the rest of the industry provides. But this time, the release wasn't met with the same universal ...