Who’s cup is that? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-13. Who’s cup is that? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-13. Who’s cup is that? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-13. Ruben Schade

One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic's new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability to navigate and read from a filesystem should be capable of using them. It turns out OpenAI are doing exactly that, with skills support quietly showing up in both their Codex CLI tool and now also in ChatGPT itself. Skil...

To tell the story of your life would take another life of equal length.  There is no such thing as a true story because every story, to be told, must leave out something. And every something left out matters. It’s all the somethings that lead us to one point and then another; it’s all the somethings that merge into reality; it’s all the somethings , subconscious and conscious, that make up our experience.  I can tell you a story, I can tell you my stories, I can tell you many ve...

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...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nick Heer, whose blog can be found at pxlnv.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by C Jackdaw and the other 127 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 introduce yourself? My name is ...

How I fixed it: Sunshine issues on NixOS Nix Linux Posted on 2025-12-11 Background I’ve got a couple of computers in the home. One machine in particular is a semi-powerful gaming machine. The weird thing about this machine is that it’s stowed away in a storage room, not a very suitable place to sit and actually use it. To be honest, I’m not really much of a gamer, and so I mostly use its capabilities for work and other heavier tasks. But it’s alwa...

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 late 2022, I had a conversation with a senior engineer on the coming problem of “what to do when AI is writing most of the code”. His opinion, which I found striking at the time, was that engineers would transition from writing mostly “implementation” code, to mostly writing tests and specifications. I remember thinking at the time that this was prescient. With three years of hindsight, it seems like things are trending in a different direction. I thought that the reason that test...

🐒🦴➡️🛸🖥️🔴🚀🌌👁️⭐👶✨ 2001: A Space Odyssey :: Arthur C. Clarke 👨🏻‍🌾🌾💰📈📉👩🏻❤️💪😤💔💀🌾 The Good Earth :: Pearl S. Buck 👽🛸💥🏚️☢️🔦🎒💰💀😱🙏🟡 Roadside Picnic :: Arkady & Boris Strugatsky ☯️💧🌊🔄💭❓💪=💧🔄❌✅♾️ Tao Te Ching :: Lao Tzu 🌶️👨🏻🎺📜✍️😤🍩👩🏻‍🦳😩🎭🤡🌀 A Confederacy of Dunces ...

Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces , to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I’ve learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent arti...

CM0 - a new Raspberry Pi you can't buy This little postage stamp is actually a full Raspberry Pi Zero 2, complete with eMMC storage and WiFi. But you can't get one. Well, not unless you buy the CM0NANO development board from EDAtec , or you live in China. This little guy doesn't have an HDMI port, Ethernet, or even USB. It's a special version of the 'Compute Module' line of boards. Little Raspberry Pi 'System on Modules' (SoMs), they're called. Compute Modules are ent...

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...

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...

I’ve been moving all my MCPs to skills, including the remaining one I still used: the Sentry MCP 1 . Previously I had already moved entirely away from Playwright to a Playwright skill. In the last month or so there have been discussions about using dynamic tool loadouts to defer loading of tool definitions until later. Anthropic has also been toying around with the idea of wiring together MCP calls via code, something I have experimented with . I want to share my updated findings with...

In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in algebraic geometry — using entirely alien techniques. It instantly captivated the field, stoking excitement in some mathematicians and skepticism in others. The result deals with polynomial equations, which combine variables raised to powers (like y = x or x2 − 3xy = z2). These equations are some of the… Source In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in al...

On the road to greatness, they’ll take the long way… We’re So excited for some Dunk and Egg goodness next year! AND the official preview ALSO, Have you heard of this contest?? Maybe you know a real-life knight or someone who you think should be? You could win a trip to attend the LA Fan Premiere for HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms to see your nominee knighted by George R.R. Martin. Using #KnightChallenge on TikTok, tag someone you know who embodies courage, valor...

While 2023 was an  incredible year  for ISRO in terms of execution of space missions and projects, and 2024 was about those successes giving the Indian government’s Department of Space (DOS) the confidence to plan an ambitious next decade , 2025 can be characterized more by slower progress, shortfalls, and delayed updates amid the same budget . Below is a linked rundown contextualizing India’s developments across domains of space. Like every year’s review, I’ve made a conscious ...

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 ....

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...